Iranian Baha'is sentenced to prison were helping underprivileged youth Tutors and children gathered for class in Sahlabad, outside Shiraz, Iran. Such classes were shut down by the government in 2006.
The Bahá’í community of Iran, numbering about 300,000 people, is the largest non-Muslim religious minority in the country
Iran - or Persia as it was generally known in the West in the 19th century - is the cradle of the Bahá’í Faith. The Iranian Bahá’í community is the oldest Bahá’í community in the world and has suffered severe persecution from its very earliest days.
Bahá’í schools
The Bahá’í community needed to be self-reliant in the face of such persecution, and it learned to tend to its own social needs. Village schools were started by Bahá’ís in the 1880s. Primary and secondary schools were later established in towns and cities.
The Tarbíyat School for Boys was founded in Tehran around 1900, and the ground-breaking Tarbíyat School for Girls was established by 1911. Other Bahá’í schools were created in the cities of in Hamadan, Qazvin, Kashan, and Barfurush.
These schools were not just for Bahá’ís; pupils of any background were welcome. Half of the students at the Tehran schools came from Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian and Christian backgrounds. By 1920, some 10% of the approximately 28,000 primary and secondary school children in Iran were enrolled in Bahá’í-run schools. And yet, in the mid-1930s the Iranian government closed most of the Bahá’í schools because of their religious affiliation.
Persecution
Today, Bahá’ís in Iran are frequently denied access to education and employment. They cannot officially assemble, nor can they maintain their sacred administrative institutions.
Following the 1979 Islamic revolution, Bahá’ís suffered a resurgence of particularly virulent and violent oppression. Some 200 Bahá’ís were killed, either executed or murdered by mobs, and many thousands were imprisoned, purely because of their faith.
Although this persecution has gone through various phases — from efforts at outright extinction in the early 1980s to social, economic and cultural suffocation in the late 1990s — it is clear today that the government has stepped up its campaign to eliminate the Bahá’í community as a viable entity in
Iran.
Efforts are being made by Iran’s cleric-led government to identify and monitor Bahá’ís. Violence against Bahá’ís is increasing, as are attacks on Bahá’í leadership, and, perhaps worst of all, Bahá’í schoolchildren have been abused by teachers and school administrators.
Bahá’ís are subject to abuse and vilification in official pronouncements, school textbooks, and state-run newspapers and television. They have no recourse either through the courts or the media: a denial of justice both before the law and before public opinion.
Global outcry
Over the decades since the revolution in Iran a wide range of national governments have added their voices at the United Nations to condemnations of the persecutions of the Bahá’ís. Resolutions passed year after year at the UN Commission on Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly have expressed member states’ grave concern at the treatment of the Bahá’ís and have called upon the Islamic Republic of Iran to protect the rights of the Bahá’ís and other minorities. Leading human rights non-governmental organisations, such as Amnesty International, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and Human Rights Watch, have also condemned the persecution of the Iranian Bahá'í community.
The Baha’is in Iran do not demand any special privileges or treatment: all they ask for is the full restoration of their human rights as citizens of Iran.
Calm & constructive resilience
Despite the oppression aimed at their very elimination, the Bahá’ís in Iran are not dispirited, demoralised or downtrodden. They remain resilient and think instead about the contribution they can make to the much-need renewal of their homeland. They press on with activities to serve their society. Fundamental Bahá’í ideas – trustworthiness, truthfulness, the oneness of humankind, the elimination of prejudice, the independent investigation of truth, the equality of the sexes – are being explored in conversations that are integral to the wider discourse on social change from which the Bahá’ís are sadly debarred.
Iran’s Bahá’í leaders imprisoned
In early 2008, seven Bahá’ís – known as the Yárán (the Friends in Iran) – who were responsible for administering the social and spiritual affairs of the Bahá’í community in Iran, were arrested.
After being detained without charge for a prolonged period in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, the seven were put through a grossly unfair trial over several months and sentenced to twenty years in prison on the basis of utterly spurious charges.
The trial court found the seven not guilty of “tarnishing the reputation” of Iran and of “spreading corruption on earth”. An appeal court overturned the verdict of the lower court in relation to the charges of espionage, collaboration with the State of Israel, and provision of classified documents to foreign nationals with the intention of undermining state security.
What remained of the case were charges concerning the activities undertaken by these seven individuals in administering the social and spiritual affairs of the Iranian Bahá’í community. In other words, the judiciary presented the religious beliefs of the defendants and their service to the Bahá’í community – a selfless service warmly acknowledged and appreciated by their fellow Iranian Bahá’ís – as illegal.
The sentences handed down by the court have been strongly denounced by international figures such as Dr Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Laureate; Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary; Lawrence Cannon, the Canadian Foreign Minister; several other foreign ministers; and international organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
You can learn more about the trial of Iran’s Bahá’í leaders here.