Bahai News

When the world news comes on TV, Roya turns it off. She doesn't want to be reminded of the violence in her native Iran.

Parviz Fadai presses his hands against his face. He tries to finish his sentence, but cannot. His cheeks redden. Tears well up in his eyes. He presses harder. He doesn't want those tears to spill over.

"It's hard," he says, brushing away the goosebumps on his arms.

Thirty years ago Fadai left his home in Iran, around the same time as the 1979 take-over of the country by radical Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who stirred up a wave of religious hatred towards the Baha'is resulting in hundreds of Baha'is executed for their beliefs.

Fadai is a Baha'i....

Iran pledged Wednesday to try seven leaders of the banned Baha'i faith on charges of spying for Israel, insulting Islam and spreading propaganda against the state, the ISNA news agency reported....

Baha'is in Rockford will host a prayer gathering to mark the one-year anniversary of the imprisonment of seven Baha'i leaders in Iran, who have spent a year in jail without formal charges or access to their lawyer, Shirin Ebadi.

Shahla Howitz of Modesto knows all about religious discrimination. Raised in the Baha'i faith in her native Iran, she came to this country with three of her sisters when she was 25 to escape the oppression....

From left to right, Pouran Yazdani, Vida Gholami and Dr. Loujan Matin describe the persecution in Iran that fellow believers of the Baha'i Faith endure.

As massive protests and turmoil in his native Iran dominate world headlines, Loujan Matin keeps prayerful focus on a poster in his medical office featuring the photographs of seven Iranians imprisoned because of their faith.

The seven, like Matin, are members of the Baha’i Faith, which Iranian religious authorities view as a heretical religion and anathema to Islam.

Matin fears for the lives of the seven — scheduled to go on trial next month — who are well-known religious figures in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as other Baha’is who remain jailed there.

Matin, an Irmo chiropractor and a naturalized U.S. citizen, has reason to worry.

His brother-in-law was hanged in 1985 because he refused to renounce his faith in an avowedly Muslim country.

“He was tortured,” he said. “His right or left shoulder was placed within a vise grip. It was not an easy death....”

CHAMPAIGN - Members of the Baha'i faith will hold a public prayer meeting Monday to mark over 13 months of imprisonment in Iran for leaders of their faith.

The meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Champaign Public Library, 200 W. Green St., C.

The spring 2008 arrest of the seven Baha'i men and women is part of a 30-year campaign by the government of Iran to eliminate Baha'is from the country of the faith's birthplace, according to Baha'i officials...

Sometimes during the past two weeks, making her rounds as a hospital resident, Dr. Saughar Samali has caught a glimpse of television news in a patient’s room or heard a bulletin on the radio in the family-practice office. Against her desire, against her better judgment, she has been plunged back into the maelstrom of Iran.

As long as she is on duty, Dr. Samali can suppress what she sees and hears of the marchers, the arrests, the beatings. But when she leaves St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paterson and returns home to nearby Clifton, the present conjures up a terrible past.

She remembers when her father’s factory in Tehran was set afire, leaving him severely scarred and blind in one eye. She remembers her family’s trying to escape to Pakistan, traveling in a smuggler’s Jeep, headlights out on a midnight desert. She remembers the army bullets that shattered the windshield and pierced the tires, and she remembers the months in prison that followed....

Neda Agha-Soltan, Iranian Heroine for Human Rights

By Amil Imani

I am so restless, I cannot cease thinking! It seems like the world we live in reveals to us incessantly, at certain moments or in certain circumstances, just how little we are and how vast the universe is. This world of ours is a very complex world. The world we live in is a world of many brutal voices. It is a world of heavy blows and delirious trances, but it is the only world that we know.

Like millions of people around the world, the tragic death of Neda has affected me tremendously. I felt a temptation to scream and run to the end of the world and say my prayers with unusual earnestness and a heavy heart. I felt like screaming for the overflowing flood of human blood. I felt like screaming for the weary eyes and innocent moans of the victims of Iranian revolution. I felt apprehensive, anxious, and fearful. And now, as I take up my pen, my hand trembles and my head swims with horror and disbelief at the magnitude of the human devastation....

In Tehran on June 20, Iranian riot police attempt to enforce Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's ban on public protests.

Hot tea and warm smiles greet the visitors to Robert Malouf and Manijeh Khorshidi's Brookfield home on a muggy Friday evening.

The Baha 'i faith, a monotheistic religion established by Bah 'u'll h in 19th century Persia, counts among its contemporary numbers an estimated five to six million around the world in more than 200 countries and territories, with a growing population in the U.S. drawn to its message of the spiritual unity of all humankind.

Followers of Baha'u'llah throughout the world, Today was a dark, sad moment for many courageous, beautiful Iranian people who stood in the face of the ugliest form of oppressive monster, and took bullets into their bodies for the sake of freedom and equality....[Continued here]

Worried: Nelson man Sole Ighani has family members who have been persecuted in Iran for belonging to the Baha'i Faith.

Iran is bracing for another day of mass protests in defiance of the country's leader.

Representatives of a half-dozen faiths gathered Saturday at a Wichita synagogue to express their religious solidarity in the wake of recent shootings in Wichita and Washington, D.C. Members of the Islamic, Hindu and Baha'i faiths joined their counterparts from Jewish and Christian congregations in an interfaith service called "Love Overcoming ...

Area members of the Bahai Faith celebrated Sunday afternoon in Ewert Park with marimba music, a drum circle, children’s activities and a picnic during the annual Race Unity Day.

Coordinator Dan Goepfert, of Joplin, said the group has been holding the annual celebration in Joplin for about 20 years.

“It’s really just designed, hopefully, to bring people of all races and cultures together in one place,” he said.

Goepfert said the Bahai Faith, founded in the 1860s, has members worldwide who believe in God and that there is only one race: the human race. Members also are active in community and educational events.

Goepfert estimated there are between 35 and 40 active members in the Joplin area, Springfield and Miami, Okla.

He said that based on the Bahai 19-month calendar, members meet every 19 days for a spiritual feast.

“Our primary central tenet is faith is unity,” he said. “We’re all of the human species, just different colors.”...

A special Devotional Program is planned for Sunday, June 14, at the Brattleboro Baha'i Center, 148 Elliot St., for the seven Iranian Baha'i leaders who have been imprisoned in Teheran for a year awaiting trial on trumped up charges of blasphemy and espionage. They have been denied access to legal counsel while in prison and face death sentences....

If Diba Samadani was still living in Iran, her life would be very different.

“I would imagine I would be a wife with a kid on the way and no education. My husband would go to work and I would be at home doing housework,” she said.

Instead, the 17-year-old, who was smuggled out of Iran as a toddler, graduated from Anacortes High School Friday.

Samadani is looking forward to starting classes at Western Washington University in the fall, where she plans to major in international studies.

Knowing what her life could have been like if her mother hadn’t taken the risk to get her and her older sister out of Iran, Samadani said she is passionate about learning no matter what the subject.

“I like learning,” she said. “I have a better appreciation for what people teach me.”

Samadani was just 3 when her mother, Fahimeh Alevi, smuggled her and her 6-year-old sister Saba out of Iran. The family was persecuted for their religion, Bahá’í, and women in the country face extraordinary obstacles....

The Baha'is in Iran, the country's biggest religious minority, have faced penetrating persecution and discrimination ever since the 1979 revolution, forcing the exodus of almost 20 percent of their total population to Pakistan in the 1980s....