Article
Comment
Freedom of Belief
Islam
5 min read

Iran: defender of minorities?

Making such claims is part of a carefully managed facade.

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A toddler is held by her father while he stands next to her mother.
Lydia and her adoptive family.

It might surprise you to learn that the Islamic Republic of Iran likes to present itself as a defender of minorities. 

It’s certainly not the sort of title you might associate with a country with such a grim human-rights record, amounting to “crimes against humanity” according to the findings of an independent fact-finding mission. 

But akin to the template of the Russians and other rogue regimes, Iran knows well that when it comes to the international arena, appearances can often take the spotlight away from ghastly realities. 

And so, when the fact-finding mission releases a report, as it did last week, outlining violations against minorities with the title They have dehumanised us, while it may achieve little in terms of change on the ground, it has the potential to at least damage the Islamic Republic’s carefully managed facade on the international stage. 

In the five years I’ve been working for Iranian Christian charity Article18, I've grown extremely familiar with the way in which the Islamic Republic brings representatives of its recognised religious minorities - Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians - to the United Nations in an attempt to prove its inter-religious tolerance.  

The latest example of this was in October, when the Armenian MP - one of five minority representatives in the Iranian parliament (as the Islamic Republic likes to remind us) - was rolled out before the UN Human Rights Committee to list the number of churches, synagogues and temples in Iran. 

The point? That if there are so many places where minorities can worship - for the record, he referenced 380 churches, 16 synagogues and 78 temples - then how can anyone claim minorities are persecuted? 

What the MP failed to mention was that those 380 churches, for example, are only open to those considered to have been born as Christians, which in Iran means Armenians or Assyrians.  

Meanwhile, the door remains firmly closed to anyone who may wish to convert to Christianity or even simply visit a church to find out more. 

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none. 

This hasn’t always been the case. There were once a large and growing number of churches that welcomed converts, but over the past 15 years they were either forced to close or to change the language in which they operate. These days, churches can only preach in Assyrian or Armenian.  

Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the forced closure of the largest Persian-speaking church in Iran, the Central Assemblies of God Church in Tehran, whose popularity ended up being its death knell. 

Just four Persian-speaking churches remain in the whole of Iran, all Anglican, and these can only welcome those who can prove they were Christian before the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. They are not allowed to admit new members, and even these have not been permitted to reopen since their forced closure during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

So, while churches in the West are often derided for their ageing populations, for Iran’s last remaining Persian-language churches, that future is entirely inevitable. 

And while the Armenian MP talks about Iran’s hundreds of churches, he fails to mention that converts have nowhere to worship, as was highlighted in our #Place2Worship campaign, which was inspired by an open letter written by three converts serving long prison sentences for their membership of house-churches.  

The three wanted to know where they might worship, free from the fear of being re-arrested. 

Because that is why Christians are imprisoned in Iran - simply for meeting together in what we in the West call “house groups”, and what in Iran are known as “house-churches”, or, in the words of the Iranian authorities, “enemy groups”

But it isn't only the converts who suffer. Armenians and Assyrians have themselves received long prison sentences for their decision to share their faith, a right that is enshrined in international covenants that Iran has signed, including Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, from which my organisation derives its name.  

Article 18 enshrines the freedoms to change one's faith and to share it with others. Both are denied to Iranians of all faiths and none. 

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts. 

In this context, I find it both baffling and even slightly amusing whenever I see the Islamic Republic of Iran presenting itself as the defender of minorities.  

Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, littered his "election" campaign with references to the “dignity” of Iran’s minorities; it’s common to see propaganda highlighting Iran's alleged defence of Christians in the region against ISIS, for example; and they love to talk about the number of churches and minority MPs that they have. 

But they aren't quite so fond of scrutiny, such as a 17,000-word report by a credible international team of experts.  

According to the experts, minorities in Iran face “ongoing institutionalised discrimination and marginalisation”, the “root causes” or “enablers” of which are the “gross human-rights violations against them”. 

The fact-finding mission highlight the example of a couple whose adopted daughter was ruled should be taken away from them because they had become Christians and she was considered to have been born a Muslim. 

I remember the story of little Lydia very well - certainly one of the most heart-wrenching of my time working with Article18.  

It also produced one of the strongest reactions, with 120 lawyers and activists signing a joint letter to the head of the judiciary at the time - one Ebrahim Raisi - calling for the decision to be overturned. 

It wasn’t. 

And while the Islamic Republic will no doubt seek to laugh or shrug off the “politically motivated” report, as they have countless others, it is to be hoped that at least some who may have been taken in by the regime's propaganda in the past will see reason to think twice the next time around. 

 

Article
Comment
Gaza
Israel
War & peace
7 min read

Gaza-Israel: bankrupt ideas still capture too many of us

One year on, we’ve turned no pages, learned no lessons, made no progress.

Todd  is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine. 

A graffitied concrete border wall stands below a blue sky and dusty ground
Border wall between Gaza and Israel.

It’s the first anniversary of October 7, and we’re left with the grim task of finding a way to appropriately honor the dead, stand in solidarity with the bereaved, and mourn with all who mourn.  And we do this as we acknowledge our ongoing collective failure and the unimaginable and avoidable loss of so many innocent lives, each one with its own promise and possibility forever denied.  In the end, it’s hard to find a way to commemorate the horror of that day because it’s still going on.  We’ve turned no pages, learned no lessons, made no progress.  

Someday there will no doubt be a grand and somber memorial that tells the story of the brutal October 7 attack. The victims of that day will be remembered, the captives and their fates memorialized. And some day there will be a museum that tells the story of what many already believe will be characterized in the historical record as a genocide in Gaza. To what we already know of the massive destruction of a place and a people will be added details that will be excavated from the rubble, testimonies from the traumatized survivors, heartbreaking tales of orphans and of the destruction of entire families. Maybe these places of collective memory will offer greater context for the world in which the tragedies that created them took place, some kind of “never again” lessons to learn, and no doubt some sharp analysis of the failures that led to these days of great darkness.  If these attempts at memorialization are honest, they will hold many of us up to withering critique. We’ll be in the museums too, enduring rebuke for the indifference that led us here or for our zero-sum thinking that could only imagine a world born of and sustained by violence in all its forms.  

These are lone and lonely voices in a land besieged by brutality, dehumanization, and ideologies of ethnic and religious supremacy.  But they are not unicorns. 

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If we don't want the story to be about our blind complicity, but about our courage, we still have time to own our agency. Because this isn't over yet. We can mark this day by remembering that it will continue to be like all the others until we all do our part to achieve a ceasefire, a release of captives, and an end to support for systems of inequality and control.  In whatever ways great or small that we can, we have to reject the logic of violence and the ideologies of hatred and exclusion.  And to be active participants in cultivating in ourselves and in our communities an imagination for the way each human life is sacred and our flourishing is tied to that of our neighbors.   

We do this even as we pause and honor the innocent dead in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and now in Lebanon. We mourn with all those who mourn. But we do that with people still dying in Gaza, with millions of Palestinians still displaced, with disease and hunger rampant, with Israeli hostages still being held, with massive street protests calling for a ceasefire being ignored, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis still displaced from their homes in the north and the south, with Hezbollah rockets still falling and now with the war more fully advancing into Lebanon, with a wider regional war ever a distinct and terrifying possibility, with settlers rampaging in the West Bank with impunity, with ideological zealots setting the terms of debate, with economic catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians have endured a year with no income, and with palpable fear among Palestinian citizens of Israel.   

The bankruptcy of the ideas that have prevailed this past year remain firmly in control and continue to capture the imagination of too many.  And yet there are those who know that violence begets violence begets violence, and that this is how we got here, not how we get out.   

I spent a day in New York City last month with four members of the Parents Circle/Families Forum, an organization made up of 700 Palestinian and Israeli families, each who have each lost a loved one in the conflict. In addition to the pain of loss they share, they also share a commitment to a rejection of the very notion of revenge and an embrace of the work of reconciliation.  Four members of this group traveled to the United States for a two-week tour to help us understand our part in their shattered and unjust reality and to let us know that there is another way if we can find the courage to pursue it.  That way is mutuality.  It is an embrace of security, dignity and freedom for all the people of their traumatized shared homeland, Israelis and Palestinians alike, in equal measure.   

Each member of this unlikely tribe has a unique story of personal loss, and as they speak, they tell of the worst day of their lives, over and over again.  But there is exponential power in the fact that these stories are told in one voice.  Two members visiting the U.S. are mothers, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who have lost children in the conflict and have been transformed by the deep realization that they share the same pain. One was a young man whose ten-year-old sister was killed by an Israeli border policeman and after some years of anger-fueled stone throwing as a teenager, he began to channel his trauma into the work of resisting occupation and violence via the collaborative work of justice, freedom and security through reconciliation.  And one of the newest members of this work is a man whose mother, an internationally recognized Israeli peace activist, was killed in a kibbutz on October 7.  He has chosen to pick up his mother’s work and devote himself to a just peace for himself and for all his neighbors, Palestinians included.  

These are lone and lonely voices in a land besieged by brutality, dehumanization, and ideologies of ethnic and religious supremacy.  But they are not unicorns. There are others there whose stories need to be told and whose work needs our support.  

My church is preaching a sermon series reflecting on the leadership and choices of the kings of biblical Israel and Judah.  Their stories are old but their inclinations to violence, their neglect of care for the poor and the widow, and their lack of concern for justice are timeless. In a recent sermon I was struck by my pastor’s observation that even those of us who have regularly engaged with the Bible all our lives don’t always know much about the kings, but we do know something of the prophets.  They are, in his words, “the ones who hold the story for God.” And in times like these,  as we descend ever deeper into darkness and inhumanity, they are the ones who share in the pathos of God, to borrow from rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. But they also show us the way out. Warmongers in the Middle East and here in the West are creating massive destruction. We too easily and readily live within the world created by their corrupted imagination.  We can’t ignore them. But we don’t have to listen to them. Listen to the prophets, those who hold The Story of God’s shalom, of his kingdom of justice and peace.  They are still among us.  One of our responses is to make sure we’re listening to these voices, amplifying them, and following their lead.  

As a Christian, over this past year, I have found myself being drawn more deeply into the life and the person and the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. The deep love of the maligned and suffering, enemy-loving  Jesus, he who was accused by the religious establishment, executed by one of the great empires of history, mocked and spit upon, all for the threat he posed to those addicted to power, control, exclusion and the violence needed to enforce it all.  This is the Jesus who boldly declared liberation of the captives, vision for the blind, food for the hungry--a new kingdom of justice and mercy, of wholeness and shalom.   

None of these things I believe absolve me from acting.  Jesus is not my cop out, he’s my way out.  What if we who seek to follow him were to repent of our propensity to violence, our fascination with the zero-sum binaries we use to create hierarchies of exclusion, and our failure to demonstrate our love for God by showing love of our neighbor?  We might not solve all the problems that are destroying us but we’d at least stop contributing to them. And imagine what a more generative and healing presence in the world we would be if we joined our voices with others of different faiths and none who also believe in a world more just and whole.  I would argue that the world in all its diversity and complexity needs Christians to mark this day and this moment is by taking Jesus so seriously that we start to live out his calling to be active participants in the work of justice, healing and repair and living reminders that all are made in the image of God, violence begets violence, and the simple truth of Mother Theresa who said, “If we have no peace it’s because we’ve forgotten we belong to each other.”