My Story: To not be a Muslim is the only thing I wanted

Shahram

As part of our special series, “My Story: Recounting Human Rights Violations in Iran,” Shahram talks about the pressures he was subjected to for converting to Christianity.

Shahram is an Iranian citizen who had to flee the country after changing his religion and coming under enormous pressure by the authorities for doing so. He now lives in one of the Scandinavian countries.

All of my troubles began when I changed my religion. Intelligence Ministry agents, as well as other security forces, took me in for questioning and interrogation a number of times. They sat me down facing the wall, with my nose almost touching the wall. They told me repeatedly not to turn around or look over my shoulder. “If you do, you’ll seriously regret it,'” they said.

They had also arrested my brothers. It was 1995. From 1994 to1995, there were massive waves of arrests. They said, “We want to 'enlighten' you.”

My wife and I were teachers in an institute and both of us were fired. On the small piece of paper they gave us when they told us we had been let go, it said, “For the sake of national interests and the institute, you are fired.”

They treated me like a criminal. What had I done? Had I murdered somebody? Did I plant a bomb somewhere? Was I a drug dealer? No. All I wanted was to freely pray to the God that I believed in.

Afterward, I found a teaching job in a high school, but I was fired from that job as well. After being unemployed for almost a year, a friend of mine who had a government position offered me a job as an accountant in Tehran’s Water & Wastewater Company.

But my response was, “My specialty is engineering, civil and technical drawings, and I don’t have the first clue about accounting.”

He said, “Don’t worry. We’ll teach you accounting, but there is a condition. You have to renounce Christianity.”

I said I would rather die than give up my religion.

We were forced to move out of our rented apartment. We moved three times in a month. My wife came down with excruciating chronic back pain as a result.

During this time, my periodic interrogations got rougher. They threatened my life. They told me if I didn’t renounce Christianity, “You’ll be killed.”

They said, “One day you may open your door and someone will stab you.” Or, “You may be crossing a street and someone will run you over.” I lived in abject fear for many months.

Let me say it as briefly and simply as I can: One’s religious beliefs are among the most personal things a human being has. But in Islam, there is no privacy or “personal zone.” Everything belongs to them and they are the ones who decide. Under Islam, there is nothing you can decide for yourself as a human being.

Anyway, they told me my sentence is death and that I only had a short period to change my ways and return to Islam. Of course, I refused and that is why I no longer live in my homeland.

I have tried to summarize my experiences as much as possible, but what I would like everybody to understand is that I never had a moment or an instant that was truly all mine. If it wasn’t the government agents who were torturing and harassing me, it was the people around me.

My father-in-law and brother-in-law were pressured by the government to force my wife into divorcing me. I went back to university, but they expelled me for being Christian and a mortad (an apostate).

During that entire period, I was humiliated, insulted, threatened and treated like a hardened criminal, just because I wanted to be Christian.