The Lives of Iran’s Bahá'í Women: A Story of Persecution, Resistance, and Resilience.

Provided by The Victims’ Families for Transitional Justice.

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The Bahá'í Faith is a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the unity of all people, the equality of men and women, and the importance of education and service to humanity. Though it originated in Iran, it is not recognized by the Islamic Republic, which views Bahá'ís as heretics and a threat to its ideology. Since the 1979 revolution, Bahá'ís, especially women, have faced relentless persecution, and been stripped of their rights, their futures, and, in many cases, their lives.

One of the most haunting stories is that of Mona Mahmoudinejad, a 17-year-old girl who was hanged in 1983 in Shiraz alongside nine other Bahá'í women. Her crime? Teaching children about love, kindness, and unity; the very principles the regime feared. Mona spent months in prison, enduring brutal interrogations where she was pressured to deny her faith. She never did. On the night of June 18, 1983, she was led to the gallows. Witnesses say that, in those final moments, she smiled and kissed the noose before it was placed around her neck. She was just a teenager, yet she faced death with a courage that shook even her captors.

Mona was not alone. The 10 women executed that night, teachers, nurses, and young students, were hanged one by one, forced to watch each other die. Among them was Tahereh Siyavushi, a 32-year-old nurse who cared for orphaned children, and Zarrin Moghimi, a schoolteacher, who told her students that hatred had no place in the world. Their only sin was being Bahá'í, and for that, they paid the ultimate price.

Decades later, the nooses may have been replaced by prison bars, but the persecution continues. Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, two of the most well-known Bahá'í prisoners today, have spent years in and out of Iran’s most notorious prisons. Their letters smuggled from behind bars tell of psychological torture, months of solitary confinement, and interrogations that stretch for hours. They write not of anger but of faith, of the unshakable belief that they will endure no matter how much the regime tries to erase them.

The Islamic Republic has turned the Bahá'í identity into a sentence, one that begins at birth and follows them through every stage of life. A Bahá'í child grows up knowing that university doors are closed to them, that their parents can lose their jobs overnight, and that their home could be raided at any moment. And yet, they continue. In Isfahan, young Bahá'í teachers were arrested simply for educating children. In Roshankouh, elderly Bahá'ís were beaten as their homes were bulldozed before their eyes. The regime does not just want to punish Bahá'ís, it wants to erase them.

Even in death, they are denied dignity. Bahá'í cemeteries have been vandalized, bodies exhumed, and families forbidden from holding burials. In some cases, authorities have offered grieving families a choice: bury their loved ones in unmarked mass graves or let their bodies rot in a morgue.

And yet, despite everything, the Bahá'í women of Iran refuse to be silent. Their strength does not come from weapons or protests—it comes from resilience, from the refusal to surrender their dignity in the face of oppression. Every time a Bahá'í woman teaches a child writes a letter from prison, or stands in court and refuses to lie about her faith, she defies a regime that has spent more than four decades trying to break her.

The world may not know their names, but their defiance lives on. In the whispered prayers of a mother who sends her daughter to a secret school. In the hands of a young girl who writes poetry in her prison cell. In the echoes of Mona’s last smile, there is a reminder that courage is stronger than fear even in the face of death.