A voice for Muslim women that will not be silenced
Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights attorney Shirin Ebadi has an unusual reply to those who invoke Islam to support authoritarian societies and the stifling of liberty for women. Islam, Ebadi says, is being wrongly used by male-dominated Muslim states and movements to justify discriminating against women when, in fact, the practice "has its roots in patriarchal and male-dominated culture prevailing in these societies, not in Islam."
What is needed, Ebadi says, is a "gender-neutral" reading of Islamic texts. "You cannot trample the rights of women under the pretext of Islam," Ebadi said in an interview Thursday morning.
Ebadi, a devoted Muslim with large dark eyes and short hair, who favors tailored dark suits and presents her arguments with soft-spoken deliberation, is hardly the first to point out the discrepancies between the Koran and modern fundamentalist governments.
But Ebadi is making this case in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it has caused religious conservatives to threaten and even attack her. Ebadi has grown so resigned to the hazards of her profession that she once turned herself in during one contentious case to avoid being arrested at home. She spent 23 days in solitary confinement, reading the Koran.
In December, as she gave a speech at the Al Zahra women's university in Tehran, 50 thugs rushed the podium, yelling, "Death to Ebadi." Her gentle persistence in the face of such threats has earned her the nickname "woman of steel."
In her first visit, since winning the prize, to California -- home of a powerful community of Iranian immigrants and exiles -- Ebadi presents her case for a modern, reformist view of Islam in a two-hour lecture on "Islam, Democracy and Human Rights" this afternoon at UCLA. In her earlier swing through Canada and the East Coast, Ebadi, 56, has been vehement on one point: "Islam is not a religion of terror and violence."
"There is a spirit flowing through all Islamic teachings that guarantees human equality in the eyes of God," she said. "We can interpret Islam to sanction equality between men and women." Religious leaders deny women equality in the name of Islam, she said, "because of the patriarchal culture governing all Islamic societies."
Because Islamic leaders cast themselves as messengers of God, Ebadi has said, they accuse their critics of being enemies of Islam. Ebadi's life illustrates the difficulties this poses for her and others who are pressing for reforms from within countries in which women's issues are cast by conservatives as the heretical corrupting influence of Westernization.
