#yaran

A former leader of the Iranian Baha’i community says the Islamic Republic gives them no chance of “leading a normal life” on account of their faith.

“For forty-five years, we Baha’is have been constantly disqualified from leading a normal life in our ancestral homeland,” Mahvash Sabet, a former member of the Baha’i community’s leadership group wrote in a letter from Tehran’s Evin Prison.

She reflected on the impact of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, stating, "Our ancestral homeland was abruptly taken from us, and we became 'the others'." Sabet recounted the misfortunes suffered by the Baha’i community, including the execution of nearly 250 of its members and the confiscation of assets belonging to many others.

The Shia clergy consider the Baha’i faith as a heretical sect. With approximately 300,000 adherents in Iran, Baha’is face systematic persecution, discrimination, and harassment. They are barred from public sector employment and, in certain instances, have been terminated from private sector jobs due to pressure from authorities.

In her letter, a copy of which was received by Iran International, Sabet has used the term “disqualified” (radd-e salahiyat) to describe Iranian Baha’is deprivation of civil and human rights including freedom of religion, the right to higher education, and most jobs.

In the context of ideological screening primarily carried out by security and intelligence bodies, Radd-e salahiyat means “found disqualified” for a position or status. Screening is conducted in a wide range of situations including higher education, civil service, participation in national sports teams, and elections.

Belief in the absolute guardianship and rule of a jurisprudent cleric (velayat-e motlaqqeh-ye faqih) and the Constitution of the Islamic Republic as a governing system are two of the fundamental requirements for being “qualified” in these situations.

Sabet, now seventy-one, was dismissed from her job as a school principal after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. She has been consistently denied the opportunity to publish her poetry in Iran, where books undergo scrutiny and rejection not solely based on their content, but often due to the authors' ideology, religion, or private lives.

In her letter, Sabet, who has spent nearly twelve years in prison for her faith, reveals that authorities appropriated a sand processing factory her husband had been constructing just a week before its launch. “He was disqualified, too!” she wrote in her letter.

In 2009, seven leaders of the Baha’i community, collectively known as Yaran (friends or helpers), including Sabet, were arrested. They were sentenced by a revolutionary court to 20 years in prison on fabricated charges, including "insulting" Islamic sanctities, propaganda against the regime, and alleged spying for Israel, for which the prosecutor had sought death sentences.

Some of the charges, including espionage, were dropped by an appeal court in 2010, resulting in a reduction of their sentences to 10 years. However, authorities reinstated the original 20-year sentences in 2011.

All members of the Yaran group were released from prison between September 2017 and December 2018. However, Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, another female member of the group, were arrested again on August 1, 2022.

first editions of dahi and yaran!

dahi/yaran summarised

dahi - he/they

a prince banished to another universe, who remembers absolutely nothing of his past life, has lost his identity, and is starting all over again

yaran - he/him

I closed every social media account I had in December 2020.

There was no farewell post. No announcement. I did not write a piece explaining why. I just stopped. Logged out. Deactivated.

Covid had pulled the emergency brake on everything. The hotel I was running had emptied out. The kitchens I had spent my life inside had gone quiet. And for the first time in almost two decades, I had something I had completely lost track of somewhere along the way.

Time. Proper, uninterrupted, mine.

I am a chef. Have been since I was thirteen. I started as a pastry apprentice in a small bakery in Istanbul, carrying flour up five flights of stairs because that was what apprentices did. I am forty-nine now. I have run kitchens and hotels on four continents. I have cooked alongside Paul Pairet, Pierre Hermé, Joël Robuchon, Frédéric Anton. I hold a Guinness World Record. I have competed at the Culinary Olympics. I run a luxury hotel in Singapore.

And for most of those years, I had no idea why some of the most talented chefs I knew stayed broke while others quietly built lives that would outlast them.

Talent was never the answer.

Knowledge was.

That is what the silence taught me. In those five years, I started connecting dots I had been collecting for thirty-six years and never had time to look at. I went back through my own career, my friends' careers, the careers of people who had walked into kitchens with me at twenty and disappeared by forty. I started writing.

Five years later, in January of this year, the book came out. Rich Chef Poor Chef. It became a number one international bestseller faster than I expected. The forewords were written by two people I am proud to call mentors at different points of my life — Paul Pairet, and Cetin Sekercioglu, who runs Upgrading.CC and is one of the most respected leadership voices in our industry. Both of them said yes when I asked. I am still slightly surprised by that.

The book is now in four formats. Hardcover, paperback, eBook, and audiobook. I narrated the audiobook myself, with my Turkish accent intact, because that was the whole point. The voice is mine. The story is mine. The accent is mine. There is no version of this where someone else reads it for me and it still feels honest.

I am back on the internet now, slowly. A YouTube channel. A newsletter. This blog. One post at a time.

If you are a chef, a cook, a hotelier, or anyone who has ever wondered why the most talented people in the kitchen do not always end up the most financially free, the book is for you. If you are not, that is fine too. Some of these posts will be for you anyway.

Thank you for being here.

📖 Book: https://www.richchefpoorchef.com/category/all-products

📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@yusufyaran

🌐 Website: https://www.yusufyaran.com/