Iran Awakening -- An Interview With Shirin Ebadi

In the year 2000, as you researched the murders of intellectuals in Iran, you found a government hit list with your name on it. Today you're a Nobel Prize winner living in Tehran with bodyguards supplied by the state. I don't understand your present relationship with the Iranian government.

You have to understand that bodyguards have two responsibilities. One may be protection, but the other is to follow my moves completely. They've told me themselves that every day they report to the police about me. The best way to control me in Iran is to give me bodyguards.

Do you have more freedom of speech than most Iranians, especially when you travel outside Iran?

There is very little freedom of speech in Iran. A number of our journalists and writers are currently in jail. So naturally, whoever leaves Iran immediately has more freedom of speech. I want to stress, however, that there are a lot of brave people in Iran. Although they know that the punishment for talking could be going to prison, they still speak their minds and go to prison.

As it turns out, publishing your book in the United States was a struggle because of U.S. laws.

Yes, exactly. I was told that because the U.S. has economic sanctions against Iran, I could not publish my book, since the proceeds would go to me, and thus to Iran since I live there. I argued that cultural exchanges should be excluded from economic sanctions, and that by refusing to publish my book here, you are actually imposing censorship on the American people.

You write in your book that "Reza Shah was the first, but not the last Iranian ruler to act out a political agenda on the frontier of women's bodies."

Reza Shah, who was very eager to move Iran toward modernity, ordered women to unveil. But you cannot forcefully tell women to unveil in an Islamic society. Reza Shah did not believe in two important principles of modernity, which are democracy and freedom.

Unfortunately, he was not the last of leaders to pursue his political agenda based on women's issues. When the Islamic revolution happened, the first political manifestation of it was the forceful veiling of women.

Women are making huge gains in the professions in Iran -- sometimes outpacing women in the United States -- and yet there are laws that severely restrict women's public life and legal rights. How should Westerners understand that?

In my memoir, I wanted to introduce American women to Iranian women and our lives. I'm not from the highest echelons of society, nor the lowest. I'm a women who is a lawyer, who is a professor at a university, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, I cook. And even when I'm about to go to prison, one of the first things I do is to make enough food and put it in the fridge for my family.

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