The Woman Iran Could Not Break
Mahvash Sabet spent a decade in Iran's prisons because she is a Baháʼí. Her memoir offers a rare firsthand account of faith, survival, and the Islamic Republic's persecution of a religious minority.
There is a moment early in Open Wide the Doors that captures the absurdity of Mahvash Sabet's imprisonment.
Having been transferred to solitary confinement, in a room that other female inmates called “the kennel,” the warden looks at the 55-year-old schoolteacher with genuine puzzlement.
“The judge says you must stay in solitary for fifteen days,” she tells her. “But I honestly don’t know why. You’re not an addict. This is hardly the place for the likes of you.”
That bewilderment runs throughout Sabet’s memoir. She was not imprisoned for violence, espionage, or political conspiracy, despite what Iran’s authorities alleged.
She was jailed because she is a Baháʼí.
The Baháʼí Faith is a global monotheistic religion founded in 19th-century Persia by Baháʼu’lláh. It teaches the essential worth of all major religions, the unity of humanity, and the harmony of science and religion. Baháʼís are persecuted in Iran because the Islamic Republic views the religion as a “deviant cult” and a political threat.
Published in English after hundreds of pages were secretly written inside prison and smuggled out by prisoners, Open Wide the Doors is both an account of one woman’s ordeal and a window into the Islamic Republic’s decades-long persecution of its largest unrecognized religious minority.
It was translated by Azita Mottahedeh and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani—the latter had previously translated Sabet’s poetry. When the two women finally met in 2017, after Sabet’s release, Bahiyyih was struck by her warmth after years in prison.
“I thought, what an amazing lady,” she tells Middle East Uncovered. “I was surprised for someone who had suffered for 10 years, how radiant and positive she was. And so full of energy and laughter.”
Inside Iran, Sabet remains subject to stringent state restrictions. Even now, she hasn’t had access to the complete memoir, nor has her daughter, Negar, seen the copy.
However appalling the conditions she has endured, Sabet refuses to surrender her dignity or empathy towards those around her—something that comes through in the memoir.
Before 1979, Sabet had built a career in education. She taught in Tehran, became the principal of one of the city’s leading schools and worked with Iran’s National Literacy Committee. But like thousands of Baháʼís, that career ended almost overnight after the Islamic Revolution, when followers of the faith were systematically excluded from public employment.
Nearly three decades later, in March 2008, she traveled to Mashhad believing she was answering routine questions about arranging the burial of an elderly Baháʼí man. Instead, she disappeared into Iran’s prison system.
The accusations quickly expanded far beyond the original allegation. Interrogators demanded false confessions, attempting to portray Sabet and the other members of the informal Baháʼí group, the Yaran-i-Iran (‘Friends of Iran’), as spies working for foreign powers. She refused. After spending two-and-a-half years imprisoned before trial, Sabet and six colleagues were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
Sabet would ultimately spend a decade behind bars before being released in 2017, only to be arrested again in 2022 and sentenced to another ten years. Now aged 74 and suffering serious heart and lung problems, she remains under the threat of being returned to prison.
Her memoir mostly focuses on her time in solitary confinement, and is at its most powerful when it dwells on the small humiliations and impossible choices that define Sabet’s life behind bars.
Newly arrived at a quarantine block housing more than a hundred women, she encounters just two toilets and two showers. The floor is slick with filth, used menstrual pads and human waste.
“The filth was appalling and the stench even worse,” she writes. “Balls of hair were scattered everywhere, seething and quivering in the faint light. The floor was slippery underfoot and the air so foul that I could hardly breathe.”
Hunger becomes another instrument of punishment. After days without proper food, Sabet discovers a discarded piece of stale bread tucked into the corner of her bunk. She recoils at the thought of eating something so dirty, wondering who had touched it or how long it had lain there.
“Before I knew it I had eaten the whole thing,” she writes.
Her dinners are served in a dog bowl.
In isolation, she measures time by the distant sounds of Nowruz (the Persian New Year) celebrations beyond the prison walls, fireworks, and car horns reminding her that ordinary life continues only a few streets away.
“Was I really in the same world as these people setting off fireworks?” she wonders.
These moments are not included for shock value. They reveal how imprisonment can lead to the steady erosion of a person’s dignity, particularly for minority groups.
Baháʼís are the largest unrecognized religious minority in Iran. They have been the target of harsh, state-backed repression since their religion was established in the 19th century. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian authorities executed or forcibly disappeared hundreds of Baháʼís, including their community leaders. Since then, the regime has codified its repression of Baháʼís into law and official government policy. Baha’i homes and businesses are often raided or confiscated.
It would be enough to crush anyone’s spirit. Yet Sabet finds comfort in her religion.
“As long as I remained firm, as long as I stayed honest and true, one way or another, the principles of the Baháʼí Faith would prevail,” she writes in prison.
Sabet is transferred from one jail to another and held alongside drug addicts, prostitutes, murderers, as well as political prisoners of different affiliations.
On her return to Evin Prison in 2011, she meets fellow inmates Nasrin Sotoudeh (a human rights lawyer) and Narges Mohammadi (an activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner), who encourage her to start writing and document everything she has endured since 2008.
Prison Poems, her first poetry collection translated into English, was published in 2013 and won her recognition as a Writer of Courage from PEN International.
Sotoudeh’s memoir, Women, Life, Freedom: Our Fight for Human Rights and Equality in Iran, was published in 2023, while Mohammadi’s book, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, is due out soon.
“These books are all pieces of the same puzzle,” says Bahiyyih. “Mahvash felt she was just one of many. She wanted to do this for all the people of Iran. On behalf of Baháʼís and women.”
In July 2022, Iranian authorities arrested Sabet and other members of the long-disbanded Yaran-i-Iran.
Iran’s Intelligence Ministry alleged they were spies for the Baháʼí World Centre in Israel, and that November, following a sham trial that lasted only one hour, the Revolutionary Court’s Branch 26 in Tehran sentenced Sabet and Kamalabadi to 10 years in prison. The judge rebuked the defendants for “not learning their lesson” before handing down his harsh sentence.
In 2024, Sabet was granted a medical furlough to undergo urgent heart surgery. She suffers from pulmonary fibrosis and heart issues. Members of the European Parliament have called for her unconditional release on humanitarian grounds, a call that has so far been ignored.
“Mahvash is in a perilous condition. She has the sword of Damocles hanging over her,” says Bahiyyih, who explains that Sabet must get regular medical tests in order to prove she’s too unwell to go back to prison.
“It’s like a Kafka novel. If you’re sick you’re free, but if you’re well you go to prison.”
The British-Iranian comedian Omid Djalili—who is also Baháʼí—has described Sabet’s memoir as “absolutely extraordinary.”
For years he has raised her plight, as well as that of the Baháʼís in his country of origin, because it represents something much bigger.
“The treatment of Baháʼís is a litmus test for the condition of human rights in Iran,” says Bahiyyih. “If Baháʼís don’t have rights, then the people of Iran don’t have rights either.”
It would be easy for Sabet to despair. The Islamic Republic remains firmly entrenched in power, and Mahvash Sabet’s life is in limbo—she could be recalled to prison at any moment.
Despite that, “She wants people to continue to have hope,” says Bahiyyih.
Open Wide the Doors: A Memoir of Faith, Hope and Freedom in Iran by Mahvash Sabet will be published tomorrow, July 9.
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