By Aida Ghajar
IranWire

It was night in Tehran.

Maryam, 22, said goodnight to her mother and went to her room. After eight years of surveillance and threats, living under state control had come to feel normal.

That night, as she fell asleep, her heart, heavy from years of watching her mother’s persecution, quietly stopped.

The daughter of activist Ensieh Abdolhosseini became another casualty in the Islamic Republic’s war on dissent. She was not executed or imprisoned but broken by the slow, relentless pressure that wore down her body and spirit.

One year and seven months after burying her daughter, Abdolhosseini has once again been summoned to the Shahid Moghaddas Security Prosecutor’s Office in Tehran.

The authorities now seek to imprison her for writing poems critical of the Islamic Republic. Her options: prison or being labeled “mentally ill.”

She refuses to back down. “I won’t ask for a pardon,” she says. “The Islamic Republic should ask forgiveness from me and all mothers.”

It began on a cold December day. The protests that erupted across Iran in 2017 posed a serious challenge to the Islamic Republic. Citizens took to the streets in response to economic hardship, corruption, and political repression.

Among them was Ensieh Abdolhosseini, an educated woman and CEO of a private company. Like thousands of others, she was exercising what should have been her basic right to peaceful protest.

The Islamic Republic's response was swift and brutal. Security forces identified her during the demonstrations and soon after, raided her home. It was sixteen-year-old Maryam who opened the door to armed agents.

The scene that followed haunted the teenager for the rest of her short life: her mother, still in her nightgown, being forcibly taken from their home.

But the agents took more than Ensieh that day. They seized her personal belongings and writings, including a notebook filled with her poetry and prose. That notebook would later become the prosecution’s primary evidence against her.

Within its pages, she had written about the massacre of political prisoners in the 1980s under orders from Ruhollah Khomeini. She questioned how the Supreme Leader had concealed both the truth and the graves of the executed.

For that, she was charged with “insulting the Supreme Leader.” In another entry, she referred to agents of the Islamic Republic as “religious shopkeepers,” leading to an additional charge of “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”

When Ensieh appeared before Judge Mohammad Moghiseh for trial, who was gunned down earlier this year, the absurdity of Iran’s justice system was laid bare.

“You called me a religious shopkeeper,” he said before sentencing her to three years in prison on the two charges.

For Ensieh, who “had never even set foot in the detention centers of the morality police,” the transition to life within the notorious walls of Evin Prison was a jarring shock.

Meanwhile, her teenage daughter Maryam began a grim routine familiar to many families of political prisoners in Iran: standing in visitation lines, coordinating bail efforts, and negotiating with authorities who had taken her mother.

After a month, Ensieh was released on bail. For a brief moment, mother and daughter believed they might escape the state’s shadow.

They attempted to leave Iran together, but police intercepted them at the airport. Without prior notification of a verdict, Ensieh was rearrested in 2018 and sent back to Evin Prison to serve her sentence.

Maryam was sent home alone.

The following eight months were marked by resistance and retaliation. Ensieh went on a hunger strike to protest her condition. In response, authorities transferred her to Qarchak Prison, placing her among women charged with murder and drug trafficking.

After ten days of this punitive transfer, guards returned her to Evin with a mocking question: “Did you have a good time?”

The cruelty didn’t end there. In 2018, under orders from Ali Chaharmahali, then-head of Evin Prison, Ensieh was transferred to the psychiatric ward of Tehran’s Loghman Hospital and chained to a bed.

According to her, she “was not even allowed to go to the yard for fresh air” and remained in the psychiatric ward for ten days, guarded by two male officers stationed outside her door >>>