After Tehran (24 page)

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Medjugorje is a town in western Bosnia-Herzegovina that has become famous throughout the world because of the six young people who, beginning on June 24, 1981, claimed to have seen visions of the Madonna there.

A Star-Shaped
Christmas Cookie

M
y grandmother taught me to pray and first told me about Jesus and Mary. She made sure I understood that even though she would not be around to watch me all the time, God would always know what I was up to. She took me to the very long Russian Orthodox Mass every Sunday, and to reward me for my patience and good behaviour, she bought me treats as we walked home. I loved the chocolate and candy, but Christmas cookies were my favourite. Christmas meant going for a much-longer-than-normal Mass and being terribly bored—but it was worth it, because after the Mass,
Bahboo
would rush me home and allow me to take a star-shaped cookie from the Christmas tree. My parents were not religious and never attended Mass with
Bahboo
and me. The Russian Orthodox were a tiny minority in Tehran, and most of the people attending Mass at our church were old women.

Christians have always been a tiny minority in Iran. Most Iranian Christians are either Armenian, Assyrian, or Chaldean—ethnic groups who have been present in Iran for hundreds of years and have churches in a few large cities, including Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahan. Following the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Turkey, many of them eventually immigrated to Iran and their community became larger. During the time of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
(1941–1979), Armenians were allowed to have their own schools. Armenians played a significant role in the modernization of the country, and they became known as a hard-working, honest people. Throughout centuries, they have had a marginal status in Iran and have survived by paying homage to the leadership of the country in exchange for safety and protection from Muslim religious extremists. The majority of their population belongs to the Apostolic Church, but a small number of Armenians are Catholics and Protestants.

Whether Assyrians are an ethno-national group or a religious community
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is not entirely clear. They fall into several denominations, including the Nestorian Church; its Chaldean offshoot; the Russian Orthodox Church; Protestant churches; and the Jacobite Church.

Iran’s population is currently about seventy-four million. Close to ninety-nine per cent of the population is Muslim, of which approximately eighty-nine per cent is Shia and ten per cent Sunni. Baha’i, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians constitute the remaining one per cent of the population.

EVEN THOUGH
Bahboo
couldn’t carry a tune, she was a member of the church choir. I keenly remember her standing next to the other singers, who were all at least as old as she was, her grey hair gathered into a tight bun at her nape, her white blouse and black skirt perfectly ironed, and a little red scarf tied around her slim neck. I watched her as she smiled, singing joyful hymns that had found their way out of her heart and were now dancing over the flickering flames of the candles, images of the Virgin and the Child, and members of the congregation.
Bahboo
was happiest at Christmas and Easter. She was a kind and generous woman who
had lived an arduous life and, as she had explained to me, had forgotten how to smile. Christmas became a miracle to me at a very young age because it was one of the two special days of the year that I could see happiness in
Bahboo’s
eyes.

Bahboo
’s life in Iran in the twenties and thirties was vastly different from mine in the seventies. I grew up wearing what I wanted to on the streets, and during the time of the shah, I was never discriminated against because I was a member of a religious minority. I read Western literature and went to a good school. However, when
Bahboo
arrived in Iran around 1921, she was forced to wear the
hejab
, which at the time had to be the
chador
, and sometimes as she walked to the market, the neighbourhood children threw rocks at her, calling her a dirty Christian.

Then times changed. On February 21, 1921, Reza Khan staged a
coup d’état
and overthrew Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last king of the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1794. According to some sources, the British Empire helped Reza Khan come to power to stop the penetration of the Bolsheviks in Iran. Reza Khan was declared shah—king—in 1925 and began the Pahlavi dynasty with a vision of modernizing Iran. During his sixteen-year reign, he built the trans-Iranian railway, connecting the north of the country to the south. He constructed many roads, introduced modern education to the country by establishing the University of Tehran, and erected many modern industrial plants. At the beginning of his reign, all women in Iran observed the
hejab
in public, because this had been their religious tradition for hundreds of years. In another attempt to modernize Iran, in the late thirties Reza Shah declared the
hejab
illegal. He believed that it held women back and prevented them from taking an active role in the progress of the country. After Reza Shah’s decree against the
hejab
, if a woman wore the
chador
in public, the police would forcibly remove it or even arrest her if she resisted.

Reza Shah was a dictator. He had no tolerance for criticism and created a system where freedom of speech did not exist and anyone who dared criticize him was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, even killed. He arrested many political leaders, including Mohammad Mosaddegh, and gave the order for the killing of others, such as Teymourtash (his minister of court from 1925 to 1932). He confiscated land from the Qajars and his rivals and added it to his own estates. Corruption continued under his rule and became more and more widespread. He closed down Armenian schools in 1938–39 and threatened the internal autonomy of the Armenians. Many villages in Iran’s Azerbaijan Province had ancient Armenian names, but Reza Shah changed them to Persian ones.

Article 13 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran states: “Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of persona, affairs, and religious education.”

The phrase “within the limits of the law” has certainly been open to interpretation by Iran’s regime. Even though the recognized religious minorities in Iran are allowed to have their temples, synagogues, and churches, they cannot advertise their religion openly because they would be suspected of encouraging Muslims to apostatize. In Iran, conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death. The government of Iran has been particularly vigilant in recent years in curbing proselytizing activities by Christians whose services are conducted in Persian.

In 1985 and 1986 I worked with a group of Catholic Armenian nuns who ran an all-girl school in Tehran. Although the Catholic Armenian Church still appeared to own this school, the government had significantly limited the nuns’ authority.
The government had assigned a Muslim principal and many Muslim teachers to the school, and the nuns were not permitted to teach the students from Christian catechism books. Instead, the Islamic government had designed and written religious education books for Christian students, and these books had nothing to do with the teachings of the Church. These amended and distorted catechism books had to be in Persian instead of Armenian so the government would have complete control over the teaching material. Soon, all religious minorities were banned from teaching their language in their schools. A decree prohibited having a school on church, synagogue, or temple grounds. Purportedly, the purpose of this new rule was to keep the Muslims who attended these schools from being exposed to other religions. In his letter to Ayatollah Montazeri, published in
Iran Times
on July 6, 1984, Archbishop Manukian wrote, “Despite your comforting words, not only did the problems raised in connection with the schools remain unresolved, but recent orders have actually worsened the situation: the unwarranted replacement of school principals, the dismissal of several teachers of the Armenian language and religion, and the closure of a number of schools.”
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The Baha’i remain “non-recognized” in Iran and do not have legal status. The authorities have classified them as “unprotected infidels.” They are subject to systematic discrimination because of their religious beliefs and have been, and are still, prosecuted in Iran. They have suffered more than any other religious minority in the country. In 2008, seven leaders of the Baha’i community were arrested in Iran and taken to Evin prison. As I am writing these lines, they remain behind bars. This latest sweep recalls the wholesale arrest or abduction of the members of two national
Iranian Baha’i governing councils in the early 1980s—which led to the disappearance or execution of seventeen individuals.
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BAHBOO
DIED
when I was seven, and with her death, Christmas changed for me. There were no more Christmas trees and star-shaped cookies. However, Alik saved the day a couple of times by giving me a gift. One year, it was a doll with black curly hair and blue eyes; another time, it was a toy train set. I had never received gifts for Christmas because
Bahboo
believed that toys spoiled children, so Alik’s kindness delighted me, but I still missed the Christmas tree and the cookies. When I turned four, Alik moved to the city of Shiraz in central Iran to attend university, and I rarely saw him. His short visits were always exciting. I loved the smell of his cologne hanging in the air. To me as a young child, he was like a hero from a book who would materialize every once in a while, then disappear in an air of mystery and intrigue.

Christmas has never been a holiday in Muslim Iran, so I had to go to school on Christmas Day. But this didn’t bother me, because I was used to it. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when I turned fourteen, I felt a strong need to resurrect Christmas and have it back in my life. Christians were an accepted minority in Iran, and even after the revolution, going to church and celebrating Christmas wouldn’t get us in trouble as long as we abided by the Islamic rules that governed the country, didn’t try to convert Muslims to Christianity, and didn’t criticize the government.

In the summer of 1980 I began saving my money to buy a Christmas tree, and when the time came, I told my mother that I needed her to go with me to help me carry it home. She didn’t mind. Buying a Christmas tree in Tehran wasn’t easy, since only a
handful of vendors sold them across the city, but luckily, there was one within walking distance of our apartment. Once the tree was in its stand, I pulled the old dust-covered boxes of ornaments out of our basement, but was disappointed to see that they had faded and looked rather ugly. I decorated them with ribbons from the store until they appeared almost brand new.

Christmas changed again for me in prison. When Ali forced me to convert to Islam, I felt like a traitor. In solitary confinement, one has a lot of time to think, and I talked to God for hours at a time. I apologized to Him over and over, explaining that I didn’t have a choice, that if I didn’t do what Ali wanted me to do, he would arrest my mother, father, and Andre, and I just couldn’t live with that. If they arrested my family, I would not have a home to go back to one day. I expected God to say something to me, but He never said a word, and many times, I wondered if He had abandoned me. But there were moments in the night, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, when I could feel the darkness of the cell wrap itself around me like a grave—and then I would feel a presence. It wasn’t a voice or something I could see or touch, but it was warm and kind, and it refused to let me go.

On Christmas Day in 1983, it snowed. I had been moved out of solitary and was again in a cell with many other girls. Early in the morning, through the barred window, I watched feathery flakes glide back and forth on the wind. Soon, the clotheslines in the courtyard and all the clothes hanging on them were frosted with white. When our time to use the yard arrived, most of the girls came back in immediately after collecting their laundry, because the air was too cold. Our rubber slippers didn’t offer much protection against the elements. I volunteered to bring in the clothes of two of my friends. It was chillier out than I had thought, but I liked the touch of snowflakes on my face. There was no one outside. I took off my socks and slippers and stood as motionless as possible. The
white curves of winter took me in, covering me, filling the small spaces between my toes. Christmas Day. The day Christ was born. A day of joy and celebration, of singing carols, eating big meals, and opening gifts. How could the world go on as if nothing had happened, as if so many lost lives had never existed?

After a while my feet began to hurt, and then they went numb. Evin had taken me away from home, from the person I had been; it had taken me to a realm beyond fear; it had shown me more pain than any human being should ever witness. I had experienced loss before; I had grieved. But in Evin the never-ending grief kept its victims in a perpetual state of suffocation. How was one supposed to live after such an experience?