“Convert or die” said the Islamist Iranian theocrat to the Baha’i.
Posted by Ed Folsom, April 11, 2026.
There’s an interesting story in the local paper, the Portland Press Herald, today about a woman who escaped from Iran during the Islamic revolution in 1979. Her name is Parivash Rohani and she carries a message about 10 females between the ages of 17 and 57, from her home city of Shiraz, Iran, who were executed in 1983. The headline on the story tells us that Rohani’s message is one of “unity,” which caused me to wonder what her message of unity might be.
As it turns out, it’s that people here in the U.S. are connected, through a struggle for equality, freedom, and justice, to the 10 females executed in Shiraz and to “the women who are executed and persecuted every day.” Where are women executed and persecuted every day? In Iran.
The facts in the story would never have been published in the Portland Press Herald without being packaged as a unity-of-women thing or something similar. But the facts have a lot less to do with the unity of women than with the evils of Iran’s ruling Islamic theocracy.
Rohani is Baha’i, so she says she doesn’t like being asked about politics or her views on the current war between the U.S. and Iran. But in 1979 Rohani was 18 years old, living with her family in the Iranian city of Shiraz. That’s the year Iran became the Islamic Republic of Iran under clerical rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini and a Shia Islamist theocracy. As Rohani tells it, one day a “mob” went on a rampage in Shiraz, throwing people of the Baha’i faith out of their homes and burning 500 of their houses to the ground, including her family’s.
Rohani’s family fled to another town, but her parents were still worried about her safety so they convinced her to flee to India. She intended to return to Iran when the revolution ended, but her passport eventually expired. Iran would not issue her a new passport unless she converted to Islam, which she refused to do.
In 1983, while Rohani was still in India, she heard an announcement on the radio one day about 10 females who were executed in her home city of Shiraz. The announcer read their names. They were Baha’i. Rohani knew them. Two of them were her mentors.
Here’s how the story describes their executions:
“At their execution, some of their family members were killed, too, Rohani said. The women were given a choice: Convert to Islam or die. She said the executioners killed the women one by one, forcing them to watch each execution in an attempt to weaken them.
They all chose to die rather than recant their faith.”
Rohani became stateless because of her own refusal to convert to Islam. It was illegal for her to remain in India, so she eventually sought refugee status in the U.S. She ended up in Maine, where she had a career as an ICU nurse until retirement. Now, she continues to carry her message of the Shiraz 10 and of the persecution, in Iran, of the Baha’i and of women.
“Convert to Islam or die.” “Death to America!” What those Islamist Iranian theocrats must really need are nuclear weapons to leverage their demands.
If you see pictures of crowds in the streets of Iran supposedly cheering the Islamist theocracy these days, consider that the goon squad in charge there also managed to fill the mobs that burned down 500 Baha’i houses in Shiraz in 1983, etc. Who has your condemnation been reserved for lately?
