Shirin Ebadi - Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope

IN THE FALL OF 2000, NEARLY A DECADE AFTER I BEGAN my legal practice defending victims of violence in the courts of Iran, I faced the ten most harrowing days of my entire career. The work I typically handled battered children, women hostage to abusive marriages, political prisonersbrought me into daily contact with human cruelty, but the case at hand involved menace of a different order. The government had recently admitted partial complicity in the premeditated spate of killings in the late nineties that took the lives of dozens of intellectuals. Some were strangled while out running errands, others hacked to death in their homes. I represented the family of two of the victims, and anxiously awaited seeing the files of the judiciary's investigation.

The presiding judge had granted the victims' lawyers only ten days to read the entire dossier. Those brief days would be our only access to the investigation's findings, our only chance to dig up evidence to build our case. The disarray of the investigation, the attempts to cover up the state's hand, and the mysterious prison suicide of a lead suspect compounded our difficulty in piecing together an account of what had truly transpired, from the fatwas ordering the killings to their execution. The stakes could not be higher. It was the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic that the state had acknowledged that it had murdered its critics, and the first time a trial would be convened to hold the perpetrators accountable. The government itself had admitted that a rogue squad within the Ministry of Intelligence was responsible for the killings, but the case had not yet gone to trial. When the time finally rolled around, we arrived at the courthouse, tense with determination.

After surveying the sheer physical volume of the files, stacks as tall as our heads, we realized that we would have to read them concurrently and, therefore, except for one of us, out of order. In deference, the other lawyers of the victims' families allowed me to start at the beginning, so each page I hurriedly turned, my eyes were the first to see.

The sun shone through the dirty windowpane, its rays moving across the room too quickly as we hunched shoulder to shoulder over the small table, silent save for the rustle of papers and the occasional thump of my wooden chair's stump leg. The significant passages in the files, the transcripts of the interrogations of the accused killers, were scattered throughout, buried in pages of bureaucratic filler. The material was dark with descriptions of the brutal murders, passages where a killer, with seeming relish, told of crying out "Ya Zahra," in dark homage to the Prophet Mohammed's daughter, with each stab. In the room next door, the defendants' lawyers sat reading other parts of the dossier, and it was impossible not to feel their presence radiating through the wall, these men who were defending those who had murdered in the name of God. Most of them were low-ranking functionaries of the Ministry of Intelligence, henchmen who had executed the death lists at the behest of more senior officials.

At around noon, our energy flagged, and one of the lawyers called to the young soldier in the hall to bring us some tea. The moment the tea tray arrived, we bent our heads down again. I had reached a page more detailed, and more narrative, than any previous section, and I slowed down to focus. It was the transcript of a conversation between a government minister and a member of the death squad. When my eyes first fell on the sentence that would haunt me for years to come, I thought I had misread. I blinked once, but it stared back at me from the page: "The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi." Me.

My throat went dry. I read the line over and over again, the printed words blurring before me. The only other woman in the room, Parastou Forouhar, whose parents had been the first to be killed, stabbed and viciously mutilated in their Tehran home in the middle of the night, sat next to me. I pressed her arm and nodded toward the page. She bent her veiled head close and scanned from the top. "Did you read it? Did you read it?" she kept whispering. We read on together, read of my would-be assassin going to the minister of intelligence, requesting permission to execute my killing. Not during the fasting month of Ramadan, the minister had replied, but anytime thereafter. But they don't fast anyway, the mercenary had argued; these people have divorced God. It was through this belief that the intellectuals, that I, had abandoned Godthat they justified the killings as religious duty. In the grisly terminology of those who interpret Islam violently, our blood was considered halal, its spilling permitted by God.