Dear Editor:
In “The Iran Bombing Is A Religion Story for All But One Person,” Mark Wingfield wrote that we cannot think of Iran as a modern state unhinged from its religious moorings. I grew up inside that religion story, and I want BNG readers to hear how a girl lives it.
I was 6 when a woman tied a scarf under my chin and told me my hair was a sin. At 9, I was wrapped in a chador, told I was now a woman, and warned God would hang me by my hair in hell if a man saw a single strand. I still slept with my doll.
At university, a young man from the Basij militia threatened to throw acid in my face if I refused him. When I went to campus security for help, they said it was my fault and asked why a woman was studying at all.
What the regime called faith, I experienced as fear. The only gentle picture of God I heard in those years came from an Armenian Christian neighbor who told me about Jesus on our walks to the library. She later was expelled from her university for her faith and left Iran. I never saw her again, but I never forgot the God she described, one who forgives and loves and does not frighten children.
Today I follow Christ, and I live in freedom in California.
When Americans debate Iran, the conversation is mostly about bombs, oil and politicians. The women and girls of Iran usually are missing from it. They are the first to suffer under a government that enforces religion by force, and they have been among the bravest to resist it.
As Christians argue over this war, I ask that we remember them, pray for them and listen to them. Their voices, and the voices of Iranian Christians imprisoned for their faith, belong in this story.
Arghavan Hejazi, Irvine, Calif.