This part of Shirin Ebadi's book, Iran Awakening, slayed me and made me think about you Doug. During the revolution, still before the embassy workers are taking hostage, no one is allowed to leave the country. However, she and her husband have to go to the u.s. for medical treatment, a visit scheduled long in advance. At the time, she is still the most prominent female judge in the country. She returns from NY to find the place had changed in just a month:
"people had begun wearing their support for the revolution on their sleeves, literally. As my taxi crept past government buildings in downtown Tehran, I noticed that the usual line of ministry cars along the curb was missing, and a long line of motorcycles was parked in their stead. When I arrived at the court, I passed from hall to hall, peeking incredulously into various offices. The men were no longer wearing suits nd ties but plain slacks and collarless shirts, many of them quite wrinkled, some stained. Even my nose caught a whiff of the change. The slight scent of cologne or perfume that had lingered in the corridors, especially in the mornings, was absent. Finding one of my female colleagues in the hall, I whispered my shock at the overnight transformation, as though the ministry staff were in dress rehearsal for a play about urban poverty.
At some moment during my short absence, apparently the populist revolt had stopped to devoted attention to truly consequential matters, such as the outlawing of the tie on government property. The radical mullahs had long disparaged Westernized technocrats as 'fokoli,' from the French word 'faux-col,' or bow tie, and now the tie was deemed a symbol of the West's evils, smelling of cologne signaled counterrevolutionary tendencies, and riding the ministry car to work was evidence of class privilege. In the new atmosphere, everyone aspired to appear poor, and the waring of dirty clothes had become a mark of political integrity, a sign of one's sympathy with the dispossessed.
"What are these chairs!" Ayatolla Taleghani, one of the prominent revolutionary clerics, had famously barked in complaint after arriving to rewrite the constitution at the senate building and finding a roomful of elegant brocaded chairs. They were already here, his aides said defensively; we didn't go out and buy them. For days, the ayatollah and his assembly penned the constitution while sitting cross-legged on the floor, until they gave up and perched on the corrupt chairs."
heh. pp. 41-2, Iran Awakening, Shirin Ebadi
Not long afterward, she learns that they are going to expel all the women from positions as judges, forcing them to take positions as clerks. She can't believe this will happen, that she had supported their revolution, that she "had loaned the credential of my support -- the support of a top female judge -- to the revolution," so they could not possibly betray her and other women like her, let alone all the women in the country.
But they did. This is the history of the Iranian women's movement for over a century: the use of women by political regimes in order to obtain power in the first place, and the continuing to use "women's issues" as a political football: pivot babes for their circle jerk. they need women to vote for them, to support them, to risk their lives for their revolutions and reforms, but all it has ever meant is that rights are given and then taken away.
She writes ina chap called, "The Bitter Taste of Revolution":
"The head-scarf 'invitation' was the first warning that this reovlution might eat its sisters, which was what women called one another while agitating for the shah's overthrow. Imagine the scene, just days after the revolution's victory. A man named Fathollah Bani-Sadr was appointed provisional overser of the Ministry of Justice. Still flush with pricde, a group of us chose a clear, breezy afternoon to descend on his office and congratulate him." ...
Bani-Sadr said, when he saw the women weren't veiled:
"Don't you think that out of respect for our beloved Imam Khomeini, who has graced Iran with his return, it would be better if you covered your hair?"
I was shaken. Here we were, in the Ministry of Justice, after a great popular revolt had replaced an antique monarchy with a modern republic, and the new overseer of justice was talking about hair.
Hair!"
The funny thing is, Eric is wrong. The problem isn't that thinking about hair and veiling and lipstick, and maybe even risking getting a baton smack over the head over wearing your veil an inch back, is just girly politics, not the manly man stuff of "real" politics.
It is rather that this girly stuff about showing ankles and wrists was given its great importance by the buoyz in the first fucking place! That was where the real politics was at, from the very beginning! :)
So, after all that, btw, she ends up being demoted to a clerkship where she goes to work daily, refusing to do any work, as protest. She finds herself in her backyard, burning all her books:
"I made little pyramids around the periphery of the yard and then set them alight. A pile of Marx. A pile of Lenin." ..
"Earlier that week, the newspapers had begun announcing the firing-squad executions of those suspected of sympathizing with leftist groups deemed counterrevolutionary. Ever since the shah had left and Ayatollah Khomeini had returned, the various political factions had split and metastasized, and then fought each other over the revolution's direction; to entrench their control, the circle around the ayatollah had begun hunting down members and suspected sympathizers of the groups they sought to sideline. Each current published its own magazines and books, espousing its particular definition of revolution, and many Iranians bought them, amassing small libraries of political texts that cataloged the different strains of revolution. But when the purges began, being caught in possession of targeted group's literature was considered a crime, an act of opposition to the regime. Book owners, and even the families of book owners, could be sentenced to years in prison." (p 66-7)
A brother, a devotee of the Mojahedin-e Khalgh (MKO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran, comes to stay with them because, his friends are being murdered, kidnapped, and jailed, and he doesn't want to jeopardize his elderly parents.
During the month of Ramazan (the way its pronounced in Persian), he refuses to even eat the pre-dawn meal because he wants "to feel hungry like poor people". He his yanked off the streets and imprisoned for 20 yrs for the crime of selling MKO newspapers. He's 17. At the age of 24, he executed while in jail. It is retaliation for the MKO's uprising shortly after the cease-fire resolution in the Iran-Iraq war. They'd been training in Iraq, fighting in Iraq's army, thinking that if they helped defeat Iran, they would be in position to launch a socialist revolution.
After the cease-fire, the MKO sent 7000 troops to attack the western Iranian province of Kermanshah, with the hopes of weakening the regime still further and igniting socialist revolution.
Her brother in law is killed in retaliation. Ostensibly, among the dead MKO, they found them with names pinned to their bodies, listing supporters in Evin prison in north Tehran. Her brother's name is listed among supporters in the prison. The government wouldn't let them mourn him, and would only tell them about his burial site a year later and why he died a year later. khanoum Ebadi, of course, defies this order telling everyone who would listen that her BIL had been executed.
She also says that, the execution rate had gotten so high that, at one point after the revolution years, the common joke had been that, if the rate of execution continued, if you multiplied the "ratio b the population of Iran, the law of probability tells us that in seven years, ten months, and twenty-six days, it will be our turn" to be executed." gallows humor.
shag