News

HOUSTON — On a blustery night the week before Mother’s Day, a woman and her daughter sat together on the sofa at a hair salon here. Nica Sabet had come to the beauty parlor after school, because it was where her mother, Nahid Sabet, worked. By this time, past 8 o’clock, the doors were locked and the customers gone, and Mrs. Sabet could tell the story that Nica had never heard in its entirety.

It was a Mother’s Day story, involving all the maternal mainstays of such stories: love, sacrifice, perseverance. Yet it was unlike any other Mother’s Day story, because all those familiar things happened amid an almost unimaginable climate of religious persecution.