How art saved Morad Tahbaz from the brutality of Iran’s Evin Prison

US, UK and Iranian citizen spent nearly six years imprisoned in the notorious Tehran jail

Stuck in a tiny room deep inside Iran’s notorious Evin prison, Morad Tahbaz escaped the harsh reality of solitary confinement by creating art out of the grooves that lined the cement walls that imprisoned him.

“I would look for animal shapes within these lines and I would count them,” Mr Tahbaz said.

The Iranian, American and UK citizen spent nearly six years in Evin after he was arrested in January 2018 on charges of espionage. Mr Tahbaz, who lived in the US state of Connecticut was visiting Iran as part of his work with the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, an organisation he established to help protect Iran’s endangered animals and ecosystems.

Early in his detention, Mr Tahbaz married his lifelong love of animals with a burgeoning interest in art. At first it was a way to pass time, but it quickly became something much more profound.

“You just have to manage yourself and how you do it, and how you find interests and hobbies, whatever you can do to keep your sanity,” Mr Tahbaz told The National. “I started drawing, then I started trying to understand Persian carpet weaving, which I always had an interest in, and I didn't know anything about it.”

Mr Tahbaz designed 40 carpets while in prison. He smuggled the designs out to his wife who then found a carpet weaver able to bring the prints to life. On top of the carpets, he taught himself how to do woodworking and engraving and constantly challenged himself to produce more and more works.

“I kept myself very busy. I really didn't have too much spare time, and for me, that was critical, because my thoughts were, 'OK, I've got to finish this piece, or I've got to finish that drawing, and what do I want to do next?' So I always had a programme for myself, as opposed to thinking, 'when am I going to get out of here?'.”

Much of his work focused on animals, in particular the Persian lion, which went extinct in Iran in 1963, a symbol of power and strength in Iranian culture. His detailed sketches, done in fine pencil, bring to life Iran’s once-rich wildlife. There are cheetahs and leopards, owls and elk, each one carefully signed and dated defiantly from Evin.

Art helped keep his mind busy and his thoughts away from the memories of his most recent interrogation or what his captors had in store for him next. In an exclusive interview with The National, his first with the international press since being released in September 2023, Mr Tahbaz outlined the years of torture he experienced at the hands of the Iranian regime.

It included frequent interrogations, which often became physical, horrendous medical care and the constant threat that his situation could somehow get worse. A cancer survivor before being arrested, prison doctors at one point told him his cancer had returned and put him through multiple rounds of chemotherapy, all the while trying to force a confession out of him.

“I'm lying in a bed, I’ve got a serum in my arm and I have an interrogator come up to me and say: ‘You know what, why don’t you sign, I'll write this thing out, your confession, I'll write it out for you. You just sign it, and then we'll get you out of here and away'.”

There was a point, during which Mr Tahbaz was in desperate need of a new catheter – a side effect of the prostate cancer he had survived years earlier – when he was close to giving up. Unable to pass water, he was convinced he would die in prison.

“That was very, very trying,” he explained. “Because there were times that I got to a point that I said: ‘I'm not going to make it. But you know what, I’ve had a good life, I've seen much of the world. I've had a great family, and it is what it is’, and I could see the kind of writing on the wall that I'm not going to get out of here in one piece.”

But he did, thanks to the persistent efforts of the administration of US President Joe Biden, who had made returning US citizens wrongfully detained abroad a priority of his single term in office. Mr Tahbaz had been sentenced to 10 years in prison but was released in a complex prisoner exchange in which the US allowed a South Korean bank to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian assets that can be used solely for humanitarian purposes.

The administration took heat from Republican lawmakers for allowing Iran to access the funds.

“I remain deeply concerned that the administration’s decision to waive sanctions to facilitate the transfer of $6 billion in funds for Iran, the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism, creates a direct incentive for America’s adversaries to conduct future hostage-taking,” Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement at the time.

But for Mr Tahbaz and the four other Americans released in the deal, including Emad Shargi and Siamak Namazi, it was the right thing to do. “It is easy to criticise, especially when you're not in the shoes of the families or the people being held hostage, tortured, when their life's in danger, you're disconnected so you can criticise, especially if you're from an opposing political party. It's very easy to do,” Mr Tahbaz said.

“The truth of it is, it's a little more complex … My belief is that whenever there are opportunities to free Americans that have been detained illegally, unlawfully, for nothing other than bargaining, and if you can find the opportunity to scrabble together a deal that doesn't cost the American taxpayer anything, it should be done.”

Mr Tahbaz believes he was taken because the Iranian regime wanted leverage ahead of then-president Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal. Despite that, he doesn’t solely blame Mr Trump for his arrest in early 2018.

“It's hard to blame an individual,” he said. “But I think trying to cater to one constituency versus another for their own political gain generally carries a huge cost, and I think they were kind of blind to what that cost would be.”