Faith & Spirit Quote by Shirin Ebadi

Ebadi’s line is a lawyer’s closing argument disguised as a moral principle: it doesn’t beg for tolerance as a warm feeling, it demands restraint as a civic rule. The key verb is “enable.” She’s not only condemning the zealot with the baton; she’s indicting the silent collaborators - courts that look away, neighbors who “don’t want trouble,” institutions that dress coercion up as tradition. Responsibility spreads outward from the aggressor to the systems that make aggression frictionless.

The phrase “personal view regarding religion” is a strategic demotion. Religion, in many political cultures, arrives wearing the costume of the sacred and the collective, claiming exemption from ordinary debate. Ebadi strips it back to the human scale: interpretation, preference, choice. That’s subtext with teeth, especially coming from an Iranian human-rights lawyer who has spent a career watching the state treat one interpretation of faith as public policy and dissent as heresy.

Then she widens the net: “force, oppression, or pressure.” Not just prisons and police, but softer coercions - family ultimata, bureaucratic harassment, workplace penalties, the social tax of being marked “impure.” The line anticipates the favorite defense of religious authoritarianism: we’re not forcing anyone; we’re merely “encouraging” virtue. Ebadi preemptively calls that bluff. Her intent isn’t to ban religion from public life; it’s to deny religion the right to conscript the public. In a world where piety can be weaponized as governance, the quote reads like a constitutional clause written in plain language - and aimed squarely at the loopholes.