PRISONER OF FAITH

Mahvash Sabet is a member of the Baha’i Faith.  She believes in the oneness of God, the harmony of religions, and the unity of the human race. A teacher of psychology and a poet, she is committed to the principles of truthfulness, integrity and justice enshrined in her Faith, and has gladly suffered imprisonment to uphold these principles. Her books of poetry and her memoir, ‘Open Wide the Doors’ are an affirmation of her love of her country and the world.

Mahvash was a teacher and school principal before the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran in 1979.  Like hundreds of other Baha’is at that time and an increasing number since, she lost her livelihood and was dismissed from public office because of her beliefs.  First arrested and interrogated in Tehran in 2005 and then later abducted in 2008 in Mashhad where she was kept in solitary confinement and subjected to gruelling interrogations by the extremist faction of the Ministry of Intelligence, she endured isolation and torture for eight months until she was finally returned to Tehran.  Here, she found that her six colleagues, the Yaran of Iran, (an ad hoc group responsible for overseeing the needs of the persecuted Baha’i community), had all suffered the same fate as herself.  Mahvash was accused of espionage, political subversion and “spreading corruption on the earth” in early 2010 over the course of three hearings, each aborted because of constitutional irregularities. She was finally convicted and condemned to twenty years of imprisonment together with her co-religionists later that summer, even as the upheavals of the Green Movement filled the cells of Section 209 of Evin with political prisoners.  These trumped-up charges have regularly been brought against the Baha’is since the birth of this new religion in the mid-19th century in Persia, but they are now deployed against thousands of their fellow compatriots for political reasons by the current regime.  

After spending the next two years in the provincial penitentiaries of Ghohardasht, and Qarchak, Mahvash and her friend, Fariba Kamalabadi, a fellow member of the Yaran, were brought back to the capital, and incarcerated once more, in the notorious prison of Evin, where they remained for the next seven years. Their twenty-year sentence was regularly reduced to ten, only to be extended to twenty again, until their final release in 2017.  Five years later, while on a trip to the north to recuperate from Covid, Mahvash was arrested for the third time, in July 2022, and was subjected, yet again, to four more months of solitary confinement, interrogation and physical torture before being condemned to a second decade-long sentence.  Although she was granted a medical furlough in 2024, when her health deteriorated seriously, she was kept suspended in a state of uncertainty for over a year, during recuperation from heart surgery, and was still expecting to be summoned back to prison when the recent war broke out in February 2026.

Since then, she and more than 90 million Iranians, have been imprisoned together in a country enduring a near total internet blackout, on the verge of economic collapse, and threatened by imminent drought and war. But Mahvash’s faith burns bright among them, like a beacon of light.  For she believes ardently in the future of Iran.