Post by cardigan on Jun 3, 2006 23:10:56 GMT -5
A while ago, you may recall a female American air force officer took the US military to court. The case was an equal rights one, concerning American female military personnel being required to dress according to Islamic law when off base in Saudi Arabia, while their male colleagues did not. During the trial, as an indication of the tension, several examples were cited including one that I am ashamed to say delighted me.
A female engineer was called to a truck breakdown and attended in her standard army issue khaki shorts and T-shirt. While jacking up the vehicle, a member of Saudi’s religious police passed by, got out of his car and began whipping her “shameful” bare legs. Within seconds, the engineer had him face down on the ground, arms up his back with a pistol held to the back of his head. This was cited in the trial as unseemly behaviour on behalf of the female soldier brought on by cultural tensions, but at the time I would have gladly paid good money to have witnessed the sight of that bearded little barbarian with his face pressed into the dust by a girl with a gun.
I find myself once again deeply ashamed of this Hollywood-inspired, knee-jerk reaction to such unpleasant conflict on reading the brilliant new book by Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening. If the Nobel prize-winning human rights lawyer and activist teaches us anything, it’s that simplistic, polarised and reductionist reactions to the complexity of the West’s relationship with political Islam is not only profoundly ignorant, but more importantly the fast track to disaster.
In a media where the only images and representations of Iran are of a hopelessly insane country led by a dangerously insane leader, full of bearded, shouting, hooligan men burning flags, beating breasts and firing guns while downtrodden, uneducated, enslaved women cower beneath burkas, Ebadi’s voice has never been more important.
The picture she paints of the country that she still loves, despite it having been the one that stripped her of her career as judge and lawyer, imprisoned her, persecuted her and threatened her life, is one of a people who are steadily, if slowly, working towards their own solutions on how they might bring an end to the catalogue of appalling suffering they have endured for decades. Ebadi’s clarity in describing how the 1979 Islamic revolution was a direct response to despicable and insulting American intervention, and hence was a revolution supported by intellectuals and ruling classes alongside the hoi polloi, goes a long way in helping us understand the mindset of the Iranian people.
Her subsequent disillusionment with the hardline Islamic clerics who seized control and began systematically persecuting women, gay people and religious minorities, is clearly a disgust that is shared by a great many of her fellow citizens. This is not a country of fanatics bent on “wiping Israel off the map” with an arsenal of illegal nuclear weapons and looking forward to the Islamic heaven they will communally encounter some 17 minutes after having launched the first missile in Israel’s direction, when Iran would disappear forever by way of Israel’s considerably greater retaliatory fire.
This instead, according to Ebadi, is a country of normal, hopeful, diverse human beings, buckling under the yoke of a brutal regime, and if left to their own devices and given the correct kind of international aid as opposed to self-interested international interference, will eventually overcome this poisonous regime on their own terms.
What’s doubly fascinating is Ebadi’s implication in the book that the next revolution will be driven by the will of women. She points to a peculiar contradiction in contemporary Iranian society, where despite women being oppressed and controlled in the most appalling ways imaginable, they are still allowed access to higher education. And, as every dictator knows, there is nothing more dangerous than an oppressed people who are intelligent and educated. The Taliban know this well, hence their ban on women learning to read, but it shows just how complex Iran is as a country that it will barely allow its women to leave the house without male consent, yet it will permit them to study subjects that will inevitably open their minds to just how terrible their plight is.
Ebadi reminds us how women are always the canvas on which uncivilised, aggressive and frightened men first paint their tyranny, but what is quite remarkable is how unjudgemental, forgiving and full of hope this woman is. Her strength is such that she retains her faith as a non-traditional Muslim, and resolutely regards the Islamic regime as a political evil rather than a religious one, continually reasserting that her religion is not one that deems women as second class, or indeed sanctions any kind of violence, oppression or injustice. The most exciting aspect of her courage to continually speak out is that her survival against the odds proves that she is not entirely alone in her country in this civilised and highly evolved thinking.
The most important message in Ebadi’s book is that Iran is not a threat to anyone except its own subjects, and indeed it will need our help if Iraq breaks out into the full-scale civil war that has already begun. This is, unsurprisingly, quite a different world view to that of the American chimp and his lackeys, who are quite clearly desperate to “liberate” Iran and its oil in the name, this time at least, of saving Israel from a nuclear attack and the West from terrorists with nuclear bombs.
In the coming months, when we will be asked to subscribe to the American “Take out the Iranian threat for the sake of the free world” or Ibadi’s “Help us with our immediate problems when we ask for it and then leave us be”, surely it’s obvious which is the right response. In truth, I no longer want to see a religious policeman’s face ground into the dirt. I want to see him educated by women like Shirin Ebadi, not threatened by American guns
Muriel Gray
A female engineer was called to a truck breakdown and attended in her standard army issue khaki shorts and T-shirt. While jacking up the vehicle, a member of Saudi’s religious police passed by, got out of his car and began whipping her “shameful” bare legs. Within seconds, the engineer had him face down on the ground, arms up his back with a pistol held to the back of his head. This was cited in the trial as unseemly behaviour on behalf of the female soldier brought on by cultural tensions, but at the time I would have gladly paid good money to have witnessed the sight of that bearded little barbarian with his face pressed into the dust by a girl with a gun.
I find myself once again deeply ashamed of this Hollywood-inspired, knee-jerk reaction to such unpleasant conflict on reading the brilliant new book by Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening. If the Nobel prize-winning human rights lawyer and activist teaches us anything, it’s that simplistic, polarised and reductionist reactions to the complexity of the West’s relationship with political Islam is not only profoundly ignorant, but more importantly the fast track to disaster.
In a media where the only images and representations of Iran are of a hopelessly insane country led by a dangerously insane leader, full of bearded, shouting, hooligan men burning flags, beating breasts and firing guns while downtrodden, uneducated, enslaved women cower beneath burkas, Ebadi’s voice has never been more important.
The picture she paints of the country that she still loves, despite it having been the one that stripped her of her career as judge and lawyer, imprisoned her, persecuted her and threatened her life, is one of a people who are steadily, if slowly, working towards their own solutions on how they might bring an end to the catalogue of appalling suffering they have endured for decades. Ebadi’s clarity in describing how the 1979 Islamic revolution was a direct response to despicable and insulting American intervention, and hence was a revolution supported by intellectuals and ruling classes alongside the hoi polloi, goes a long way in helping us understand the mindset of the Iranian people.
Her subsequent disillusionment with the hardline Islamic clerics who seized control and began systematically persecuting women, gay people and religious minorities, is clearly a disgust that is shared by a great many of her fellow citizens. This is not a country of fanatics bent on “wiping Israel off the map” with an arsenal of illegal nuclear weapons and looking forward to the Islamic heaven they will communally encounter some 17 minutes after having launched the first missile in Israel’s direction, when Iran would disappear forever by way of Israel’s considerably greater retaliatory fire.
This instead, according to Ebadi, is a country of normal, hopeful, diverse human beings, buckling under the yoke of a brutal regime, and if left to their own devices and given the correct kind of international aid as opposed to self-interested international interference, will eventually overcome this poisonous regime on their own terms.
What’s doubly fascinating is Ebadi’s implication in the book that the next revolution will be driven by the will of women. She points to a peculiar contradiction in contemporary Iranian society, where despite women being oppressed and controlled in the most appalling ways imaginable, they are still allowed access to higher education. And, as every dictator knows, there is nothing more dangerous than an oppressed people who are intelligent and educated. The Taliban know this well, hence their ban on women learning to read, but it shows just how complex Iran is as a country that it will barely allow its women to leave the house without male consent, yet it will permit them to study subjects that will inevitably open their minds to just how terrible their plight is.
Ebadi reminds us how women are always the canvas on which uncivilised, aggressive and frightened men first paint their tyranny, but what is quite remarkable is how unjudgemental, forgiving and full of hope this woman is. Her strength is such that she retains her faith as a non-traditional Muslim, and resolutely regards the Islamic regime as a political evil rather than a religious one, continually reasserting that her religion is not one that deems women as second class, or indeed sanctions any kind of violence, oppression or injustice. The most exciting aspect of her courage to continually speak out is that her survival against the odds proves that she is not entirely alone in her country in this civilised and highly evolved thinking.
The most important message in Ebadi’s book is that Iran is not a threat to anyone except its own subjects, and indeed it will need our help if Iraq breaks out into the full-scale civil war that has already begun. This is, unsurprisingly, quite a different world view to that of the American chimp and his lackeys, who are quite clearly desperate to “liberate” Iran and its oil in the name, this time at least, of saving Israel from a nuclear attack and the West from terrorists with nuclear bombs.
In the coming months, when we will be asked to subscribe to the American “Take out the Iranian threat for the sake of the free world” or Ibadi’s “Help us with our immediate problems when we ask for it and then leave us be”, surely it’s obvious which is the right response. In truth, I no longer want to see a religious policeman’s face ground into the dirt. I want to see him educated by women like Shirin Ebadi, not threatened by American guns
Muriel Gray