I was covering the Parliament of the World's Religions a few years ago. I spent long hours in the makeshift press room of Montserrat, a medieval monastery outside Barcelona. Part of my internment in that stuffy room was technical - I brought the first Macintosh the monks had ever seen, and it was an exercise of divine patience to get it networked.

During one of those late nights, the organizers of the event took over the room for a beef session. They seemed unaware that a journalist was lurking - or were just too tired from wrangling hundreds of holy people to care. The Dalai Lama had cancelled at the last minute, citing health reasons, though they grumbled that there were probably political pressures. A Sikh leader needed a delicate intervention for his oversized entourage. And don't even mention the keynote speaker. "I don't care if she did win the Nobel Peace Prize," said a prominent clergyman who will remain unnamed. "That woman is a ****."

The woman he was talking about was Shirin Ibadi, an Iranian lawyer and a force for human rights in the Muslim world. In an opinion piece today over at the NY Times, Maura Casey begins her article about Ibadi with the bumper-sticker wisdom, "Well behaved women rarely make history." Read the rest of the (very good) piece here.

Ibadi is undertaking the task of gathering a million Iranian signatures in support of women's rights. She probably won't succeed. She doesn't have to. She has comfortably settled into gadfly status, protected by her international reputation, free to hold up the standard of the western humanist tradition in the world of Sharia. There's little doubt that she is unpopular in Qom. But how popular is she in the rest of the country - especially the educated, growing middle-class?

There is little question that Iran is poised to become a major player in the new middle East, especially with the rise of Shiite power in Iraq and Lebanon (there is a good piece in the Christian Science Monitor today exploring the regional power struggle between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran). So the question becomes important: Who are the major players in Iran? The move towards the moderates, which flickered less than five years ago, seems to have died. But people like Ibadi are pressing against a lockdown on human rights, keeping the Iranian debate alive on tolerance and democracy.

Ibadi reminds me of another ill-behaved woman. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know...