Mahvash Sabet’s Open Wide the Doors: A Memoir of Faith, Hope and Freedom in Iran is ostensibly a prison memoir, but its real subject is larger and more dangerous: what happens when a state claims divine authority and then decides that certain citizens are not merely politically inconvenient but morally, spiritually and socially illegitimate. Sabet writes from the position of a Bahá’í imprisoned by the Islamic Republic, yet the book refuses to remain confined to the familiar literature of political imprisonment. Its central argument is that persecution does not begin with torture. It begins with classification: the moment a state decides that one group is somehow outside the moral community. “From 1979 on, their persecution became systematic,” Sabet writes, describing how Bahá’ís were “‘disqualified’ from civic life and denied the protections extended to other religious minorities” (p. 15). That word, “disqualified”, is among the most revealing in the memoir. It captures the bureaucratic character of persecution: exclusion becomes less a spectacular act of violence than a process through which citizenship itself is quietly withdrawn.
The historical record presented through Sabet’s memory is consequently not simply one of individual cruelty but of institutional transformation. She recalls that between 1980 and 1983 “all nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran were abducted, never to be seen again”, while eight members of a newly elected National Assembly were executed without trial (p. 15). Her later encounter with an interrogator makes the logic of this repression more explicit. “According to the religious fatwa of the Glorious Imam,” he asks, “the lives and properties of these people are lawfully ours, are they not?” (p. 140). The quotation is shocking not merely because of its brutality but because it reveals the fusion of religious doctrine, state authority and material dispossession. Sabet’s most serious accusation is therefore not simply that officials behaved badly. It is that an ideological system created the conditions in which injustice could be represented as duty. Her description of a 1991 memorandum calling for the “quiet strangulation” of the Bahá’í community through “poverty, ignorance and fear” (p. 150) presents persecution as policy rather than aberration.
Yet this is also where the memoir demands careful reading. Sabet is a participant, victim and witness, not a detached historian. Her account is necessarily shaped by memory, trauma and faith. That does not make it unreliable; indeed, memoir’s subjective quality is part of its evidentiary power. But it means that the reader should distinguish between personal testimony, interpretation and historical generalisation. At times Sabet moves rapidly between them. Her declaration that “violence had become endemic in our country” and that the rule of law appeared non-existent (p. 32) communicates a lived political reality, but it is also a sweeping judgement. The strength of the memoir lies not in pretending to be a neutral institutional history, but in showing what systemic persecution feels like from inside the machinery designed to administer it.
The prison itself becomes Sabet’s principal laboratory for examining the relationship between power and human dignity. Her descriptions are deliberately corporeal. The reader encounters air that “smelled fetid and stank of faeces” (p. 29), floors covered with “piles of excrement and heaps of used menstruation pads” (p. 34), and a cell in which a filthy toilet is “no more than a hole in the cement” (p. 90). These passages could easily become sensationalist, but their cumulative purpose is more political than literary. Sabet is documenting a system in which humiliation becomes an instrument of control. The contrast between the administrative face of Evin and its hidden reality is especially effective. She describes the prison entrance as a “beautiful green space, filled with flowers and lush grasses”, provoking the thought, “Is this a prison or paradise?” (p. 231). Then comes the devastating reversal: “Step through that door and you’re in the heart of hell” (p. 232). The architecture becomes metaphor: respectable appearances outside, coercive reality within.
Her account of interrogation is even more disturbing because it demonstrates how modern repression operates through psychological exhaustion as much as physical violence. “First, they drain you of energy by flogging you with questions,” she explains, before describing how interrogators exploit vulnerabilities until the prisoner becomes overwhelmed by fear (p. 56). The image is important because it challenges the conventional idea that torture necessarily involves visible physical injury. Sabet’s description of “white torture” is more psychologically sophisticated: “It was not only physical harm and injury, surely, but emotional and mental damage, too” (p. 251). Solitary confinement alters her experience of time itself. “I was able to walk across a desert for the length of two long years,” she writes, pacing her cell during brief periods of absence (p. 158). Here the memoir becomes an anatomy of psychological domination: the state does not merely imprison the body; it attempts to colonise the prisoner’s experience of time, uncertainty, hope and selfhood.
The most compelling sections, however, concern the paradox by which repression can strengthen the identity it seeks to destroy. Sabet repeatedly insists that the purpose of coercion is to break moral independence, yet her own experience produces an unexpected discovery of agency. “I was learning the meaning of free will in that grey cell,” she writes. Solitary confinement was imposed upon her, but “it was up to me how I chose to live with it” (p. 165). This is the philosophical centre of the memoir. Freedom, she suggests, cannot be reduced to physical mobility. A person can be imprisoned and retain a sphere of moral choice; conversely, a society can call itself free while systematically narrowing the choices available to minorities. It is an attractive argument, but it carries a danger of its own. The language of spiritual resilience can sometimes romanticise endurance. Not every prisoner emerges strengthened. Not every victim discovers transcendence. The political demand must therefore remain justice, not merely the celebration of those who survive injustice.
Sabet’s faith is central to this struggle, and the memoir is unapologetically theological without becoming entirely sectarian. Her most remarkable claim is that hatred did not take root in her: “I realised that hatred, even towards the interrogator, the agents of the Intelligence Bureau, or the guards had not taken root in me” (p. 164). Later she writes that coercion can ultimately be resisted because “we reject force and are attracted to love” (p. 271). This gives the memoir its moral architecture. Yet it also produces an intellectual tension. If the persecutor is interpreted primarily as morally corrupted, rather than politically empowered, there is a danger that structural responsibility becomes softened into a story about individual souls. Sabet generally avoids that trap, but her emphasis on forgiveness occasionally risks shifting attention from accountability to reconciliation. Her best passages preserve both: the refusal to hate and the refusal to surrender truth.
The memoir is particularly powerful when it examines how persecution spreads beyond the obvious political prisoner. Sabet’s encounters with women imprisoned for prostitution, poverty and exploitation expose a society in which patriarchal domination reproduces itself among the oppressed. She observes that women who had themselves suffered under men sometimes “chose to replicate it within the prison walls” (p. 131), concluding that patriarchy had effectively imprisoned them twice, through “a prison of gender roles within the confinement of the prison walls” (p. 132). This is one of the book’s more sophisticated observations because it refuses the comforting distinction between oppressor and victim. Systems of domination can survive because their habits are reproduced by those who suffer under them.
The memoir’s treatment of religion is similarly provocative. Sabet contrasts the Bahá’í community’s institutional structure with clerical systems, explaining that there are “no rabbis, no priests, no mullahs” and that elected institutions are authorised to serve the community through collective decision-making (p. 58). Her implied criticism of theocracy is unmistakable. She asks, with devastating simplicity, “And this is what happens in a society ruled by a theocracy that claims to be executing the laws of God on earth?” (p. 51). Yet the strongest criticism here is not an argument against religion but against the political monopolisation of religious truth. The book’s implicit challenge is whether any state should possess the authority to determine which theology deserves citizenship and which theology deserves punishment.
