“How long did you say you have been a Christian?” he began.
“Eleven years.”
“And how did you convert to your religion?”
“From the Spirit of Christ entering my heart, and from reading the Bible and other books.”
“Do you have a relationship with any churches in Iran?”
“No.”
“How many Christians do you know?”
The truth was, I knew of many other Christians. But if I admitted that to this man, he would demand their names and addresses. Their safety, freedom, families, and even their lives would suddenly be in danger—and Maryam and I would be completely unable to warn them. I would never lie about my faith in Christ, no matter what the cost. But I had to protect innocent people from whatever Maryam and I were about to undergo.
“None except for Maryam.”
“Where did you convert to Christianity?”
“In Turkey.” Again, this wasn’t exactly true. I had been baptized in Turkey seven years after becoming a Christian in Iran. But I knew that if I admitted to becoming a Christian in Iran, it would raise enough questions to get a lot more people in trouble. “Turkey is where Maryam and I met each other.”
“Did you go to church in Turkey?”
“I lived there for a year, and sometimes I went to church.”
“Why did you go to church?”
“To pray and to get in touch with other Iranians in Turkey.”
“How many people did you give Bibles to?”
“To my friends there who asked questions, and anybody I thought would like to know about my faith in Christ.”
“Have you given away Bibles when you travel?”
“I always carry some New Testaments with me, and if people ask, I will give them one.”
There were more questions: Why did I live in my own apartment and not with my parents? How much money did I make? How did we get Bibles into the country? Who were the people in the pictures on our laptop? Finally, Mr. Rasti shoved a stack of papers across the desk.
“Sign,” he ordered.
I didn’t have a chance to read them and was too tired to argue. After I signed, a guard took me back to the room where Maryam waited and took Maryam upstairs for her interrogation by Mr. Rasti.
MARYAM
After I was seated in Mr. Rasti’s office, he began with the same litany of questions I later learned he had asked Marziyeh.
“How long have you been a Christian?”
“Eleven years.”
“Are your parents also Christians?”
“No.”
“Why do you believe in Jesus? Does this mean you’re no longer a Muslim?”
“I believe in Jesus because His Spirit came into my heart,” I explained. “I know He is the Son of God, and He is my Savior.”
“Who invited you to become a Christian?”
“Nobody. I studied the Bible. Jesus Himself revealed His truth to me.”
“What Christians are you connected to, besides your roommate?”
“Nobody.”
“Who gave you all the Bibles and CDs and other religious material?”
“Nobody. They are my property. I personally brought them to Iran.”
“Did you speak to anyone about Jesus after you converted?”
“Yes. Family, friends, anyone who asked.”
“Did you give them Bibles or CDs?”
“Yes, if they asked.”
“According to Miss Marziyeh Amirizadeh, the two of you have been out today in your car distributing Bibles. Do you deny this?”
What a ridiculous trick. This is a common interrogation method: tell a lie about what the other person said on the chance the suspect will admit something she wouldn’t otherwise, because she’s duped into thinking the authorities already know about it. Marziyeh and I knew each other too well and trusted each other too much for this trick to work.
“No, we weren’t handing out Bibles. I was at the dentist.”
“Your friend has confessed that the two of you went to various cities in northern Iran to distribute Bibles.”
“She said that?”
“Yes,” Mr. Rasti insisted, glowering. “I have it all written down right here.” He motioned to some papers in front of him.
“It didn’t happen,” I replied.
“Do you know it is illegal to speak about Jesus or give away Bibles?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know that talking about God could be an offense.”
“How many people have you talked to about Jesus since you converted to Christianity?”
Untold thousands, I thought to myself. But I didn’t say it out loud.
“Maybe ten or twelve people a year, and I handed out about the same number of New Testaments.”
There were questions where I could avoid saying anything that would harm others, and not tell a lie. But this question could lead down a trail of more questions and tragedy for others, and I would not say anything that would put people in danger. Though neither of us would lie about our personal faith, we also would not betray our friends. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had just made the same choice that Marziyeh had made during her interrogation.
“Why do you do this?” Mr. Rasti demanded harshly. “Why do you want to separate the youth from their faith and beliefs?”
“That has never been my objective,” I said. “I’ve never tried to separate anyone from their beliefs. If they have questions, I answer them. If they want to know more, I tell them, because I want them to know the truth about the Lord’s love and about Jesus, their Savior.”
“Don’t you believe in the prophet of Islam, the leadership of the imams, and the fact that Islam is the most complete religion?”
“No, I don’t. The Bible says that Jesus Christ is the first and last Savior of the human race. Jesus says, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me.’”1
“You have been misled!” Mr. Rasti said, frowning. “There are no such words in the true Bible. Jesus has promised that the last prophet will come after him, and that prophet is Mohammed. You have been brainwashed by a distorted version of the Bible. You should read the correct version, which is for sale in bookshops all over Iran.”
“Mr. Rasti,” I said, “I did not come to believe in Jesus because of any book, other people’s opinions, recommendations of the church, or my own research. Jesus spoke to me in my heart. I experienced Him, felt Him, and my spirit touched Him and knows He is alive. Before I believed, before I ever set foot in a church, I heard His voice calling me and I answered.”
Mr. Rasti motioned to a stack of notes he had made during the interrogation, with the questions in red and answers in black. “Put your signature and fingerprint beside every answer,” he instructed.
“But I haven’t read any of them,” I replied.
Mr. Rasti drew himself up in a huff. “I would not risk destroying my life after death to write down lies on this paper! I assure you I’m an honest man.”
By now, it was after 11:00 p.m. I had been interrogated for more than two hours. I had been at the police station since late afternoon and was too exhausted and too sore from my dental appointment to argue. I did as instructed, then was taken back to the office where Marziyeh waited. We still weren’t allowed to speak, but we knew each other so well that we could communicate silently.
Are you okay? Marziyeh asked with her eyes.
Yes, I assured her.
It was nearly midnight when another guard came in and said, “You will remain in custody. I will take you to the detention center.”
Prisoners were not housed at the police station. We had to go across town in order to be locked up. We were ushered into a room to do the necessary paperwork. A bored and sleepy-looking soldier sat behind the counter.
“What is the charge against you?” he asked, reaching for a form.
“Christianity,” we said together.
“Advertising and promoting Christianity,” added our guard as she han
dcuffed us to each other.
For some reason, being cuffed together struck us as funny and we started laughing. Marziyeh raised up our hands and said, “We are proud of these handcuffs because we’re wearing them on account of our faith in Jesus Christ!”
“I have faith in Jesus too,” the soldier said, “but I would never try to convert someone else to my beliefs. You’re not in custody for believing in Jesus; you’re in custody for promoting Him to others.”
We got into another dirty little white car and were driven to the Vozara Detention Center. Inside, an officer asked our guard what we were charged with. “Advertising and promoting Christianity in Iran,” he answered.
The officer let out a chuckle. “Is there really any such charge as that?” Our guard said nothing. Another officer, rough looking and overweight, seemed to be in charge. After reading over our paperwork, he started asking the same questions we’d been answering all day: How long have you been Christians? Do you live alone? And on and on.
“Is Christianity an offense?” I demanded.
“That’s what we’ve been charged with,” Marziyeh added.
“No,” the man in charge insisted, “you are not charged with being Christians. Most probably yours will be a political case. If the court can prove you’ve been supported by someone from the outside in promoting Christianity, the charge will be spying.”
We were led down a long flight of stairs into a basement, through a series of steel doors, and past a small room with a red carpet and an oil heater. The floor was littered with junk food. “Is this where we’re staying?” I asked Marziyeh. It was our first time inside any sort of jail. We had no idea that what we had seen was a break room for the staff, nothing like the rooms where prisoners lived.
We were escorted into a room where two sleepy, grumpy female guards waited for us. “Hand over all your belongings,” one of them ordered. We gave them our wristwatches and everything else we had. “Now take off all your clothes. Underwear, too.” We were then subjected to the humiliation of a full body search. The guards said it was to keep prisoners from smuggling in drugs. We were allowed to dress, but they kept our shoes, socks, and scarves so we couldn’t use our shoelaces or the other items to hang ourselves. We hadn’t brought heavy coats with us, and late at night the room was uncomfortably cold. The concrete floor of the hallway was like ice under our bare feet.
We went through another metal door to a hallway with rooms opening off on either side. “Take a blanket from the stack and find yourselves a spot,” the guard ordered as she clanged the door shut behind us. In the dim light, we could make out blanketed figures on the floor of the rooms. Though most of the women were asleep at this late hour, a few pairs of eyes followed us as we walked up and down the hall deciding which room to enter. We didn’t need light to tell us the place was filthy beyond imagining; our noses told us well enough. The stench of sweat, vomit, and backed-up toilets was overpowering. It took all our self-control to keep from retching—in this moment, our empty stomachs were a blessing. The floor of the toilet area was awash in muck from two overflowing commodes; the trash bin was piled high with used sanitary pads.
After finding what looked like the least crowded room, we went back to a spot near the door to get blankets. They were loathesome—stiff with dirt and smelling strongly of urine, some of them still wet. They were all in about the same condition, but it was so cold we had to have something to cover ourselves with. We grabbed a couple that felt mostly dry and walked the few steps to our room, wrapped up as well as we could on the freezing floor, and huddled together, holding hands.
The onrush of emotions was like nothing I had ever experienced: bone-tired, confused, hungry, thirsty, repulsed by the foul air. How would our sisters and Christian friends find out what had happened? Would we be in here for a day? A year? Were our lives in danger? We were too tired to be afraid—it was all too new for us—though our future was completely unknown. It was more than we could absorb. All we could do was turn it over to the Lord.
We traded stories of our separate interrogations by Mr. Rasti, prayed to Jesus to protect us, and fell into exhausted and fitful sleep. It was to be our first of more than 250 nights behind bars.
CHAPTER 3
THE ROAD TO VOZARA
Marziyeh
“FOR GOD’S SAKE, WON’T SOMEBODY GIVE ME A DAMN CIGARETTE!”
The voice that jarred us awake was half scream, half animal cry, mixed with the grating, rattling noise of somebody shaking the bars of the cell-block door at the end of the hallway.
“Give me a cigarette! I know you’ve got them. Have mercy!” The words dissolved into a loud moan and what sounded like two women crying.
I woke up disoriented—stiff and sore from sleeping on the cold floor, confused at being in a strange place. It took a minute to remember that Maryam and I were under arrest and had spent the night in the detention center. It wasn’t some crazy, terrible dream after all—it was reality. We buried our heads in our blankets for warmth, so that along with the sounds penetrating our consciousness there was the strong, sour aroma of stale urine mixed with the overpowering stench of the broken toilets.
“Give! Me! A! Cigarette!” The howling and begging continued, the bars shaking and clattering with each word. Maryam and I started talking quietly to each other, going over the events of the previous day and marveling that we had been able to sleep at all in these conditions.
Just then, we felt a kick at our blankets. We peeked out from underneath to see a wild-looking woman standing in front of us. She kicked at us again. “Can I have a cigarette?” It was the unmistakable voice that had screamed us awake. Now that she had found us, she made us the object of her insistent demands.
Although she was quite a young woman, she looked positively frightening—her filthy dress half unbuttoned, exposing one of her breasts, and her long, black hair matted in clumps and falling across her face. Her teeth were rotten, some broken and others missing entirely. She looked like a witch in a horror movie. When we said we didn’t have any cigarettes, she turned abruptly and left.
The detention center was in a basement twenty steps down from street level, its walls lined with dark, damp, dirty stone blocks. Our cell was one of ten or so opening onto a narrow hallway. At the end of the hall, we saw the door in the wall of bars where we had come in. That door led to a small room with another wall of bars at the far end. In that far wall was another door, which opened to another long hallway. To the left in the hall was the entrance to the cell block with steps going up; to the right was an office or dayroom where the guards stayed. For now, the doors to individual cells were unlocked. We later learned that they were locked at night when the cells were crowded, and remained locked until morning. This solved the mystery of the terrible blankets. If a woman was forced to answer the call of nature during the night, she had no choice but to soil her bedclothes.
The door at the end of the hallway clattered open and two female guards, wearing masks to protect them from the nasty odors, came in and ordered us to fold our blankets and stack them in the corner. We could see now that there were fifteen or so women locked up in our area, ranging from teenagers to middle age. Some were well dressed, while others wore little more than rags. Over the next few days, we would see countless women come and go as they were either transferred to prison or acquitted and released.
The jail didn’t serve breakfast, and of course we were unprepared. Fortunately, another prisoner kindly shared some biscuits with us. After we ate, we took our turn in the facilities. There were four toilets, two of which were broken and filled to overflowing with muck. There was no soap, tissue, towels, or running water in the sink. The floors were so filthy that the floor drains were clogged as well, leaving conditions we need not describe. And we were still barefoot.
With that memorable experience behind us, we set out to meet some of the other prisoners and learn more about the detention center. We saw the woman who had screamed at us and kicked us earlier, now sitting
on the floor of the hallway smoking a cigarette a guard had given her. Next to her was a very beautiful young girl. Both of them were crying and shouting, occasionally calling out the names of Islamic prophets and asking them for help.
We sat down beside them without saying anything. This startled them. The Vozara Detention Center was not a place where strangers were friendly to each other, especially to crazy-sounding people who woke the cell block every morning screaming for a cigarette. We introduced ourselves and asked the two why they were there. The screaming woman told us her story, the first of many heartbreaking accounts of abuse and desperation we would hear behind bars in the days that followed.
Her name was Leila. She had been arrested two days before for buying drugs on the street. She was married and had a son. As a newlywed, she learned that her husband was addicted to opium. He pressured her into using it with him, and soon she became addicted too. Then he stopped taking drugs and threatened to divorce her unless she stopped as well. Instead, her addiction became worse and her habit grew to include cocaine and heroin. Desperate for money to buy drugs, she left her family and sold herself into prostitution, earning 4,000 tomans (about two US dollars) per time. She lived in a downtown park and slept in a cardboard box.
“I have prayed to Allah for help,” she said, “but he has not answered my prayers.” She started to cry again.
The young girl, Sephideh, was nineteen, with sparkling eyes and beautiful golden hair. After her parents divorced, her mother had disappeared and her father ignored her to spend time with his friends. She left home with her boyfriend, who introduced her to crack cocaine and opium. She had been arrested buying opium in a park; it was her second offense.
Leila and Sephideh asked us why we were in prison.
“For believing in Jesus Christ.”
They had no idea Christianity was a crime and asked us to tell them more about Jesus. After we shared our testimonies, Sephideh asked if Christ could help her. With tears brimming in her beautiful eyes, she begged, “Please pray for my freedom. If I am released this time, I will give up drugs, go back to school, and get a good job.”
Captive in Iran Page 3