Praying for the safety of Baha’is in Iran
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
While the recent story about coloured badges for religious minorities may not have been entirely true, a story that ran last week in Canada’s The Record reminds us that Iran’s religious minorites are still facing heavy persecution. The piece tells how Khosrow Farahbakhsh, a Baha’i now living in Canada, fled Iran in 1983 to escape a country where he couldn’t get an education and where the authorities were killing Baha’is:
Only two months before he hatched his plan to flee, 10 women from his hometown of Shiraz were hanged for teaching the equivalent of Sunday school and refusing to renounce their faith. Like Farahbakhsh and his family, the women were followers of Baha’i, a 163-year-old faith that was under attack by Iranian clergy and government.Since Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, more than 200 Baha’is there have been killed.
And now, according to United Nations observers, persecution of Iran’s Baha’is is on the rise again, driven by a hard-line Islamic government. In a country where the top Muslim clerics exercise ultimate political power, religion and government are closely linked.
So Farahbakhsh, 42, plans to tell his story to students in Guelph schools. He’s part of a group of Baha’is at the university who are holding lectures, writing letters and hosting prayer vigils to draw attention to the Baha’i plight.
For those of us who came into the Baha'i Faith through the ever popular 
