ICC Note: Shia Islam is the state religion in Iran, with Christians being regulated to second class citizens. However, only individuals whose families were Christian before the revolution are recognized as such. These individuals are given a tightly controlled box within which they are allowed to exercise their faith. Meanwhile, conversion to Christianity can lead to harassment, intimidation, abuse, and even jail time.    

05/15/2018 Iran (CNA) –  In Iran, conversion to Christianity can be a crime meriting a sentence of more than 10 years imprisonment.

Catholic churches within the country are closely monitored with surveillance cameras to ensure that Muslims do not enter, and religious schools are limited in what they can teach, an Iranian-born journalist, Sohrab Ahmari, explained to CNA.

Ahmari is currently writing a spiritual memoir about his own journey to the Catholic faith for Ignatius Press. He converted in 2016 after living in the U.S. for more than two decades. His conversion would have been nearly impossible had he still been living in Iran.

“In Iran, Catholicism is primarily an ethnic phenomenon. There are Armenian Catholics and Assyrian. They have their own churches, but they can’t evangelize and they can’t have Bibles in any languages but their own,” said Ahmari, who worked for the Wall Street Journal for several years before becoming a senior editor for Commentary magazine.

“The Iranian Constitution enshrines Shiite Islam as the state religion and it relegates certain other religious minorities to protected, but second class status, so that is Jews and Christians, mainly, people of the Abrahamic religions,” he continued. “These people have a certain degree of limited rights, but they also have all sorts of social handicaps.”

The Islamic republic’s population is 99 percent Muslim, and its recognized religious minorities are strictly controlled.

“The treatment gets far worse for groups that the regime does not recognize as legitimate,” explained Ahmari. This includes evangelical Christianity and the Baha’i religion.

After facing trial as apostates, Christian converts from Islam have been subject to increasingly harsh sentencing, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2018 report, which noted that “many were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for their religious activities.”

Maryam Naghash Zargaran, a Christian convert from Islam, was released from prison in August 2017 after serving more than her her full four year sentence. Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, was among those who advocated for her release.

In May 2017, four evangelical Christians were sentenced to 10 years in prison each for their evangelizing efforts.

The U.S. State Department has designated Iran as a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious freedom since 1999.

The Iranian government’s growing ability to censor and monitor Internet users increases their capacity to enforce official religious interpretations and crackdown on activists.

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