Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
Iranwire – It was night in Tehran.
Maryam, 22, said goodnight to her mother and went to her room. After eight years of surveillance and threats, living under state control had come to feel normal.
That night, as she fell asleep, her heart, heavy from years of watching her mother’s persecution, quietly stopped.
The daughter of activist Ensieh Abdolhosseini became another casualty in the Islamic Republic’s war on dissent. She was not executed or imprisoned but broken by the slow, relentless pressure that wore down her body and spirit.
One year and seven months after burying her daughter, Abdolhosseini has once again been summoned to the Shahid Moghaddas Security Prosecutor’s Office.
The authorities now seek to imprison her for writing poems critical of the Islamic Republic. Her options: prison or being labeled “mentally ill.”
She refuses to back down. “I won’t ask for a pardon,” she says. “The Islamic Republic should ask forgiveness from me and all mothers.”
It began on a cold December day. The protests that erupted across Iran in 2017 posed a serious challenge to the Islamic Republic. Citizens took to the streets in response to economic hardship, corruption, and political repression.
Among them was Ensieh Abdolhosseini, an educated woman and CEO of a private company. Like thousands of others, she was exercising what should have been her basic right to peaceful protest.
The Islamic Republic’s response was swift and brutal. Security forces identified her during the demonstrations and soon after, raided her home. It was sixteen-year-old Maryam who opened the door to armed agents.
The scene that followed haunted the teenager for the rest of her short life: her mother, still in her nightgown, being forcibly taken from their home.
But the agents took more than Ensieh that day. They seized her personal belongings and writings, including a notebook filled with her poetry and prose. That notebook would later become the prosecution’s primary evidence against her.
Within its pages, she had written about the massacre of political prisoners in the 1980s under orders from Ruhollah Khomeini. She questioned how the Supreme Leader had concealed both the truth and the graves of the executed.
For that, she was charged with “insulting the Supreme Leader.” In another entry, she referred to agents of the Islamic Republic as “religious shopkeepers,” leading to an additional charge of “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”
When Ensieh appeared before Judge Mohammad Moghiseh for trial, who was gunned down earlier this year, the absurdity of Iran’s justice system was laid bare.
“You called me a religious shopkeeper,” he said before sentencing her to three years in prison on the two charges.
For Ensieh, who “had never even set foot in the detention centers of the morality police,” the transition to life within the notorious walls of Evin Prison was a jarring shock.
Meanwhile, her teenage daughter Maryam began a grim routine familiar to many families of political prisoners in Iran: standing in visitation lines, coordinating bail efforts, and negotiating with authorities who had taken her mother.
After a month, Ensieh was released on bail. For a brief moment, mother and daughter believed they might escape the state’s shadow.
They attempted to leave Iran together, but police intercepted them at the airport. Without prior notification of a verdict, Ensieh was rearrested in 2018 and sent back to Evin Prison to serve her sentence.
Maryam was sent home alone.
The following eight months were marked by resistance and retaliation. Ensieh went on a hunger strike to protest her condition. In response, authorities transferred her to Qarchak Prison, placing her among women charged with murder and drug trafficking.
After ten days of this punitive transfer, guards returned her to Evin with a mocking question: “Did you have a good time?”
The cruelty didn’t end there. In 2018, under orders from Ali Chaharmahali, then-head of Evin Prison, Ensieh was transferred to the psychiatric ward of Tehran’s Loghman Hospital and chained to a bed.
According to her, she “was not even allowed to go to the yard for fresh air” and remained in the psychiatric ward for ten days, guarded by two male officers stationed outside her door.
For years, many political prisoners, both men and women, have been subjected to similar treatment: transferred to psychiatric facilities, chained to beds, and given unspecified medications and injections.
It is a systematic attempt to break prisoners psychologically and discredit their sanity – a form of torture disguised as medical care.
Eventually, Ensieh was released on bail. However, freedom from prison did not mean freedom from surveillance. A case officer known by the alias “Salehi” maintained what Ensieh described as “a heavy security shadow” over her family.
Salehi repeatedly told family members she was kept under surveillance so that the case might be closed if she refrained from further activism. This indefinite limbo – neither fully free nor imprisoned – created an ongoing atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.
“An open case is worse than long-term imprisonment or execution,” Ensieh explains. “With execution, you die once. With an open case, you are executed every day.”
For eight years, that shadow followed Ensieh and Maryam. They were banned from leaving the country. Their movements and communications were likely monitored.
Ensieh described herself as “a prisoner in this homeland. Even outside prison, after eight months, I remained a prisoner.”
The surveillance and harassment extended to their entire family. Maryam could neither flee Iran nor withstand the daily psychological toll. Their lives, according to Ensieh, were “under control and security surveillance,” resembling anything but a normal life.
And the heaviest price was paid by Maryam.
At sixteen, she opened the door to armed agents who dragged her mother away. She was thrust into Iran’s complex legal system, trying to free her mother. For eight years, she lived under watch and threat.
Maryam, described as “a girl with a height of 174 centimeters and eyes as bright as life,” gradually “lost the luster of youth from her eyes.”
After her death, her classmates told Ensieh that they witnessed Maryam’s struggles. Maryam had shared her suffering with them, saying the Islamic Republic was hurting her mother and that they were not free.
Despite this burden, Maryam completed her studies in accounting. She often asked her mother when the case would be closed, hoping they could “leave this place of suffering, seek their destiny in a new country, and free themselves from interrogator Salehi’s constant presence in their lives.”
That day never came.
One night, after saying goodnight to her mother and going to bed, “her heart could no longer bear it, and her life’s pulse stopped.” Maryam was 24.
Ensieh and Maryam had, in many ways, “grown up together.” Ensieh was only 21 when she gave birth to her. Later, her family shared a chilling memory: after Ensieh’s first arrest, when security agents violently took her away, Maryam’s eyes “saw only white light for two days.”
Maryam’s death turned Ensieh’s grief into steely defiance. “At Maryam’s grave, I told everyone I would bury my child in eternal soil myself,” she recounts. “The pain of laying her face into the earth will stay with me forever. Maryam was my red line.”
Instead of breaking her, the loss hardened her resolve. “I told myself, ‘Ensieh, get up. What did you learn in Evin?’ I no longer have anything to lose. I will not allow anyone who comes along to bully me.”
After burying her daughter, Ensieh returned to work and then went directly to the Intelligence Office, where she publicly accused Salehi of responsibility for Maryam’s death.
Now, eight years after her initial arrest and following the loss of her child, Ensieh has been summoned to serve her sentence.
The five-day deadline for the summons expired on May 15. Authorities suggested she could avoid prison by visiting the Medical Examiner’s Office and obtaining a “certificate of mental illness,” which could then be used to apply for a pardon.
Ensieh’s response is unequivocal: “The Islamic Republic wants to label us mentally ill, to assassinate our character. If I were a criminal, why didn’t you come after me eight years ago? I ask no forgiveness from this system.”
“When my child was alive, and I was her joy, I compromised a little for her sake so she wouldn’t be harmed. But now that she’s gone, and they come after me again with complete impudence, I will not compromise.”
To accept such terms, she says, would be “to trample on the blood of those killed in the fight for Iran’s freedom.”
Her decision is made: “I will not walk into the Evin Prosecutor’s Office. You’ll have to come take me.”
Ensieh sees her story as part of a larger pattern: mothers who have lost children to state violence in Iran, from the mass executions of the 1980s to the present day.
“It’s as if all the energy of those young people has become courage in the mothers.”
These mothers often become fearless advocates – perhaps, as Ensieh says, because “Is there anything worse than the death of a child? I will not let the Islamic Republic enjoy my wailing.”
“They say, ‘Hit the son, and the father bends.’ But I show that I did not bend with Maryam,” Ensieh declares, refusing to follow the state’s script of fear and submission in the face of overwhelming force and tragedy.
“I paid the price. My child paid the price,” she says. “The Islamic Republic reopened my case after my daughter, who endured depression and suffered all these years, died of a cardiac arrest in her sleep.”
Throughout her ordeal, Ensieh has drawn a sharp line between religious belief and the political use of religion by the Islamic Republic.
“I bow to no one except my own God,” she says. “He is the God of Maryam, Ensieh, and all political prisoners.”
As she faces reimprisonment, Ensieh chooses to speak out. “She has decided not to remain silent, to place the cost of her lost life, Maryam’s death, and her imprisonment on the shoulders of the Islamic Republic, and to retell the story of her suffering.”
“I also told Salehi: Even if I die, I will die like a woman, free.”
In a system built to strip people of their humanity and agency, Ensieh Abdolhosseini insists on retaining both. She rejects the false choice between imprisonment and being declared “mentally ill.” She refuses to ask forgiveness from those who destroyed her family.
Instead, she demands accountability.
“It is not I who should request a pardon,” she says. “The Islamic Republic should ask for forgiveness – from me and from all of us.”
