A few days from now the Iranian government will put on trial a schoolteacher, a social worker and an optometrist, along with four other innocent members of the Bahá'í community of Iran, on unsupported charges of "spying for Israel, insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the Islamic Republic."
The two women and five men have been imprisoned without access to their lawyer, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, for close to a year. They are the latest victims in a breathtaking array of attacks against the Bahá'í community that have intensified under the current government. Bahá'í homes have been torched, Bahá'í holy places demolished and Bahá'í children vilified for their beliefs.
Government documents instruct universities to expel Bahá'í students "once it becomes known that they are Bahá'ís." They order the military to create lists of Bahá'ís and to secretly monitor the activities of the community. Speaking about the Bahá'ís in 2005, General Romeo Dallaire declared that this kind of "inventorying and targeting of citizens, based on their religious beliefs or racial heritage, is the first ugly step toward systematic violence and crimes against humanity."
The 350,000 Bahá'ís in Iran are the country's largest religious minority, but they enjoy no rights under the Iranian constitution. The irony is that, unlike the smaller Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian communities, the Bahá'ís believe in Islam. Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the faith, refers to Islam as "the blessed and luminous religion of God," and to Muhammad as "the refulgent lamp of supreme Prophethood."
Yet although it began in Iran, the Bahá'í Faith today is no more an Iranian religion than Christianity is a Judean one. Iran contains less than 5% of the world's Bahá'ís, the overwhelming majority of whom live in India, Africa and Latin America. Bahá'ís come from 2000 national, ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The Britannica names the Bahá'í Faith as the second most widespread religion on earth, with "significant communities" in over 200 countries--surpassing Islam itself. The first Canadians became Bahá'ís in 1897.
Since the 1840s, Bahá'ís have been the scapegoats of fundamentalist clerics and successive Iranian regimes. In the 19th Century many thousands were murdered by government authorities and mobs incited by mullahs. After the 1979 Islamic revolution over 200 Bahá'ís were executed. The record of persecution is littered with insanities that would be funny if they weren't so horrifying. Two men were sent to prison in 1996 for "working against the country's security by holding a children's art exhibit." Married women have been charged with prostitution because Iranian law doesn't recognize their Bahá'í marriages and no civil marriage law exists. And in 1983 seven young women, including a seventeen-year-old girl, were hanged for teaching the equivalent of Sunday school to Bahá'í children and refusing to deny their faith.
The absurdity of the current charges of insulting religious sanctities should already be obvious. The "evidence" for espionage has always been that the Bahá'í World Centre is located in what is now Israel. But it is only there because the Iranian and Ottoman governments imprisoned Bahá'u'lláh there in 1868, eighty years before the state of Israel was born.
The Bahá'í World Centre maintains cordial relations with Israel because, on Bahá'u'lláh's order, the community obeys all governments and never involves itself in partisan politics. "In every country where any of this people reside," he wrote, "they must behave towards the government of that country with loyalty, honesty and truthfulness." It's also why the Bahá'ís disbanded hundreds of elected governing councils in Iran almost the moment they were declared illegal in 1983, and why last Monday they agreed to suspend all informal activities as well, simply as an act of good faith.
Why, then, if the Bahá'ís have no political agenda, revere Islam and love their country, is their very existence so objectionable to the Iranian government? Bahá'ís follow a prophet who appeared after Muhammad. This fact of belief contradicts a clerical establishment that draws its popular legitimacy by claiming to represent the final messenger of God. This reason--pure religious intolerance--is proven by the fact that, repeatedly, Iranian Bahá'ís have been offered freedom from persecution in return for recanting their faith.
The Bahá'ís of Iran have endured persecution for 30 years now, yet they have refused to consider contravening the letter or spirit of Bahá'u'lláh's instructions against resorting to violence, to divisive political tactics or even to pointing fingers at individuals. As the prisoners wrote last Monday from their cells, all that Bahá'ís have ever asked of the Iranian government is that it live up to its commitments as a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Only international scrutiny prevents Iranian radicals from carrying out their worst intentions, and governments around the world have joined our Parliament in demanding the seven be released. But regardless of what happens in the coming days, the greater concern is what will happen once the story of this particular trial disappears from the headlines. If we allow the Bahá'ís of Iran to drop from our awareness, then the most fanatical elements of Iranian society will return to their cozy pattern of denouncing Bahá'ís from pulpits, kicking students out of school and bulldozing cemeteries--a systematic pattern of persecution that carries all the hallmarks of pending genocide.
A version of this article was published in the 13 March 2009 edition of Imprint, the University of Waterloo's official student newspaper
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