Article

Culture

Freedom of Belief

Language

16 September 2023

5 min read

Translating heart-languages

For two Iranian women, home and danger are often synonymous. Belle Tindall shares why they translate a defiant message.

Belle Tindall

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

An illustration of a woman with dark long hair looking to the right.

'Miriam'

Open Doors.

This weekend (16th September) marked the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini. Mahsa, also known as ‘Jina’, was a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested by the Iranian ‘morality police’ and tragically died while being held in police custody. Her (alleged) crime was a violation of Iran’s strict dress code, as she was caught in the city of Tehran without her hair adequately covered.

News of Mahsa’s unjust arrest and harrowing death quickly spread throughout the world, building a momentum of grief, shock, and defiance.

Of course, we mourned the tragic loss of a precious life. A woman was lost; a daughter, a sister, a friend, a person. Mahsa’s life was taken away and we watched the world grieve as if she belonged to us all. Billions of hearts were breaking at the loss. However, accompanying such deep grief was a profound sense of rage. We were faced with the reality that women in Iran aren’t safe. On the contrary, they are in danger of arrest, violence and death – all at the hands of those who are supposed to protect, all under the guise of that which is meant to empower. In Iran, as in so many countries, a woman is simply a dangerous thing to be.

Another people group who find themselves living in continual danger in Iran is its Christian population. In a population of 86 million, 1.2 million are believed to be Christians. With Christianity perceived as a threat to the State and an insult to Islam, Christians in Iran are often severely discriminated against. What’s more, the Human Rights charity, Open Doors, have observed that the tightening of the Penal Code in 2021, the force of which was keenly felt in the way in which protestors of Mahsa Amini’s death were so harshly dealt with, are making things increasingly difficult for Christians.

So, to be an Iranian woman is hazardous. To be an Iranian Christin is hazardous. It therefore goes without saying that to be an Iranian woman who is also a Christian – well, such an identity comes with such difficulty, it can be hard to fathom. For such women, home and danger are often synonymous. Which is why the stories of Miriam and Stella, two Iranian women who are secretly translating the Bible into their own languages, is so astonishing.

‘Miriam’

Miriam is Iranian, but she also belongs to the fifty per-cent of the Iranian population who do not speak Farsi/Persian (the national language) as their first language. Azeri, Kurdish, Baluchi, Armenian Gilaki, Luri, and Arabic are all spoken throughout the country. Therefore, despite Farsi being the official language of Iran, almost half of the population aren’t fluent, while millions of Iranians are visually illiterate in the Farsi script.

Miram, who despite it not being her first language, has learnt to speak and read Farsi to a high level, became a Christian through secretly watching online classes on Christianity. Being married into a strict Muslim family, Miriam kept her Christianity a secret from her husband. That was, until he walked in on her watching one of her classes. Despite the immense dangers she faces as a result of the minimal rights that a Christian woman holds in Iran, Miriam decided that she would be honest with her husband about her new-found Christian faith. Miriam still marvels at the unexpected response from her husband, who said,

‘I know you are a serious-minded woman and if this is important to you, it’s OK.’

Out of curiosity, Miriam’s husband joined her in watching the online classes, until he too became a Christian.

For the past three years Miriam has been secretly working on translating the Bible from Farsi into her ‘heart-language’ (for the sake of Miriam’s anonymity, she has kept her ‘heart-language’ confidential). She tells us that she is willing to take the profound risk of doing this work because,

‘We are not allowed to study our heart languages in Iranian public schools. This is a limitation for our people. Iranian leaders use my people as political tools. I wanted to do something good for my people. I have this language specialty and experience, this expertise, so I can help my own people. People like my mother can read this book.’

Being the first person from her community to do such work, Miriam states that,

‘Despite having two children and knowing that my life is at risk for believing in Jesus in Iran, I cannot even imagine leaving this work unfinished. I must complete this work and see the result.’

'Stella'

A woman with dark hair looks straight at us.

'Stella'

Stella is also Iranian, and also speaks a ‘heart-language’, one that is shared with even fewer people than Miriam’s.

After tragically losing her husband in 2013, Stella had to battle her late husband’s family to keep custody of her then seven-year-old son. As the battle continued to rage on, Stella fled Iran with her son, leaving behind her entire life in order to keep hold of her child. As a refugee, Stella’s life is not without its ever-present difficulties as she is continually fighting to stay in the country that she and her son have now called home for ten years.

Stella became a Christian twelve years ago, while she was in the middle of the fierce battle to keep hold of her son while mourning the loss of her husband. As sorrow and desperation raged around her, Stella simply knelt on her floor and spoke into the silence ‘if you are God, save me’. She has been a Christian ever since.

Just like Miriam, Stella is secretly working to translate the Bible from Farsi into the language of her community. With tears in her eyes, she says,

‘There is no other job that your boss is God. I love my mother language. I'm telling the poetry; I write the context. I write the sentence, I record it… I am thinking about my mum, my father, my childhood. And everyone that doesn’t have it (the Bible) right now. I really want to bring God to my town and my people.’

Stella can’t return home, but she is nevertheless determined to work for the spiritual well-being of those whom she was forced to leave, regardless of the immense risk.

The heart language that both Miriam and Stella speak of, and are translating the Bible into, is the vernacular that binds their communities together in their home country of Iran. But to me, hearing these stories; the term that Miriam coined feels loaded with depth of multifaceted meaning.

The language with which they speak of their faith is unfused with resilient hope and faith-fueled boldness.

Their words when they speak of their home are dripping with resilient affection, obvious frustration and forgiveness.

The way in which they speak of themselves, and their dangerous task, is undeniably defiant and astonishingly selfless.

Review

Books

Culture

4 April 2024

4 min read

Remembering red on red

The cultural revolution's factions have a disconcertingly contemporary feel.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A Chinese stamp depicts a map of the country from which people march holding a little red book

Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stamp, 1968.

Public domain, via Wikimedia.

Modern era China has suffered human loss on an unimaginable scale. The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century cost over 20 million lives, more or less the global total from the Great War of 1914-18. The vicious Japanese occupation in the 1930s led to 15 million Chinese deaths. The famine begun in 1958, precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, caused around 40 million deaths.

For one nation, however large, these are appalling losses. By contrast, the fatalities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) amounted to one million or more. But the impact of this communist insurgency within a communist state is profoundly felt today, for its generation is still alive. The trauma of those years has wounded the bodies and minds of millions; people who are unsure how to come to terms with it because of the uncertainty of what can be safely talked about.

Mao’s incitement to younger people to turn on their teachers and elders in vitriolic criticism and violent attack, including torture and murder, was an attempt to re-boot the revolution by exterminating elements of western capitalism and traditional Chinese authority – the so-called Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs and habits. The humiliation of teachers and parents was profoundly at odds with the Confucian culture of respect for elders, and it was embedded in young minds whose frontal lobes had not fully developed and where empathy was unformed. The ensuing violence, pain and hardship was sickening, encompassing millions.

Many of the bereaved and injured, the perpetrators and the victims, are still alive. Some bury their memories as a way of coping; others search for meaning, but run up against an authoritarian government with new digital tools that make totalitarianism possible. In her book Red Memory (Faber and Faber, 2024), Tania Branigan has produced a masterpiece of literature. Interviewing survivors, bystanders and instigators of the violence, she has produced a history of their guilt and trauma, while reflecting on the uses of memory.

The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

The word remember is coded with meaning. When we piece together our memories of the past, we re-member them and the members are frequently not put back together again in the way an event happened. This becomes more pronounced with the passage of time and the known tendency for people to make themselves more central to a story than they were at the time. We also narrate the past in ways that burnish our reputation and preserve our conscience. The Cultural Revolution has been reassembled in fragments; there is, and there will be, no initiative like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People can make of it what they want; but without justice, the losses fester.

The lack of a shared public memory also means the Cultural Revolution can be made to service any goal. Detached from the moorings of truth, it becomes a malleable symbol. Xi Jinping suffered himself. His father was purged, denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and sent to hard work in rural Shaanxi Province. This is his creation myth, and how it made a man out of him. But there are other lessons to be taken from that time which he has strategically and wilfully ignored. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who followed Mao were determined that never again would one man develop a cult of personality like his, by ensuring limited presidential terms. Xi Jinping has abolished this limit and introduced Xi Jinping Thought in an echo of Mao’s Little Red Book. If there is one thing Xi has taken from his experience, it is the terror that chaos unleashes and the need to avoid it at all costs. The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work

The cult of Mao was idolatrous, usurping Christ. Jesus said he would divide families: ‘father against son…mother against daughter…mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law’. This divisiveness was located in his claim to be the way, the truth and the life. He did not seek to divide families, but knew his claims would do so. Mao intentionally turned families against themselves - the foundation of a civil society - to ensure loyalty to him would not be compromised.

It is easy to identify this several decades on and at the safe distance of several thousand miles. Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work. It is also sloppy to make links between the ideological fervour and purity of Maoism and today’s social media culture. There is no direct link, despite some claims. But the story of how groups coalesce righteously and are manipulated into ever more extreme forms of factional purity has a disconcertingly contemporary feel.