Word: baha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last August, Iran's prosecutor-general, Hojatoleslam Hossein Musavi Tabrizi, ordered the abolition of all Baha'i organizations. The community obediently shut down its 400 local meetinghouses and dissolved the national and local governing councils. In the months since Tabrizi's declaration, a farmer was lynched, a young woman was slain by a mob just after she gave birth, and 190 more Baha'is were arrested. Says Mehri Mavaddat, an Iranian refugee lawyer now living in Toronto whose husband was executed in 1981: "The killings are very casual. That's what makes them so horrible...
...Baha'is, who are often convenient scapegoats, have been persecuted since their faith was founded in mid-19th century Persia. After a tyrannical Shah was assassinated by a Muslim terrorist in 1896, crowds attacked the Baha'i community in Yazd, killing several people. Believers were repeatedly tortured and mutilated by local vigilantes in subsequent years. The worst outburst prior to Khomeini's takeover occurred in 1955-56 under the late Shah. Former agents of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, say that government agents provoked anti-Baha'i hysteria to divert reactionary Muslims from turning...
There is a fundamental doctrinal reason for such enmity. Islam proclaims that Muhammad was the "Seal of the Prophets," God's final messenger to mankind. But the Baha'i faith-an offshoot of Shi'ism, which is itself a minority branch of Islam-asserts that two prophets came after Muhammad. To Muslims this constitutes a new, perverted faith. The first prophet was Mirza 'Ali Muhammad, who declared in 1844 that he was the Bab (gate), the pathway to God. He was executed in 1850 as a heretic. When Persian authorities tried to wipe out his disciples...
...Babis adopted the name Baha'u'llah (Glory of God) and proclaimed himself the Promised One, or Messiah, in 1863; his followers became known as Baha'is. He replaced the Babis' militant zeal with strict nonviolence. Baha'u'llah spent many of his final years in a Turkish prison or under house arrest near present-day Haifa, Israel. There the Baha'is built his tomb and established their world headquarters. This tenuous connection with Israel further inflames Muslim suspicions...
...Baha'is advocate world peace and the unification of all peoples and religions. They respect the Koran and holy books of other faiths. The Baha'is have no clergy class and elect their leaders to limited terms of office. The Baha'is also champion world government and the use of an unspecified universal language. But unity, say members, will come only by worshiping God through Baha'u'llah, the prophet who is his "Manifestation" and who revealed God's message in 100-odd books, which were translated from Arabic and Farsi as the creed...