The Plight of the Baha'is In Iran

[RonPrice]

I became involved in the Baha'i Faith back in the 1950s in Canada. My mother joined this new world Faith in 1953 and two years later the first serious persecution of the Baha'is in Iran in my lifetime occurred. This persecution has hit the media periodically all my life. The article below is just the latest in this long history, a history going back to the 1840s. The event I mention occurred 8 months ago, and the situation has got worse.-Ron Price, Australia

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Six Baha'i leaders in Iran were seized and imprisoned back in May 2008. The act prompted condemnation and concern from the international Baha'i community and a top American religious freedom panel. A U.S. panel says attacks on Iran's Baha'is have increased since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president. Iranian intelligence agents searched the homes of the six and then whisked them away, according to the Baha'i's World News Service. The report said the six were sent to Evin prison. The arrests followed the detention in March of another Baha'i leader.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry could not immediately be reached for comment, and the incident has not been mentioned in Iran's state-run media. "Their only crime is their practice of the Baha'i faith," said Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Baha'i international community to the United Nations. The U.S. State Department issued a statement "strongly" condeming the arrests, which it said were "a clear violation of the Iranian regime's international commitments and obligations to respect international religious freedom norms.

"We urge the authorities to release all Baha'is currently in detention and cease their ongoing harassment of the Iranian Baha'i community," the U.S. statement said. The group -- regarded as the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran -- says the arrests are reminiscent of roundups and killings of Baha'is that took place in Iran two decades ago.

"Especially disturbing is how this latest sweep recalls the wholesale arrest or abduction of the members of two national Iranian Baha'i governing councils in the early 1980s -- which led to the disappearance or execution of 17 individuals," Dugal said.

"The early morning raids on the homes of these prominent Baha'is were well-coordinated, and it is clear they represent a high-level effort to strike again at the Baha'is and to intimidate the Iranian Baha'i community at large," she added. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom -- a government panel that advises the president and Congress -- condemned the Wednesday arrests, as well as another in March. The commission chairman called the acts the "latest sign of the rapidly deteriorating status of religious freedom and other human rights in Iran."

The commission said the six were members of an informal Baha'i group that tended to the needs of the community after the Iranian government banned all formal Baha'i activity in 1983. The commission chairman, Michael Cromartie, echoed the feared that the "development signaled a return to the darkest days of repression in Iran in the 1980s when Baha'is were routinely arrested, imprisoned, and executed." The Baha'is are regarded as "apostates" in Iran and have been persecuted there for years.

"Since 1979, Iranian authorities have killed more than 200 Baha'i leaders, thousands have been arrested and imprisoned, and more than 10,000 have been dismissed from government and university jobs," the commission said. The commission said that since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power a few years ago, Baha'is "have been harassed, physically attacked, arrested, and imprisoned."

"During the past year, young Baha'i schoolchildren in primary and secondary schools increasingly have been attacked, vilified, pressured to convert to Islam, and in some cases, expelled on account of their religion." The commission said other groups in the predominantly Shiite Muslim country of Iran, such Sufis and Christians, are subject to intimidation and harassment. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory statements about Israel have "created a climate of fear" among the country's Jews.

The Baha'is say they have 5 million members across the globe, and about 300,000 in Iran. The Baha'is say their faith "is the youngest of the world's independent religions" and that its basic theme is that "humanity is one single race and that the day has come for its unification in one global society." They say their founder, Baha'u'llah (1817-1892), is regarded by Baha'is as "the most recent in the line of Messengers of God that stretches back beyond recorded time and that includes Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, Christ and Muhammad."-Posted by Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania

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The Baha'is have had a horrific time in the last 150++ years. I wrote the following prose poem to describe a tangential context and throw a contrasting light on the plight of the Baha'is.--Ron

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THE GROWTH OF AN IDEA

In watching the ABC TV’s four part series “Mafia: Mafia? What Mafia,” screened on Monday evenings at 9:35 to 10:30 p.m. from 25 February 2008 to 17 March 2008, I could not help but notice the stark contrast between two organizations that had their origins in the mid-nineteenth century but with psycho-ethnic-national-spiritual-historical roots that are obscure and complex even to the specialist. One of these organizations I belonged to and one I had heard about, read about and seen discussed in the media for half a century, from my youth in the 1950s and 1960s until just yesterday. After watching yet another discussion of the mafia on ABV TV, I felt moved to write this mostly prose-poem of contrast and comparison, two threads in my life: one a thin one I only experienced in the print and electronic media and the other that had become part of my inner life for over half a century.

At the end of the 19th century The Sicilian ethnographer, a Palermo physician, Giuseppe Pitre wrote: “the mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of ideas or interests.”1 Beginning with this consciousness, this paradigmatic psychology, an entrenched culture or “industry of violence” had developed in Sicily by the mid-19th century. Leopoldo Franchetti described the mafia in Sicily in 1876, in one of the first written reports on the mafia, as a culture, a way of life, an industry of organized destructiveness and terror deeply rooted in the institutions of mid-19th century Sicily. By the 1960s this culture had become embodied in an international organization whose direction of development was logical, indeed, hardly surprising given its embryonic origins and ethos. -Ron Price with thanks to Nancy Triolo, “Mediterranean Exotica and the Mafia "Other" or Problems of Representation in Pitre's Texts,” Cultural Anthropology,Vol.8 No.3, pp.306-316.

At the end of the 19th century the well-known Cambridge University Orientalist Edward Granville Browne in 1890 met Bahá'u'lláh, the successor to the Báb whose teachings had been both popularized and anathematized in the 1840s in an Iranian bloodbath far more extensive than anything that occurred in Sicily. By 1890 Bahá'u'lláh had been a prisoner and an exile from Iran for almost 40 years. His teachings were at first shrouded in obscurity but gradually came to light in a vast literary output and exegesis by His successors. His followers were and still are considered heretics in Iran. Some 20,000 Babis, Baha’u’llah’s precursors, and Baha’is were brutally exterminated in the half century 1844 to 1894.

Today Baha’u’llah is recognized by several million of His followers around the world as the Divine Teacher for this age. According to Bahá'í belief, such Teachers have included: Moses, Abraham, Christ, Muhammad, Krishna and Buddha, among others. They have appeared at intervals throughout history to found the world's great religious systems. They have been sent by an utterly mysterious, completely obscure, profoundly perplexing, forever unknowable Creator to enable us to bring human civilization to ever higher levels of achievement and knowledge, larger units of social and political organization, indeed, new and wonderful configurations deriving from the power of thought. –Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 5 March 2008.

A lot can happen in 150 years,

on this earth, this veil of tears.

It has been a century & a half

of endless fear....still it is near.

With feather not with hammer

I would wish to lightly brush

the sleep-fast windows of this

dozing world where my brother,

unwitting, lies innocently curled

as the flames leap lush and the rank

winds yammer...tongues lick the door,

lap the sashes. Wingless, I clamber;

songless scream surrounded by patterns

of private withdrawal as obscure in their

psychology as they are transparent in their

very noisey and noiseless external shape.

Ron Price

5 March 2008

[JB Globe]

The situation of the Baha'is in Iran provides just another example of the need for serious reform if not revolution.

The Mullahtocracy can do what it wants in regards to crushing reform movements or oppressing religious and ethnic minorities, but eventually they are not going to be able to escape the demographic time-bomb that's creeping up on them. You should take solace in the fact that the vast majority of Iranians are under 30 and the vast majority of them are opposed to the current regime. It's power base has been weakening for years and will only continue to erode.

Hopefully the next president of the United States will realize that bullying Iran only serves to give the Mullahs the only issue they have traction with: standing up to foreign influence. Without that issue to help them, they're left with a terrible economic situation and a regime most people don't like - it will only be a matter of time before they're forced to face their future.

[RonPrice]

The situation of the Baha'is in Iran provides just another example of the need for serious reform if not revolution.

The Mullahtocracy can do what it wants in regards to crushing reform movements or oppressing religious and ethnic minorities, but eventually they are not going to be able to escape the demographic time-bomb that's creeping up on them. You should take solace in the fact that the vast majority of Iranians are under 30 and the vast majority of them are opposed to the current regime. It's power base has been weakening for years and will only continue to erode.

Hopefully the next president of the United States will realize that bullying Iran only serves to give the Mullahs the only issue they have traction with: standing up to foreign influence. Without that issue to help them, they're left with a terrible economic situation and a regime most people don't like - it will only be a matter of time before they're forced to face their future.

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Thanks, JB Globe, foryour response. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but I did not see your response until today. Let me add the following before closing with yet another comment on Iran, a comment which draws on a recent statement from the internationally elected body at the apex of Baha'i administration:

Iran's crisis of civilization will be resolved neither by blind imitation of an obviously defective Western culture nor by retreat into medieval ignorance. The answer to the dilemma was enunciated on the very threshold of the crisis, in the clearest and most compelling language, by a distinguished Son of Iran Who is today honoured in every continent of the world, but sadly not in the land of His birth. Persia's poetic genius captures the irony: "I searched the wide world over for my Beloved, while my Beloved was waiting for me in my own home." The world's appreciation of Bahá'u'lláh came perhaps most explicitly into focus on 29 May 1992, the centenary of His death, when the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies met in solemn session to pay tribute to Him, to His teachings and to the services rendered to humanity by the community He founded. On that occasion, the Speaker of the Chamber and spokespersons from every party rose, successively, to express their profound admiration of One who was described in their addresses as the Author of "the most colossal religious work written by the pen of a single Man", a message that "reaches out to humanity as a whole, without petty differences of nationality, race, limits or belief".

What has been the response in His native land to a Figure whose influence has brought such honour to the name of Iran? From the middle years of the 19 century when He arose to champion this Cause, this new message, and despite the reputation His philanthropy and intellectual gifts had won, Bahá'u'lláh was made the object of a virulent campaign of persecution. In recognizing His mission, the forefathers of the present Baha'i community in Iran, had the imperishable glory of sharing in His sufferings, imperishable because such suffering lends greater meaning to their present struggle. Throughout the ensuing decades, those who have remained faithful to His Cause in spite of grievous hardship, who have sacrificed for it and promoted its civilizing message to the most remote regions of the planet have known your their portion of abuse, bereavement and humiliation--indeed each Bahá'í family in Iran, each in their own way.

One of the most appalling afflictions, in terms of its tragic consequences, has been the slander of Bahá'u'lláh's Cause perpetrated by that privileged caste to whom Persia's masses had been taught to look for guidance in spiritual matters. For over 150 years, every medium of public information-- pulpit, press, radio, television and even scholarly publication--has been perverted to create an image of the Bahá'í community and its beliefs that is grossly false and whose sole aim is to arouse popular contempt and antagonism. No calumny has been too vile; no lie too outrageous. At no point during those long years were the Baha'is, the victims of this vilification, given an opportunity, however slight, to defend themselves and to provide the facts that would have exposed such calculated poisoning of the public mind.....enough for now....I rest my case, a case that will be with us for some time to come until, as you say, JB Globe, that demographic time-bomb which is creeping up on Iran's religious establishment goes off. My thinking is that it has already gone off but, like many a bomb, it is seen only in the years of its after effects.-Ron

Edited December 31, 2008 by RonPrice

[August1991]

Thanks, JB Globe, foryour response. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but I did not see your response until toplanet day..

Ron, you're a one-trick pony but you raise a good point ignored in the West, and on this forum.

To pick an example, Iran is a one-party state. Iranians, like too many people on this planet, do not understand the Scientific Method. (Many Iranians are engineers and medical doctors but they don't understand the basic precepts of Galileo and Voltaire. Sad but true.)

America just had an election and a black man named Hussein won.

Ron, go figure.

Edited December 31, 2008 by August1991

[Chris in KW]

Hopefully the next president of the United States will realize that bullying Iran only serves to give the Mullahs the only issue they have traction with: standing up to foreign influence. Without that issue to help them, they're left with a terrible economic situation and a regime most people don't like - it will only be a matter of time before they're forced to face their future.

Well said!

[RonPrice]

Well said!

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I could add much more on this subject but, for now, I rest my case. I may write again on this subject( from your one-trick pony as August1991 pointed out), if there are more reactions here. Thanks for the comments thusfar, folks.-Ron