When Mahvash flies from Tehran to the provincial city of Mashhad, one chilly morning in March, 2008, she fully expects to be home by evening. But she never returns. For she is arrested, detained and finally condemned to a ten-year prison sentence, further extended another decade in 2022. Mahvash has been a prisoner for thirteen years so far, on trumped-up charges, simply because she is a Baha’i.
The reason for her initial arrest is the burial of a dead man. But as weeks of solitary confinement and interrogation drag on, it becomes clear that the poor corpse is just an excuse. As the secretary of the Yaran of Iran, an ad hoc group appointed to serve the beleaguered Baha’i community after their institutions are disbanded by the Islamic regime in 1983, Mahvash was responsible for arranging this burial in a Baha’i cemetery. But the hard-liners in Mashhad are now using her compliance with a dying man’s wish, to accuse her of burying a Muslim in unsanctified soil, polluted by apostasy.
The interrogator knows that Mahvash knows that the corpse is a mere pretext. She also knows that his aims extend far beyond apostasy, for he wants to prove that she is a foreign agent and a spy. Her interrogations over the next three months read like chapters in a psychological and spiritual thriller. Day after day she is bombarded with biased questions that distort the truth. Night after night she agonizes over whether her answers balance integrity with discretion. Her only reprieve from this cross-examination is when she finds herself, that spring, forging bonds of abiding friendship with addicts, prostitutes and murderers in the maximum-security ward of the public prison of Mashhad.
After two fake hearings, Mahvash is transferred back to Tehran in May, where she learns that the six other members of the Yaran have also been arrested and detained, like her, in solitary confinement in Evin. Although the corpse can at last be laid to rest, the interrogations intensify in the weeks that follow, and accusations of espionage against her rise to heights of absurdity through the summer heat. Her ordeal reaches a climax when Mahvash is obliged to defend the historical reasons and non-political role of the head of her Faith, the Universal House of Justice. But even as this pernicious white torture turns red with brutal beatings, and grows bitter green with grief at the threatened execution of her colleagues, Mahvash discovers the symbol of true patriotism in these colours of the Iranian flag. By the time she is united with her dear friend Fariba, she has crossed the threshold of detachment to attain a strange, new kind of freedom; she has stepped out of the prison of self into the fresh air of forgiveness and reconciliation, so vital for her country.
Her story is an affirmation of hope and faith for the future of Iran.
Open Wide the Doors is out now on Amazon, get your copy here.
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