A Tehran Girlhood, Part 2

Iran Awakening
by Shirin Ebadi, Azadeh Moaveni

(Page 2 of 2)

When my mother was growing up, she dreamed of attending medical school and becoming a doctor. But before the day of the khastegari, the family roundly dismissed this possibility, on grounds that my mother scarcely had control over. As she entered adolescence, it escaped no one's notice that she was becoming a rather spectacular beauty. Had she been born a generation earlier, when it was unheard of for women to attend college, her luminous, fair skin and slender figure might have conferred some advantage in the only realm in which she could compete, the marriage bazaar. But for a young woman born in the late 1920s, a time when patriarchy was slowly loosening its grip on Iranian society and a few women were being admitted into universities, her good looks were a liability to any ambition greater than marriage.

She did not wear the veil, for her family was not so traditional as to insist that its girls cover their hair. But she did witness the banning of the hejab, as part of the modernization campaign launched by Reza Shah, who crowned himself king of Iran in 1926. Turning an expansive country of villages and peasants overnight into a centralized nation with railroads and a legal code was a complex task. Reza Shah believed it would be impossible without the participation of the country's women, and he set about emancipating them by banning the veil, the symbol of tradition's yoke. Reza Shah was the first, but not the last, Iranian ruler to act out a political agenda — secular modernization, shrinking the clergy's influence — on the frontier of women's bodies.

Circumstance and era conspired to keep my mother from a university education, but at least she ended up marrying a man as unpatriarchal as could be imagined, for his time. My father was serene by temperament, controlled his anger without fail, and could never be provoked into raising his voice. When upset or irritated, he paced the house with his hands behind him or methodically rolled a cigar, extracting tobacco from a silver case carefully, using the time to still his mind and raising his head only when he was fully composed.

He was born into a wealthy family, to a landowning father who served as a colonel in the military, in the late days of the Qajar dynasty, the monarchy that preceded Reza Shah's. My grandfather married a Qajar princess whom he loved dearly, but who could not bear him children. After painful years of trying, he finally relented to the insistence of his brothers and, with his wife's approval, acquired a second wife, Shahrbanu, who gave birth to my father and uncle. My grandfather passed away when my father was seven, leaving Shahrbanu alone with two children. The relatives fought over his will and eventually stripped the widowed Shahrbanu of much of his property and wealth. Indignant, she decided to fight back. She traveled to Qom, Iran's holiest city and home to the country's seminaries, hoping to find clerics who would help her secure custody of her children and the holdings that remained. With their assistance, she managed to keep her two sons, as well as assets enough to meet the family's basic needs. In those days, women's consciousness of their rights was limited to their intuitive sense of right and wrong; they would not have conceived of petitioning a legal system for redress, and instead appealed to influential men in society — often clerics, seen as a resource for battling injustices large and small — to advocate on their behalf.

I was born on June 21, 1947, the summer before we left Hamedan for Tehran. My childhood memories revolve around our home in the capital, on what was then called Shah Street (renamed, like most of the city's street, after the Islamic Revolution). The house was quite large, two stories tall and full of rooms, a veritable playground for my siblings and me. In the manner of old Iranian homes, it was built around a central courtyard garden full of roses and white lilies. There was a pool in the middle where a few silvery fish swam, and on summer evenings our beds were carried outside, so that we could fall asleep under the stars, the air perfumed with flowers and the night's silence filled with the chirping of crickets. My mother kept the house spotless — clutter of any sort irritated her — and in this she was assisted by our household staff. Many of my father's farmworkers from Hamedan had applied to serve at our house in Tehran. She entrusted each servant with a task; one did the shopping, another cooked, the third cleaned, and the fourth served tea and meals to guests.

My mother seemed to genuinely love my father, though their marriage had been essentially arranged, and had kept her from attending college. She would wait impatiently for his deep, booming voice to resound through the courtyard at the day's end. But after her marriage, she developed an extraordinarily anxious temperament. If we came home five minutes late, we would find her in the alley outside our house, frantic with fear that we had been kidnapped or run over by a car. The nervousness manifested itself in her physical health as well, and she was often ill, in and out of the care of doctors unable to fully treat or diagnose the source of her constant agitation. There was no obvious reason for it. By almost any account, she was a perfectly fortunate woman — cared for by an ideal, loving husband, mother to obedient, healthy children, in relatively good social and financial standing. It would have been enough to make most Iranian women of her day content. But I can't recall a single day when my mother seemed truly happy.

As I grew older, my mother still groomed herself immaculately, still smiled quietly as she sat knitting in the shadiest corner of our spotless house, but the anxieties still raged inside her, and her body revolted with one illness after another. She was perpetually sick, and her attention to her failing health only fed her nervousness. For a while she came down with asthma, and she paced the house, complaining of feeling suffocated. When I was fourteen, my older sister married and moved back to Hamedan, leaving me the eldest child at home. My mother's poor health was the backdrop of our lives, and I constantly feared her death. I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling through the gauze of mosquito netting, worrying about my brother and sisters. What would happen to them if our mother died? Each night, I entreated God to keep her alive until my little brother and sister grew up. In my young mind, I thought that if she died I would have to quit school and take on her duties at home.

One day that year I crept up to the attic, to make a quiet appeal to God. Please, please keep my mother alive, I prayed, so I can stay in school. Suddenly, an indescribable feeling overtook me, starting in my stomach and spreading to my fingertips. In that stirring, I felt as though God was answering me. My sadness evaporated, and a strange euphoria shot through my heart. Since that moment, my faith in God has been unshakable. Before that day I had only said my prayers by rote, because I had been taught to say them, just I had been taught to wash my face before bed. But after that moment in the attic, I began to recite them with true belief. It is hard to describe the awakening of spirituality, just as it is difficult to explain to someone who has never fallen in love the emotional contours of that experience. My attic revelation reminds me of a line from a Persian poem, "Oh you, the stricken one / Love comes to you, it is not learned."

Copyright © 2006 by Shirin Ebadi. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Shirin Ebadi is one of the leading human rights activists in the world. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. She continues to work as a lawyer in Tehran while also lecturing widely around the world.