One Woman's Way

Sunday, Dec. 07, 2003 By SCOTT MACLEOD | TEHRAN
KIDS' CHAMP: Ebadi, a staunch defender of child rights, at her home for street children
MICHELINE PELLETIER/CORBIS
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When she heard she was about to be arrested, Shirin Ebadi was afraid. It was June 2000, and Ebadi, a human-rights lawyer in Tehran, had been collecting evidence that Iran's hard-line mullahs were behind a series of vigilante attacks on reform-minded intellectuals. Among the evidence: a videotaped admission she had obtained from a former vigilante. This was dangerous information. As a law professor and activist, Ebadi understood the risks; she could be dragged off to jail by the Islamic regime, or assaulted herself. "Fear, like hunger, is an instinct," she says. "It comes whether you like it or not."

But when the moment of terror came, Ebadi, typically, was not worrying about her own well-being. She was more concerned about her family's reaction than what she might face in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison. So instead of waiting for agents to knock on her door, she told her husband and two children that she was going away to visit a friend. To avoid a traumatic scene, Ebadi slipped off to an Islamic court and turned herself in to a magistrate.

She was taken to one of Evin's dirty, dark cells, where she endured 23 days of solitary confinement. She spent the time praying and reading the Koran, and was treated with respect by her guards. When the authorities suddenly freed her, the move assured her she was not alone in her struggle — international pressure had let the mullahs know the world was watching. And though she was later convicted of defaming the Islamic Republic, given a two-year suspended sentence and temporarily barred from practicing law, the world has been watching ever since — which is one reason why Ebadi, 56, will be in Oslo this week to receive the 2003 Nobel Prize for Peace. She is being honored as Iran's human-rights champion — a defender of political prisoners, oppressed women, abused children — and though she shuns politics, the award gives a needed boost to the freedom struggle in Iran. Despite high hopes raised by the election of moderate President Mohammed Khatami six years ago, hard-line clerics in Tehran have blocked major change, killing reform legislation and jailing hundreds of political activists, journalists and writers. For the movement, Ebadi's award is an infusion of hope.

But the symbolism is even more potent. Ebadi is the first Muslim woman to receive the Peace Prize, and the honor has stirred pride and joy in millions of others from Rabat to Kuala Lumpur. Ebadi was in Paris when the award was announced in October, and when she returned to Tehran, thousands of Iranians, mainly women, turned out at the airport to welcome her home with tears, songs and carnations. "I don't have the same courage as Mrs. Ebadi," says Zahra, a 60-year-old sociologist. "But now when I walk in the street, I stand taller."

Ebadi's Nobel is proof that while Muslim women continue to endure severe inequality, many are nonetheless making remarkable efforts to reshape their own lives as well as the societies that shackle them. Ebadi's have special significance, because she is not a Westernized feminist advocating secular rule, but a devoted Muslim living under a repressive Islamic system who insists that women's rights are universal and compatible with Islamic teachings. "The prize proves that the way I was going, the path I have taken, is the right one," she told TIME before leaving for the Nobel ceremony. "It shows people that struggling for human rights is the right thing to do."

Ebadi is trying to make the most of the international attention that comes with the Peace Prize. With boundless energy radiating from her petite frame, she has been strategizing with fellow activists and giving speeches to students, urging them not to give up hope, turn their backs on religion or abandon their political activism. When she isn't barn-storming, visitors to her home in Tehran's Yoosefabad neighborhood find Ebadi following up the dozens of cases of political prisoners in her files.