Persecuting the Harmless - the Trials of the Bahai Faith

Speaking personally, this has been a worthwhile venture, researching into religious (and non-religious) persecution. While the details of the persecution meted out by believers to other believers and others have been horrifying at times, I have learned to respect the tenacity of the persecuted. An Anglican vicar friend of mine, for instance, told me that Pakistani Christians accept persecution as part of life. To me, NO religious persecution is acceptable, and I am glad of the means to condemn it. Besides this, I have learned more about the beliefs of persecuted groups whose tenets were previously unknown to me. One such group is that of the Bahai faith who are a harmless religious minority of only a few million worldwide, yet who still attract persecution in a small number of countries, worst of all in Iran.
So who are the Bahais? Well, this is what I have learned:
The Bahá'í faith is one of the youngest of the world's major religions. It was founded by Bahá'u'lláh in Iran in 1863. The basic Bahai beliefs, all of which are admirable (even if some are common to all religions) are as follows, and taken from the Bahai UK website:


"Bahá'u'lláh taught that there is one God whose successive revelations of His will to humanity have been the chief civilizing force in history. The agents of this process have been the Divine Messengers whom people have seen chiefly as the founders of separate religious systems but whose common purpose has been to bring the human race to spiritual and moral maturity.
Humanity is now coming of age. It is this that makes possible the unification of the human family and the building of a peaceful, global society. Among the principles which the Bahá'í Faith promotes as vital to the achievement of this goal are

• the abandonment of all forms of prejudice
• assurance to women of full equality of opportunity with men
• recognition of the unity and relativity of religious truth
• the elimination of extremes of poverty and wealth
• the realization of universal education
• the responsibility of each person to independently search for truth
• the establishment of a global commonwealth of nations
• recognition that true religion is in harmony with reason and the pursuit of scientific knowledge". " 

Whatever our beliefs, there is not, I believe, anything there for other religious believers to find objectionable. There is a worldwide Bahai presence (6000 in the UK; 140 000 in the USA) of about six million adherents. The Bahais, then, are a peaceful and inoffensive religious minority. No-one, I thought in my ignorance, should feel the need to persecute them.
Alas, I was wrong. The Bahai faith, founded in 1863, had the great misfortune to start out in Iran, where its followers were immediately regarded as heretics and apostates to Islam. This is because Islam teaches that Muhammad was "the seal of the prophets", and no further prophets (such as Baha'u'llah) are needed. It has been the unhappy fate of the Iranian Bahais to be persecuted under every political ruler in Iran, be it the Shah, or the Ayatollahs. Since 1979, over 200 Bahais have been executed, thousands have been imprisoned or driven into exile, and their community leaders arrested. They are also barred from higher education and employment opportunities. This disgraceful situation has been the subject of numerous reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
To be "fair" to the Iranian regime, Bahais face discrimination in other countries: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Morocco. All these countries are Islamic; the only Muslim country to grant legal recognition to the Bahais is Egypt. The recent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood has caused anxiety to Bahais, Christians and other religious minorities in Egypt - the world's media never mentions that. One wonders why...perhaps the safest comment to make is that religious persecution is worse in some countries rather than others? Which leads to an obvious conclusion...