Christians anxious about threats to religious liberty in America can draw inspiration and strength from stories shared by Iranian Believers persecuted in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Marina Nemat, a former political prisoner and author of the bestselling memoir Prisoner of Tehran, encouraged this lesson during a lecture at the Acton Institute on November 19. She shared, “There’s never been a revolution in the history of mankind where people get on the street and say, ‘we want a horrible dictator!’ No. People want freedom and democracy. But that’s not necessarily what they get.”
Raised in a Catholic family in secular Iran under the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Nemat recounted her happy childhood. She watched the Osmonds on television and listened to the Bee Gees on her Boombox. Encouraged by her parents and teachers, she aspired to become a medical doctor. “So I made my plans. I was going to go to med school, marry Donny Osmand, and live happily ever after,” she joked. “It didn’t work out.”
During the summer of 1978, resistance to the Shah bubbled to the surface. Nemat’s friends attended protest rallies. Instead of Bee Gees and the Osmonds, new terms like “dictator” and “social justice” began to saturate her teenage conversations. But despite the people’s expectations of religious and political freedoms, Nemat’s Christian family became nervous over the Islamic drive behind the revolution.
“All religious minorities were kind of worried about what they were hearing because, I mean, it had accepted the name of an Islamic revolution. And rightly so, it worried us,” she explained. “People trusted the Ayatollah. People trusted the promises that he made. But of course, he had no intention of keeping those promises. We didn’t know that.”
In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, it became evident too that freedom and democracy were not delivered. Protests erupted among the young people, who now demanded basic equal rights such as the equality of men and women. This time Nemat joined in the protests. That was, until a wave of arrests of teenagers swept her community.
“My generation – 80% of my school mates – we were on the streets protesting the Islamic regime,” she noted. “Every day another desk would be empty. Every day another went missing. But we shrugged it off. How bad could it get? Well, really bad.”
Nemat was arrested on January 15, 1982. She became a 16 year-old political prisoner. She weighed 90 pounds, and her wrists were so small that they slid out of the cuffs. So the officers had to place both of her wrists into the same cuff. Her wrists were cracked to fit the one cuff. “The torture had not even begun,” she noted.
For over two years Nemat endured interrogation, torture, rape, starvation, solitary confinement, forced marriage, and forced conversation to Islam. Prayer was a comfort Nemat held to in her dire situation. “During solitary confinement, I would have conversations with God. It made sense, right? Who else?”
During one of her out-loud conversations with God, Nemat realized exactly how her situation mirrored the situation of her Savior. “So I had nothing to complain about,” she said.
“If God was something sitting on his throne in heaven, I had every right to be mad at Him. Every right. It’s so easy to be mad at God,” she confessed. “But then I realized, wait a minute. I’m a Christian. Jesus walked here. He was wrongfully arrested. He was wrongfully tortured. And guess what? He was wrongfully executed.”
Nemat trusted that her persecution would not be in vain. She kept hold of hope because, as she explained, “Christ was in that cell with me. I testify to that.” Nemat was released two years after her arrest thanks to the Muslim family of her “torturer husband.”
Although Nemat admits that it would be easy to dwell in thoughts of hatred and revenge, she commits to love others according to Jesus’ example. She now lives in Canada and advocates on behalf of religious freedom and refugees “because of the cross.”
“This cross that I hang here is not something pretty. It is a tool of torture,” Nemat explained. “This cross around my neck reminds me of [a] simple answer. Why did He die? Because he loved. Not because he hated. That has been my beacon in any situation.”
No comments yet
