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Open Wide the Doors: The Power of Conscience and Endurance – Mahvash Sabet, The Songbird of Iran
Open Wide the Doors: The Power of Conscience and Endurance – Mahvash Sabet, The Songbird of Iran
October 10 @ 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm IST
This event features extracts and reflections from Mahvash Sabet’s memoir Open Wide the Doors, documenting her imprisonment in Iran.
Mahvash Sabet is an internationally recognised Iranian Poet, Writer, and former Educator and an Iranian prisoner of conscience and member of the Bahá’í community. Sabet’s memoir documents her imprisonment and explores the extraordinary capacity of individuals to retain their conscience, dignity, compassion and humanity under conditions of persecution. The event uses her testimony to reflect on human rights, freedom of belief, endurance and the power of the human spirit. The guest speaker is Roja Fazaeli, Established Professor of Law and Islamic Studies, Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway.
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Artists
Mahvash Sabet, Poet, Writer and former educator
Roja Fazaeli, Established Professor of Law and Islamic Studies, Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway
Full Event Details
In March 2008, Mahvash Sabet was summoned by Iran’s Intelligence Bureau in Mashhad to discuss the burial arrangements for a member of the Bahá’í community. She told her husband that she would be home in Tehran that evening. Instead, she would spend the next ten years in prison.
Sabet was one of the seven members of the Yárán-i-Irán, the group that served as the informal leadership of Iran’s persecuted Bahá’í community. In the months that followed her arrest, the other members were also detained.
In its 2024 report, ‘The Boot on My Neck’, Human Rights Watch described the systematic and systemic persecution of Bahá’í women, children and men in Iran as amounting to the crime against humanity of persecution.
Sabet’s memoir, Open Wide the Doors, documents her first ten months in captivity, offering an extraordinary account of life behind Iran’s prison walls. Yet this is more than a story of imprisonment. Sabet writes with remarkable compassion about her fellow prisoners, including thieves and prostitutes, as well as the guards and interrogators who hold power over her.
Mahvash Sabet was described by Irish poet Michael Longley as the Songbird of Iran and the beautiful, uplifting voice of this songbird rings out throughout Open Wide the Doors. Here her testimony reveals a profound understanding of human nature and an unshakeable belief in the resilience of the human spirit. Even when freedom is taken away, she shows that an individual can refuse to surrender their conscience, dignity or capacity for compassion.
This event will share extracts and reflections from Open Wide the Doors, using Sabet’s experience to explore questions of human rights and, more deeply, the extraordinary courage required to maintain one’s humanity under conditions designed to destroy it.
At a time when the voices of those imprisoned for their beliefs and convictions remain at risk of being silenced, Mahvash Sabet’s story offers both a witness and a challenge. It reminds us that even behind prison walls, the human conscience cannot be imprisoned.
As the Financial Times wrote of Open Wide the Doors, Sabet’s testimony “reinforces the power of individual conscience and endurance as the only way forward.”
The entire event is based on the memoir of a prisoner of conscience in Iran and offers an opportunity to learn about Mahvash Sabet’s experiences as a prisoner and as a human being and to explore important issues regarding human rights.
This event is presented by the Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs
Part of the work of the Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs is a commitment to promoting human rights, equality, and the dignity of every person. This work is rooted in a central Bahá’í belief: that the welfare of every part of humanity is inextricably bound up with the welfare of the whole. Because, as Nobel Laureate Dr Shirin Ebadi has put it: “Discrimination and injustice can spread like a virus in society. Injustice to you is the first step of injustice to me.”
Through initiatives such as Open Wide the Doors: The Power of Conscience and Endurance and the Our Story Is One exhibition – which commemorates the ten Bahá’í women executed in Shiraz in 1983 and has to date been staged in Dublin, Cork, Ennis, and Kilkenny – the Office seeks to foster greater awareness of human rights and the importance of standing against injustice wherever it occurs.
Artist & Speaker Biographies:
Mahvash Sabet is an internationally recognised poet, writer and former educator. She is a prisoner of conscience in Iran, condemned for being a follower of the Bahá’í Faith. Over the past twenty years, she has been incarcerated in four Iranian prisons, arrested on three separate occasions and held for thirty months without trial. She has twice been given ten-year sentences because of her beliefs, the first time in 2008 and most recently in 2022. In May 2025, there was a call at the European Parliament for her unconditional release, on humanitarian grounds. It has, until now, been ignored.
Born in Ardestan on 4 February 1952, Mahvash grew up in the provincial town of Zavareh, where she was first exposed to fanaticism and prejudice against the Bahá’í Faith as a child. When she was about ten years old, her family moved from the provinces to the capital, enabling her to continue her education in Tehran. A bright student with a flair for poetry, she later received a bachelor’s degree in social sciences at Reyhan University, and embarked on a teaching career soon after her marriage to Siyávash Sabet on 21 May 1973. After several years, she became the principal of 21 Farvardín, a prestigious school in District 13 of Tehran, and later directed the school of Tehran’s Air Force Base personnel. She was also invited to serve on the National Literacy Committee of Iran, as a respected education professional.
But everything changed, for Mahvash and many others, when the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. It changed catastrophically for the 350,000 Bahá’ís, members of the largest religious minority in the country.
The Songbird of Iran
Mahvash has been repeatedly targeted by Iranian authorities under false charges like espionage and propaganda against the state. After her arrest in 2008, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. During her time in the notorious Evin Prison, she wrote verses on small scraps of paper that were smuggled out and published as Prison Poems.
In 2017, she was named the PEN International Writer of Courage and was released after a reduced 10-year term. Amidst a wider crackdown on the community, she was re-arrested in July 2022 and given another 10-year prison sentence following an unfair trial.
In 2017, Mahvash was chosen as the winner of the PEN Pinter Prize for a Writer of Courage by fellow poet Michael Longley (1939-2025). Mahvash was described by Irish poet Michael Longley as the Songbird of Iran. Mahvash is an Honorary Member of English PEN. According to English Pen, Mahvash began writing poetry in prison, and a collection of her prison poems was translated into English and published in 2013. Two more volumes of poems رها (A Tale of Love – More Prison Poems) and حکایت عاشقی (Love Story) were published in 2019 and 2021.
Mahvash Sabet is now internationally recognized for her work as an Iranian poet, former educator, and prominent human rights defender and as one of the Bahá’í Seven, a group of community leaders who served on an informal committee called the Yaran-i-Iran (Friends of Iran) to manage the affairs of the heavily persecuted Bahá’í minority in Iran.
Sabet has faced severe health complications exacerbated by torture and harsh prison conditions. Following an open-heart surgery, she was placed under medical furlough/house arrest in Tehran to recover, though she remains under constant threat of being sent back to prison. Numerous organisations have called for her unconditional release.
Her deeply moving prison memoir, Open Wide the Doors – A Memoir of Faith, Hope and Freedom in Iran, details her journey of endurance, hope, and unwavering faith. The book is described as a courageous memoir from a prize-winning poet and prisoner of conscience in Iran.
Fennell Photography 2022
Roja Fazaeli is an Established Professor of Law and Islamic Studies at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway. Professor Fazaeli has published widely on the subjects of women’s rights in Iran, the relationship between human rights and religion, women’s religious authorities and Islamic feminisms.
As a recipient of a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, she is the principal investigator of a five-year project (2023-2028) on Building Conceptual and Methodological Expertise for the Study of Gender, Agency, and Authority in Islam (BILQIS).
Professor Fazaeli is a member of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions-funded project investigating the nature of hate in society (NETHATE). She additionally serves as the chairperson of the board of directors of the Immigrant Council of Ireland. Roja is also a member of the board of directors for Front Line Defenders, Scholars at Risk Europe and Iran Academia, as well as being a member of the editorial board of Religion and Human Rights.
Before joining University of Galway, Roja was Professor in Islamic Civilisations at Trinity College Dublin, where she was a Fellow of the College, and served as the Warden of Trinity Hall, a residential learning community of more than 900 students.
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