Bishop Hassan Dehqani
Born 14th May 1920 Taft, Iran
Died 29th April, 2008, Oakham, England
Bishop of Iran 1961-1990; President Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East 1976 – 1986; Assistant Bishop of Winchester 1982-2005;
Christian writer
Elam Trustees and staff joined Iranian and Middle Eastern church leaders and around four hundred others in Winchester Cathedral at the funeral of the late Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, Bishop of Iran from 1961 to 1990. The Bishop of Winchester presided over the service and the celebration of Holy Communion, while the address was given by the late Bishop’s son in law, Revd Francis-Dehqani. As the cathedral choir sung the Nunc Dimmitis, the coffin was carried out to a graveyard just outside the cathedral. As it was lowered into the earth many wept quietly as they remembered the Christian man who had served them faithfully for so many years.
In Winchester, and in Tehran, Isphahan, and Shiraz in Iran where memorial services were also taking place friends indeed had much to remember. There was the Bishop’s ever lively conversation; his extremely sharp mind, always ready to question and probe; his passion for Persian poetry and just the sound of Persian words; his love of pictures, and his own talent at water painting. All of this and more was set in the fixed contexts of his unswerving commitment to Jesus Christ, His church, and his own family, and since 1980 the living pain of the loss of his only son Bahram who was murdered in his place at the beginning of the revolution.
When Bishop Hassan, the son of a shoemaker from the obscure village of Taft near Yazd in central Iran, learned that in 1994 he was to be buried in Winchester Cathedral, he wrote to thank the Dean, adding with characteristic humour, ‘I am so excited, I can hardly wait to die.’ The cover of his autobiography in Persian entitled ‘One Well; Two Sources’ sums up well the remarkable journey he has made. At the top there is a picture of him as a little boy with his mother in Taft, at the bottom he is with his wife walking towards Winchester Cathedral.
Bishop Hassan’s Christian journey began with the wish of his dying mother when he was just five years old. She had become a Christian working for missionaries in Yazd and then returned to Taft to run the village dispensary. Aware that she would suffer an early death she asked that her son be given a Christian education. He was sent to the Stuart Memorial College in Isphahan where the principal was William J. Thompson and here in his teens he became a committed Christian and was baptised in 1938.
After graduating as a teacher from Tehran University in 1943, he did two years military service and then began working for the Anglican diocese under the same William Thompson who had now become the Bishop. He was selected for ordination and sent to be trained at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, England where he was helped a lot in his faith by that great pillar of Anglicanism, the late Bishop Stephen Neil. Once ordained in 1949 he became the priest in charge of St Luke’s Church in Isphahan for ten years. In 1952, during Mossadeq's bitter dispute between Iran and Britain over oil nationalisation, a time when anti-British feeling was at its height throughout Iran, Hassan married Margaret Thompson, the daughter of the Bishop Thompson. On Thompson’s retirement, Hassan in 1961 became the first ethnic Persian Bishop consecrated in Iran since the seventh century. As well as expanding the educational services of the church, perhaps Bishop’s greatest contribution was to make his church thoroughly indigenous. In 1976 his success as a Christian leader in Iran was noticed further a field and he was appointed as the first President Bishop of the new Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East.
In his prime it would have seemed that Bishop Hassan had many years ahead of him to have a decisive impact on the Church in the Middle East, but in 1979 the Islamic Revolution swept through Iran and one of its first targets was the small Anglican Church, considered by fanatics to be nothing but a nest of English spies. Schools and hospitals were taken over, bank accounts frozen, missionaries were imprisoned, and Christian blood was shed. Revd Arastoo Sayyah in Shiraz had his throat cut, and two gunmen broke into the bishop’s flat in Isphahan early in the morning and fired six bullets at the bishop’s head from the end of his bed. So confident were the assassins, that shortly after a car came to a nearby hospital asking for the bishop’s corpse. But the gunmen had missed: four bullets left a halo in the pillow round the top of his head; one went into the mattress, and one into Margaret’s hand which she had flung over her husband. The Bishop then had to leave for a pre-planned conference and he was persuaded not to return. Tragically his son, Bahram, working as a teacher, did not leave: he was shot on May 6th, 1980. Bishop could not attend the funeral, but sent a prayer which circulated the world
O God
Bahram’s blood multiplies the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls
So when his murderers stand before thee on the Day of Judgement
Remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives
And forgive
The great ‘enriching’ that Bishop saw as being God’s purpose in allowing his son to be murdered in his place was for him to write. And though completely faithful to his church duties in exile in England, it was writing that he gave himself to. By the end of his life he had published over twenty books, including his Magnus Opus, the three volume, ‘Christ and Christianity Among The Iranians’. Poignantly he called his publishing house, Sohrab – the name of the son in the great Persian legend who was killed unwittingly by his own father, Rostam. For a number of years Elam Ministries has shared the stocking and distribution of the Bishop’s books and all his titles can be ordered from our web-site.
The Bishop was a good friend of Elam Ministries. He was on the Board of Reference; he came to visit the centre near Guildford; and was often in touch with the previous editor of Elam’s Persian magazine ‘Kalameh’, Mojdeh Shirvanian, the daughter of Abdul Masih Shirvanian, a close school friend from his days at Stuart Memorial College. Five years ago she and Issa Dibaj, son of the martyr Mehdi Dibaj, conducted a long filmed interview with the Bishop which was made into a documentary and has been shown on satellite TV a number of times. It is available from the Elam office. Another school friend from those days is Seth Yeghnazar, the father of Elam’s founder and director, Sam Yeghnazar. Now 97 ‘Papa’ Seth as he is affectionately known to Iranian Christians wanted very much to be at the Bishop’s funeral, but he was too frail.
As the Bishop left this world he was surrounded by his three daughters, their husbands, and of course his wife, Margaret whose love and devotion had constantly strengthened him for more than fifty five years. At the funeral her dignity in grief and the warmth and friendliness she showed to the hundreds who queued to give their condolences showed the strength of her Christian faith that has constantly upheld her.
At the end of Mojdeh Shirvanian’s interview with the Bishop she asked him what he would like to be remembered for. His simple answer is one we can all learn from – ‘I want to be remembered as someone faithful to his calling’.
Elam Ministries, May 2008