Yamin Mohammad Munshi
There exists, deep in the sedimented strata of modern despotisms, a hidden calculus — one not of numbers but of silences. It is there, in that unspoken matrix of forbidden memory and sacralized amnesia, that the tale of Roya Sabet becomes a cipher. Not merely a woman, nor even an accused — but a prism refracting the spectral absurdities of theocratic jurisprudence. In the Republic of Veiled Statutes, where God’s name has been pawned to the intelligence branch of fear itself, the criminal is no longer defined by act but by essence. Roya’s exile, arrest, and sentencing function less as judicial events and more as sacrificial rites, consecrated not in the pursuit of law, but in the preservation of power.
She came, as they say, not with banners nor with sabotage, but with filial affection. Twenty-three years away, in the dry honesty of expatriation, she had become, to the regime, both invisible and unforgiven. The return of the daughter was not a homecoming but a test — a trial not in the forensic sense, but in the older, spiritual sense: a fitna. To care for one’s ailing parents, to walk through the streets of Shiraz unarmed and unrepentant — this was, in the current grammar of terror, tantamount to sedition. The mother-state, itself ill and paranoid, does not tolerate rival maternities.
And how could it? The authoritarian psyche fears most what it cannot control — the uncoerced act of compassion, the unlicensed pilgrimage, the unsolicited return. Roya’s footsteps, echoing through the boulevards of her childhood, unsettled more than the dust of memory. They disturbed a curated silence — one in which exile was meant to be permanent, the body banished and the soul forgotten.
Yet this is not merely a legal problem, nor even a human rights issue in the tired UN sense. It is metaphysical. For Sabet belongs to that ancient lineage of forbidden illuminators — a Baha’i, whose faith insists, with reckless dignity, that truth progresses, that revelation did not end in a seventh-century cave. In such a claim lies not only doctrinal dispute but revolutionary poison. For if truth progresses, then the past — the codified, calcified past — may be in error. This is intolerable to any state whose legitimacy depends on the inerrancy of its sacred script.
Thus Roya was not punished for what she did, but for what she meant. She was a grammatical error in the ideological syntax of the Islamic Republic — and grammar, in regimes of purity, is always policed with brutal fidelity. The semiotics of her faith, her presence, her refusal to vanish quietly, all amounted to apostasy against the cult of stasis.
What were the charges? Communicating with Israeli institutions — a sin of proximity. Forming a group against national security — a sin of association. Propaganda against Islam — a sin of speech. But dig deeper: these are not charges but projections. The state, unable to kill an idea, stabs at its shadows.
To say she collaborated with Israel is, in itself, an admission of theological panic. For the Zion they claim to oppose is not Tel Aviv but Enlightenment; not the Mossad but the soul’s right to dissent. Her correspondence, real or imagined, is thus transformed into ritual impurity. The specter of the “outside” contaminating the “inside” — that ancient fear of the foreign goddess, the Babylonian tongue, the unbordered truth.
The accusation of group formation, too, is laced with irony. In a state where associations are criminal and ideology is monolithic, any gathering not orchestrated by power becomes, ipso facto, subversion. That she may have sat, spoken, or even prayed with others becomes in the prosecutorial imagination a conspiracy — not against the state per se, but against its theological narcissism.
And then propaganda. What is propaganda? In Iran, it is merely that which contradicts. The Baha’i faith contradicts. It speaks of unity not as imposition, but as diversity reconciled; it speaks of independent investigation of truth, a concept as dangerous to authoritarianism as matches to gasoline. That she professed this faith — in deed, name, or silence — is enough. The blade of law seeks not guilt but guiltiness.
Yet let us not be naïve. The charges are not real — but the sentence is. Twenty-five years. A life interrupted, if not erased. In the imperial semiotics of the Islamic judiciary, length is not proportional to crime but to meaning. The greater the truth you embody, the longer they attempt to imprison your body — as if walls can restrain a metaphor.
One must ask: what manner of mind composes such a sentence? Not merely a judge, but a priest in bureaucratic robes. The courtroom becomes a theater of submission. The law, which ought to be a dialogic encounter with justice, has become in her case a soliloquy of domination. Her verdict was decided long before she entered the dock. The gavel did not fall — it descended like a tombstone.
Sabet’s faith is not incidental here. It is central. The Baha’is, long reviled by the Islamic Republic, serve as the eternal outsider. Neither People of the Book nor apostates in the traditional sense, they float in a liminal void where rights vanish and protections dissolve. In that twilight, the regime rehearses its violence, unchallenged.
Roya is thus not only herself but the latest page in a long, blood-written text — a text which began when the Ayatollahs declared themselves custodians of divine wrath. That wrath, of course, must be fed. And who better to feed it than the woman who dares to believe differently?
We must speak also of gender. For her womanhood, too, is a kind of heresy. The clerical state is patriarchal not only in practice but in metaphysics. It imagines the cosmos as a hierarchy — God above, man below, woman beneath. In that cosmology, a woman who dares to speak, to travel, to believe, becomes not merely rebellious but ontologically inverted. Roya Sabet, both devout and defiant, is not only a threat — she is a theological insult.
So they seek to erase her. But not all erasures succeed. Some, like palimpsests, bleed through. Roya’s dream, her roya, remains etched — however faintly — into the collective conscience of those who dare to remember.
This is the paradox the regime cannot solve. The more it condemns her, the more it reveals its own moral bankruptcy. For the world watches, if only dimly, and sees in this woman not a terrorist, but a target; not a criminal, but a casualty of conscience.
To defend her is to defend something far greater than one person. It is to reclaim the sacred space between belief and blasphemy — that thin, trembling line where freedom breathes.
We must not argue, then, only for her innocence. We must argue for her meaning. Her name — Roya — means “dream” in Persian. And what is more dangerous to tyranny than a dream it cannot decode?
Postscriptum: On Silence, and the Art of Withstanding
In a land where the tongue is tethered and the gaze surveilled, silence becomes both shield and signal. Roya’s silence — in court, in exile, in resistance — is not absence but overabundance. It is the language of the mystic, the cipher of the dissident. It confuses power, because it cannot be measured. And so they fear her silence even more than her speech.
To write in her defense is not only to speak for her, but with her. It is to compose, in forbidden script, a hymn against tyranny. And this hymn, fractured though it may be, persists.
Let those who read these words not seek clarity. Let them seek conscience. For in the smoke and mirrors of the sacred courtroom, it is not understanding that saves, but remembering.
Author can be mailed at munshiyamin5@gmail.com
