Word: baha
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...week felt a need to retreat, at least briefly, from one of his Administration's most staunchly held foreign strategies. In an International Human Rights Day address, Reagan paused in a litany of familiar themes (the Soviets' "barbaric war" in Afghanistan, Iran's persecution of the Baha'i religious minority) to broach a surprise topic. "The U.S. has said on many occasions that we view racism with repugnance," he asserted. He then confessed "our grief over the human and spiritual cost of apartheid in South Africa...
...itself publicly and disband. In August they suspended the Hojjatieh Society, an esoteric Shi'ite Muslim splinter group that refuses to interpret the Koran in the fashion approved by the mullahs. During the past five years the regime has also incited mobs to desecrate the shrines of the Baha'i faith, drive thousands of adherents out of their homes and kill at least 150Baha...
...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...
...policy of peace applies even to current enemies. Vahid Alavian, an engineering teacher at the University of Illinois whose father was tortured and executed in Iran in 1981, seeks to be forgiving toward the anti-Baha'i mobs, although he doubts that the Almighty will be as tolerant. "They are mostly pawns who believe they are working for the elimination of the ungodly from the earth," he says. "But those who plan all this know better, and they will pay a high price before God." -ByRichard N. Ostling. Reported by Raji Samghabadi/New York and Don Winbush/Chicago