Hassan Barnaba Dehqani-Tafti, priest and author, born May 14 1920; 

The Guardian: The Rt Rev Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, who died aged 87 died on April 29 2008, was the Anglican Bishop in Iran from 1961 to 1990, survived an assassination attempt following the 1979 revolution and had to exercise the last 10 years of his episcopate in exile.

Compassionate and courageous, gentle but outspoken, he showed remarkable forgiveness to the murderers of his son, who was shot not long after the attempt on his own life.

Hassan was born in the village of Taft in central Iran, to a modest Muslim family, mainly involved in making traditional cloth shoes. His mother died when he was five, but she had become a Christian and, as a result, he received a Christian education through the Church Missionary Society before going to Stuart Memorial College in Isfahan, and then to Tehran University to train as a teacher. He became a Christian at the age of 18, taking the additional name Barnaba (Barnabas), meaning "son of consolation or encouragement", a name which exactly expressed his remarkable ministry.

He trained at Ridley Hall in Cambridge and was ordained in 1949, serving as a pastor in Isfahan and Tehran before being consecrated bishop, the first person of an Iranian, rather than Armenian or Assyrian, background in such a post since the 7th century. From 1976 to 1986 he was also presiding bishop of the Episcopal church in Jerusalem and the Middle East.

Life under the Shah was never easy for Christian communities and Dehqani-Tafti was among those who welcomed the revolution, writing to Ayatollah Khomeini pledging support for the building of a just and free Iranian society. However, the consequences of the revolution for the tiny Anglican church were devastating. The priest in Shiraz, Arastoo Sayyah, was brutally murdered and other pastors were arrested; its two big hospitals, three schools and three institutions for welfare work among the blind, all of which were developing under Hassan's episcopate, were confiscated and their bank accounts closed. Hassan called a meeting of the clergy to decide what to do. "The decision was to stand firm," and put their lives on the line. It encouraged him when he heard from Persian friends: "You are very few, but you are the only group which has resisted them." In November 1979 two gunmen entered the bedroom of the bishop's house. Four shots were fired and narrowly missed. Margaret Dehqani-Tafti still has the pillowcase with its four bullet holes, while a fifth shot passed through her hand as she flung herself across her husband's body to protect him. The following May his secretary, Jean Waddell, was shot and badly wounded, and his 24-year-old son Bahram ambushed and murdered. For Bahram's funeral, which he could not attend, Hassan composed a prayer of forgiveness for the killers.

Persuaded to go into exile, he exercised a valuable ministry not only to his own diocese from afar, but to the Iranian community in this country and as an assistant bishop in Winchester.

While at college he had been influenced by a Christian convert from Sunni Islam who helped him to see "how a strong and intelligent Christianity could truly belong in and with an authentic Persian culture". Hassan had a strong love for Persian literature and also wrote poetry and a number of books, including his moving autobiography The Unfolding Design of My World (2000).

It pained him deeply that his fellow countrymen thought they were inimical to one another. He rejected the view that his church was persecuted because it was a foreign church. "Our 'crime' was that we had started to build a 'Persian church' and they could not accept that." He often referred to Hafiz, the 14th-century mystic and poet, and ends his autobiography with some of his words: "The very intoxication of love, though tending to our ruin,/ Makes the fullest life to flourish out of ruination."

He married Margaret, the daughter of William Thompson, the previous Bishop of Iran, in 1952. She was a courageous, lifelong support and companion. She and their three daughters, one of whom is ordained, survive him.