"If you can't eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it." The Persian proverb opens a book about the Iranian revolution by Shirin Ebadi, a human rights lawyer who became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. But there could not be a more appropriate line to sum up Ebadi's own life. "I am always being faithful to this motto," she said Friday from Minneapolis, in the midst of an eight-city speaking tour in the United States. "And that's why I travel all the time and talk about it." Forced from her homeland in 2009, after Tehran's crackdown on post-election protesters, Ebadi has lived in Britain and America. She said she has spent too many nights alone in hotel rooms, fearing for the lives of her husband and sister who were jailed and beaten. And, for her own safety.
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Shirin Ebadi was Iran's first female judge but was stripped of her job after the revolution
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She warns that women may not gain from changes sweeping the Arab world
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She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights work in the Islamic republic
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She says Bashar al-Assad's ouster in Syria could accelerate change in Iran
The prize means you can be a @placeholder and at the same time have human rights.''