It’s been probably three or four years since I read this and it was in my top 2 or 3 reads of the year.

New York Times book review:
The decade after the revolution was a crucible of war and repression. For Ebadi, it was marked above all by the political imprisonment and murder of a family member. She recounts that episode with the mixture of outrage and empathy that would fuel her return to legal practice in the 1990's, by which time Iran's leaders had realized they needed their female lawyers and law professors.
Ebadi shouldered the country's most intractable human rights cases pro bono. She pored over religious texts to argue against particular interpretations of Koranic injunctions by insisting that within Islam, other more just or less discriminatory interpretations were possible. She did this not because she had warmed to the Islamic penal code or to the idea of religious interpretation as a foundation for the law, but because her cases were pressing and her intellectual vanity was not.
Ebadi represents the family of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was killed in police custody in 2003. She herself was imprisoned in the course of her work on the case of a student who was beaten to death by paramilitaries during a 1999 protest. When a number of dissident intellectuals were murdered under mysterious circumstances in the late 1990's, Ebadi took on one of the most significant of those cases, representing the children of Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, a couple slain in their home. While digging through government documents in the course of preparing for that trial, Ebadi encountered the official authorization for her own assassination.
Ebadi is a towering figure, but she writes of her life choices as though they were natural and obvious. Not that the others in her orbit all chose to risk their lives and freedom. Many of her friends, she recalls with wistfulness and no small amount of anger, emigrated during the Iran-Iraq war. Others collaborated with the regime or went into legal fields that allowed them some distance from politics. For Ebadi, the only patriotic choice was to stay and the only moral choice was to fight injustice within a system that enshrined it as law.
These labors have often been frustrating. Many of Ebadi's cases remain unresolved, and many of the laws she has sought to change persist today. Still, through her work she has spotlighted some of the Islamic Republic's most egregious practices. In doing so she offers no small measure of hope to those who have run afoul of a judicial system that prefers to operate in the shadows.
One wishes there were more about the cases themselves, the strategies she has used to represent her clients and the intricacies of the trials. In many instances we are not even told how the legal proceedings ended, if they ended at all. Ebadi writes that she reserves these details for a future book, but their absence here is conspicuous.
What we do get is a complex and moving portrait of a life lived in truth, as Vaclav Havel would put it, within the stultifying confines of a political system intended to compel passivity. Ebadi is well aware of the compromises forced on her as she works to curb the Islamic legal system's worst excesses. It is worth quoting her at length on this point, because she articulates the dignity of a reform movement inside Iran that has been derided by Islamists and Westerners alike as too appeasing of the other side. At a time when Washington speaks naïvely and grandiosely of regime change in Iran, Ebadi's story offers an eloquent reminder that working for justice within an unjust system does not always permit a simple and satisfying moral posture. She writes:
"It so happened that I believed in the secular separation of religion and government because, fundamentally, Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation. It can be interpreted to oppress women or interpreted to liberate them. . . . I am a lawyer by training, and know only too well the permanent limitations of trying to enshrine inalienable rights in sources that lack fixed terms and definitions. But I am also a citizen of the Islamic Republic, and I know the futility of approaching the question any other way. My objective is not to vent my own political sensibilities but to push for a law that would save a family like Leila's" — a child who was raped and murdered — "from becoming homeless in their quest to finance the executions of their daughter's convicted murderers. If I'm forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the egalitarian ethics of Islam, then so be it. Is it harder this way? Of course it is. But is there an alternative battlefield? Desperate wishing aside, I cannot see one.

Happy Birthday!!

Thank you for this birthday gift. It arrived while I was traveling. It looks like this book is right my alley and that it will be very interesting to read.

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