Arrests are part of official campaign to block development of Iranian Baha’is « halifaxbahai.org

Arrests are part of official campaign to block development of Iranian Baha’is

NEW YORK, 25 May 2011 (BWNS) – The raids carried out on some 30 homes of Baha’is, who were offering education to young community members barred by the government from university, is the latest action in Iran’s ongoing policy to keep its largest non-Muslim religious minority on the margins of society.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Baha’is have been systematically deprived of higher education. With nowhere else to turn, the community initiated its own educational programmes.

“The Iranian authorities are clearly determined to make it impossible for the Baha’i community to educate its youth whose opportunities are blocked by the state,” said Bani Dugal, Principal Representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations.

“Denying people the right to education is a denial of their right to exist as free and productive human beings – and to make a contribution to their society,” she said.

via halifaxbahai.org

from AMPwerx

halifaxbahai.org

Academic conference explores "othering" of Iranian Baha'is

TORONTO, 4 July 2011 (BWNS) – Iranian scholars, many from globally prominent universities, gathered here for a groundbreaking academic conference on the persecution of Iran’s Baha’is.

Titled “Intellectual Othering and the Baha’i Question in Iran,” the conference examined how Iranian authorities have sought to exclude Baha’is from social, political, cultural, and intellectual life by portraying them as outsiders in their own land – a process known as “othering.”

The event, held from 1-3 July, was the first major academic conference at a top-ranked university to focus on the persecution of Iran’s Baha’is in any context.

“This conference is not a Baha’i studies conference,” said its main organizer Mohamad Tavakoli. “It is an effort to understand the use of repression in the history of modern Iran and how the ‘othering’ of Baha’is has become a mechanism of mass mobilization for the legitimization of the state and for the creation of political-religious ideology.”

Dr. Tavakoli – a well-known scholar on Iran and the Middle East from the University of Toronto – said the idea for the conference came from his own research into the degree to which various Iranian groups had used anti-Baha’i rhetoric and made a scapegoat of Baha’is to gain political power, both in the past and the present.

via halifaxbahai.org

from AMPwerx