A fight for rights
The celebrated Iranian rights activist Shirin Ebadi renewed her message of defiance and optimism in a talk at MIT on Wednesday afternoon, vowing that Iran’s women will continue to “fight for full and complete equality” despite a harsh crackdown on the reform movement by the country’s dictatorship.Ebadi, forced into exile in London in 2009, maintained a confident tone in her remarks while acknowledging the grim reality in her homeland, where many reformers and activists are serving long jail sentences for participating in protests against the regime.“The women of Iran are going to fight for full and complete equality,” Ebadi told an audience of hundreds in Tang Auditorium, “and we are not going to stop until we achieve our purpose.”Under Iran’s fundamentalist regime, she noted, a woman’s life legally holds half the value of a man’s life; polygamy is legal, allowing a man to have up to four wives; and men...