Justice & Law Quote by Shirin Ebadi

Ebadi’s sentence is a legal brief disguised as a moral intervention. The target isn’t only authoritarian governments; it’s the rhetorical shield they hide behind. By specifying “invoke the name of Islam,” she frames repression as a branding exercise: power laundering itself through sanctity. The verb “invoke” matters. It implies performance, selective citation, a courtroom trick where the loudest witness is the one least accountable.

Her intent is strategically narrow and culturally explosive. She isn’t arguing against Islam, which would be easy for regimes to dismiss as foreign contamination. She’s arguing against misuse, which forces the debate inside the tradition rather than outside it. That move protects dissidents and believers at once, creating a coalition space: you can be devout and still indict the state. “Rights of people” is similarly calibrated. It’s universalist language, but phrased in a way that sounds less like a Western export and more like a baseline of human dignity that any ethical system should recognize.

The subtext is a rebuke to the common authoritarian trick: equating political obedience with religious loyalty. Ebadi refuses that merger. If rights violations are “misusing Islam,” then the regime’s moral legitimacy collapses, and clerical or ideological authority becomes contestable rather than ordained.

Context does a lot of work here. Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, speaks from inside a system where law, religion, and state power are tightly fused. Her sentence reads like a wedge driven into that fusion: not anti-faith, not naïvely conciliatory, but a disciplined attempt to reclaim interpretive authority from those who govern by sanctified coercion.