Hassan Dehqani-Tafti

In May 1980 Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti was in Cyprus for meetings. There he heard that his only son Bahram, twenty-four years old, had been shot dead in Tehran. He could not go home. Half a year earlier he himself had been shot at, and the church leaders around him had urged him to stay away.

So he did the only thing he could do from that distance. He wrote a prayer. His youngest daughter, then thirteen, said forty years later that he dictated it over the telephone to her mother Margaret. At the funeral in Isfahan it was read aloud, in Persian. It began like this: “O God, we remember not only Bahram, but also his murderers.”

The man who wrote that prayer had been born into a Muslim family, in a small town in the middle of Iran. He became the first Iranian to lead the Anglican church in his own country as its bishop. He wrote poems, hymns and books in his mother tongue. For the last twenty-eight years of his life he lived in England, and he never saw again the country he prayed for.

It began in Taft.

A TOWN NEAR YAZD

Hassan Dehqani-Tafti was born on May 14, 1920, in Taft, a small town near Yazd, in the middle of Iran. At that time foreigners still called the country Persia. It was a Muslim country, with small, ancient Christian churches of Armenians and Assyrians.

His parents were Muslims and they were poor. About his father and mother the sources do not fully agree. A Christian journalist wrote in 2016 that his father was a shoemaker and that his mother had become a Christian. The major English obituaries do not say this. There you read only that he had an Islamic upbringing that later found a place in his life as a follower of Jesus. He described his childhood himself in his 1959 autobiography. I have not been able to consult it, so about his parents I say no more than this.

We do know how the Christian faith had come to that region. In 1869 the Church Missionary Society, an English Anglican mission society, opened a station in Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan. Later came stations in Kerman, in Yazd and in Shiraz. The mission built hospitals and schools. In 1912 Persia became an Anglican diocese of its own, with English bishops. An Anglican church is a church in the tradition of the Church of England, with bishops, a set liturgy and its own prayer book.

Hassan attended such church schools. He ended up at Stuart Memorial College in Isfahan, a mission school.

SEVENTEEN AND BAPTIZED

In 1938 he was baptized in Isfahan. He was seventeen. For a boy from a Muslim family, that was a big step. The sources do not say how his family reacted, and I am not going to fill that in.

What is certain is that he quickly became a leader in the city’s growing Christian youth group. After that he trained as a teacher at the University of Tehran. From 1943 to 1945, in the years of the Second World War, he served as an officer in the Imperial Iranian Army, where he also worked as an interpreter.

After the war he worked for two years as a layman in the diocese, under the English bishop William Thompson. A layman is a church worker who is not ordained. In those years he got to know Thompson’s daughter Margaret.

A PERSIAN POET IN CAMBRIDGE

In 1947 Hassan left for England, for Ridley Hall in Cambridge, a college that trains Anglican clergy. The theologian Kenneth Cragg, who knew him well, wrote after his death that the poetry in him quickly responded to the aura of the ancient stones of the university.

I find that a lovely detail. There was a young Persian walking among the Gothic colleges, raised on the poets of his own country, and he felt no contradiction. Cragg described him as someone who believed his Persian background and his Christian faith could come together. He worked at that all his life.

In 1949 he was ordained deacon, in 1950 priest. He returned to Isfahan and became pastor of St Luke’s Church, the church that would later become the cathedral of the diocese. He stayed there ten years.

A MARRIAGE IN THE OIL CRISIS

In 1952 he married Margaret Thompson. She had been in England training as a nurse and came back to Iran for the wedding. It was the year of the oil crisis between Iran and Britain, when Iran nationalized the British oil company and relations between the two countries were very bad.

According to her obituary in the Church Times, Margaret was eighteen when she wanted to marry him. He was twelve years older. Not everyone was pleased. There were objections, including from people with a colonial outlook, who did not think a marriage between the daughter of an English bishop and an Iranian priest was fitting. Her parents did support the couple.

Here you touch something that plays a part in much mission history. The English missionaries brought the gospel, the schools and the hospitals. But leadership long remained in English hands, and treating an Iranian as an equal did not always come naturally. With their marriage Margaret and Hassan showed that it could be different.

They had four children: three daughters and one son. Bahram was born on September 22, 1955, in the Christian hospital in Isfahan.

In 1959 Hassan’s autobiography appeared, in Persian and in English. The English title was Design of My World. He named the book after the great royal square in Isfahan, Naqsh-e Jahan, which means something like the design of the world.

APRIL 25, 1961

In 1960 he became pastor of St Paul’s Church in Tehran. A year later he succeeded his father-in-law. On April 25, 1961, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti became bishop in Iran. He was the first bishop of Iranian descent in the Anglican diocese. One English obituary even calls him the first ethnically Persian bishop in the country since the Islamic conquest in the seventh century.

He would remain bishop for thirty years. His church was small, much smaller than the ancient Armenian and Assyrian churches. Unlike those churches, the Anglican church also sought contact with Muslims, and people from a Muslim background, like himself, joined it.

He built up schools, for girls and for boys. He wrote hymns and poems in Persian.

From 1976 to 1986 he was also the first President-Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, the Anglican province for that region. A British magazine later wrote that he led the movement toward local leaders of their own in the churches of the Middle East. He himself was the first example of it.

A REVOLUTION HE WELCOMED AT FIRST

At the end of the 1970s Iran was in upheaval. The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ruled as a monarch with strong ties to the West. In 1978 there were mass protests against him. In January 1979 the shah left the country, and in February Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. An Islamic Republic was established.

According to the human rights organization Article 18, which cites the bishop’s book, he welcomed the revolution at first. Many Iranians hoped for more freedom and justice. For the small Anglican church things turned out differently. The ancient Armenian and Assyrian churches were given rights in the new constitution. Churches that reached Muslims faced restrictions, confiscations and arrests, as a Polish scholarly article sums it up.

It happened fast. On February 19, 1979, eight days after the change of power, the Reverend Arastoo Sayyah was murdered in his church office in Shiraz. He was the pastor of the churches in Fars Province. In June and July the Christian hospitals in Isfahan and Shiraz were confiscated. The hospital in Isfahan had cared for people for more than a hundred years. In August the bishop’s house and the diocesan offices in Isfahan were searched. Papers, photographs and personal belongings were taken or burned.

What I write here is about 1979 and 1980. It is not a judgment on Iran or on the people who live there now. It is what happened to this one church and this one family.

FOUR BULLETS IN THE PILLOW

In the early morning of October 26, 1979, two armed men entered the bishop’s house in Isfahan. Hassan and Margaret were in bed. Five shots were fired. Margaret threw herself over her husband. One bullet went through her hand. The other four hit the pillow, around his head. Her obituary in the Church Times calls it a halo, a ring of bullet holes.

According to Article 18, the bishop had shortly before refused to hand over access to a church fund. The diocese had a trust fund, used among other things for the pensions of church workers.

Shortly after the attack he traveled to Cyprus and England, for engagements that had been planned earlier. The leaders of the Anglican churches worldwide advised him not to go back and to lead his diocese from outside. Margaret did go back to Iran. Their children were still there.

What it feels like to see on your own pillow the holes where your head lay, no source says. I am not going to fill it in either. What is certain: he remained bishop of Iran.

A PASSPORT AS A BARGAINING CHIP

Bahram was by now a young man. At twelve he had gone to a boarding school in England, Monkton Combe, and he had studied at Oxford. In 1978 he earned a master’s degree in economics at George Washington University in Washington. After that he went back to Iran. He taught economics and dramatic literature at Damavand College in Tehran. In the years of the revolution he also worked as an interpreter for foreign journalists.

His sister was getting married in England. Bahram wanted to go, but his passport was withheld. According to the family, and according to papers later found in his car, he was not allowed to leave the country. He was told he could get his passport back if his father handed over the church fund.

Friends warned him that he was in danger. According to his sister, he refused to leave, partly in order to stay with his sisters.

On May 1, 1980, Jean Waddell, the diocesan secretary, was badly beaten in Tehran. Five days later it was Bahram’s turn.

TUESDAY, MAY 6, 1980

On Tuesday, May 6, 1980, Bahram drove away from his college after work. His car was forced to a stop by another car. Two men got in with him and drove with him to a deserted plot of land near Evin Prison. A fourteen-year-old boy saw him talking with the two men. Then he heard a shot and saw two people running away to another car. Bahram died of a gunshot wound to the head before he could be treated.

All of this is in Iranian newspapers from that month and in a file of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, an organization that documents human rights violations in Iran. Who the killers were has never been established by a court. No one was convicted. The Iranian newspapers of the time gave conflicting explanations. The family has always said that he was killed because he belonged to the church, and because he was his father’s son.

In The Hard Awakening the bishop wrote a sentence that comes back in almost every story about him: “They took his passport as they couldn’t take mine, and killed him instead of me.”

What do you do then, as a father? You are on an island, you cannot get to your child, you cannot get to your wife, you cannot even go to the funeral.

A PRAYER OVER THE TELEPHONE

He wrote. First a letter, in which, according to the Independent, he said he felt bewildered but very calm. He also wrote that the killers did not know what they were doing. Those are almost the words of Jesus on the cross: Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

And he wrote the prayer that he dictated to Margaret. On May 11, 1980, Bahram was buried after a service at St Luke’s Church in Isfahan, the church where his father had been pastor for ten years. Margaret had identified his body. She spoke at the funeral and arranged the grave. And her husband’s prayer was read.

Here I give in my own words what it says. He remembers his son and also the men who killed him. He thanks God that through this grief the family follows Jesus more closely, in the way of sacrifice. He prays for love that sets them free from hatred toward their persecutors. He writes that Bahram’s blood multiplies the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of their souls. And it ends with a petition for love that teaches how to prepare yourself to face your own day of death.

I have read this prayer often. What strikes me every time is that it does not pretend it does not hurt. It calls the murderers what they are. And then it prays for them.

Could you do that? To be honest, I do not know it of myself. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti sat with exactly that question on an island in the Mediterranean, and he prayed.

A BISHOP IN BASINGSTOKE

A few weeks later Margaret and the daughters came to England. Hassan joined them from Cyprus. They thought it would be for a few weeks or months. It became the rest of their lives. His youngest daughter, who later became a bishop in the Church of England herself, said that they arrived as refugees.

They went to live in Basingstoke, in the Diocese of Winchester. Bishop John V. Taylor made Hassan an assistant bishop there. That way he could carry on his work for Iran. Until 1990 he remained bishop of Iran, in exile. He supported the Christians in Iran, worked with Iranians in England and kept writing and translating.

In 1981 SPCK in London published The Hard Awakening, his account of the revolution and what it meant for his church. A Polish researcher later discovered that officials of the British Foreign Office discussed the book before it appeared. At that time British staff members of the diocese were still imprisoned in Iran, among them Jean Waddell, and relations were tense.

He founded a publishing house for Persian Christian books. He called it Sohrab, in honor of Bahram. Sohrab is the young hero of the Persian epic the Shahnameh, who dies at the hand of his own father. I do not know whether he chose the name for that reason. The source says only that it was a tribute to his son.

CHRIST IN PERSIAN POETRY

According to a review in the magazine of the friends of the church in the Middle East, he wrote or translated more than thirty books. That review calls him “a wise pastor, teacher and evangelist,” and also a poet, hymn-writer and artist. Between 1992 and 1994 a three-volume work on Christ and the Iranians appeared in Persian. In 2000 the sequel to his autobiography came out: The Unfolding Design of My World. A Pilgrim in Exile. The design of his world had unfolded further, and it had become a different design from anything he could have known in 1959.

After his retirement in 1990 he remained involved until 2000 as the bishop’s representative for Iran.

PARADISE IN WINCHESTER

In 2005 Hassan and Margaret moved to Oakham, a small town in the English Midlands. He died there at the end of April 2008, at the age of eighty-seven. The sources differ about the exact day and place: the Independent gives April 28 in Oakham, other sources April 29 in Winchester.

At his death the Anglican province in the Middle East wrote: “The way he forgave those who broke his heart continues as an unforgettable lesson throughout the Anglican Communion.”

He was buried in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral, in the part called Paradise, the burial ground of the bishops and deans. Margaret lived for another eight years. She died on October 22, 2016, and was buried beside him. In Isfahan, Shiraz and Tehran memorial services were held for her.

Bahram was buried in Isfahan, after the service in his father’s church. In Canterbury Cathedral he is remembered in the chapel of the martyrs of our own time. His father lies far away from there, in an English garden called Paradise, the man who from an island dictated a prayer for his son and for the men who killed him.