SHARIA LAW: This Iranian Lawyer Saved My Life. Now We Must Save Hers.

The lawyer who saved my life was just sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes in Iran.

I first met Nasrin Sotoudeh — an internationally renowned human rights lawyer, and our country’s foremost campaigner for women’s rights and against child executions — when I was being harassed and violently intimidated by Iran’s intelligence services. My crime? I had removed my headscarf in public and put the video online, in protest of Iran’s forced hijab law and the stifling control over women’s bodies and choices that it represents.

I finally felt empowered, being part of this White Wednesday movement in Iran, where every Wednesday women would courageously defy the regime in removing their headscarves, or wearing a white shawl in support of those who did, and which quickly grew into a near daily event. I was an ordinary woman, partaking in an extraordinary movement.

For this, I would go on to be arrested a total of three times last year. I was beaten and brutalized in prison, my only breaks from the psychological torture of solitary confinement. It was the most frightening experience of my life — not just the pain — but that I felt so alone, suffering in solitude.

Read the whole thing.