NSA of the US addresses Congressional Human Rights Caucus about Baha’is in Egypt
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
Back on November 16, Kit Bigelow, the director of external affairs for the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, addressed the Congressional Human Rights Caucus of the
House of Representatives in the US. She was there to talk about the situation of the Baha’is in Egpyt.
The most urgent issue that faces the Bahá’ís in Egypt is the Government’s decision to require all of its citizens to obtain mandatory identification cards. At present, Bahá’ís are not legally permitted to obtain these cards.
…
The cards must be presented for any type of government service, such as medical care in a public hospital or processing for a property title or deed. They are required to obtain employment, education or banking services. They are needed to pass through police checkpoints, and individuals without cards are deprived of their freedom of movement.
It also seems that the UK Parliment was approached by the Baha’is to put preassure on Egypt over the issue. But the deadline for obtaining these cards was December 31, 2005 and I can’t seem to find any more news about it. If I hear something you’ll all be the first to know, but just to clarify what we’re dealing with here have a look a little farther down Ms. Bigelow’s address:
…on December 15, 2003, a fatwa by the Islamic Research Academy of Al-Azhar University described the Bahá’í Faith as “a lethal spiritual epidemic in the fight against which the state must mobilize all its contingencies to annihilate it.” The statement goes on to demand: “those [Bahá’ís] who have committed criminal acts against Islam and our country must disappear from life and not be allowed to announce their deviation from Islam.”
Jerks.
(Thanks to San, who should not disappear from life, for the tip)
Update:
A reader from Ningbo, China wrote to say that they found it odd to find the members of the Al-Azhar Academy described in the above article as “jerks” saying instead “Indeed how can we bring ourselves to deplore their miscalculated efforts to ‘annihilate’ the Bahai Faith in Egypt once we realize that these actions only conspicuously reveal, to nations several times its size, the resistless influence and power of the Cause of Baha’u'llah?” And they offer this quotation from Baha’u'llah:
‘Methinks at this moment, I catch the fragrance of His garment blowing from the Egypt of Baha; verily He seemeth near at hand, though men may think Him far away.’
-Baha’u'llah
And of course we can go further and remind ourselves that Egypt was the first muslim country to delcare, back in 1925, that the Baha’i Faith was a religion, seperate from Islam.
So perhaps ‘jerks’ isn’t really the right term after all. Perhaps we should call them ‘unwitting champions of the Cause of Baha’u'llah’ instead.
For those of us who came into the Baha'i Faith through the ever popular 
