Dr. Shirin Ebadi

The lecture last night was really great. For some reason, I expected it to be in English, but it was in Farsi.

The first thing Dr. Ebadi talked about was, to put it bluntly, how much Islam sucked for women and people of other faiths. I was starting to think that, although her points are correct and valid, that this lecture might validate certain people’s beliefs that Islam really IS oppressive to women. But when she turned it around and said that these backwards beliefs are only one (wrong) interpretation of Islam, I was in love.

To be concise, her main point was that democracy is not incompatible with Islam, and neither are human rights. If democracy is to exist in Iran (or any other nation, for that matter), it must come from the people and not from an occupying force. Also, human rights must be the framework for this democracy and human rights are not culturally relative.

There was oodles of other fun facts and things I never knew about Iran, like how the Iranian embassy in France issued fake passports to Jews fleeing the Holocaust in WWII. She also got a lot of cheers for saying that she was pro-choice. If you’re able to attend one of her lectures, I recommend that you do so.