By Sandra Marroquín —
Only 9 years old, Aynaz Cyrus was arrested for singing publicly in Iran. She was put in handcuffs and hauled off to detention center. Her parents were called by the morality police to come pick her up. Her mother, a Koranic teacher, and her father, a sheik, felt great shame.
“I was arrested for having nail polish on, I was arrested for singing publicly,” said Anni Cyrus on Mohamad Faridi’s YouTube channel. “I was arrested for sitting in the front passenger seat of a cab, I was arrested for attending a party where girls and boys were all dancing, I was arrested for walking alone past curfew of sharia.”
This is the world of sharia. In Iran, Anni, at age 12, was sentenced to 75 lashes of the whip – for taking the front seat in a cab. (Her grandmother paid off the torturers to get her out of 50 of them.)
“I was just a simple normal healthy teenager,” Anni says. “My father tried to ‘get me under control’ before I would ruin his reputation. But he couldn’t. By nature, I just love dancing. I love music. Music got me through a lot of tough times.”
Since father couldn’t get control of his daughter, he sold her off to get married. She was 13. (In Islam, a 9-year-old can marry because Mohammad married Ayeesha at age 6 but didn’t consummate until she was 9.)
For $50 (in U.S. currency), she became a wife to an old man.
“He owned me,” she says. “For a year-and-a-half, if he wasn’t beating me, he was raping me. If he wasn’t raping me, he was beating me.”
She went to sharia court asking for divorce. But the judge did her a favor by not notifying her husband. He told her to obey her husband and submit without complaint. If he would have notified the husband, she would have legally been beaten even more severely.
Meanwhile, she studied the Koran to try to understand what was happening to her. What she found was that the abuse was all legal, considered right and righteous, in the Koran.
“The more I read the Koran, the more I started to realize that I am in a cult that worships Satan,” she says. The Koran calls Allah the “greatest of deceivers.” When she read that, she realized Allah could not possibly be God.
Because she happened to be born in Iran, Anni was in quite a predicament. She had no freedom of conscience and was subject to the tortures of her husband, reinforced by the legal system.
As she grew slightly older, she realized she had better play along with the system to avoid the beatings. She always wore the hijab. She prayed five times a day.
Finally, her grandmother came to the rescue. Realizing that Anni was suffering, Grandma sold all her gold to get her smuggled out of Iran. Anni became a refugee in Turkey and then in the United States.
“She literally rescued me from death,” Anni says.
Anni was a refugee in Turkey until she turned 18 and was accepted as a refugee to America.
Anni became an atheist. But in America, friends began to present the Gospel to her. She rejected it over and over.
In 2017, she was invited to share her story in a church, not because she was Christian but because it would educate Christians about the destructiveness of Islam. She repeated her bitterness over being sold for a meager $50 to salvage her father’s reputation.
Her story was filmed and posted on YouTube. Within 48 hours, it received 1.5M views.
She was astonished. A friend called and asked her if she had purchased views.
“No,” she responded, and before she knew what she was saying, she blurted out, “I think it was the Lord.”
Suddenly, she felt her heart held lovingly inside.
In her left ear, she heard the still small voice of the Lord: Don’t you worry. You’re heavenly Father loves you.
“That was the moment I stopped running from him,” she says. “I had no reason to run and had a million reasons to listen to him.”
She surrendered her life to Jesus Christ as her Savior and Lord and was born again.
In 2009, she founded LiveUpToFreedom to rescue people out of Isalmic countries, such as child brides and political prisoners.
She went public in 2015 with her expose of Islam in response to President Obama’s declaration: “Islam is part of America.”
She responded with a resounding, “Never.” Her video response to Obama went viral. “Let me be clear: Fight, or get your hijabs ready, ladies, your beards ready, gentlemen.”
She does educational videos exposing the abhorrent things taught in the Koran.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here
About this writer: Sandra Marroquín studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near Los Angeles.
