I Died in Tehran and Jesus Showed Me What Is Coming to Iran
My name is Soraya Tehrani and I am from Tehran, Iran.
I now live in Toronto, Canada.
There is a specific kind of woman the Islamic Republic of Iran works very hard to produce.
She is covered.
She is quiet in public and loud in agreement with the right things.
She repeats the correct slogans.
She raises her children inside the correct boundaries.
She does not ask questions that have no approved answers.
She performs her faith with precision and she measures her worth by how well she performs it.
She is useful to the system.
She is grateful to the system.
She believes the system is the same thing as God.
I was that woman for most of my adult life.
My name is Soraya Tehrani.
I grew up in the Tajrish neighborhood in the northern part of Tehran, which sits at the foot of the Alborz Mountains.
In summer, you could see the mountains clearly from the window of my childhood bedroom.
White peaks above the brown and gray of the city.
In winter, the smog settled over everything and the mountains disappeared entirely and you had to remember on faith that they were still there.
That detail has stayed with me.
I did not understand why until much later.
My father, Hossein Tehrani, was a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the University of Tehran.
He was a serious man with serious eyebrows and a mind that could hold enormous amounts of religious law and political theory simultaneously.
He had written three books.
He had trained dozens of students who went on to positions in the judiciary and the religious establishment.
He was respected the way men are respected in Iran when they have devoted their entire intelligence to confirming what the state already believes.
My mother, Maryam, was a teacher.
Elementary school, young children, the grades where you teach them the alphabet and their first prayers at the same time.
She was warmer than my father but no less certain.
Certainty was the air my family breathed.
Certainty about Islam.
What certainty about the revolution.
Certainty about Iran’s place in God’s plan for humanity.
I was the middle child of three.
My older brother, Siavash, studied law.
My younger sister, Golnaz, was the artist of the family, always drawing, always coloring, always seeing the world in shapes and colors that the rest of us walked past without noticing.
I was the one most like my father.
Precise, disciplined, argumentative in a focused way that teachers called gifted and classmates occasionally found exhausting.
I studied theology at the University of Tehran following my father’s path.
I was good at it.
I had a gift for the kind of thinking that religious law requires.
Careful, systematic, attentive to precedent and detail.
I graduated near the top of my class.
I married at 23, a man named Farshad who worked in the Ministry of Culture, which in Iran meant he worked in the Ministry of deciding what the public was and was not allowed to see, hear, and read.
We had two daughters, Roya and Nasrin.
I raised them the way I had been raised.
Prayers at the correct times, the correct clothing, the correct beliefs presented with the correct confidence.
I was proud of how I raised them.
I believed I was giving them the best possible foundation for a good life and a favorable judgment from Allah.
I was 38 years old and I had never once seriously questioned a single thing I believed.
Then the bleeding started.
It began as something small that I ignored because small things are easy to ignore when your life is very full and very structured and stopping to pay attention to your body feels like a disruption you cannot afford.
A heaviness, that a fatigue that did not respond to sleep, irregular cycles that I attributed to stress and did not mention to Farshad or to my mother because in our household the body’s problems were handled quietly and with minimum disruption.
Three months of ignoring it before I finally went to see a doctor.
The doctor referred me to a specialist.
The specialist ordered tests.
The tests ordered more tests.
The more tests ordered the conversation I was not prepared to have.
The word was uterine.
The stage was three.
The timeline was not as forgiving as I had been hoping.
I sat in the specialist’s office on a Thursday afternoon listening to her explain what she was explaining and I felt the world I had built with such precision begin to tilt.
Not collapse, just tilt has the way a table tilts when one leg is shorter than the others and you have just noticed it for the first time.
I am a religious woman.
My first response to the diagnosis was to pray.
My second response was to pray more.
My third response was to go to a respected mullah in our neighborhood and ask him to pray over me and advise me.
He told me that illness was a test from Allah.
He told me to be patient.
He told me that suffering purified the soul and that my reward in paradise would be proportional to my endurance on earth.
I left his home feeling the tilt deepen.
I underwent surgery, then chemotherapy, then more surgery.
Iranian hospitals at that level are competent, particularly in Tehran, and my husband’s position gave us access to doctors who were better than average.
My mother came and stayed with us for 3 months during the worst of the treatment.
She cooked and prayed and kept the girls’ routines as normal as possible.
My father came on weekends and sat beside my bed and recited the Quran in his careful professor’s voice while I lay under three blankets feeling my body fight a war I had not declared.
I prayed constantly, not with my father’s precision, with desperation.
I prayed to Allah to heal me.
I prayed to Allah to spare me for my daughters who needed their mother.
I prayed to Allah to tell me why.
Why me?
Why now?
Why at this moment when my daughters were still young and my life still had so much in it that felt unfinished.
Allah did not answer me, not in any way I could recognize.
There was silence from that direction.
The same quality of silence I had my entire life accepted as normal and sufficient.
But lying in a hospital bed with a body that was fighting cancer, normal and sufficient suddenly felt like very thin rations.