THREE DECADES AGO, Shirin Ebadi used to take to the roof of her home in what became a nightly ritual. There she joined the thousands across Tehran chanting ‘Allahu Akbar [God is most great]’ from their rooftops, in solidarity with those who would eventually tip Iran into revolution.
"The gorgeous, hymnal air of these lofted cries hung over the stilled city," she recalls in her memoir, Iran Awakening. "So spiritually enchanting that even my stolid, cynical friends were moved." This year Ebadi, the first Iranian – and the only Muslim woman – to win the Nobel Peace Prize, watched from afar as those protesting the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June appropriated the defiant rooftop cry of those revolutionary days as their own.
Ebadi was attending a conference in Europe when Iranians took to the streets in numbers not seen since 1979 to protest an election result opposition leaders believe was rigged. Authorities attempted to quell the mass demonstrations with violence. More than 20 people died in the unrest, and hundreds were arrested.
“It was very interesting for me to see that people have achieved such a level of political maturity that they were staging peaceful demonstrations on such a scale,” Ebadi tells me, through an interpreter. “The people were being shot at, they were being killed on the streets, yet they continued to protest and they refrained from violence. At the time, I thought, as I do now, that people who show such solidarity will achieve victory, and I know that they will.”
Since then, more than 100 opposition figures have been put on trial, and many more of those arrested in June remain in prison. Three of Ebadi’s close colleagues were detained. “The people in prison have been badly mistreated. They told me that they were kept in solitary confinement somewhere that was the size of a very small cupboard,” she says.
The trials, many of which have been televised, have saddened the woman who, in 1975, became Iran’s first female judge, at the age of 28. But the revolution Ebadi had initially supported ushered in a regime that eventually removed her from the post, after clerics insisted that Islam forbids women serving as judges.
“These trials are show trials. It reminds me of the courts during Stalin’s reign,” she says. “The confessions they have extracted are not credible at all. In the prosecutor’s bill of indictment, even Facebook and the internet have been accused. He said all these protests were a result of such technology from the West.”
The story Ebadi found most painful was that of Saeed Hajjarian, a hero of Iran’s reform movement, who was left paralysed after an assassination attempt in 2000. “Just after the elections, they took him to prison in his wheelchair. He was harassed to such a point that he confessed. He couldn’t even read the written confession because of his condition, so somebody else read it out for him and he was told to nod his head in agreement. In the so-called confession, Hajjarian said this all happened because of what we had studied in the reform era, and because of all that we were misled and we were under the impression we would have Western-style democracy in Iran.
“I was ashamed when I heard about this. I was ashamed to see that courts in Iran have reached such a point that such trials take place.”
Ebadi was allowed to practise law again in 1992, and since then she has become a thorn in the side of Iran’s hardliners for her crusading work on human rights. In 2000 she spent three weeks in solitary confinement after filing a complaint against Tehran’s police chief following an attack on pro-democracy students.
She plans to go home to Iran before the end of the year, despite the risk of harassment or worse, and is likely to take on the cases of some of those killed in June’s brutal crackdown. Already she has been approached by the mother of Neda Soltan, the student who became the face of the protests after a video clip showing her fatal shooting went around the world.
Ebadi believes the demonstrations that gripped Iran this summer were about much more than just a disputed presidential election. “The people were frustrated with the general state of affairs,” she says. “The unemployment rate in Iran is sky-high and the same goes for inflation . . . One in six people live below the poverty line, according to the government’s own statistics.”
She notes that several grand ayatollahs have spoken out against the government in the months since, with one decrying the current regime as “neither Islamic nor republic in nature”.
This, Ebadi argues, is significant. “The government always maintained that it has its legitimacy because of Islam, and whatever action it took was in accordance with Islamic principles . . . But now that the grand ayatollahs are saying that this regime is not Islamic, the regime is losing legitimacy.”
At recent rallies to mark Qods Day, an annual government-backed event held to express solidarity with the Palestinians, there were chants not just of the usual “death to Israel” and “death to America”, but also “death to Russia” and “death to China”.
“Why do you think that was? They were telling the government they don’t agree with their policies. They believe these two countries are supporting the Iranian regime,” says Ebadi.
She believes this year will eventually be seen as a turning point in the political history of Iran.
But the possibility that the situation could spill over into more bloodshed worries her. “State violence is continuing, while the people themselves have so far refrained from any violence. My main concern is that people may become frustrated and angry and they may actually resort to violence. So I am doing my utmost to encourage people to resist violence and remain peaceful,” she says. “It is difficult to predict the future . . . all I can say is that our people demand democracy and they will achieve it.”