Open Wide the Doors by Mahvash Sabet

Open Wide the Doors by Mahvash Sabet

'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.

Mahvash Sabet is an Iranian prisoner of conscience. She was arrested in 2008 and was released in 2017. Her Prison Poems were smuggled out of Evin Prison and published in English in 2013. In 2017, she was recognised as the PEN International Writer of Courage. She was rearrested in July 2022.