It is often a startling and fascinating discovery to learn about a unique Christian community that has not been the subject of serious engagement among Western Christians.  In this book, Benedikt Romer (Bundeswehr University, Munich) has written a fascinating account of a particular group of Iranian Christians in the modern world.  As Romer summarizes:

After the 1979 Revolution, a growing number of Muslim-born Iranians started to attend churches offering services in Persian.  Following governmental violence and ingoing discrimination against Persian-speaking Christian communities, a house church movement as well as a sizable and continuously growing exile community of Iranian Christians have come into being (31)

Romer’s main subject is the Christian communities in exile outside of Iran, especially in Turkey and Europe, but also in North America.  Therefore, the focus of this book is not on the long known Christian minorities of Iran, e.g. The Assyrian Church and the Armenians living in Iran (as well as other Middle Eastern countries).  Rather, Romer’s emphasis is on the slowly growing “Persian-Speaking” Christians.  This is a euphemism of sorts, because the older Christian minorities are known to have their own languages other than Farsi = “Persian”, the dominant language of Iran. That being the case, “Persian-Speaking” Christians is a population that consists of Iranian Christians who are mainly converts from Islamic backgrounds (whether from very religious backgrounds, or only nominally religious – both of which are large percentages of the Iranian population).  Clearly, this is a group whose very existence many Iranians would undoubtedly dispute or even deny.  These are precisely the communities of interest to Romer.

Romer acknowledges that there are limitations to the research base that Romer had available to him.  For obvious reasons, research on converts from Islam within Iran would prove virtually impossible.  Outside of Iran, Romer chose to work with those Iranian Christian ex-patriots who have already taken up a highly public persona in online media Christian “ministries” aimed at fellow Iranians.  He analyses hours of sermons and other public programs.  There is also a limited number of autobiographies of some of these media figures but also other prominent Christians – perhaps most significant being the late Iranian Anglican Bishop, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti (1920-2008), whose father was a Muslim, and mother a Muslim-born convert to Christianity. 

Romer, citing a number of sociological works on the conditions of diaspora and exile more widely, approaches his main communities of interest with questions about how they compose themselves as a group – and especially what it means to be an Iranian-Christian community outside of Iran – e.g. in “exile”.  Each successive chapter, then, examines elements of how this community understands itself – and what practices seem to contribute to this ongoing sense of identity. 

In Chapter 3, for example, Romer discusses how Iranian Christians have adopted – and adapted – Iranian native celebrations that are not necessarily tied directly to Islam and Islamic history.  The new year celebrations known as “Nowruz” and another known as  “Yalda”, for example, have been extensively adopted by the diaspora Christian communities as celebrations that allow Iranian Christians to continue to identify strongly as culturally Iranian, without adopting elements historically tied to Islam.

Chapter 4, in my view, was among the most fascinating.  Noting that Persian poets and poetry are among the proudest national traditions of Iran (among all Iranians), Romer discusses how Iranian Christians not only encourage the study of classical Iranian poetry (often seen as not inextricably tied to Islam) including famous poets like Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Rumi. Christians like to point out, for example, how often these classical poets honor Jesus, but these communities – even more significantly - also encourage Iranian Christians to write their own poetry – and some Christian poets have risen to become artists of great communal pride and accomplishment.  I finished this chapter with great hopes that there may be a published anthology drawn from this growing body of Iranian Christian poetry.

There is also a discussion of the rise of honoring Christian Martyrs – which Romer did not extensively connect with the Shiite tradition of honoring the martyrdom of Hussein (among the unique elements of Shiite, as opposed to Sunni, Islamic tradition), but which clearly is another example of the “Christianizing” of a unique Iranian religious tradition.  This was a most interesting chapter, but one which raised fascinating issues that will surely require considerably more analysis in the future.
This last point leads directly into Chapter 5, which involved a more troubling discussion of attitudes to Islam among the convert leaders Romer cites.  Here is where Romer’s dependence on information from very public figures may raise problems. For mostly understandable reasons (these Christians are, after all, converts from Islam), their publicly expressed attitudes toward Islam are generally negative.  While there are occasionally words of respect, there is a tendency (as Romer notes) for Iranian Christians to play into Western anti-Islamic attitudes with their rhetoric.  One wonders how much of this is inspired by their Western contexts in exile – and how much are genuine feelings of resentment toward persecution and their exilic fate. There was an exception to this in the respectful attitudes toward Islam in the writing of Bishop Dehqani-Tafti, but this seemed to be a notable exception. 

Romer’s last chapter (before summary conclusions) includes fascinating discussions of how Iranian Christians have particularly interesting interpretations of Biblical passages that they see as especially relevant to their own identity and context.  One obvious case is the significance of positive Biblical attitudes toward the ancient Achaemenid ruler, Cyrus, and another is their unique interpretations of what is called “The Elam Prophecy” (Jer. 49:35-39).  This Jeremiah passage is a somewhat obscure oracle in Jeremiah, which has taken outsized importance in the Iranian Christian communities because of their identification with the ancient Elamite peoples.  Given this, one can fully understand why an exiled people would place great significance to  the Prophet Jeremiah saying of God, “I will restore the fortunes of Elam…”.  Such a statement takes on obvious significance.

For readers interested in the unique history, context, and issues facing culturally unique (and frankly fascinating) Christian communities in the modern world – especially who define themselves with biblical concepts of “exile” - Romer has introduced many of us to an exceptionally important example.