Shirin Ebadi’s Fight for Freedom: Lessons from a Nobel Laureate and Iranian Women’s Resistance

Shirin Ebadi is a 2003 Nobel Prize winner known for her political activism and human rights work as a lawyer in Iran. She was also one of the people placed on the state’s execution lists.

In 2017, I listened to the audiobook version of her memoir, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran.

“There was a female Palestinian suicide bomber clutching a rifle in one hand and her little son in the other. This, it seemed, was the state’s only vision of gender equality. Ahmadinejad instituted separate elevators for men and women in government buildings, and he fired swaths of municipal workers who were not religious or devoted enough to his ideology.”

Listening to her made me wonder how my husband and my children would have suffered had I become a high-stakes activist for the causes I believe in. I had also read Blueprint of a Revolution by Srđa Popović and realized that a low-stakes game is often a better alternative for the majority of the masses. Of course, it requires more momentum and patience. It is not as fast as a high-stakes uprising or revolution.

After all, Ebadi says in the book, “It’s not just hope and ideas. It’s about action.”

And she asks, “If we all packed our suitcases and boarded planes, what would be left of our country?”

Ebadi’s memoir is heartbreaking in so many pages, and is a very difficult read. She writes about how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brought an extremist worldview to Tehran. After the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic imposed Sharia law. The cosmopolitan Tehran of the 1970s, where she once sat in cafés and was courted by the man who would become her husband, was erased by a radical political vision for Iran.

“Women are the victims in this patriarchal culture; they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother’s home.”

During the revolution, Ebadi was demoted from her position as a judge to a clerk because women were deemed unfit to judge men. Instead of breaking her, it solidified her commitment to human rights work.

She tells stories of colleagues and activists leaving Iran and her own internal conflict between escape and resistance. Despite bombs and morality patrols in the mid-1980s, she stayed. That was her show of resistance to the regime.

As she raised her two daughters, the streets were bombed into rubble and people were hung from cranes in public squares for their political beliefs. She writes about her husband respecting her career choice to be a judge, and she in turn liked him for his self-confidence. That he was comfortable with a woman who was independent and didn’t think that her duty was only towards home life.

“This was always the most painful part of my work: the searching eyes of the mothers and fathers whose children had been killed or were imprisoned… But the reality is that the fate of their sons and daughters rests largely on the political conditions of Iran, not on my abilities as a lawyer.”

When morality is removed, law becomes violence.

Parents would come to her with photographs in their hands, believing she could save their children. She would be tormented, knowing the system was rigged.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize did not make her safer. In fact, it magnified the danger. Because of a news embargo, no one in her own country even knew she had received it. 

In 2009, just before Iran’s disputed election and violent crackdown, Ebadi chose not to return from a conference in Spain. Iranian authorities later confiscated her Nobel medal, froze her accounts, and targeted those close to her. 

She has lived mainly in the UK since, widely described as being in exile. Not as a choice, but as a condition of survival to continue her human rights work.

In the face of our current political climate around the world, I encourage you to read Until We Are Free. Once you do, it becomes impossible not to start thinking about life differently, with a global conscience instead of a local one. 

Even if I am unable to pay the personal cost of activism like these brave women, who have stood across generations and borders in global solidarity for women’s rights, I salute their unrelenting spirit of freedom. 

Since the 2022 uprising in Iran, we all became Mahsa Amini, the young woman killed by hijab enforcement police. The fight continues as #SayHerName.

I will leave you with a poem ‘My Country, I Shall Build You Again’ by Simin Behbahani, the Lioness of Iran. These words echo the courage of those who persist under oppression, the same courage Ebadi also embodies, and that generations of women continue to carry forward.

They remind us that freedom is neither easy nor guaranteed, yet it is worth fighting for. 

My country, I shall build you again,
Even if with bricks of my life,
I shall erect pillars beneath your roof
even if with my own bones.
With the flood of my tears.
I shall again cleanse your blood.
I shall again smell those flowers
favored by your young.

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