Hot Spot

by Jim Carroll

  “If you’re truly a Christian, then perhaps there’s some hope for you. If not, then it would appear you’re leading others astray, simply for the purpose of causing dissent. And I understand you’re a skillful interpreter of dreams – even dreams that lead to apostasy from Islam.”

  “I don’t see where these questions lead.”

  “First, this is a conversation, not an interrogation. Second, you need not be concerned about where we’re headed. You can supply much useful information. I want to know what you mean when you say you’re Christian.”

  This was the most difficult question he could have asked me. Why would he start with this theological point? Now I was forced to be clear. “I mean that I believe Jesus is God Himself and that He sacrificed Himself for me by dying on the cross.”

  “Why was that needed? It seems a waste of divinity. I doubt you’re worth it.”

  “The sacrifice was necessary because I couldn’t conquer my sin or pay the penalty for it.” These were the standard statements of belief in Jesus as Savior that I had heard all my life.

  “Then what is your right to this sacrifice?”

  “I have no right to it.”

  “Then, how dare you claim it?”

  I stammered, unable to give a clear response. Please end this line of questioning.

  Only later did I get it right in my head: the One who sacrificed Himself is the One who offers His sacrifice to the believer. It was a judicial act and therefore a bestowal of right. Did my failed answer reflect the uncertainty that comes to all believers at times, my lack of precision, or was my faith more superficial than I realized? The timing was bad, very bad. Perhaps on other days I would have been secure with the questions. But not this day.

  The very idea of Evin, the horror of every Persian nightmare, was too much for my mind. I couldn’t concentrate. Then, to top off, Ali showed me a letter from Esau. The letter said, “I can attest that this man, Yacoub Al-Tamimi, was a Muslim at birth, and that he has committed apostasy in converting to Christianity.” The letter had all the wallop of a potential death sentence for apostasy. How did Esau have the contacts to reach me with such a calamity here?

  Ali offered no solace, “You know what this letter can mean.”

  Ali had reached the core of my uncertainty. Not only was I now accused of being a Muslim apostate; and though I knew that was false, Ali had baited me into questioning the strength of my belief in the work of Jesus! Why did I deserve Esau’s accusation, and even more, the protection of Jesus’ sacrifice? I had been troubled in my spirit since I first left Kuwait for King’s College, and now my fear doubled.

  Ali acknowledged my limits and terminated that line of questioning. Why was he testing my faith when I anticipated his main objective to be my incrimination?

  His demeanor changed when he turned to my friends who had disappeared, Abbas and Shaheen. He moved closer to me, his face directly in front of mine, with a wrinkle between his eyebrows. “We know all about these two. There is nothing more you can tell us. They were duly charged with apostasy, and the proper penalty administered. We want to know about the others.” Now, the old questions again.

  I experienced a surge of courage. “There were no others.”

  Ali left me in my cell without another word. He had demonstrated two lines of questioning – on the one hand, his questions had been focused on determining my spiritual condition, and on the other, in trying to uncover information about other believers. And then there was that praying callus on his forehead. I feared his return to ask more questions I couldn’t answer.

  For three days I was kept in my cell with no questioning. Food was brought twice a day, two dry pieces of flatbread in the morning and tea, rice, and beans in the evening, insects in the rice. I got brown water from my single tap. Ali had taken back the blanket with him. The uncertainty of when, or if, physical torture would begin was worse than the uncomfortable quarters. I was adrift, and couldn’t sleep. Did God have a plan in this? Fear reigned.

  Ali never came again.

  By the fifth day, I was allowed to leave my cell for meals and one hour in the prison yard with other inmates. The yard was stark with no grass, only small, pointed stones that jabbed through my prison-issue, thin-soled shoes.

  One of my prison mates was Omid Kokabee, who was taken captive after returning from an American graduate school to visit his family in Iran. Omid was a laser physicist. The government had offered to allow him to spend his sentence doing laboratory work on their weapons systems, but he had refused as a matter of conscience. He was a hero in the yard. How could he have had such courage? He was a secular Sunni Muslim and uninterested in religion. I tried to interest him in Christianity, but he was unmoved and turned away to talk with other inmates. “Don’t bother me with that stuff.”

  I took this failure as God’s sign to me. Psalm 86:1 says, “Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.” The psalm indicates the importance of admitting our destitute state. There was no question about the magnitude of my need, but I hadn’t once voiced a prayer or thrown myself on God’s mercy.

  A short time later my physical and emotional torture began. I was transferred to Ward 350 for political prisoners. My new cell was smaller and there was no bed, just a sheet on the concrete floor, which drained the heat from my body when I tried to sleep. Sitting up was better. Three days each week they took me to a soundproof room and tortured me with electric shock and needles. The needles were inserted in my groin area, and the electric shocks were applied to my testicles. I screamed for so long that my voice disappeared. I wondered if the soundproofing was adequate to conceal my cries. The taller of my two tormentors, the one most adept in this method, kept repeating, “Perhaps you would like to tell us about those you brought into apostasy.”

  They also beat me with a small wooden club. Usually this was carried out by the shorter of the two, as he specialized in the use of this crude instrument. Welts arose on my sides and back, and the blood vessels under the skin ruptured. His comment: “It appears you’re enjoying this. I’ll try to make you even happier.” The torture was designed not to leave any visible evidence outside the portion of my body covered by clothes. How considerate.

  Another portion of the cruelty was even worse, the so-called enferadi, or white torture. I was confined in an isolation room with no communication whatsoever with others. The bright lights of the cell were kept on constantly with no break for sleep. Sometimes the lights flickered, only making the brightness more obvious. I tried everything to make the time pass – counting the blinks of my eyes, recalling long passages of my college textbooks, attempting to evoke dreams which previously had come so easily, and, of course, reciting the psalms. Nothing worked. Even when my eyes were closed, the white walls and white lights of the cell penetrated. I have no idea how long I was held in this solitary state. It did not take long before I did not have a sure sense of time at all. Was it even passing? Would I ever see the sun or moon again? More than anything I longed for darkness and rest. I began to lose myself in the interminable light.

  Questionings, when they occurred, assumed a predictable course. “Why did you come to Iran? You’re Kuwaiti. You came to disrupt our government and our citizens. Why do you despise us? We know your family is Christian and that you’re Christian. Why did you leave Islam? You came to lead our citizens to apostasy, didn’t you? We need to know the names of those you persuaded to apostasy.” They all read from the same script.

  Except for little Afsin, they already knew the answers to the last question. I assumed the others I led into apostasy, if I could even be credited with such a feat, were already dead. There was nothing for me to add. The guilt from my friends’ deaths rested on me and hindered the little sleep I could get. After a while, I was ready to tell them anything, but I really had nothing to tell.

  After a long time, they set up a video conference with my father and the rest of my family in Kuwait. It was a great relief to be around others in preparation for
this. I was instructed to say I was well treated and make no mention of any charges. I obeyed, of course, just as I did for all their requests. The computer camera showed Papa, Hibah, and Binyamin sitting in our living room on the leather couch, all leaning forward, rigid, with their hands on their knees, all unaccustomed to this kind of communication. Binyamin was crying. The view was blurred, and papa’s wrinkles were not clear. They carefully made no mention of the Kuwaiti Christian movement, and for that I was thankful.

  There seemed to be no resolution in sight as the days in solitary and then later in being tortured continued. My urine showed blood, indicating kidney damage, and the physical cruelty was concluded for a time. Maybe they didn’t want there to be any lasting proof. Did that mean I would eventually be released?

  Once again my skill in simple accounting that had been so valuable at Kashan came to the fore. A guard informed me that the warden wanted to see me the next morning. I was allowed to go to the library for the first time when I told the guard it would help me do whatever was wanted. There I learned as much as I could about the man who held my fate in his hands. Copies of old newspapers in the otherwise pitiful prison library, told the story. Some time before, political prisoners had demanded to be present during a monthly search of their cells. In order to collect physical evidence against the prisoners, the prison guards took most of the prisoners’ personal belongings. After that, the punishment for contraband ensued. Prisoners were blindfolded and handcuffed before being shoved through a gauntlet formed by security officials carrying batons. They were struck on their backs, heads and faces, and some were forced to strip naked before being locked in cells. That the prison had allowed this newspaper report to be available in the library sent us, the inmates, a clear message; its publication in the newspaper likely was designed to intimidate the general population.

  This was the same warden I was to face: Ali Rashidi, who, along with his executive assistant, Java Moemeni, had supervised this newspaper-described assault on Ward 350 a year earlier – later called “Black Thursday.” I was nauseous with fear. What did he want from me?

  I expected the worst. Rashidi was a towering man whose bulk reminded me of a pyramid, the peak being his tiny, bald head. His eyes looked too big.

  “Mr. Al-Tamimi, I have some requirements that cannot be met by my current staff. We have need of your skills. We’ve heard how you handled the finances at Kashan. Here at Evin I have a complex job for you, and we expect you to assist. This is not a choice.”

  “I understand. Will the torture stop?”

  “Torture does not exist at Evin. We employ moral persuasion, which is designed to evoke your sense of humanity. You do not experience physical pain here.” A plain lie, which he told with ease.

  Try as I might, I could not fathom who was actually in control of the prison system in general and particularly, that of Evin. The funding emanated from the parliament, but the parliament was under the indirect control of the Council Guardians, half of whom were appointed by the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah. The roles of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security were undoubtedly related in some way.

  Rashidi took me to the accounting center which was much larger than the one at Kashan, recently painted, with newer computers, more windows, and two employees hard at work. They didn’t look up as he passed. Rashidi dismissed them and told them to go home. They left shaking their heads; the government and their families’ position guaranteed their jobs. As they departed, Rashidi said, “Don’t worry, your monthly check will continue.”

  Rashidi gave me a complex plan. I was instructed to memorize it and not write it down. The plan was a shell game of finances designed to move the funds from three different pots: one from general government funding, one from the Revolutionary Guard, and the third from the Ministry of Intelligence. At each transfer of the funds, the money was to be placed in another internal account, present only on the Evin computer system. He told me to generate a password for this account. “Keep the password to yourself. I don’t want to know it.” I was more suspicious by the moment. Then, a fourth transfer of five percent of all the incoming funds would be made to an outside account, and the remainder put in the regular prison account for routine expenditures. I was given the routing number of the bank along with an account number to which the funds should be transferred. By moving the funds in this complex pattern, it would be difficult to determine if funds were lost at any one point. I was to determine the schedule of transfers in a non-repeating fashion and not inform Rashidi of the variations. Again, another cause for alarm.

  The transfers quickly became routine for me. Compliance was an easy way to avoid beatings. Rashidi developed confidence in me, and soon we began to discuss personal issues. He was curious how I had become a Christian. He seemed a kind man, and I couldn’t picture him as the author of the Ward 350 assault. I told him about my mother: how she used the Bible to teach herself to read, and eventually brought about the conversion of our entire family.

  He finally divulged private information about his family and his only son who had thalassemia, a blood disorder causing severe anemia, which he was unlikely to survive. “I’ve tried to get treatment for my son here in Iran. Nothing has helped. He receives transfusions every week, and gets sicker with every procedure. He cries from the pain, and has developed antibodies against the transfused blood, which make it difficult even to proceed. His face has become deformed because there’s compensatory bone marrow activity in his bones.”

  He opened the top drawer on this desk and showed me a photograph that was not displayed on his desk. Was he ashamed of the child? The little boy had a protuberant forehead and large, high cheekbones. His dark eyes protruded from their orbits and begged for forgiveness – for sins I speculated he had not yet committed. Rashidi was inconsolable as he disclosed his fears, crying at one point. He saw nothing but death for his son, and I saw a man concerned about his child.

  The reason for the embezzlement of funds soon became clear. Rashidi was using them to provide the best possible medical care for his son. Still the care was not enough, and the boy’s condition declined.

  As part of my duties in the accounting office, I had access to e-mails, as long as I asked permission. The guard read the e-mails before they were sent. It was time to call on my old nemesis, Farmson, who had finally made it to medical school. I e-mailed him out of desperation. He replied, “Well, chum, you’ve got yourself in a mess now, just like we said you would.”

  After I asked him about treatment for thalassemia, he wrote me of a program, which was available at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where he was doing his pediatric rotation. The procedure involved stem cell transplants. The good news was that they would accept Rashidi’s son for treatment, but for a considerable amount. They were always eager, he said, to get cash payment from patients coming from the Middle East.

  Rashidi was elated. He instructed me to increase the fund transfers to ten percent.

  Because of Rashidi’s position, the treatment plan for his son became widely known. Rashidi was aghast when a cleric suggested the procedure might be against Islamic law. And what’s the religious reasoning on that one? I wondered. Following a transfer from Rashidi’s bank funds to the cleric, a convenient fatwa or Islamic ruling resolved that issue in the boy’s favor. Hmm.

  On January 8, 2016 Youness flew to London with his father. There the little boy underwent allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, which means that a matched donor was located and the blood-making stem cells from the donor administered to the patient. The procedure had a high risk of failure and physical danger because it required that drugs first be administered to destroy the child’s own defective bone marrow. I was stiff with fear. If that boy died with the treatment, I would be blamed. And then, nothing would save me.

  Two months later Rashidi and his son returned home. The thalassemia was reversed, the anemia was relieved, and the father seemed suitably grateful. I hoped this hap
py outcome would lead to improvement in my status. This was my selfish thought about what was a life-saving, life-changing event for little Youness. Certainly the father’s thankfulness was real; mine was motivated by my hope for safety.

  Two weeks later before breakfast Rashidi himself came to my cell. My heart beat faster and I began to sweat at the novelty of his visit. He was pale and stiff. The Ministry of Intelligence were checking Evin’s books. “Don’t discuss this with anyone. Continue in your job. I think I can cover the matter.” He didn’t sound convinced, and his eyes were too wide and bulging.

  As the funds had been transferred to Rashidi’s account, I assumed I was safe. But after breakfast when I called the bank, I discovered my name had been inserted in the place of Rashidi’s. No funds were left in the account. I had completely misread the man. This had been his plan from the beginning. How easily had I been taken in!

  The Ministry of Intelligence wasted no time in my prosecution, and a court date was set the next week. As I was taken away to court, Rashidi smiled and said, “And what has Jesus done for you today?” I could now picture him as the stealthy instigator of the Ward 350 incident. He was far more devious than I had expected.

  The prosecutor said, “You have no need for an attorney. Your guilt is certain. You have stolen from the Great Leader himself.” Given the sequence of events and Rahsidi’s cleverness, an attorney could have done nothing. The trial lasted less than an hour. After the guilty verdict, I was left sitting in a holding cell for two hours, awaiting sentence. Would they inflict the strict Islamic punishment for theft? Would they cut off my hand? Which hand? I was right-handed. I hoped not the right hand. Perhaps I could learn to manage with no left hand. What about the pain of amputation? I was certain they would use no anesthetic.

  The guards, one on each of my arms, brought me back to the courtroom. I was positive they could feel me shaking. When the judge pronounced the verdict of five years at Evin for embezzlement of the state funds, I was relieved. How great a blessing that I would not lose my hand. I was allowed to call my father and tell him about my sentence. I suppose in some way an official sentence was relief to us all.