Customer Reviews

Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope

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Mrs. Ebadi's purpose in writing the book is to give Westerners an accurate and eye-opening account of the human rights struggle in Iran. It is a fascinating biography full of political facts, personal struggles, and victory. Ebadi tells the reader in her epilogue that her desire was not to explain and give motives to the political crises that Iran has faced over the past fifty years, but to present the historical legacy of upheavel in her country in a way that Americans can comprehend and understand clearly. If you want to learn about Persian politics and the influence of hard-line Islam on Iranian society, this is the book. If you want to learn about the struggle of women under the pressures of conservative Islam, this is the book. If you want to read a brief, quick biography, this is also the book. If you want to deconstruct your stereotypes about Islam and the Koran, this is the book. Ebadi's writing is clear, simple, and stunning.

Very accurate description of daily lives in Iran, I'm very pleased that finally someone -and who could be better than Ebadi- wrote a book explaining the strange phase Iranian people went through in the past half a century.

I specially enjoyed the parts where she explains the gradual enforcement of Hejab (women's dresscode), and the gradual fading of women's rights in the Religious regime.

I've recommended this book to all my friends. For anyone who is interested on the subject, this is as close as one can get to how it feels to really live in Iran.

Additionally, Ebadi is able to transfer her amazingly strong personality right to the reader. You'll finish the book thinking that you should seriously put up with a lot less s*** than you do, even if it might sometimes be scary to single-handedly stand up for what you believe in.

Finally, we learn about Shirin Ebadi's struggles and trials and tribulations from inside Iran. This Nobel Peace Prize Winner candidly discusses her country's realities -- her struggles, her hopes and the importance of US-Iranian dialogue. Shirin Ebadi's story is unique in every way and we learn about the fine line she walks while surviving under the Islamic Republic of Iran. She's daring, brilliant and a trail blazer ... If you liked "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and "Lipstick Jihad" you will be sure to enjoy this book!

Ms. Ebadi gives a great account of true activism in Iran. The book demonstrates both a simple and real account of society and politics in Iran and a view of Ms. Ebadi's activism and perseverance.

Unlike many Iranian intellectuals who inevitably left Iran, Ebadi stayed and fought inside Iran. She fought for human rights including children's rights and women's rights while her actions put her on top of the list of targets for hardliners responsible for serial killings of other writers and intellectuals.

Despite all of this, Ms.Ebadi's well-deserved nobel prize has induced jealousy and animosity from closed minded individuals inside and outside of Iran and that's why one might occasionally hear some incoherent rantings against her work.

In the end this book is a great read for anyone who is interested in getting a real peek inside Iran and see what this country is all about.

I purchased this book in Amsterdam and read the entire book on a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis. I am delighted it is available on Amazon as there were challenges getting it published in the US. Shirin Ebadi is a very inspiring woman and she made me re-evaluate what have I done lately to make the world a better place. Her courage, tenacity, sense of justice and high level of integrity are communicated beautifully through the book. The ramifications of politics are extremely interesting in the impact they have on the everyday lives of average people, such as who is power the Shaw vs. the Ayotolla? A wake-up call of how your life can change very quickly through no fault of your own. It is one of the best books I have read in years, I am recommending it to all of my reading friends. This is a must read - Hats off to Shirin I would love to meet her!

Written by Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, this highly readable memoir reaches out specifically to American readers to help them understand the Islamic Republic of Iran as the two countries continue on what gives every appearance of a collision course. While Iran (Persia) can look back over a history of 3000 years, recent memory of political history dates from the 1953 CIA-assisted overthrow of its democratically elected prime minister, Mossadegh. The more than 50 years since then, as remembered by Ebadi, are a record of sometimes concealed, sometimes open animosity between our two nations, leading to the current dispute over Iran's development of a nuclear capability.

There are many books about Iran during these years written by outsiders, including Iranians from the West (such as the co-author of this book, Azadeh Moaveni, whose "Lipstick Jihad" tells of a return to Iran after growing up in California). This book provides an insider's view of the years since the fall of the Shah in 1979, and told from a woman's point of view, it describes the experience of losing not only her professional standing as a judge but of the struggle to preserve her identity, her integrity, and finally her life, as she is marked for elimination by a death squad eager to wipe out any perceived resistance to the hard-line government.

Unwilling to leave her country, while long-time friends and associates flee to the West, especially during the protracted and bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s, she remains behind, using her legal training to work in the defense of women and children, whose welfare is compromised by the extreme conservatism of the country's Islamic leaders. In working for reform, she also attempts to achieve justice for the student victims of the government's most repressive measures of intimidation. Meanwhile, she raises a family and never loses hope - even after an arrest puts her in prison for a while - that the democratic ideals that drove the revolution will some day be fulfilled.

[...]

Shirin Ebadi's Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope is a very easy, compelling read. Of course I heard about Khanum-e Ebadi, but I had never actually heard her speak or read any of her writings.

My big fear whenever I read a memoir is the possibility that it is pure propaganda and promotion. (Witness the slew of memoirs from former officials of George W Bush's government who distance themselves from its policies. Where was your conscience when you were implementing them?) While no memoir will be free of these elements, I felt that Khanum-e Ebadi's shows a real human being who finds herself in events that teach her to stand up for justice and think about how oppressive governments, religious beliefs and cultural habits manipulate and coerce decent people into compliance.

Khanum-e Ebadi begins her career as a judge during the last years of the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. Her naiveté at this stage of her career is surprising to me, since I would assume that a judge is by nature a political animal. (Perhaps I'm too wrapped up in George Bush judicial appointments.) At any rate, this naiveté prevents her and others from seeing that the Iranian revolution of 1979 would turn ugly. I think it's this regret over her mistake of uncritical support of the revolution which caused her to become a much more sophisticated student of government and revolution later in life.

The bulk of the remainder of the book describes her participation in various cases involving defense of the rights of women, children and political prisoners. I believe this narrative will help people answer the following questions (or at least guide them to better thinking about them):

1. Is U.S. military intervention a good idea?
2. Is a government based upon religion generally, Islam specifically, compatible with a just society?
3. What should an individual do when faced with an oppressive society and government?

1. Is U.S. military intervention a good idea?

The short answer is "no." And Khanum-e Ebadi gives a lot of good reasons for this. I think one of the most important reasons is her conclusion about how to achieve positive change, which I address in point 3. The U.S. support for the 1953 coup and for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s means that most Iranians interpret covert and overt U.S. military intervention as attempts to control Iran, not free her people.

2. Is a government based upon religion generally, Islam specifically, compatible with a just society?

Without explicitly saying so, and I hope I'm not putting words in her mouth, I believe she would say, "Yes, it is possible for a religiously-based (including Islam) government to promote a just society, but there are so many ways it can go wrong that it is better to base the government on secular principles." I derive this conclusion based on her discussion of her attempts at reforming Iran's personal status laws and her impressions of the quality of people who rose in the government of the Islamic Republic.

She realizes that within the religious interpretive project, it is possible to support liberating and oppressive interpretations. So more important than the specific religious texts involved are the ethos and character of the people with the authority to impose their interpretation on society. In the case of Iran, the revolution elevated the most patriarchal elements of Iranian society to power, and their interpretations of Islam were imposed on all others, even those of recognized and authoritative religious scholars.

The second problem with religiously-based governments is that religion has instruction for both the outer and inner dimensions of a person, and the people on whom governments rely for support can more easily and quickly judge a person's outer dimension than inner dimension. This promotes hypocrites and social entreprenuers (in the most negative sense), who are able to make end runs around those who trouble themselves with the inner dimensions of religion.

I should add here that the United States certainly shows that you don't need a relgion-based government to promote hypocrites and social entrepreneurs.

3. What should an individual do when faced with an oppressive society and government?

Khanum-e Ebadi is against emmigration (although she eventually agrees that her daughter leave for Canada) and against violent revolution, such as the Mujahidiin-e Khalq Iran. I think she has a gift for recognizing the cracks and weakpoints of an oppressive system, and she believes focusing on those cracks causes effective, long-term change. For example, when an eighteen-year old woman lectures her about Islam in the Iranian countryside, she realizes that the same process which transformed this rural girl from a peasant to an ideological functionary for the Islamic Republic will later turn her and her daughters into a thinking opposition. When people emmigrate, they turn their back on attacking these weakpoints in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and she cannot hide her disappointment.

Additional links:

* Iranian Children's Rights Society

This is a concise book on how the society is affected by revolution and its vagaries in Iran. Written by the venerable Nobel Laureate, it showcases many brutalities done by the regime in the name of tradition and religion. This also shows a woman's struggle to cope with the human rights in such regime. Although written very briefly and possibly in a haste, meaning that scenes jump to one another suddenly and there is no in depth explanation why the society is behaving like this, this book is a primer in civil movement in Iran. I had a long-time suspicion that Iranian law is very messy, making its people hate the regime and it turn Islam itself. This book proves it, which shows how Iranian penal code uses extreme means in the name of Islam, whereas the same laws are very different in other muslim countries.

This book gives an intelligent and objective view of the turmoil of Iranian life from the 1979 revolution to the last year. It isn't a history book, as mentioned in other reviews, but a memoir as it admits, thus it is more focused on the life and reflections of the author rather than a documentary approach. The author is a devout muslim and seeks to promote the view that Islam and democracy are not incompatible. She is honest in her accounts of her government and how it has treated its citizens, but she is not a shill for promoting the official US line about our relations with Iran. She definitely feels that the US has a good share of blame for the state of things. However, she does seem to avoid, for the most part, the common Iranian party line that all things bad are America's fault. Her account of the reform period of Iranian politics in the late 90's is particularly helpful in understanding how the man on the street over there really felt about the ups and downs of that time.
It is a fairly quick read that will leave you with a clearer understanding of the Iranian people, something much needed as we try to decide how to approach our relations with them.

One is often bombarded with the "party line" viz a viz Iran in the western media surfacing a healty dose of skepticism.

However, after reading this book the skepticism is unwarranted. A noted judge turned journalist and nobel peace prize winner takes us behind the "veil" of Iran.

She touches our hearts with graphic stories of torture, executions, rapes and ridiculous intrepretations of sharia law. At points in the books I was boiling with anger at how unjustly ordinary citizens of this country are treated in the name of Islam, particularly women and children. Yet, amongst this oppression we see humanity fortitude and courage from the least likely places slowly but surely changing the regime, in which the clergy is all powerful.

The single greatest revelation in the book is the true power and abuse of power the clergy have in the life of any Muslim. The West has very little understanding of how Muslims are oppressed and controlled by the clergy and their henchmen. Dissent is equivalent to blasphemy which is punished severely, usually by torture rape then death.

The author gives hope to all Iranian and Muslims and serves as a role model for all intellectual Muslims, women and men alike.