Tag: Bible

What next for Iran’s overlooked minorities?

It is an anxious time to be Iranian, but even more so if you’re part of a minority community. Will the US assault on Iran lead to a mass exodus or a longed-for new start?

Five days since the start of President Trump’s bombing of Iran and the assassination of its senior leaders, the question of what comes next hangs in the air like plumes of dust from the rubble.

Lord (William) Hague has summarised the options as “repression, chaos or liberation”. Repression – again – by the country’s brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, chaos if the country falls into civil war, and liberation if somehow millions of Iranians welcome the pro-Western Reza Pahlavi to lead the country to democracy.

Reports that Mojtaba ​Khamenei, the son of assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is tipped to be the frontrunner, have set the needle hovering between the first two of those options.

It is an anxious time to be Iranian, but even more so if you’re part of a minority community. Why do they matter? The Islamic Republic is not just home to Shia (89 per cent) and Sunni Muslims (10 per cent), but to ancient communities of Zoroastrians, Jews, Baha’i and Assyrian and Armenian Christians. Their very presence in the Islamic Republic challenges its ideology, and they have complained of being treated like second-class citizens.

Even more problematic for the regime are Shia who abandon the national creed and become atheist, or Evangelical Christian. A 2020 report found some 1.5 per cent of Iranians identified as Christian, meaning converts alone could number around 500,000. But because “apostates” can face jail, some have fled Iran. Some wash up on UK shores – and in such numbers that the Church of England has devised a Farsi-language Communion liturgy for them. Each conversion away from Shi’ism is a quiet rejection of the 1979 Revolution.

Above: Article 18 advocates for the rights of Iranian Christians

Iranian-born Dr Sara Afshari, research tutor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, has described “religious disengagement and conversion” as a form of political dissent.

Writing during the January protests, in which the IRGC slaughtered 3,000 demonstrators according to official figures (or up to 30,000 according to activists) she explained: “For many, conversion has not been only a spiritual journey, but a symbolic refusal – an existential “no” to religious coercion and political control.”

Steve Dew-Jones, news director of the charity Article 18, says he worries that if the regime clings on, it could hit out at its minority populations and those in prison or awaiting trial, who include nearly 60 Christians. (Update: Reuters has reported Evin prison, where many are held, has been bombed and Open Doors has said food distribution and communications have been cut off and prisoners are being moved to undisclosed locations.) A fresh wave of state-sponsored repression could, according to Le Monde, catch anyone picked up by facial recognition cameras.

Other easy targets whose arrests would spread fear would include members of “underground” congregations. Those initially dancing in the streets have included Iranians of all creeds – but minorities are easy to scapegoat. The regime, which enjoys spying on its own people, won’t give up without a fight: the Revolutionary Guard is believed to have more than 190,000 members embedded deep in the country’s population of 93 million, in addition to the forces of the Iranian Army.

Resources on the Diocese of London's website for Farsi-speakers
Above: Some Church of England dioceses offer materials for Iranian worshippers, noting “many have powerful testimonies of … transformation – often at great personal cost”

A variant of this possibility, “regime readjustment”, could see a tamed regime allowed to continue, on conditions set by the US, as has happened in Venezuela. Iran’s nuclear capabilities and oil reserves would be obvious targets for US negotiators but Trump has not condemned Iran’s poor religious rights record.

Quite a contrast from the US’s intervention in Nigeria on Christmas Day, which Trump framed as protecting the country’s Christians from genocide, or even the 2003 Iraq invasion, which President Bush justified as a mission to export democracy. So if the Iranian regime is permitted to carry on as before except in a few areas, Christian persecution will most likely carry on unchecked.

However, if US-Israeli bombing removed any new leader and enough of the regime for separatist groups to start civil conflict, the ensuing chaos could be even worse for Iran’s minorities. According to CNN, the CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces and other Iranian opposition groups with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran.

Certainly the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the messy collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government led to total social disintegration. An exodus of minorities followed, that included an estimated five-sixths of Iraq’s Christians. These were ordinary citizens who had had enough of being scapegoated by compatriots and forgotten by US-led troops.

US military planning, such as there was, had not bargained on an Al Qa’eda insurgency or the emergence of ISIS. Both jihadist militias were catastrophic for minorities, and their indulgence in gruesome killings succeeded in attracting new recruits from around the world.

Iranian Christians know they are socially vulnerable and could be made more so by a breakdown in law and order. If they felt it was safer to flee, we might see more of them at Calais and in our churches.

Violence can spread quickly in the Middle East. Last night the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq posted on X that drones had damaged an apartment block built for local Catholics, and a nearby convent. Again some Iraqi Catholics are fearing that they should flee.

Liberation might seem the most far-fetched of the possibilities on Iran’s horizon, with a secular democracy that contributed to the peace and stability of the whole region. It is clear that there is huge popular support inside Iran for greater freedoms – freedom for women to discard the veil, freedom to walk away from Shi’ism, freedom for Iran’s LGBT community to become more visible.

The American values the revolutionaries rejected in 1979 seem less objectionable to many Iranians now; American exports such as iPhones and Instagram have proven a hit. This would be the best environment for Iran’s minorities to thrive as equal citizens. But is it possible to leap from autocracy to democracy?

Dew-Jones believes so. “If there was any chance that the people could actually decide and be empowered,” he says, then peaceful regime change could occur, led in the short term by exiled prince Reza Pahlavi, “who appears to be the person whom Iranians inside and outside, not exclusively but by and large, are calling on to lead the transition.”

Realistically, if the US wants Iran to morph into a secular, liberal, non-nuclear regime, it will have to help pay for it. One lesson, from Egypt where the so-called Arab Spring failed to bring about lasting change, is that democracy is not achieved in one regime change or one election: it is the gradual building up of a multi-layered culture of empowerment, respect and rights.

However, another lesson, from Iraq, whose current stability is far from perfect, is that without adequate planning and support, a poorly defined hope of regime change can take years to realise and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Above: Aida Najaflou, an Iranian convert to Christianity, who was arrested in February 2025 and has been sentenced to 17 years in jail for offences against the Islamic Republic including involvement in an underground “house church”, the longest sentence given an Iranian Christian last year related to their faith. Photo: Article 18

I despair of the maleness of the Bible

The confrontational military imagery leaves me cold; St Paul’s legal arguments for the reasoning of the Gospel likewise. Women have had to shoehorn their experiences of God into men’s descriptions of Him for too long


O Lord, let me not be overwhelmed.

From without and within I am surrounded.

Mocking men belittle me, they judge me by standards they do not keep.

In their hearts are only lust and vanity.

Day after day I have tried to make peace. I seek no glory for myself; boasting is never on my lips.  

My thoughts swirl around me like a storm, and fear overtakes me.

My hormones crush me to the point of sorrow.

“Your God is good?,” they laugh. “Has he really prospered you?”

Silence them, O God.  

My body is weakened but my hope is in you. Restore my strength, O God.

Have you read this Psalm lately? Me neither. My pastiche may be humble but my point is that anyone reading the Bible is handed a book 100 per cent written by men. Not one single Biblical author is a woman. Not even the books named after women – Esther, Ruth (all two of them).

We know the reasons why: until the last century or so, women were less likely to write anything, or even to be taught to write. And Judeo-Christian traditions are historically built on male priesthoods. Female spiritual writers crop up by the Middle Ages, mystics such as Hildegard von Bingen, St Julian of Norwich, St Bridget of Sweden, later St Teresa of Avila. But they are still a tiny minority.

So what? Because over the centuries Christians have gone to the ends of the earth to ensure that believers can access the Scriptures in their own language, in order to demonstrate that the Messiah is for all and is close to all. And yet sometimes when I open my Bible its maleness sometimes feels like a foreign language to me. The confrontational military imagery leaves me cold; St Paul’s legal arguments for the reasoning of the Gospel likewise.

The Song of Solomon, which includes lines for the female lead (described in the passive as “the Beloved”), was not, as far as we know, written by Solomon and one of his hundreds of wives – nope, it was just by him. Would the “friends” of poor Job have been quite so lacking in empathy if they had been women? Even the Psalms, which I find more accessible than many of the books in the Bible – not a single one is written by a woman, so they all reflect the worldviews or faith-views of men. God is a Father, God is a rock, God is a shield, God is a horn – big, strong things. (They remind me of the imagery plastered all over my toddler son’s clothing: diggers and dinosaurs unlike the fairies and unicorns in the girls’ section.)

A few years ago there was a grave concern in that the charismatics were “feminising” the Church. There was a genre of contemporary song jokingly described as “Jesus is my girlfriend”. I’m not a fan of songs so vacuous that the word “Jesus” can be switched for the word “baby”, and would look at home in the charts. But if you are talking about songs that might speak to over half the congregation (and women usually make up way over half in churches) then why be so dismissive? Women have had to shoehorn their experiences of God into men’s descriptions of Him for centuries. Isn’t it time men did the same for a bit, without moaning?

Many people now read their Bible in inclusive language, so the most obvious instances of excluding women have been addressed. But these are small changes that don’t address the substance of what is written. If the Bible more accurately described the faith-experience of women, perhaps there would also be a better understanding of what a woman is. She is not simply a man with different bits. She has her own way of seeing the world and processing it, based on experiences unique to her. Therefore the Church cannot simply put male-written bits of Scripture into her mouth and assume they adequately express how she wants to relate to God.

I am not saying I don’t believe Scripture is divinely inspired. But I do wonder how it would read if those God had inspired had been women rather than men: female Psalmists, female chroniclers, female wisdom, an account by one of the educated women in Jesus’ or Paul’s circle in the first-century Roman Empire? Instead of Psalms to be sung on the eve of battle, how about a Psalm that described the fear around giving birth? That would at once be historically illuminating, spiritually honest, and would right a tragic historical wrong by showing women’s bodies to be incredible but frail, rather than sinful or intimidating and not to be talked about. (Giving birth is, of course, just one experience that’s more about woman than man.)

I would like to hear more from Miriam, Ruth and Esther; from Mary, the mother of Jesus; from Mary and Martha; from Mary Magdalene; from Pilate’s wife (whatever her name is); from Phoebe. It is too late, but let us at least hear from female authors and theologians today imagining what they might have said, or interpreting biblical authors such as David and Paul. A touching example I recall comes from Bridget Plass. In her book Dear Paul, am I the only one? she imagined a social worker of a teenage girl writing to the Apostle. The girl had destroyed effects to do with her birth family on the advice of the enthusiastic church she had joined, that had advised her to “forget what is behind and strain towards what is ahead” (Phil 3). I had always found that passage impossible, even irresponsible. Plass imagined Paul replying that he was writing only what he as a man on death row had found helpful.

Such contextualisation I had never heard from a male preacher. Plass’s pastoral touch made Paul more palatable and allowed compassion to be read between the lines. We need more of these voices today.