Christians of Iran

Christianity has been present in Iran since at least the third century CE, earlier than in much of Europe. The Church of the East grew up inside the Sasanian empire and sent missionaries as far as China, and its descendants, the Assyrians and Chaldeans of Urmia and Tehran, still live in Iran alongside the larger Armenian community and small numbers of Catholics, Protestants and converts. Iran’s 2016 census counted about 117,700 Christians.

A church of the Persian empire

Christian communities existed in Mesopotamia and western Iran by the second and third centuries. Their numbers grew when Shapur I (r. 240–270) deported thousands of captives, many of them Christians, from the Roman cities of Syria, including Antioch, and settled them in Khuzestan and Fars. Christianity spread in Iran among Syriac-speaking Arameans, Persians and others, and Syriac became its language of worship and learning.

When the Roman empire became Christian in the fourth century, Persia’s Christians fell under suspicion. Shapur II (309–379) persecuted them during his wars with Rome, and the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Simeon bar Sabba’e, was executed in the 340s. Under Yazdegerd I a synod at the capital in 410 organised the church under its own head, the catholicos, and in the following century it separated from the churches of the Roman world over doctrine. Western writers later called it “Nestorian”, a name its members reject; they call it the Church of the East. Christians were influential at the late Sasanian court: Khosrow II’s wife Shirin was a Christian. The Sasanian story is told on Christians in the Sasanian Empire.

From the caliphs to the Mongols

After the Arab conquest Christians became protected dhimmis, and the catholicos moved to Baghdad. Christian physicians and translators, many of them trained in the Sasanian tradition of Gondishapur, served the Abbasid caliphs and translated Greek science into Arabic. Missionaries of the Church of the East reached Central Asia, India and China, where a stele erected at Xi’an in 781 records their arrival.

The Mongol conquest brought a brief revival. Several Mongol princesses were Christian, including Doquz Khatun, the wife of Hulagu, and the Ilkhans used Christian envoys to seek alliances in Europe, most famously the monk Rabban Sauma (see the Ilkhanate and Europe). After Ghazan Khan’s conversion to Islam in 1295, Christians lost their protection, and the violence of the fourteenth century and Timur’s campaigns destroyed most communities. The church survived mainly in the mountains of Hakkari and on the plain of Urmia.

Missionaries and the Urmia Assyrians

In the nineteenth century Urmia became a meeting point of churches. American Presbyterians arrived in 1835, led by Justin Perkins, and printed books in the spoken Neo-Aramaic of the Assyrians, creating a modern literary language. Catholic, Anglican and Russian Orthodox missions followed, and many Assyrians joined the Chaldean Catholic or Protestant churches. Modern schools and colleges made the Urmia Assyrians one of the best-educated communities in Qajar Iran.

The First World War ended this world. Northwestern Iran, though officially neutral, became a battlefield (see Iran in the First World War). In 1918 Ottoman troops and Kurdish irregulars attacked the Assyrian population, and the patriarch Mar Shimon XIX Benyamin was murdered by the Kurdish chief Simko Shikak. About half the Assyrians of Persia are estimated to have died in massacres, flight and epidemics, and many survivors ended up in refugee camps in Iraq. Smaller numbers returned to Urmia and Salmas; others moved to Tehran.

The twentieth century and today

Under the Pahlavis, Christians shared in Tehran’s growth, and the 1976 census recorded 168,593 Christians, most of them Armenians (see the Armenians of Iran). The constitution of the Islamic Republic recognises Christianity as a minority religion, and recognised churches hold services in Armenian and Assyrian; Assyrians and Chaldeans share one seat in the Majlis. Emigration since 1979 has sharply reduced their numbers.

The position of converts from Islam is very different. Iranian law does not recognise conversion away from Islam, and services in Persian, the language most converts use, are restricted. The Iranian authorities describe evangelical house churches as illegal groups linked to foreign powers. Christian advocacy groups and UN human rights rapporteurs report arrests and prison sentences for converts and pastors, and recall the murder in 1994 of Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr of the Assemblies of God, who had campaigned for the release of a convert pastor. Estimates of the number of converts vary widely and cannot be independently checked. For the wider picture of religion in Iran, see religion in Iran; for the city at the centre of Assyrian history, see Urmia.