Volume I Issue 2
used the deed from her home to post bail for her husband. They were together for a few months before he was summoned to Evin Prison in Tehran to act as a wit- ness during a trial. “He went even though we both knew it was a trap,” Mavaddat says sadly about her husband’s decision. “He told me that he had to go otherwise they would keep bothering other Baha’is.”
Needless to say, Mavaddat’s
husband was imprisoned with- out a trial, and after six weeks she was allowed to visit him. The conditions in the prison horrified her. “There were 220 people in a room designed for 20. There was no doctor and toilets were always broken. Beds are simple pieces of wood,” she recalls. “When I was in prison, I was only allowed to go to the washroom once a day. The cells for solitary confine- ment where both my husband and I spent some time were only one meter by one meter.” Mavaddat’s husband was
tried once, pulled from his cell at midnight and cast before a panel of clergymen who talked endlessly without allowing him to address the charges. “The mullahs asked him to recant his faith,” says Ma- vaddat. “But he would not.” Af- ter a few weeks, he was executed. When Mavaddat retrieved his body from the morgue, it was clear that he had been tortured. There was also a tattoo on his leg: “ANTI-RE- LIGIONIST.” With her husband dead, Ma-
vaddat fled to her father’s home in Tehran, then hitched a ride through the desert to the Pakistani border. Like the mother of Donna Hakim- ian, she sought asylum and even- tually moved to Sweden, toured the world, then came to Canada. Mavaddat took it upon herself to speak candidly to the world media about the persecution her commu- nity was facing in Iran. She was encouraged by the
Universal House of Justice – the spiritual headquarters of the Baha’i faith – to begin a tour of Scandi- navia where she spoke with many large publications. Mavaddat’s cause was to enlist the conscience of the global community. Mavaddat was eventually grant- ed a visa to travel to the United States. She took this opportunity to continue her teaching. In Amer- ica she shared her story with Time Magazine, the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others. “This was therapy for me,” she says. “I didn’t want to let this blood be wasted.” Stashed away in a nonde-
script box in a closet are the ar- chives of her tours. Clippings from newspapers from all over the world are kept alongside the photos of her home after the Rev- olutionary Guards arrested her husband, and that of his tortured body in the morgue. “Canada was the first coun-
try to grant Baha’is refugee sta- tus,” Mavaddat tells me. That brought her to Quebec where she stayed temporarily with a sister.
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