Righting Wrongs by Robin Kirk

Author:Robin Kirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

IRAN AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Iran launched a nuclear weapons program in the 1950s. In 2015 Iran, the United States, and other countries signed an agreement that limited Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

The US withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Iran then resumed its nuclear-enrichment program.

Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. Ebadi allowed herself to hope that democracy would again return. Then married with two daughters, she successfully reapplied for her law license and began taking on high profile human rights cases.

But instead of a return to democracy, Iran became even more extreme. Ebadi believes a “clique of revolutionaries” took power and immediately cracked down on dissent. Morality police, called komitehs, targeted women specifically for the smallest supposed offense, like wearing makeup. Despite their stated goals of protecting the family, women, and children, Ebadi uncovered case after case of shocking state-sponsored abuse. “Islamic law tore children away from mothers in the case of divorce, or made polygamy as convenient as a second mortgage,” she wrote.

In one case, she represented the mother of a nine-year-old girl beaten to death by her father and half-brother. The mother had divorced the girl’s father to escape his drug use. Yet because a woman has fewer legally recognized rights, a court granted custody to the abusive father. The father was acquitted of murder and the half-brother received only a two-year sentence. Although Ebadi was disappointed, the case did lead to a reform that allows mothers to gain custody when fathers are deemed unfit.

Ebadi believed women have always been key to Iran’s democratic future. Currently, over 65 percent of university students are female. Other Islamic states, among them Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, have women as cabinet-level ministers.

The region-wide “culture of patriarchy” has to change, she believes. Women should be free to follow their dreams, and that means being able to leave their homes without fear of being arrested for the wrong clothing or no head covering. “There is a popular saying that modernity is born in the street,” she once wrote. “A woman who comes to the street cannot go back to the old traditions. And this was the key to the freedom of Iranian women.”

In 1999, while reading through legal materials, she saw her own name listed as a government target for attack. The document included a caution: government killers should wait until after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when many Muslims fast, even though the clerics considered Ebadi an “infidel,” or nonbeliever.

Later, the government arrested and tortured Ebadi for her legal work. For her, the problem isn’t Islam but how the religion has been interpreted as part of a patriarchy that has a long history of violence against women. “It was through this belief—that the intellectuals, that I, had abandoned God—that they justified the killings as a religious duty,” Ebadi explains in her memoir. “In the grisly terminology of those who interpret Islam violently, our blood was considered halal [or allowed], its spilling permitted by God.”

The regime canceled her law license in June 2000, then detained her and kept her in solitary confinement for 25 days.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.