Sunday Lunch with Shirin Ebadi
Three security guards are standing watch in the lobby of the downtown office building that is home to the big law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw.
They are waiting for Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. It is not clear, exactly, from whom they are guarding her -- she has already spent time in a Tehran jail and lives, even now, in a sort of tense legal limbo when she is at home in Iran -- but Ebadi seems unsurprised at their presence.
Standing less than 5 feet tall, Ebadi nonetheless has a long, quick stride, and the guards hasten their steps to keep up with her as she makes her way from a chauffeured car through the lobby and up to the law firm's offices on the 32nd floor.
When she travels internationally, Ebadi sheds the modest head covering required in Iran. She is dressed today in a plain gray pantsuit and a black silk blouse. A touch of red lipstick is visible on her mouth, setting off the hennaed tones in her short, dark hair. She does not smile, but neither does she look particularly anxious. She wears the practiced, neutral expression of someone who simply does not want any trouble.
Fought against sanctions
There is, it must be said, nothing particularly extraordinary about her presence or her manner. But she receives a hero's welcome at the firm that represented her, starting in 2004, in a groundbreaking lawsuit challenging key components of the U.S. government's economic sanctions against Iran.
Though Ebadi, who was awarded the peace prize in 2003 for her work providing legal representation to those who suffered under the Iranian regime, was offered an exemption to the federal regulations that made it impossible for writers in Iran, Sudan and Cuba to commercially publish their work here, she declined that special consideration and elected instead to challenge the government's interpretation of the Trading With the Enemy Act.
"I said that cultural affairs are not covered by the sanctions," Ebadi explains, speaking through an interpreter, as we share a pre-lunch coffee in a corner conference room, "and that, by not allowing this book to be published, you are actually imposing censorship on the American people and, according to the Constitution, censorship is against the law. . . . I am very happy and thankful to my American colleagues at Mayer Brown for helping me, and I'm grateful to the American courts who proved they are independent. After the court's decision, many Iranians were able to publish their books and sell their music in the U.S."
Ebadi's memoir, Iran Awakening (Random House, $24.95), written with Azadeh Moaveni, has just been published, and she is touring the United States to promote it. This is either a very good time or a very bad time to be an Iranian dissident making public appearances across America, and for Ebadi, it is an occasion to bring into broad relief the complicated nature of her feelings toward both her native country and the country that has embraced her as a symbol of democratic resistance to a radical Islamist regime.
"No country needs an atomic bomb," she'll tell the Mayer Brown attorneys later over lunch, "neither Iran nor the United States."
And there will be an uncomfortable silence in the room that has been decorated to celebrate Ebadi's legal victory and the release of her book.
"When Mr. Bush says, 'We will not dismiss any alternative, even war,' then the Iranian government will use this excuse to suppress the internal opposition," she'll say, taking a certain amount of air out of that whole democracy promotion balloon. "This sort of thing happens even here. In the U.S., with the excuse of finding terrorists and [protecting] national security, they have eliminated a lot of freedoms. For example: listening in on telephone conversations, which is against the Constitution."
And the applause that comes at the end of her speech will be polite, but not entirely warm.
Islam's varied interpretations
Now, though, as she waits for this speaking engagement to begin, she relaxes for a moment. She sees a certain amount of humor in her situation. She is too much of a reformer for her life in Iran to be entirely comfortable, but she is also too committed to peaceful change and working within the system to ever be fully understood outside her own country.
"Iran has bad laws, which are very prejudicial against women," says Ebadi, who, after learning that she'd won the Nobel Peace Prize while on a trip to Paris, was taken into an Iranian court to face charges (later dropped, due to pressure from the international community) because she'd been photographed -- hair uncovered -- shaking the hand of French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. "The Iranian government claims that these laws are Islamic, and my job is to prove that these laws are not Islamic but come from wrong interpretations of Islamic laws. I have to prove to the government that they can change. Islam, like any religion, has many interpretations. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot even drive cars, while in Indonesia and Bangladesh and Pakistan, we see that women can even become prime minister. So the real question is which Islam? Which interpretation?"
Ebadi, 59, was once her country's highest-ranking female judge. But after the 1979 revolution, she was demoted from judge to secretary and given a job as a clerk-typist in the same courtroom where she'd once presided. Later reforms allowed women to once again practice law, and Ebadi founded Human Rights Defenders, a group of activist attorneys who take on political and human rights cases. She knows that, as a woman, her rights -- and those of her two daughters -- exist mainly at the pleasure of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Both daughters are now attending graduate school in Canada, Ebadi says, "but they have both promised me that they will return to Iran. I hope they keep their promise."
She pauses for a moment, seeming to consider how this might sound, if it might be too much to ask of bright young women who have tasted Western freedoms.
"Of course," she adds, "they are free to live where they live. But, as a mother, I am also free to wish whatever I wish."
