One Can Make a Difference (17 page)

None of us can see what lies ahead, and because of this we tend to look at the future with fear. When you have confidence and trust it's much easier to deal with this fear. And also, when you imagine the possibilities of what could come out of what you are trying to do, then that becomes a source of inspiration and encouragement.

This way of thinking may come naturally to some, but most of us need to teach ourselves along the way. That is why, largely, this sort of confidence doesn't happen in our earlier years. During those years we're being guided by our parents, our teachers, and it's only when we get out of school and face the world that we begin to be challenged. It's from facing challenges, big ones or small ones, that trust and self-assurance builds.

Of course, there are times when you're not very sure how things are going to turn out, and when they turn out well, you say, “Thank God.” I definitely do believe in a higher power, in a higher energy that is sometimes impossible to explain. We have given it many names in different communities. Whether we call it God or the angels or whatever, it is what guides us through seemingly impossible times. I've faced too many obstacles to list here, but I think I survived the moments of difficulties because of a strong commitment not only to God, but also to a need to succeed. Partly because I had people ahead of me whom I'd looked up to and whom I did not like to disappoint. And partly because there were people behind me, whom I did not want to disappoint. I hoped to give them strength by keeping strong, by keeping on, by not giving up. I think those are the forces that sometimes give us energy that we don't necessarily understand.

Conviction, vigilance, preparedness, confidence, imagination, these are some of the traits that bring victory, and victory brings great joy. As do your accomplishments, especially accomplishments that are likely to outlive you. These are accomplishments that will testify to your belief and your faith long after you're gone. If you believe that you have improved the situation for the better, this makes you feel that life is worth living. It is good to remember that quite often we are not challenged by major things, we are challenged by ordinary things in our ordinary life. Meeting these challenges is no less worthy or meaningful than meeting the monumental ones. The most vital thing is to meet any challenge with determination and joy.

LILY MAZAHERY

Throwing Out a Lifeline

When I was a little girl, I often traveled through the Middle East. To me, all
those women in “purdah” (literally meaning a “curtain” that excludes them from
the world), a tiny cloth mesh window in their burqas allowing them to see the
world like blinkered horses, were simply a part of the landscape. I am sorry to say
that I didn't think of them as consequential at all, and that's how it is supposed
to be. Even male imbeciles are full participants in society's business, whereas the
cleverest woman counts only as half a person who must obey him in all things.
She can never walk unaccompanied and, in many places, is forbidden to attend
school or to work. My shame at so many years of not “seeing” these covered
women may contribute to my attraction to Lily Mazahery's work. Lily is not
only making them visible but also giving them a voice in the courts. Sometimes
she saves their lives, which are often in danger for reasons that defy humanity.

Lily's whole country, Iran, became a happily forgotten place to her when
she fled it as a child during the revolution. But now it has returned to her
consciousness with a bang, and she is showing just how strong and useful a
liberated woman can be.

S
ince the revolution in Iran, it is perfectly legal to stone a woman to death under Sharia, the Islamic laws put in place by the religious bodies that seized control of the country. It happens this way: a woman is forcefully pushed into a pit dug in the earth. Her hands are tied behind her back. Dirt is thrown into the pit until she is buried up to her chest. People then stamp on the earth to tamp it down and make her escape impossible. Her own relatives often throw the first stones, which, by law, must not be big enough to kill her outright. Then everyone joins in until she is finished. Can you imagine it? Women are killed in this way for the “crime” of adultery. An adulterous man, on the other hand, will get only a public lashing. Men are also allowed to take multiple young women, children really, as their wives, a form of sanctioned serial adultery and polygamy.

Women can also be stoned to death for flirting, for being caught holding hands with a man who is not related to them even when they are single, and for being raped. Yes, raped! The word for rape, “zena,” is the same as that for debauchery and debauchery is a crime punishable by death under Sharia.

I was born in Teheran and was about five years old when the revolution came. I remember the chaos, shouting, flags burning, and our family life being turned upside down. I was upstairs studying at a little desk in a quiet room with floor to ceiling windows, when someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the house. Then another. Everything went up in flames and we ran out, my mother carrying my newborn baby brother in her arms. The worst blow of all was when my father, who worked for the government, had to leave us, to leave the country. It was six long years before we could join him.

We were reunited with my father the minute we stepped off the plane at JFK. I was jubilant. I didn't want to think about Iran ever again. I associated my life there with trauma, with loneliness, with missing my dad, with fear. Now I was going to be an all-American girl, speak English, play with American girls, go to an American school. A month after we were reunited with my father in the United States, my maternal grandmother, the closest remaining relative in Iran, died, and a door closed on that world for me. I told myself I would never speak a word of Farsi again. I was going to be an American teen! And that's what I became, completely.

My father was a civil engineer.When I was about fourteen, he took me, very proudly, to the opening of a law school he had designed. It was a beautiful day and during the opening ceremony I made up my mind to become an attorney. That was my path.

Around that time I met an Iranian girl I will call “Leila” who came from a broken home, and my own parents pretty much adopted her as their own. We were close until I went to college and then we lost touch. I found out that Leila had become pregnant at the age of seventeen, married the older man responsible, and moved to Kansas. Then, in my first year of law school, she called to say he was taking her back to Iran. She didn't want to go but she had no choice. I found it unbelievable, but I put it out of my mind and wished her well.

I really did live the American dream. I graduated top of my class and was recruited by one of the best law firms in the world, Jones Bay. This meant limousines, an expense account, big money, the works; all you strive for to be successful. Sitting in my office one day, I heard from my friend again. Leila now had two children. Her husband was abusive to her and she had found out that he not only had another wife in the United States, but the first wife was moving to Iran to live under the same roof with them. Leila was horrified and desperate to come back to America. What could I do but try to help her?

I worked around the clock. By getting on the Internet and searching, I found many people with connections in Iran, with legal training, even college groups of expatriates who were willing to help. Finally, we had enough of a legal leg to stand on to allow Leila to get a divorce hearing. If she could be freed from her husband's control, she could leave. I was so happy for her. But, when she went before the court, the judge asked her if it was “that time of the month.” Flummoxed, Leila admitted that it was. That is when we found out that women are considered incompetent to make decisions at those times and Leila's divorce was flatly denied. Leila paid a man to help her flee to Turkey with the children, but September 11, 2001, was only days away. Even a world away, everything would change when those planes flew into the World Trade Center. Leila ended up unable to cross the border. Her husband found her, kidnapped her, and took her back. She's still there today.

This experience shook me from my ivory tower. I had family myself. I had legal training. I had a deliberately severed link to a country where my friend and other women like her were treated like things, where human rights did not extend to them. And the more I studied, the more I realized that this was not always the case in Iran. Going back to the days of Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire, human rights were an important part of the development of the country. Now, reading the new penal code introduced since the revolution, those rights have been stripped away to the extent that a woman has no inheritance rights, no right to custody of her own children, and can be stoned to death for falling in love, for a wide array of ridiculous and harmless things labeled “acts incompatible with chastity”!

Perhaps the last straw was learning of a sixteen-year-old girl who was hanged in public for riding in a car with a boy. I couldn't sit still after that, so I started to contact jurists in Iran, and the more people I talked to, the more I learned. I made contacts with other lawyers in the United States who wanted to help.That's how I ended up founding the Legal Rights Institute, a nongovernmental organization, an international support network really, to fight for the rights of women and children in my former home.

One of our first cases involved a woman who was gang-raped while she tried to defend her niece. When she went to the police for help she was arrested and ended up sentenced to death because she had had physical contact with the men! Such women usually have no chance, the courts are kangaroo courts and there is no freedom of the press. Through persistence and determination and with much help from people on the ground in Iran, we were able to get her sentence commuted.

Another effort is our “One Million Signature Campaign,” for which I started a petition drive in the United States, to collect a million signatures asking the government of Iran to treat men and women equally. We work with human rights lawyers who travel in and out of Iran, helping get women out of jail, getting them representation in the courts, trying to save their lives. We send little things to the women in jail, too, that make them realize that someone out there cares about them, is working to free them: flowers, photos, and once, even painting supplies for a prisoner named Delara Darabi. So many women commit suicide, their despair is so great; we try to ease that sorrow, give them hope, and bring a smile to their lips. There is not a day that I don't cry over a case I know about, one woman or another.Yet there we are, 9,000 miles away, digging for information, making contacts nearer to her, looking for legal remedies, trying to help her.

It was one thing for me to put in insane hours representing a
Fortune
100 company. It is another to put in double those hours and save a life. To see the impact of my work on one living being's life, even if I never meet that person face to face, even if she will never know me, is such a reward for me. To know she will see her children again, nothing can compare with that.

I know it's odd that it's a Chinese, not an Iranian, proverb, but I keep this proverb on my desk. It reads, “When a finger points at the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.” I like to think that in my small way I am the pointing finger to a much larger concept than one case here, one case there, but to the eventual liberation of women in Iran. That proverb keeps me motivated. The goal is all that matters, and my goal is to see women free enough to dance on the moon.

SIR PAUL McCARTNEY

All You Need Is Passion,
Passion Is All You Need

When I was in my teens, the girls from my dorm and I used to take a
battery-operated record player out onto the hill behind our convent boarding
school and listen to our cherished RPMs. Among them was “Thank You, Girl”
by the Beatles. It was so badly warped by the Indian sun (our school was in the
Himalayas) that we had to tie increasingly heavy weights to the stylo to keep it
from skipping and hiccoughing. I told Paul about that recently because he and
Chrissy Hynde had been serenading Paul's daughter, Stella, with that song
after her spring fashion show in Paris, a perfect tribute for her.

The thing about Paul is that he's down to earth. In the early sixties, when
I started the All-India Beatles fan club, a hoity-toity nun who found out about it
hauled me in front of school assembly and said, “Do you realize that these boys
are from the slums of Liverpool?” What I knew then is that they were “working
class,” and what I know now is that Paul has never turned his back on those
roots. Class meant a lot some sixty years ago, and Paul triumphed by touching
millions of hearts, crossing that ridiculous barrier and holding his hand out, even
today, to help others to do the same.That's the story that belongs in this book.

I
used to listen to the radio a lot when I was a kid. The music was mostly from my dad's generation, Fred Astaire, whatever. Later, my dad, who was an amateur musician, pointed out the sound of the bass to me. He said, “Listen! Do you hear that booming noise? That's the bass.” I listened and it intrigued me. That's when I decided to find out how music was done.

My dad gave me a trumpet for a birthday present, but I really wanted to sing and you can't sing if you've got something in your mouth, so I asked him if he'd mind very much if I traded it for a guitar. He said all right, so off I went, down to the music shop in town, Rushworth and Draper it was called. I got a cheap, simple guitar called a Zenith. I love it, I still have it. I never took lessons but I had a guitar book that I used to teach myself how to play. There were little dots to help you learn where to put your fingers so you could make chords. I learned the chords G, G7, C, and F. When I got really going, I went on to learn rock and roll, copying songs like Eddie Cochran's “20 Flight Rock,” about a girl dancing with you on a Saturday night to a “record machine,” that kind of stuff. Then a film came out in 1956 starring Britain's sex symbol, Jayne Mansfield, about a girl who wants to be a singing star. It was a great influence because this film did rock and roll proud. It was in color on a wide screen, and it treated rock and roll with respect. It had Fats Domino in it, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and Eddie Cochran. Jayne Mansfield wasn't bad either!