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Mahvash Sabet. Photo credit: permission granted by Sabet’s family
Open Wide the Doors: A Memoir of Faith, Hope and Freedom in Iran
On Sale:
July 9, 2026
(Europe, UK & Commonwealth)
August 18, 2026 (US)
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 Bahá’í 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.
Praise for Open Wide the Doors
From Azar Nafisi, New York Times bestselling author of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN:
“This book is a testament to the power of truth, to the fact that in our darkest times, in times of brutality and indifference, we can still preserve our dignity, our humanity, and our belief in hope.”
“An essential book that reminds us of both our capacity for evil as carriers of darkness and our obligation to survive as carriers of light.”
–Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading
“This book is about faith and thresholds. All the prison memoirs I have read—and I have read many—are about walls and veils wrapped in ideologies. Mahvash Sabet, a prisoner of conscience in Iran, invokes doors – iron doors, doors with double chains and locks, doors with knobs on only one side – again and again in her heart-wrenching account of injustice, violence, and prejudice. Yet faith, conviction, grace, and dignity cannot be locked away. They move beyond enclosures, beyond the reach of tyranny. No door – no machinery of repression – can bar their power or their passage. Open Wide the Doors, edited and exquisitely translated by B. Nakhjavani and A. Mottahedeh, is an eloquent testimony to that truth.”
–Farzaneh Milani, author of Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers
“Sabet fought injustice and found strength in her faith and her cellmates – a testimony to how small acts of kindness in a world of evil can keep hope alive. This is an important book that illustrates the cruel persecution of the Bahá’ís in the Islamic Republic of Iran – an unflinching account that deserves to be read widely.”
–Marina Nemat, internationally bestselling author of Prisoner of Tehran
“Amidst the tragedy engulfing the people of Iran today, Mahvash Sabet's memoirs provide a poignant glimpse of a better world. Her astonishing resilience and profound humanity in the face of prolonged injustice leave no doubt that it is, in fact, her tormentors who are in the prison of hatred and violence. Her shining example of dignified defiance shows us the path to a glorious future for Iran in which power and prosperity is derived from the noble potentialities inherent in human beings.”
–Payam Akhavan, professor of international law and former UN prosecutor at the Hague
“Deeply moving, Mahvash Sabet’s first-hand insights share how to survive prolonged injustice and pain with profound dignity and strength. Her love shines throughout – love for family and friends, for co-detainees with various records of criminality, even the very prison and intelligence officials who preside over her suffering in solitary confinement. In showing us how delicate personal and artistic sensibilities can be finessed and survive in such ugly settings, her life is a lesson for us all.”
–Nazila Ghanea, professor of law, University of Oxford, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief