Christians Are Being Jailed in Iran
8th September 2022
Iran has long been known as a silencer of dissenting voices, but even by its standards the jailing in mid-August of a 63-year-old man with advanced Parkinson’s disease, and his wife, came as a surprise.
Last week, a 58-year-old man and 48-year-old woman joined them in Tehran’s Evin Prison. And apart from their senior years, these four Iranians have one crucial thing in common: they profess to be Christians.
Yet the quartet also possess one crucial difference: in the regime’s eyes, only one of them can truly be considered a Christian.
Fifty-eight-year-old Joseph Shahbazian is of Armenian descent and as such is considered to be “ethnically Christian”.
The other three — 63-year-old Homayoun Zhaveh, his 44-year-old wife Sara, and 48-year-old Malihe Nazari — are ethnic Persians, and this, in the regime’s eyes, means that they were born Muslims, and remain so, regardless of what they may have since come to believe.
The similarities and differences between these four Iranians — and their shared predicament — show clearly that, in the Islamic Republic, neither recognised nor unrecognised Christians are free to act out their beliefs.