The Times (London), UK
July 21, 2012 Saturday
Edition 1; National Edition
‘Recant your faith and we will give you back your daughter’
Iranian Christians tell Andrew Riley how state persecution is costing
them families, jobs and even lives
by Andrew Riley
The much-publicised case of Youcef Nadarkhani, the pastor sentenced to
death for apostasy, has highlighted the plight of Christian leaders in
Iran. Lesser known, but more pervasive, is the State’s persecution of
ordinary Christians in Iran, particularly those newly converted from
Islam. They routinely face losing their jobs, homes and even custody
of their children unless they agree to recant. Since early 2011, more
than 300 Christians in Iran have been arrested, questioned and
detained – some only for a few hours but in many cases for weeks or
months, according to figures compiled by the Christian charity Elam,
which was set up in the UK in 1988 to support the Church in Iran.
The experience of Mojdeh [not her real name] is fairly typical. She
was forced to choose in court between her faith and her 2½-year-old
daughter when her husband, a Muslim, divorced her. “The judge told me,
‘There’s only one way you can take custody of your daughter: if you
come back to Islam and recant your Christian faith, we will give you
your daughter’.” Her lawyer urged her to agree but Mojdeh stood firm.
“I told the judge that I would never deny Jesus. So the court ruled in
favour of my husband and took my daughter away from me.”
Earlier this year the Christians in Parliament all-party parliamentary
group held an inquiry into the “Persecuted Church in Iran”. MPs and
peers including David Burrowes, Baroness Berridge and Lord Hylton
heard evidence from ten witnesses assembled by Elam, as well as
written evidence gathered by other Christian groups concerned with
religious freedom such as Open Doors and Christian Solidarity
Worldwide. The inquiry’s report is due in October.
The population of Iran is some 74 million, of which 393,000 people –
about 0.5 per cent – are Christian, according to the Atlas of Global
Christianity. The majority of these “official” Christians in Iran
belong to the Armenian Apostolic Oriental Orthodox (Gregorian) Church
or to the Assyrian Church of the East, both of which have historically
been tolerated by the State as catering only to “ethnic Christians”
(those of Armenian or Assyrian descent) with services conducted in
their own language.
It is a very different story for churches which conduct services in
Farsi, which all Iranians speak, which are viewed as “proselytising” –
and hence as a threat to the stability and continued existence of the
Islamic Republic of Iran. Since December 2011 many state-sanctioned
churches in Tehran, Ahwaz, Isfahan, and other Iranian cities have been
forced to close completely, or to close their Farsi-speaking services,
and many of their pastors have been arrested. The churches affected
have been Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Anglican/Episcopalian and
Catholic. No longer is it primarily the underground “house” churches
that are being picked on: the authorities’ repression of sanctioned
churches is apparently on the increase, according to Elam.
Mojtaba Mohamadi, a wellinformed member of Elam, says: “When people
come to faith in Iran and go to a church, and the authorities find
out, they frighten these new Christians by bringing them in for
questioning. They are blindfolded on the way to the interrogation
centre, and are threatened to make them recant and to sign documents
saying they will not take part in any further Christian activity. The
authorities then fill in the jigsaw by asking for the names of all the
Christians they know.
“The authorities will normally then let them go. But if they refuse to
recant or to co-operate, they are usually put in prison and as a
result of pressure from the authorities they nearly always lose their
job and nearly always are thrown out of rented homes; they may also
lose a place at school or college or have their degree certificate
rescinded.”
For church leaders, however, the position is far worse. Precise
information is hard to obtain, but at least 14 leaders – including
Youcef Nadarkhani – are believed to be languishing in prison in Iran
having been arrested on charges ranging from engaging in Christian
activity and membership of an illegal group (a house church) to
apostasy. The real figures are almost certainly far higher, Elam
believes. Pastor Nadarkhani has been detained since 2009; despite
recent indications that the regime has softened its stance, his fate
remains uncertain. Another high-profile case is that of Pastor Farshid
Fathi, who was arrested on Boxing Day 2010. He has just lost an appeal
in Tehran against his six-year prison sentence, which has included
more than 100 days in solitary confinement.
Despite that, some estimates now put the number of new Christians in
Iran at more than 500,000 – a far cry from 1979, the year of the
Iranian Revolution, when there were fewer than 500 known Christians
from a Muslim background in Iran. Such is people’s disenchantment with
the country’s ruling Islamic regime, and the spiritual vacuum that it
has created, that Elam believes that hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of Iranians could turn to Christianity in the next few
years. Elam itself has translated the New Testament into Farsi and has
distributed more than a million copies inside Iran.
Mohamadi [his name has been changed] grew up in a Muslim household in
Iran and converted to Christianity in the time of the Shah – a period
of relative religious freedom. Change under the Iranian Revolution
involved the murder of leaders of the evangelical churches in the
1990s. One of those subsequently labelled as a martyr, Mehdi Dibaj,
spent nine years in prison on a charge of apostasy before being
released in January 1994 after pressure from human rights groups;
Bernard Levin reproduced Dibaj’s lengthy final testament, addressed to
his jailers, word for word in his column in The Times. Dibaj’s freedom
was short-lived: he was shot dead five months later. Another Iranian
apostate from Islam, the Rev Hussein Soodmand, a leader of the
Assemblies of God church in Mashad, was hanged in prison in 1990. In
April this year his daughter Rashin told the Christians in Parliament
inquiry that her father had been buried in a part of the prison
graveyard “where we were not even allowed to put a headstone”.
Mohamadi picks up the story: “The authorities then realised that this
[murdering Christians] was counterproductive because of publicity in
the West, so they started controlling churches, as in China. Out of
that sprang the need for underground churches, in the early 2000s.
Since then the authorities have not really gone in for killing
Christian leaders – they prefer to put them in prison and torture
them. Ultimately, they want them to leave Iran.”
He believes that the sole thing that the Iranian authorities take
notice of is unwelcome publicity, “such as the campaign by The Times
to save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani”, the Iranian woman sentenced to
death by stoning for alleged adultery. He adds: “They are not afraid
of American drones, not afraid of protocols or of military
intervention. If more papers and media had picked this story up, they
would have let her go by now.”
At least 14 Christian leaders are languishing in prisons in Iran