Mehdi Dibaj

Life and Ministry

Mehdi Dibaj was born at Sari in northern Iran in AD 1934 to a Shia Muslim family, converted to Christianity as a teenager through the witness of the Assemblies of God mission station at Sari, and was baptized in AD 1949. He served the Persian-language Assemblies of God congregation as a lay preacher and translator, married a Christian convert named Azar, and remained at his post in Sari through the upheaval of the AD 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought the apostasy laws of Sharia into Iranian federal practice. He was arrested in AD 1983 on charges of apostasy from Islam, held without trial for nine years at the Sari prison, two of those years in solitary confinement, and finally tried in absentia by a Sari revolutionary court in December AD 1993 that found him guilty of apostasy and sentenced him to death.

Circumstances of Death

Dibaj's written defense at his trial, smuggled out of Sari by Mehdi Mahdavi and published internationally by Open Doors and Voice of the Martyrs, became one of the most-circulated confessional documents of late-twentieth-century Christian persecution. International pressure secured his release on 16 January AD 1994 — three weeks after his Anglican-Assemblies colleague Bishop Haik Hovsepian-Mehr had publicized his case. Hovsepian was murdered three days later. Dibaj himself was abducted in Tehran in late June AD 1994 and his body was found by police in a forest park north of the city on 5 July, killed by stabbing some days earlier. The Iranian authorities attributed his death to the Mojahedin-e Khalq militant group; no independent forensic confirmation was permitted, and the Iranian Christian community attributes the killing to the same Ministry of Intelligence that had taken Hovsepian.

Legacy

Dibaj's smuggled defense — I am ready to give my life for the gospel — is now memorized by Iranian house-church believers as a model confession of converts from Islam. His witness is that the courtroom of a hostile state is a pulpit for the gospel: the man who could not preach openly in Sari preached his most-quoted sermon to the Sari judge who condemned him. The Persian-speaking churches he had served have multiplied, mostly in the underground, throughout Iran and the Iranian diaspora.