Iran Awakening
by Shirin Ebadi
Rider, £12.99; 236pp

Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
by Jason Elliot
Picador, £16.99; 250pp

“AS I WAS DEFENDING the (Divorce) Bill to the commission, an imperious, traditionalist cleric sitting next to me gathered his robes and turned to address me: ‘Why have you written that male consent is not required for divorce?’ “Because it’s not,” I said. “And I’ll prove it to you.” I pulled out the Shahr-e Lomeh, the Shia textbook of jurisprudence. “This is the book you study in the seminary, and on which you are tested in becoming a mullah,” I stated. “It says nowhere in here that male consent is required. So why are you insisting it is?” For trumping this cleric with his own seminary’s books, the lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi is ejected from the session at the Iranian parliament. In another court battle the judge sternly warns her: “Do not criticise Islamic law,” to which she responds “I am only asking if justice has been served.”

Ebadi’s inspiring memoir Iran Awakening offers a first-hand look at her remarkable life and Iran’s human rights struggle. She was forced to resign as Iran’s first female judge when the revolutionaries decided that women were unfit for such roles. She turned her law practice into a base for rights campaigning, taking cases of dissident writers, intellectuals and pro-democracy activists that other lawyers deemed far too dangerous.

She has juggled motherhood and a career and at a time when “intellectuals are turning up dead all over the country”; her daughter declares: “Don’t tell me tomorrow that so-and-so is on hunger strike, or that someone just got sent to prison, you better show up.”

Ebadi, a committed Muslim, has battled for an interpretation of her faith that is compatible with democracy, convinced “that change in Iran must come peacefully and from within”. For her efforts she has been imprisoned and threatened with death by those who denounce her as an apostate “for daring to suggest that Islam can look forward, and denounced outside the country by secular critics of the Islamic republic, whose attitudes are no less dogmatic”. But she is far from a lone, friendless voice in Iran and has many allies and supporters.

After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 Ebadi was greeted at Tehran airport by a joyous crowd numbering “hundreds of thousands”. Among her admirers was the granddaughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, who placed a garland of orchids around her neck.

Iranian society is riddled with such bizarre paradoxes or, as Jason Elliot puts it in Mirrors of the Unseen: “Janus-like traits which puzzle, bemuse, and infuriate the outsider.” Yet with headlines across the Western world screaming of a new era of international history in which Cold War rivalry has been replaced by a fundamental clash of civilisations, we cannot pander to ambiguities.

Elliot’s account of his travels through a much misunderstood nation reveals glimpses of Iran beyond the clichés and headlines. He is armed with a broad knowledge of Persian culture and history, fluent in Farsi, yet only a short while after entering Iran he tells us: “My Iran, and everything I had assumed about it, was dissolving before my eyes.”

He reminds us how modern Iran, with its “glowering visage of Khomeini, an enduring icon of Islamophobia”, is a now pale similitude “of the days when Persia was the intellectual treasury of the world, and its culture a model of sophistication”.

In turn, as he is formidably challenged by a postal worker in Kermanshah on Herodotus and Classical Greek accounts of the Persians, he is reminded of “the long reach of history in the Persian psyche” and of an ancient gripe by its people of “having been misrepresented to the world”.

Elliot passionately absorbs Persian art and reads ancient structures as you might a primary document for clues of a people and their heritage. When the remains of the Ilkhanid citadel are fenced off for repairs, he climbs rickety planks of scaffolding to reach nearly 100ft above the city. As someone furiously waves him down, he flourishes a fictitious permission slip with equal vigour and keeps going.

Prepared to rough it in the interest of his quest, he often stays in abysmal digs as he travels to areas where “veils of poverty” thicken on route. He moves with intimacy and great sensitivity through diverse social settings, but can’t help feeling “bumpkinish” at a stylish Tehran dinner party.

Elliot tells us that he had intended “to give politics a wide berth; but it had quickly become a portion of my daily experience. So often did I encounter resentment at the regime’s broken promises it was difficult not to suppose the whole country was disillusioned and weary and resentful and simmering like a Vesuvius”.

But as he gets to hear from those with their ear to the ground at a gathering in the British Embassy compound, the Iranian experience is “far ahead of would-be Islamist states; they understood the limitations of theocratic rule better than any other Islamic nations, and the continuing debates on the nature of rulership were probably the world’s most intellectually sophisticated”. And that “every factor was in place for its evolution, which it would be a pity to usurp”.

Or as Elliot, the intrepid traveller, weighs in: “Much easier to wage war than to solve the challenges of peace.”