“Our guide would show us the lights in the distance and tell us we were nearly there. But I knew it was a lie. Those lights were at least a few days away.”

Shabnam Ighani’s happy and carefree life shattered after the revolution of the Islamic Republic in 1979, bringing discrimination for her Bahá’i faith and being a female, a marriage she felt trapped in, and a desire only to escape and build a better future for her family. Determined, Shabnam fled Iran with only what she could carry and her two young sons.

Follow Shabnam on her harrowing and triumphant escape from Iran, and discover the 10 self-made rules she used to build a new future for her family, free to mix into society with the freedom to fight for a better future.