Description: A courageous memoir from a prize-winning poet and prisoner of conscience in Iran
A courageous memoir from a prize-winning poet and prisoner of conscience in Iran'Against the scale of Iran's past, her testimony reinforces the power of individual conscience and endurance as the only way forward.' Financial Times In March 2008, the Intelligence Bureau of Mashhad summoned Mahvash Sabet. She told her husband she would be back home in Tehran by the evening. She wouldn't be released for ten years. The authorities would go on to arrest every other member of the Yárán-i-Irán, the community representatives for Iran's most persecuted religious minority: the Bahá'ís. Documenting Mahvash Sabet's first ten months of incarceration, in Mashhad and later Evin Prison, Open Wide the Doors is a portrait of Iranian society behind prison walls. It thrums with compassion for Iran's thieves, prostitutes, and even prison guards. If you keep your heart open, Sabet proves, no judge, interrogator or torturer can crush your soul.
Review Quotes: 'Mahvash Sabet, a prisoner of conscience in Iran, invokes doors - iron doors, doors with double chains and locks, doors with knobs on only one side - again and again in her heart-wrenching account of injustice, violence, and prejudice. Yet faith, conviction, grace, and dignity cannot be locked away. They move beyond enclosures, beyond the reach of tyranny. No door - no machinery of repression - can bar their power or their passage. Open Wide the Doors, edited and exquisitely translated by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Azita Mottahedeh, is an eloquent testimony to that truth.' Farzaneh Milani, author of Veils and Words