The shimmering beauty of the cross around Mercedeh’s neck was a stark contrast to her sad, grim, disfigured face. It was a reminder of the beauty and purity of Jesus Christ and how He descended from heaven to earth, suffering terrible pain and humiliation, to save the sinners of the world. Yet despite our sins, He doesn’t leave us to perish, but leads us out of the darkness into His shining light of salvation.
While spiritually we were strong and fulfilled, physically we suffered along with the rest of our fellow inmates. The filth, bad food, poor medical care, and lack of exercise and fresh air in prison made it practically impossible to stay healthy. Prisoners saw their hair become thin and brittle from malnutrition, like Shirin Alam Hooli’s had done; their skin, eyesight, strength, and ability to sleep were all degraded by the conditions. And woe to anyone who had the misfortune to actually get sick—the inept medical treatment was likely to do more harm than good.
Maryam and I both felt ill during much of our time at Evin. I struggled with a chronic sore throat, splitting headaches, backaches, and kidney problems almost from the beginning. Several times, I visited the clinic, in another building across the prison yard from the women’s prison. It was three or four stories tall, with the second floor reserved for female patients. There I saw addicts from Ward 1 for the first time. These women were in frightful condition, little more than toothless, ragged skeletons because of their drug habits. They could get their fix more easily inside the prison, because the prison officials readily sold drugs supplied by the same organized crime group that controlled sales at the prison shop.
The women’s doctor, Dr. Avesta, was prejudiced against Christians the same way many of the guards were. She prescribed antibiotics for me every time I went to the clinic, though she never examined me and seemed to have very few medical instruments in the room. I picked up my medicine from the pharmacy downstairs, but the drugs did nothing to relieve my symptoms. I would suddenly get a severe headache and have to go to bed. I spent part of every day doing exercises to try to relieve my back pain. At times, my back hurt so badly that I would cry involuntarily until my face turned blue.
For years, I’d had powerful, vivid dreams that I believe the Lord used as a way to communicate with me. One night, in my misery, I dreamed that nails were being driven into my hands the way nails had been put into Christ’s. In the dream, my right hand had a hole in it from the nail, and I heard Jesus say to me, “I have let you taste a little of My suffering.” When I awoke, I thanked God for the strength to survive in prison, even though I saw myself as weak and disabled. My suffering there was nothing compared to what Jesus had endured for my sake.
By the time I felt better—a testament to the natural healing powers of the human body, not to the medical services supplied by the Iranian government—Maryam had fallen dangerously ill. It all started when a serious virus spread throughout Ward 2. When Mommy caught it, she developed a high temperature, chills, and an eye infection. Because she was so unpopular, none of the other inmates wanted to risk catching the disease by taking care of her. I was too sick to help, but Maryam nursed Mommy, even though we had decided to keep our distance from her because of all her gossip and backbiting.
Mommy had a strong constitution, and because she had clout with the guards, she got plenty of fresh fruit and nourishing hot soups. She recovered within a week. By then, Maryam had come down with the virus and was beginning to suffer. It started as a cold and progressed to a sore throat and an ear infection that got steadily worse. Within a few days, the agony of her earache drove Maryam to bed, where she wrapped the covers around her head to try to reduce the pain. She couldn’t sleep, and along with the pain came dizziness. The next morning, when I awoke, Maryam was lying so still beneath her blanket, and her face was so pale, that I became alarmed. I shook her by her shoulder until she opened her eyes, but when I spoke to her, she couldn’t hear a word I was saying. She had become completely deaf.
I quickly reported this serious problem to the guards and tried to get Maryam a clinic appointment. But one of the guards looked at Maryam and said, “She looks all right to me. There’s nothing wrong with her.” I pleaded with the guards for hours until they finally relented—which they did mostly to silence me and the other prisoners who were arguing on Maryam’s behalf.
When another guard came to escort Maryam to the clinic, he said harshly, “You could have waited a few days. You wouldn’t have died.” He turned her over to a female prisoner who worked in the office, with orders to take her to the clinic. The woman was angry because it was lunchtime, and she forced Maryam to stand in the corridor for half an hour while she left to eat.
Once again, the clinic was full of drug addicts from Ward 1. They looked like African famine victims, ravaged by the effects of drugs and without money to buy any food to supplement their prison meals. After waiting a while on a bench, Maryam went into Dr. Avesta’s office. The doctor took her blood pressure, and before asking any medical questions, asked, “What are you charged with?” Maryam could sometimes hear a little and was able to figure out what the doctor was saying.
“I’m here because I believe in Jesus Christ.”
“Is that a crime? Were you involved in any activity?”
“I converted to Christianity. Converting is a crime.”
“Yes, and a very dangerous one.” Dr. Avesta shook her head. “If you are an apostate, your sentence will be heavy.”
After Maryam described her symptoms, Dr. Avesta gave her some erythromycin, an antibiotic useless for treating a virus and which no sensible doctor would prescribe. Maryam started taking it, and also took some pain pills that other inmates gave her. Her condition only got worse as the infection spread to her eyes, causing a painful discharge that restricted her vision to nothing more than shadowy images. Two days later, she developed a sharp pain in her stomach and a terrible headache. Waves of nausea washed over her. I helped her to the toilet, where she knelt on the floor and vomited for hours. Others in the ward called for the guards, who looked at Maryam through the bars without opening the door.
“She’s very sick,” I insisted. “She has a bad eye infection and can’t see.”
One of the guards looked at Maryam’s red, pus-filled eyes. “She’s been crying too much. That’s why her eyes are red. Calm down. She’ll be all right.” With that, the guards left.
Exhausted from all the vomiting, Maryam was too weak to climb into her bed. Shirin Alam Hooli and I, and a few others, wrapped Maryam in blankets on the floor and held her. Shirin massaged her head, hoping to relieve some of the pain. A few days later, when Maryam started feeling better on her own, some of our friends and I convinced the guards to take Maryam once more to see Dr. Avesta. After Maryam explained what had happened to her, the doctor said, “It doesn’t matter. The medicine I gave you probably poisoned you. But don’t worry. Your eardrum will heal itself.” With that, Maryam was brought back to the ward. In time, her body did indeed heal itself. By then we had been in prison for almost forty days.
As soon as we felt well enough, we resumed praying for other prisoners. New prisoners, strangers to us, approached us regularly now. “We’ve heard you are Christians and that God answers your prayers. Please pray for us,” they said.
“Of course, we’ll be happy to pray for you,” we always replied, “but we can’t promise you will be released. If God wants you to be free, you will be free. And you can pray for yourself, too. God will hear you.”
MARYAM
Two newcomers were very young girls terrified of being in prison. They asked Marziyeh and me to pray for them and were disappointed when they didn’t get out the next day. They asked us to pray again. Instead, we started walking with them and talking about how they could call on Jesus themselves to save them. They thought being a Christian had to do with going to church and observing certain rituals.
“No,” I explained, “Christianity isn’t church rituals. It’s a matter of believing in Jesus Christ in your heart. Then your sins are forgiven.�
� They both promised they would talk to Jesus when they were alone and pray for Him to reveal Himself to them.
Two days later, they excitedly told us they would be released that day. “We really believe in Jesus Christ,” they declared. “He heard us!” They wanted the location of a church. We had no paper, so I wrote the address on the backs of their hands. As I was writing, the girls’ names were called from the loudspeaker, and they were set free.
Friends warned me that the prison staff knew we were praying for people, and that we should be careful. “Praying is not a crime,” I said. “We don’t force anyone to have us pray for them. Many Muslims in here pray as much or more than we do, but people prefer to ask us to pray for them in the name of Jesus. That’s their choice.”
Marziyeh and I had both prayed often for Shahin, the secret Christian who’d been imprisoned for owing her brother money. We had told her she should forgive her brother for bringing charges against her, just as Christ had forgiven her for her sins. She prayed faithfully for Jesus to help her, but it was a struggle. Finally, she decided to call her brother and say she had forgiven him for keeping her in prison. When she called her husband a few hours later, he had incredible news. “Your brother has forgiven you!” he shouted. If her husband promised to pay the debt, her brother would pay Shahin’s bail immediately. Not only that, but her brother also apologized for what he had done, admitting that his wife had pressured him into doing it. What had seemed a hopeless situation was miraculously transformed in a single day.
Usually, prisoners were excited to hear their names on the loudspeaker, because it meant they were being released, or that at least their case was moving forward. At the same time, it could be a sign of something bad, such as a trip to court for sentencing. Six weeks after our arrest, we heard our names on the loudspeaker at Evin Prison. It made us apprehensive and our friends even more so. Our dear friends Silva and Shirin came into our room at once to ask if we knew why we were being ordered to report to the prison office. We had no idea.
We put on the required chadors and went to the office. A woman behind the desk said, “You are being transferred to Ward 209. You will go downstairs and wait for a guard to escort you.”
Just like that—no warning, no explanation. Without ever seeing the charges against us in writing or speaking to a lawyer, we were being sent to the dreaded 209, the section set aside for political prisoners, where Silva had been kept in solitary confinement for eight months and where Shirin had been beaten unconscious and had her teeth knocked out.
We went back to the ward to say a quick good-bye to Silva, Shirin, and the others we had come to love so much. The news of our transfer stirred up memories of their own awful experiences in Ward 209, and they were terrified for us. After giving our sisters’ phone numbers to Silva and Shirin, with instructions to get in touch with them if we didn’t return, we hugged everyone and went downstairs. After half an hour, a rotund, bearded, middle-aged guard appeared and barked, “Wear your hijab properly and follow me.” The hijab is the Islamic head scarf that must hide every strand of a woman’s hair in public. There was nothing wrong with the way we were wearing ours; he only wanted to show off his authority.
We walked behind him for a hundred yards or so until we came to a small white door in a red brick building. He told us to wait and not to talk to each other; then he disappeared inside.
After a minute, he returned with a blindfold in each hand. “Put these on,” he ordered. We covered our eyes and tied the cloths behind our heads. “Now follow me,” he said gruffly. “Look under the bottom of your blindfold and watch my feet.”
We stumbled inside and heard the door lock behind us.
CHAPTER 12
FAIRNESS AND INTEGRITY
Marziyeh
We followed the guard down a narrow hallway until he told us to stop and face the wall. “Don’t talk to each other,” he ordered. We waited for more than half an hour. Standing still aggravated my backache, so I began transferring my weight from one foot to the other, trying to get some relief. Finally I whispered to Maryam, “I can’t stand up anymore.”
“Who has permitted you to talk?” the guard demanded. Neither of us said another word. Compared to the noise of Ward 2, this place was eerily quiet. Nobody spoke. Even the footsteps seemed silent; we wondered if the guards wore special shoes.
A different voice said, “Follow me. Look down and watch my shoes. Be careful not to fall.” This man’s voice was not as harsh as the other one’s. We followed him up a long staircase and down another narrow hallway. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. All we could see around us was pairs of shoes. The guard took us into separate little rooms, about six feet square. There was a door open between the rooms, so we could hear each other.
The new voice belonged to Mr. Mosavat—another pseudonym; mosavat is the Farsi word for “fairness.” These officials had quite a sense of humor when picking their professional names. A second man in the room with him was Mr. Sedaghat (Farsi for “Mr. Integrity”), an interrogator in Ward 209 who had the same last name as the warden of the public part of Evin Prison. Mr. Mosavat did most of the talking in a calm, friendly tone. He gave us both a list of questions to answer in writing and went back and forth between our two rooms asking more questions.
He started with me. “Well, Miss Amirizadeh, how are you today?”
“You should know that, the way you seem to know everything else,” I answered. “We’re fine.”
Mr. Mosavat maintained his cool demeanor. “You were in the Vozara Detention Center for fourteen days, and now a month and a half in Evin. Surely this has taken a toll on you.” I remained silent. “In fact, that’s why you’re here today. Whether by our error or sheer bad luck, you were arrested by a rather extremist group. I am with the Ministry of Intelligence and usually handle the cases of Christian prisoners. Unfortunately, this extremist group has had your case file. We have been struggling and reasoning with them to turn your case over to us. We’re here to make sure you will be released and back home as soon as possible.
“By the way, how are you getting along with the conditions at Evin? I hope you haven’t had any problems.”
What a hypocritical weasel! “I think you know about the conditions and problems at Evin,” I said. “There’s no need for me to remind you.”
“Of course you’re right,” Mr. Mosavat said. “I’m just concerned for a lady like you being in such an unsuitable place. That’s why I’m trying to have you sent here to Ward 209, to conclude your case and have you released.”
“What do you mean ‘unsuitable’?” I asked.
“There are many criminals over in the public side of the prison, and it isn’t appropriate for people like you to mingle with them.”
“Those criminals are also human beings,” I said. “We have no problem mingling with them. In fact, we like being with them.”
“I suppose you’ve been speaking to them about Jesus,” Mr. Mosavat ventured.
“Of course we have. And we don’t even have to approach them. Because the charges against us are so unusual here, their curiosity gets the best of them. They want to know what we believe in that’s worth going to prison for. We tell them about Christianity and Jesus. So actually, you’re to blame for spreading Christianity, because by keeping us here you make people notice us and become attracted to who we are and what we believe.”
Mr. Mosavat’s cool suddenly evaporated. “No!” he said angrily. “What you’re doing is not right at all! You’re making our young people lose their identity and turn away from Islam!”
“Is this the identity Islam gives the youth of your country?” I fired back. “An identity that leaves women no hope? No choices in life? That makes them property of their husbands no matter how abusive they are? That promotes one-hour marriages? That ruins young girls’ lives, driving them to prostitution and drug addiction? That gives them no legal representation once they’re here?”
“I think you have learned a lot during your stay,” Mr. Mosa
vat observed.
“I certainly have! Don’t think I’m unhappy about being here. Yes, the conditions are hard. But I’ve learned more about Iran and Islam at Evin Prison than I could have learned in any university. It has transformed my life. I am a different person than I was.”
Mr. Mosavat tried a new angle. “Of course, our argument is not only about your faith. I believe every religion must be respected.” I couldn’t suppress a smile at such a blatant lie. “Our problem is that you are promoting your faith. You do not have the right to speak to our people about Jesus. I have worked on Christian cases for many years and have read the Bible in full. Your Bible says you must follow the laws of the country where you live.”
“I don’t think you’ve read the Bible correctly,” I said. “Jesus tells His followers to spread His gospel message. When the law of men and the law of Christ differ, I follow Christ.”
“But Miss Amirizadeh, you don’t have the right to convert your fellow citizens to another faith. In an Islamic state this is a criminal offense.”
“The government tricked us with lies into coming to the police station. The basiji ransacked our apartment and took our belongings without a warrant. These are the illegal acts of a dictatorship.”
“Miss Amirizadeh,” Mr. Mosavat said with an icy tone, “you must understand: I am the law. And no one should dare oppose this.”
“If God showed His face to you today and said you must tell your people the truth, would you follow His order, or the law of Iran?” I asked.
“This is impossible!” Mr. Mosavat declared. “God would never issue an order that would cause strife or chaos among His people. In any case, if you continue your activities here, it will be very hard for you.”
“Do what you wish,” I said. “Unless you cut out my tongue, I will keep feeding the people’s hunger for the truth about Jesus. And if you do cut out my tongue, I will share His gospel with sign language!”
Captive in Iran Page 14