A former Muslim woman who received Christ as her personal Lord and Savior has since joining ministry led more than 1 500 Muslims to Christ.
She leads two churches and trains other Christian organisations how to reach out to and disciple Muslim background believers.
Annahita Parsan, a journalist and an ordained minister in the Church of Sweden revealed during an exclusive interview with CBN News that no one would have thought that she, a Muslim woman who was simply trying to stay alive in an abusive marriage in Iran, would one day lead two churches.
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The 48-year-old told CBN News that during her abuse, she read the Bible, but kept it a secret from her husband. Although she began to feel the peace and love of God, the abuse proved to be too much.
Parsan admits being beaten with a shovel by her then-husband. As a battered wife, with bruises and cuts all over her body, Parsan eventually tried to kill herself with pills, but she survived.
Annahita Parsan’s journey to Christ and across two continents is one that included several brushes with death.
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Parsan, her husband and her children fled Iran through the mountains to Turkey in 1984, where she and her daughter faced more danger, before landing in a Turkish prison. They would finally make it to Denmark where she divorced her still-abusive husband, and also heard the Gospel for the first time. Then she moved to Sweden where she and her two children walked into a church and prayed, “We are Christians, from now on.”
Parsan revealed during the CBN interview that she entered ministry in 2012 and has led more than 1 500 Muslims to Christ.
“I work specifically with the Muslim community, many are also Farsi-speaking,” Parsan said. “Sometimes they come to the church because they are curious. Sometimes they are asylum seekers and sometimes they are just visiting from places like Iran and Afghanistan, so they secretly get baptised and then they go back.”
According to CBN News, Muslim immigration has also made Sweden a home for dangerous radicals, and Parsan said she has received death threats, and lives with the knowledge she could be killed.
“I have serious threats at least a couple of times per year, a threat of a knife attack or a bomb attack. I have a police officer attached to my case I can always call, and we have security during our services. I have other threats from my own distant family members,” she added. “But for me, what I do is worth it.
“I hope people out there who have lost their faith, will maybe hear my story and be inspired to come back,” Parsan said.
As a young woman living what seemed like a hopeless existence in Iran, Annahita Parsan saw no plan and no purpose in her abusive marriage, only random violence. But God had a plan.
“God loved me and he was in my life from the beginning,” she said.
It is rather unfortunate your husband was not a Muslim in the first place. A practicing Muslim never abuses a woman, for it is not the teaching of Islam.
From the quran: Sura 4:34 “If you fear high-handedness from your wives, remind them [of the teaching of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them.” Plain as rain.
May be not. But why is wife battering more rampant in Islamic countries and amongst Muslims. Visit Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, to mention but a few, for a first hand experience. The
first step in solving a problem is acknowledging it.Please don’t shout Islamophobia!
This is one of the most remarkable stories of the Grace of Jesus I have ever read. And such an effective witness now! I pray Jesus will keep her and make her Gospel minisry even more fruitful!
Because Abdul’s comment is questionable, I wish to furnish the following extract from a thesis (not mine) that I have on my desktop:
“DIVINELY ENDORSED MISOGYNY (DISLIKE OF, CONTEMPT FOR, OR INGRAINED PREJUDICE AGAINST WOMEN). ( I considered it advisable to include the definition of the word “misogyny.)
Islam declares that women are intellectually and morally inferior to men.
It requires the witness of two women to equal that of one man (surah 4:11).
The Quran sanctions polygamy of up to four wives, but women cannot marry
more than one husband, affirming that men are a “degree above them, and
Allah is Mighty, Wise” (surah 2:228).
Men can divorce their wives, but women cannot divorce their husbands (surah 2:228).
The Quran sanctions men to deny sexual relations and even beat their wives if they deem necessary (surah4:34).
Further, Muslim women must completely cover their bodies in public,
stand behind their husbands, and kneel behind them in prayer, and in some
respects are considered to simply be instruments of their husband’s sexual desires (surah 2:223).
Women are also deemed inferior spiritually, as Caner and Caner quote
two Hadiths stating: “Muhammad said, ‘I was shown Hell-fire and that the
majority of its dwellers are women.’ Bad omen is in the women…after me I have not left any affliction more harmful to men than women’” (2002:134).
Modern scholarship, particularly in the West reinterprets such Islamic texts to grant women equality in most spheres of life politically, economically, educationally, etc., boasting that the modern Islamic woman has more rights than those typically granted to modern western women (see Braswell 1996:3418-3420).”
This kind of reversal-interpretation is unconvincing in light of even a surface reading of the implicated texts, and the biography of Muhammad and his contemporaries.
Such inverted interpretations are also unconvincing in light of
how the vast majority of women are valued in Islamic countries around the
globe. Many contemporary books document a sampling of the horrors done to
women in Islamic contexts (e.g. Goodwin’s Price of Honor and Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter).
Richardson cites a typically horrific example:
A woman is raped on a bus in Egypt and Fundamentalists began
saying it was the girl’s fault. She was wearing a skirt…not a hijab. The
media also began to blame her…Even women said it was her fault…she
was working, not staying at home (2003:43).
Alternatively, Jesus persisted in elevating the value and role of women
throughout His ministry far beyond the cultural and religious norms of the day, emphatically honoring women to equality (e.g. John 4).
The New Testament writers further teach equality of men and women before God (e.g. Galatians 3:28) and include naming women in the very lineage of the Messiah, God’s son (Matthew 1:1-17).
Christian women are assured the same standing before God
eternally and granted the same high honor and sacrificial love that He bestows on His church in this life and the next (Ephesians 5:22-33).”