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AUTHOR:
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH
TITLE:
The Baha’is in Iran: Twenty Years of Repression
SOURCE:
Social Research v67 no2 p536-58 Summ 2000The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced withpermission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.THE Islamic Republic of Iran proclaims Shi’i Islam as its state religion, andrecognizes only Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism as other true religions. Thethree minority faiths are legitimized by the Constitution and accorded certain legal andpolitical rights. The Baha’is, however, Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, arenot mentioned in the Constitution and have the status of unprotected infidels. Since theonset of the Islamic revolution in the fall of 1978, more than 200 Baha’is, mostlyleaders of the community, have been put to death. Baha’i institutions have beendisbanded, community properties confiscated, holy places demolished, and cemeteriesdesecrated. Baha’is have no civil rights. They cannot hold government jobs, enforcelegal contracts, practice law, collect pensions, attend institutions of higher learning, andopenly practice their faith.The hostility of the Iranian clerical establishment that took over the government inearly 1979 was not a new phenomenon. It had roots in the nineteenth century whenthe clerical class saw its spiritual monopoly threatened by the spread of the Babireligion, the precursor of the Baha’i Faith. The Bab (Gate), founder of the movement,claimed to be not only the return of the twelfth imam expected by the Shi’is but aprophet and the herald of “him whom God shall manifest,” a messenger and bearer ofa new revelation. The Bab’s claim to prophethood could not be reconciled with thetraditional literalist interpretation of the Muslim belief that Muhammad was “the seal ofthe prophets” and Islam the ultimate religion. After several years of imprisonment, theBab, who refused to recant, was publicly executed by a firing squad in June 1850 inTabriz. The Babis resisted attacks by government forces in several localities.Thousands perished in the unequal struggles in Zanjan, Neyriz, and Mazandaran. In1852 an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Naser ed-Din Shah by three Babis,aggrieved and exasperated by the execution of their leader, precipitated a massacreof scores of innocent men and women, among them the renowned poetess Tahereh.Most of the Babi leaders were wiped out; the surviving adherents were dispirited anddisorganized. It seemed that the movement had been defeated, the old order restored,and the spiritual monopoly of the Shi’i clergy reaffirmed.One of the prominent Babis, Mirza Hoseyn Ali Nouri, later known as Baha’u’llah,had been arrested in connection with the attempted assassination of the Shah. Despitethe fact that he was found not guilty of participation, he was nevertheless exiled toBaghdad, where he proclaimed himself to be “him whom God shall manifest,” whoseadvent had been prophesied by the Bab. Although Baha’u’llah, at the urging of theIranian ambassador, was removed by the Ottoman government from Baghdad first toConstantinople, then to Adrionople, and finally to the pestilential fortress-city of Acre(now Akko) on the shores of the Mediterranean, he gathered the Babi remnant andfounded the Baha’i Faith. Baha’u’llah’s emissaries traveled through Iran, rallying thesurviving Babis and spreading the new dispensation. The revitalized and growingBabi-Baha’i community once again began to attract the attention of the clergy and thegovernment. Baha’u’llah commanded his followers that his teachings be spread onlythrough peaceful means, that his followers be loyal to the government and obey theauthorities. He taught that the purpose of his religion was the promotion of amity andconcord among all peoples, races, and religions, but that did not lessen the fear andhatred of the more conservative elements dominant within the clerical establishment.
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By the end of the nineteenth century the Baha’is found themselves under constantpressure from ecclesiastical and governmental authorities, and they were attacked ontheological and moral grounds. They were declared heretics because of their belief thatrevelation was progressive and without end, meaning that the line of prophetsstretched from the legendary Adam into the most distant future. Under this assumption,Muhammad was not the last prophet (as Islam claims) but rather one in a chain ofrevealers of divine will, a chain that includes not only Jesus and the prophets of Israel,but the founders of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and other religions that Islamdoes not recognize. The mullahs execrated Baha’i teachings on the equality of menand women, the abolition of the notions of ritual impurity and dietary restrictions, therejection of the practice of taqlid (imitation of a chosen religious leader), and theassertion of the freedom of the individual to investigate truth and adhere to a religionof his choice. The absence of clergy in the Baha’i Faith and the governance of thecommunity by its freely and democratically elected representatives were other sourcesof hostility the mullahs as a class harbored against the Baha’is.Western influences flooded Iran in the twentieth century. While the massesremained largely under clerical influence, the bureaucracy, the officers’ corps of thenewly created national army, and the intellectual elite began to lose interest in theintricacies of the Sharia and in theological disputations. They welcomed Reza Shah’sattempts at modernization, which included unveiling women, restricting turban wearing,secularizing the educational system, and introducing Europeanized legal codes. Theclergy that had helped Reza Khan ascend the throne (out of fear of a republic suchas the one Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had established in Turkey) found itself marginalizedand with greatly diminished influence in public life. The mullahs perceived similaritiesbetween some of the modernizing reforms and Baha’i teachings and linked their dislikefor these reforms, and for Reza Shah, with their old hatred of the Baha’is. They spreadrumors that the Shah himself was a Baha’i, and that Baha’is dominated thegovernment and were the principal force for subverting Islam.The two Pahlavi shahs were ambivalent about the Baha’is. On the one hand, sincethe Baha’i community included some of the best educated, most competent and loyalIranians, the shahs used them in the service of the government; on the other, theyresented Baha’i refusal to deify the monarchy. Moreover, they found it convenient inmoments of crisis to placate the clergy by allowing it to attack the Baha’is, evenpermitting an occasional pogrom, provided it did not turn into a large-scale disturbancethat would endanger public order or unduly increase the power of the clergy. Thestronger the Pahlavi dictatorship grew, the more repressive it became toward theBaha’is; it closed their schools, prohibited their publications, refused to recognize theirmarriages, and turned them into second class citizens. To satisfy the more radicallyanti-Baha’i ecclesiastical elements and to steer them away from opposition to themonarchy, the government permitted and even encouraged the formation of theHojjatiyeh Society in 1953. The founder and leader, Sheykh Mahmud ZekrzadehTavallai, better known as Shaykh Muhmud Halabi, was a fanatical enemy of the Baha’iFaith, which he had studied as a seminarian and to which one of his best friends hadbeen converted (Tayyeb, 1982). The Hojjatiyeh Society was endorsed by leadingclerics such as Ayatollah Borujerdi and worked in close cooperation with the SAVAK,the political police, and became the principal antagonist of the Baha’is. Its activitiesincluded publication of anti-Baha’i pamphlets, denunciation of Baha’is to the authorities,and the disruption of Baha’i gatherings by gangs of toughs. The Hojjatiyeh Societywould play an important role in the persecution of the Baha’is after the Islamicrevolution (Abedi, 38-40, n.d.).Whereas earlier attacks on Baha’is had been of a theological nature, because of thespread of nationalist sentiments among the educated elite, the mullahs added a new
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH: The Baha’is in Iran: Twenty Years of Repression 2
 
element to their rhetoric. To appeal to the changes in the mentality of the youngermembers of the upper class, the mullahs now accused the Baha’is of being unpatrioticor outright agents of foreign powers. In the 1930s there appeared a book whichpurported to be the memoirs of Kniaz Dalqurki, presumably Prince Dmitrii Dolgorukov,a one-time Russian minister in Tehran. The book describes how the minister had beensent by the tsar to Iran to subvert Islam, making Iran vulnerable to Russian penetrationand eventual domination. The minister claims to have achieved his goal by influencinga young Iranian to proclaim himself a prophet, thus creating the Babi movement, whichwas nothing more than a Russian invention. No reputable scholar has ever doubtedthat the so-called Dalqurki memoirs were counterfeit. Nevertheless, this illiterateconcoction found acceptance among a large segment of educated Iranians. In the lasttwenty years Iranian representatives at the UN have on occasion referred to it as proofthat the Baha’i Faith is not a religion but a political movement serving foreign interests.As enemies changed, so did the accusations. Baha’is have been alleged to serve theRussian or British intelligence, the CIA, or Israel, depending on which countryhappened to be in disfavor at the time the allegations were made.As the Islamic revolution gathered momentum in late summer 1978, anti-Baha’iecclesiastical elements saw an opportunity to realize their goals of uprooting the Baha’iFaith from Iran. They were undoubtedly encouraged by the position taken by AyatollahKhomeini who, in December 1978, while still in exile in France, expressed his viewsin an interview with Professor James Cockroft of Rutgers University.Question: “Will there be either religious or political freedom for the Baha’is underan Islamic government?Answer: “They are a political faction. They are harmful. They will not be accepted.Question: “How about their freedom of religion — religious practice?Answer: “No.” (Martin, 1984, 31)In the chaotic conditions that followed the overthrow of the shah, the Baha’icommunity was particularly vulnerable. In many parts of the country local clericalleaders, many connected with the Hojjatiyeh Society, organized attacks on individualBaha’is and seized Baha’i property. In a letter dated March 23, 1979, a clericalorganization called the Foundation of the Dispossessed claimed title to all Baha’iproperties, and turned over the house of the Bab, the holiest Baha’i shrine in Iran, tothe prominent mullah, Sheykh Sadeq Khalkhali (Martin, 1984, 43-44). Protests ofBaha’is from all over the world were of no avail. Appeals to the newly formedgovernment headed by Mehdi Bazargan, a respected individual with a reputation foradvocacy of human rights, were ignored in silence. In September, a mob led bymullahs and officials of the Department of Religious Affairs demolished the shrine.Throughout the country, properties belonging to the Baha’i community such ashospitals, community centers, libraries, and even cemeteries were seized without anylegal basis or justification. Over the next several years a body of rules issued byleading mojtaheds (mullahs authorized to pass legal judgments) ratified theexpropriation not only of all Baha’i community properties but in hundreds of cases theconfiscation of private property, including homes, shops, and agricultural land.The assault on the Baha’i community took many forms, one of which was the denialof employment that threatened to pauperize a large segment of the Baha’i population.One after another national and local government departments began to fire Baha’iemployees without any attempt to conceal that the cause of dismissal was membershipin the “misguided sect.” Hundreds of documents show that ecclesiastical, judiciary, andadministrative bodies worked in concert to rid the civil service of every Baha’i whetherhe or she was a school teacher, doctor, nurse, army officer, or college professor. Thusa circular letter issued by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, dated December 7,1981, states, “In the name of God, The Most Exalted,”
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