COMMENTARY    Shirin Ebadi By AZAR NAFISI Iran is in the news again. Not for its nuclear weapons or its connections to terrorist groups; not for its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan or the murder of an Iranian-born Canadian journalist; not for its stonings, and not even for its executions. Iran is in the news because a woman, a human-rights lawyer, has won the Nobel Prize for Peace. *** "This prize doesn't belong to me only -- it belongs to all the people who work for human rights and democracy in Iran," said Shirin Ebadi, the laureate, at a press conference in Paris on Friday. She was not merely being humble. Her award directs our attention to an Iran that is very different from the one dominating the news, the Iran that is overshadowed by the Islamic regime, an Iran that is misunderstood by the outside world in its attempts to reduce a rich and dynamic society's ferment to a struggle between "hardliners" and "reformers" within the ruling elite. But this other Iran has the unruly habit of rearing its head at the most inopportune times, eluding our pat formulations. It is defined by the many different voices within the country's civil society, who defy all our attempts at a simplistic portrayal. This is a time to remember certain representatives of this other Iran, those who share the honor of Ms. Ebadi's award: the dissident secular writer Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, who was killed by government agents on Dec. 10, 1998, the day on which his translation of the history and text of the Universal Declaration of Human rights was published. His murder was part of a series of murders -- notoriously called the "chain murders" -- committed against some secular dissident writers and two nationalist leaders, Daryush and Parvaneh Forouhar. Ms. Ebadi was the lawyer for the Forouhars' family, for which she was jailed and disbarred for five years. Alongside them we remember the former Islamist revolutionaries who, criticizing their own actions from within, became instrumental in the ideological transformation of many other veterans of the Islamic revolution, noted among them the courageous investigative reporter Akbar Ganji, who questioned the very foundations of the Islamic rule. And then there are the university students. Only this summer, in a three-week period, 4,000 were arrested to prevent a demonstration in memory of the brutal suppression of the student uprising in 1998. Ms. Ebadi, like many other women in Iran -- such as Mehrangiz Kar, another courageous human and women's rights lawyer -- came into the political arena by claiming her right to live as a professional, and as a woman. Before the revolution Ms. Ebadi had no political record; she had distinguished herself as Iran's first female judge, and served as president of the city court of Tehran from 1975-79. She was forced to step down as a judge in 1979; the Islamic regime deemed women too weak-minded to serve as judges. But when one space was closed to her, she sought to open another: She became a women's rights activist and human-rights defense attorney. As a woman activist she did not have to look to other countries for role models: She could rely on the tradition created by many courageous Iranian women before her, who, for over a century, had fought despotism, opening political, cultural and social spaces for Iranian women. In her lifetime, Ms. Ebadi saw her country evolve into a modern dynamic society where women were involved in all spheres. At the time of the Islamic revolution, Iran could boast of two women ministers, one minister for women's affairs (the second of her kind in the world), women parliamentarians, women in the police force and heavy industry. Ms. Ebadi was involved in the formulation of progressive laws such as the family protection law which supported women at home and at work. She knew that the progress Iranian women had made in such a short period was not the gift of a shah to be taken away from them by an ayatollah. If the Iranian women did not abdicate their rights after the Islamic revolution it was not due to the grace of the Islamic rulers, whose first targets were women, culture, minorities and human rights. The first laws the new regime changed were those that benefited women. They repealed the family protection law, lowered the age of marriage from 18 to nine, legalized polygamy and brought stoning as punishment for what they called adultery and prostitution. The order they created was a totalitarian state in the name of religion. In so doing, they took away the right to freedom of religion, thus robbing individuals of their right to create the kind of relation they wished with their God. They violated the rights not only of atheists and religious minorities but also of genuine Muslims who did not want their religion abused as a political tool. Ms. Ebadi, Ms. Kar and many others did not succumb to the regime's lies; they did not think that to be a Muslim presupposes a belief in Islamic rule. For 24 years, Ms. Ebadi has consistently challenged female exclusion by defending the applicability of human rights and democracy regardless of nationality, religion, race or sex. "In the case of Iran," says Ms. Ebadi, "human rights are violated by the very laws of the country. Most of the legislation passed after the revolution is in contradiction with human-rights values and principles." "I am a Muslim," Ms. Ebadi asserts, "so you can be a Muslim and support democracy." This negates the stereotypical images that many Islamists and their apologists in the West disseminate about Islam and democracy. They try to persuade us that among all the religions only Islam is culturally determined, and that while there is no such thing as Christian or Judaic or Hindu or Zoroastrian democracy, Muslims are only defined and shaped by their religion. This claim, no matter how moderate or extremist its advocates might be, is dangerous because it segregates Muslims from the rest of the world. Democracy loses its meaning when it is restricted by any ideology, religious or secular. The safety and freedom of citizens in democracies is irretrievably bound with the safety and freedom of people like Ms. Ebadi who are fighting to reassert the best achievements of mankind: universal human rights. For those in democracies, defense of human rights should arise not just out of a sense of compassion, but also as the only safeguard against violence and terror. *** Yes, Iran is in the news again. If the Islamic regime in Iran grabbed headlines through its formulation of a modern theocracy, those in Iran's civil society today, the ones with whom Ms. Ebadi wishes to share her award, are also making news by presenting to the world a different model for the conflicts that face Muslim-majority countries. They point to a non-violent way of change and transformation, once more proving that the only way to confront brutality is by stepping out of the domain of the violator, by refusing to act the way he does, and by defying him by not being like him. Each culture finds its own way of creating a path to democracy, the way of a Jefferson, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King, a Havel or an Aung San Suu Kyi. They each found the solution through their own culture and traditions, but they never lost sight of the universality of their principles. Now, the Iranian people have the privilege and the potential to bring good news not only to Iran and to Muslim societies, but also to the world. This is the main reason why democratic-minded citizens of the world should support the Iranian people's aspirations and thereby prove that, for them, democracy and human rights are not mere words, but are principles by which they shape their lives -- as well as the lives of others. Ms. Nafisi , a professor at Johns Hopkins and formerly at Tehran University, is the author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books" (Random House, 2003). ********* Azar Nafisi Director, The Dialogue Project School of Advanced International Studies The Johns Hopkins University