Interview

Change

Freedom

Freedom of Belief

Middle East

29 January 2024

5 min read

Freedom of belief: The harsh scars of lived experience in Iran

Belle Tindal meets Dabrina, an Iranian contemporary, and compares their experience of living – from cars to believing.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A somewat beaten white car parked on the side of a street.

An Iranian street scene.

Foroozan Faraji on Unsplash.

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me…’

Those are Jesus’ words. You may well recognise them, they’re among his most famous. Probably because they’re so darn bewildering, fairly uncomfortable too. At least, they are to me.

You see, I’ve only ever read these words. I’ve never actually lived them.

I read them on Wednesday morning, in fact. And there was nothing inspired, intentional or special about that. Nearly all of my days begin the exact same way - tucked up in bed with a cup of tea and an allocated chunk of Bible to read through – and, on Wednesday, it just so happened to be this chunk. It was a fairly mundane affair, business as usual. Except, on this particular Wednesday, which incidentally started with these particular words, I met someone for whom these words have been lived, not merely read.

Someone for whom these words hold memories and scars, for whom they are as precious in their truth as they are painful.

Someone who does not have the privilege of regarding these words as bewildering or uncomfortable, as I do.

On Wednesday, I met Dabrina.

I was fending off deadlines and 9am lectures. Dabrina was fending off sexual threats from the guards and physical assault at the hands of the interrogators.

Dabrina is from Iran, the ninth most dangerous country to be a Christian in the world. And on a bitterly cold January evening, she stood behind a podium in the Houses of Parliament, a place which has Bible verses etched into its very walls, and told us of her country, a place where belief in those very same verses is a punishable offense. With Christianity regarded as a conspiracy to undermine the Iranian government and Islamic law, much of the Christian way of life is illegal.

Gathering in large groups, illegal. House churches, illegal. Evangelism (or, more accurately, anything that is perceived to be evangelism), illegal. Teaching children, illegal. Translating the Bible into their own languages, illegal.

And not only that, but Christians are considered inherently ‘unclean’, second-class citizens in almost every way. A Christian in Iran could never be a doctor, a teacher, or a lawyer. They are also not allowed to touch food, meaning that they cannot work in retail or hospitality either. There are restrictions on what schools and universities they can attend, where they can go, and who they can socialise with. In short, they are persecuted. Christians in Iran are in danger, constantly.

I learnt all of this from Dabrina’s speech that day; a speech that left me wondering how on earth we can have so much, and yet so little, in common.

You see, both Dabrina and I believe that Jesus existed, and more than that, that he was and still is everything that he claimed to be - Son of God, light of the world, saviour to all – the whole thing. And we both try to live our lives accordingly. We have the same answers to the same questions, the same worldviews, the same God.

But the parallels get more specific than that.

Both of our parents led our local churches throughout our childhoods. But there’s a key difference; Dabrina grew up used to her father frequently disappearing with no explanation. Again and again, he would vanish, and she would be forced to anxiously await his return. I have never had to lay awake wondering if my dad was dead or alive.

I spent my teenage years working in a local coffee shop, relishing the first hints of what an independent life might feel like. Dabrina tried to get a job as a waitress too, but it was illegal for her to touch food, so she was turned away.

I spent my early twenties doing a theology degree and soaking up every moment of what I was told would be the most care-free years of my life. Dabrina spent her early twenties in an all-male prison.

I had friends who would (good-naturedly) roll their eyes at my Christian faith, wondering why I would willingly choose to wake up so early on a Sunday morning. Dabrina had friends who were spying on her and reporting the details of her life to the government.

I was fending off deadlines and 9am lectures. Dabrina was fending off sexual threats from the guards and physical assault at the hands of the interrogators.

I remember buying my first car, Dabrina remembers hers being tampered with by the authorities – on three occasions.

I live in the country I was born in. Dabrina has had to flee hers.

So, you see – While I read Jesus’ words about persecution, Dabrina lives them. Dabrina, and 365 million others around the world.

Talking to Dabrina was humbling, and astounding, and challenging - and a million other things too. The details of the trauma that she has gone through will undoubtedly continue to humble me for a long time yet, and I’m glad about that. But her answer to my final, and arguably ever-so-western, question left me utterly stunned. I asked why, after everything that she has been through and with every danger that it poses, is she still defiantly living a Jesus-shaped life. And her answer,

‘When you encounter God, when you encounter Jesus, when you are healed, when you witness signs and wonders, when you encounter the love of God as your father, as your saviour, as your provider – how can you walk away from that?

… When you’re in that much danger, you will cry out to God and he will meet you there.’

Here was a woman, for whom belief in Jesus has her caused physical harm, calling him a healer. A woman, whose faith in God has taken away her home and everything that she had built within it, calling him provider. A woman, whose Christian conviction has landed her in endless danger, calling God a saviour. A woman who told me that the Jesus I have got to know in comfort, she has seen show up in peril. A woman who told me stories of the underground church, which just so happens to be the fasting growing church in the world.

And in that moment, I thought about how much, and yet how little, I had in common with this incredible person before me.

And I thought about how mystifying it is that these 365 million people are hidden in plain sight, suffering under a blanket of silence, and how that surely cannot go on? And I pondered how so many people are being denied their freedom of belief, a basic human right, and yet we barely speak about it? And I felt indignant in a way that must infuriate those who have spent more than an evening engaging with this issue.

And then I thought back to that bewildering sentence from Jesus – where he puts the words persecution and blessed together - and realised that it is a sentence that I shall likely spend my life pondering, while Dabrina knows it to be totally and concretely true.

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Interview

Change

Politics

S&U interviews

30 April 2024

7 min read

Stephen Timms: still on mission

The MP on five decades trying to prove a Christian Tory wrong.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man in a suit turns to look at the camera and behind him is a gallery of large painting

Stephen TImms MP.

The day before the February 1974 election, the first in which he was old enough to vote, Stephen Timms says an elder at the Brethren assembly that he then attended – near his home in Fleet, in Hampshire – took him aside. The Brethren are a non-denominational, non-conformist evangelical Christian movement.

“You will be voting Conservative, won’t you?” Timms recalls the man asking.

The assumption surprised Timms, who had thought there was an “obvious connection” between the social justice elements of Christ’s teaching and parties that sought greater equality. He told the elder – Mr Gilmour – that he would be voting Labour.

The incident was an early sign of how Timms, now 68, would spend a life that has brought together an evangelical Christian faith with attachment to the Labour party.

His career has taken him as high as the Cabinet – where he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury for a year in 2006 and 2007. He became Sir Stephen in 2022. He also has a reputation as one of the MPs most dogged in pursuing case work for constituents. That commitment nearly cost him his life in 2010 when a constituent, angry at his support for the Iraq War, stabbed him twice at a constituency surgery. Timms is standing again at the coming general election for East Ham, the constituency which, with some boundary changes, he has represented in various forms since 1994.

“I suppose I’ve spent 50 years trying to prove Mr Gilmour wrong,” Timms says. “[He was] a delightful man but I never agreed with him about that.”

There is a “very clear trend” of economic justice in the biblical message, which the Labour party represents and seeks to realise, Timms goes on, over coffee at an arts centre in his constituency.

“The Christian roots of Labour are absolutely clear,” he says, pointing out that Keir Hardie, the party’s first leader, was an evangelical Christian and many of its other founders were Methodists. “I’ve always seen Labour values and Labour aims as wanting to realise that commitment to economic justice which is such a clear thrust of the Bible.”

He sees no attempt in the Conservative party to realise that vision, he says.

“It’s just not a subject of interest, I don’t think,” Timms says of Conservative supporters. “For people in the Conservative party, there are concerns about maintaining order and respectability and all those things and I can understand how you might find those in the Bible. But I don’t think that’s what the Bible is about.”

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’.”

Timms’ attachment to his small area of East London is almost as strong a thread in his story as his Christian and Labour party commitments. He first came to the area while a maths student at Cambridge, in the summer of 1976, as part of a two-week mission by the Christian Union of Emmanuel College to Forest Gate. It was a formative experience.

“It was the first time I could see how what I believed could shape my life,” Timms recalls.

He returned to the area in 1978 when, after leaving university, he was recruited by Logica, then an information technology and management consultancy, working in the west end of London. He joined the church that the 1976 mission had planted – now called Plaistow Christian Fellowship. He continues to attend the church with his wife, Hui-Leng, originally from Singapore, who was also part of the 1976 mission.

His joined the local Labour party.

“Very quickly, I was asked to be the secretary of my local branch Labour party, which was Little Ilford branch, and then very quickly after that I was asked to be the secretary of the constituency Labour party,” Timms recalls.

Timms was chosen as an office bearer, he believes, because of his neutrality in a bitter feud. Left-wing activists had tried to oust Reg Prentice, Labour MP for the constituency, then called Newham North-East. They claimed he was fundamentally a Conservative. Long-standing local activists had successfully defended him. Both sides had been left dismayed when Prentice subsequently defected to the Conservative party.

“It was a terrible mess,” Timms recalls.

His first elected office was as a councillor on Newham Council, fighting in an unusually high-profile council byelection in 1984. The party had, surprisingly, lost the three Little Ilford wards to representatives of the then Liberal-SDP Alliance. But it emerged that two of the Alliance councillors had given false addresses and there was a byelection.

“Ken Livingstone came down; Neil Kinnock came down,” Timms recalls, referring, respectively, to the then Labour leader of the Greater London council and the Labour party nationally. “We threw everything at it.”

Timms was leader of Newham council when, in 1994, the previous MP, Ron Leighton, died of a heart attack. After being chosen as the Labour candidate, Timms won the subsequent byelection, in June 1994.

His connection with his church has remained critical, he says. A group in the church offered to pray with him every month when he became a councillor. They increased the frequency to weekly once he became leader of the council.

“We still do that and that has been a very important source of support for me through all the ups and downs of the intervening 34 years,” Timms says.

Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that an evangelical Christian would form such a strong bond with, first, Newham North-East and then East Ham, as the constituency has been known since 1997. The seat has, according to the 2021 census, the eighth-highest proportion of people – 41.2 per cent – identifying as Muslim.

Timms insists the tension is less than it might appear. The first person to urge him to stand as an MP following Ron Leighton’s death was the chair of the Alliance of Newham Muslim Associations, he says.

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’,” Timms recalls.

There are points of connection between different faith groups in the area, he adds. He has a particularly strong connection with Bonny Downs Baptists Church, in Beckton, which has an active food bank and many other social ministries.

“If you look at the people who around this community are really doing things to help here, it’s the faith groups,” Timms says. “It’s Bonny Downs Baptist Church; it’s some of the Muslim groups.”

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,”

Timms’s sense of affinity with his Muslim constituents, however, did not prevent the most distressing incident of his career – when Roshonara Choudhry tried to kill him at a constituency surgery in Beckton in May 2010.

Medical staff described the two stab wounds, to his stomach, as “life-threatening” and Choudhry is serving a life term for attempted murder. She had been radicalised by online Islamist extremist sermons and acted because of Timms’ vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq war.

“It was a very, very unpleasant episode,” Timms says, with characteristic understatement.

In March this year, he says, he received a reply from Choudhry, part of a correspondence that began after she wrote to him expressing remorse for her actions.

Even the stabbing, however, underlined the community’s goodwill, Timms insists.

“I was absolutely inundated after that episode with people sending cards and good wishes – including Christians saying, ‘We’re praying for you’, and quite a lot of similar things from Muslims saying, ‘We’re praying for you for a speedy recovery’,” he says. “I hadn’t had that experience before of Muslims telling me, ‘We’re praying for you’. So it left me with a stronger sense, I think, of being supported by my Christian and Muslim constituents, which I appreciated very much.”

Timms nevertheless remains an unapologetically partisan politician. He wants a Labour government under Keir Starmer, he says, to resolve problems he says have built up over 14 years of coalition and then Conservative government since 2010.

“I think the country is in a sorry mess,” he says. “I think we very urgently need a change of direction. I think that the prescription that Keir Starmer has set out offers a hopeful way forward.”

Timms, who is currently chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, says he would be “delighted” to return to a ministerial role in a Starmer government. He is standing as an MP again in the hope of being able to support a new Labour government.

“It would seem a shame to leave just when we might be on the brink of a Labour government again,” he says.

Nevertheless, the way he links his work as an MP with his Christian faith sets him apart.

“I experienced a calling to be in this area,” Timms says.

As far back as when he came to East London, his thinking about faith, what to do with his life and politics were all “intertwined”, he adds.

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,” Timms says.