Ali uses his family connections to get her death sentence commuted by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself. One of her interrogators, Ali, has fallen in love with her.
On the day she is to be executed, she is led out in front of a firing squad, blindfolded, and just as she is about to be shot to death, a last-second clemency spares her life. During this time, Marina writes, the only thing that allowed her to survive was clinging to her "Christian forbearance" – her strong religious belief was a way to keep sane. As she is beaten and tortured repeatedly, she watches many of her friends die either because of the way they are treated or through execution. In prison, Marina is placed on death row. Soon afterwards, on January 15, 1982, the teenage Marina was arrested and immediately imprisoned in Tehran’s most feared place: Evin Prison, the site of torture and abuse. Then, after asking her calculus teacher to continue teaching the class math instead of switching to an all-Islamic lecture, Marina led thirty other girls on a walkout.
She published several articles in the school newspaper arguing against replacing the standard curriculum with pro-government propaganda. The sixteen-year-old Marina protested the changes the government was putting in place – particularly as they affected her school and education. When Marina was in high school, the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Islamic Revolutionaries, and overnight the country became a repressive and punitive state run on fundamentalist Islamic principles. As she remembers her childhood, it was a happy and normal one: church, school, summers in a small country cottage, and the beginnings of a relationship with a church friend Andre Nemat. Her mother was a hairdresser and her father taught dance. Marina grew up in a Russian Orthodox family in Tehran, Iran – a descendant of the wave of Russians who fled to Iran during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Published in 2006, many years after Marina’s traumatic experiences, and after she finally gathered the courage to speak out about what she had gone through, the book traces her childhood before and after the Islamic Revolution that toppled Iran’s monarchy and replaced it with Ayatollah Khomeini’s totalitarian theocracy.
The autobiography Prisoner of Tehran tells the story of author Marina Nemat’s teenage imprisonment in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.
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