Word: baha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since 1979, at least 150 believers have been put to death. Though the official charges usually involve "spying" or "treason," Baha'is say that the real reason is official intolerance of a faith which the Shi'ite Muslim mullahs of Iran regard as blasphemous. An estimated 550 Baha'is are in prison. Thousands more have lost their homes and possessions, and mobs have desecrated Baha'i assembly halls, cemeteries and the faith's holiest shrine in Iran, the House of the Bab in Shiraz...
Though Iran's constitution allows Christians and Jews to practice their faiths, Baha'is have no such freedom. The U.S. human rights report says that the government has established a legal basis to "move against all Baha'is if it chooses to do so." In Wilmette, Ill., headquarters for the faith's 100,000-member U.S. branch (worldwide membership: 3 million), a spokesman fears that "unless things change, Baha'is in Iran are going to be annihilated...
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...