Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 9:09pm
The Thorny Road to Unity
Column: Life at First Sight
The Thorny Road to Unity
In the same week, I received snapshot views of two developments that concern the worldwide community of the Baha’i Faith. And, I believe, if examined in more depth, they have much instructive relevance for the world itself.
The first shared a participant’s overview of the remarkable variety and diversity of human experience that was to be found at the international Baha’i convention held recently in Haifa, Israel, to elect the faith’s international governing body, the Universal House of Justice. (Read a story about the convention at: http://news.bahai.org/story/627.)
Dr. Ibrahim Amoussa, a delegate from Gabon, described encountering an Italian industrialist and a presidential advisor from South Africa – along with a 25-year-old Latin-American student with impressive knowledge about the kinds of educational efforts that can empower underprivileged youth to rise to the highest possibilities of their spiritual nobility. One Ph.D. who works with an international research agency spoke two languages, but the delegate who operates her own small business in Cameroon speaks five,” he pointed out.
A total of a thousand delegates from more than 150 countries attended this election that takes place every five years. And what each of them had the chance to witness, he said, is the living, breathing evidence of Baha’u’llah’s call to human unity as the imperative of our time, and the great gift God has offered us in this day.
This diverse gathering of the peoples of our planet might resemble a UN conference. But where that latter gathering usually represents many nationalities and ethnicities, the Baha’i International Convention also brings together representatives from the broadest possible range of economic and social levels. Delegates who happen to be clerks, musicians, and coal-miners carried out their electoral duty shoulder-to-shoulder with top-level executives and experts in their fields. And – though often overlooked or absent in so many other settings, representatives of indigenous peoples from throughout the world stood proud and smiling in the photo images of this variegated flower garden of humanity assembled together.
Then in contrast, I read of the arrest and imprisonment on May 14, of six individuals who have offered their service in coordinating the activities within the beleaguered Baha’i community of Iran, the place of the faith’s birth. Taken from their homes during the night were Mrs. Fariba Kamalabadi, Mr. Jamaloddin Khanjani, Mr. Afif Naeimi, Mr. Saeid Rezaie, Mr. Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Mr. Vahid Tizfahm. Similar treatment had previously been meted out to their associate and co-worker, Mrs. Mahvash Sabet, who had been arrested and imprisoned on March 5. (Read more about the arrests here: http://iran.bahai.us/bahai-leaders-arrested-in-iran/)
This action is disturbingly reminiscent of the Iranian government's activities in 1980 and 1981, when scores of Iranian Baha’i leaders were summarily rounded up and subsequently executed. In 1980, all nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran, the national governing body, were abducted and disappeared without a trace.
A second National Spiritual Assembly was elected and soon afterward, eight of those nine members were executed on December 27, 1981. Subsequently, hundreds of Baha’is in Iran suffered the same fate. Since that time, all elements of Baha’i administration have been outlawed in Iran. Youths are denied access to higher education, children are vilified in their schools, and many jobs and other privileges are denied Baha’is.
On a world scene where human suffering and tyranny are rampant and catastrophic disasters have wracked two Asian nations, response to the plight of the Iran Baha’is, a religious minority of about 300,000 in that country, has been surprisingly swift. On Wednesday, the presidency of the European Union called on Iran to end this persecution of members of a religious community whose faith is banned in the Islamic republic. At the same time, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement condemning the arrests stating that they “demonstrate the seriousness of the loss of basic religious freedoms and human rights in Iran.”
These came on the same day that Iran acknowledged that these six leaders of the country’s Baha’i religious community had been arrested on “security-related charges,” for “acting against national interests.”
In January, Iran had announced that it had sentenced 54 Baha’is for “anti-regime propaganda”, with three sentenced to four years in jail and the rest to suspended one-year jail terms. Baha’is, whose teachings forbid both politicizing and proselytizing, are the least likely people to be associated with propaganda of any kind.
Atrocities that violate human rights and freedoms abound with increasingly painful intensity, not the least of which are reports of the heart-wrenching xenophobic violence against refugees in South Africa. Mankind’s heedlessness of God’s call in this day continues to lead down the same awful roads and more often than not, the real victims are the totally helpless and innocent.
Yet, as blogger Phillipe Copeland put it, “I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how a religion [the Baha’i Faith] that brings people from all backgrounds together to work for a better world could be a bad thing. What possible threat can it pose to anyone? Why do its followers deserve harassment ... and even death?”
Just what dangers does any people or government perceive in an invitation to transcend the blind imitation of our limited identities and loyalties and recognize that true identity in which each of us has been made, the one that a Higher Authority has forged above any earthly — or ideological — barriers?
Those thousand united souls standing together at the international Baha’i convention on Israel’s Mount Carmel, transcending dozens of formerly perceived barriers, and the handful of individuals currently locked in an Iranian prison have all embraced the very remedy that could make so many of our most terrifying headlines disappear.
The multiplication of goodness and the love of humanity that they treasure — and extend to each member of their human family everywhere – are the steps on the path toward unity that our Creator is offering us. Yet seemingly so few seem ready to walk together upon it.
In the same week, I received snapshot views of two developments that concern the worldwide community of the Baha’i Faith. And, I believe, if examined in more depth, they have much instructive relevance for the world itself.
The first shared a participant’s overview of the remarkable variety and diversity of human experience that was to be found at the international Baha’i convention held recently in Haifa, Israel, to elect the faith’s international governing body, the Universal House of Justice. (Read a story about the convention at: http://news.bahai.org/story/627.)
Dr. Ibrahim Amoussa, a delegate from Gabon, described encountering an Italian industrialist and a presidential advisor from South Africa – along with a 25-year-old Latin-American student with impressive knowledge about the kinds of educational efforts that can empower underprivileged youth to rise to the highest possibilities of their spiritual nobility. One Ph.D. who works with an international research agency spoke two languages, but the delegate who operates her own small business in Cameroon speaks five,” he pointed out.
A total of a thousand delegates from more than 150 countries attended this election that takes place every five years. And what each of them had the chance to witness, he said, is the living, breathing evidence of Baha’u’llah’s call to human unity as the imperative of our time, and the great gift God has offered us in this day.
This diverse gathering of the peoples of our planet might resemble a UN conference. But where that latter gathering usually represents many nationalities and ethnicities, the Baha’i International Convention also brings together representatives from the broadest possible range of economic and social levels. Delegates who happen to be clerks, musicians, and coal-miners carried out their electoral duty shoulder-to-shoulder with top-level executives and experts in their fields. And – though often overlooked or absent in so many other settings, representatives of indigenous peoples from throughout the world stood proud and smiling in the photo images of this variegated flower garden of humanity assembled together.
Then in contrast, I read of the arrest and imprisonment on May 14, of six individuals who have offered their service in coordinating the activities within the beleaguered Baha’i community of Iran, the place of the faith’s birth. Taken from their homes during the night were Mrs. Fariba Kamalabadi, Mr. Jamaloddin Khanjani, Mr. Afif Naeimi, Mr. Saeid Rezaie, Mr. Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Mr. Vahid Tizfahm. Similar treatment had previously been meted out to their associate and co-worker, Mrs. Mahvash Sabet, who had been arrested and imprisoned on March 5. (Read more about the arrests here: http://iran.bahai.us/bahai-leaders-arrested-in-iran/)
This action is disturbingly reminiscent of the Iranian government's activities in 1980 and 1981, when scores of Iranian Baha’i leaders were summarily rounded up and subsequently executed. In 1980, all nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran, the national governing body, were abducted and disappeared without a trace.
A second National Spiritual Assembly was elected and soon afterward, eight of those nine members were executed on December 27, 1981. Subsequently, hundreds of Baha’is in Iran suffered the same fate. Since that time, all elements of Baha’i administration have been outlawed in Iran. Youths are denied access to higher education, children are vilified in their schools, and many jobs and other privileges are denied Baha’is.
On a world scene where human suffering and tyranny are rampant and catastrophic disasters have wracked two Asian nations, response to the plight of the Iran Baha’is, a religious minority of about 300,000 in that country, has been surprisingly swift. On Wednesday, the presidency of the European Union called on Iran to end this persecution of members of a religious community whose faith is banned in the Islamic republic. At the same time, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement condemning the arrests stating that they “demonstrate the seriousness of the loss of basic religious freedoms and human rights in Iran.”
These came on the same day that Iran acknowledged that these six leaders of the country’s Baha’i religious community had been arrested on “security-related charges,” for “acting against national interests.”
In January, Iran had announced that it had sentenced 54 Baha’is for “anti-regime propaganda”, with three sentenced to four years in jail and the rest to suspended one-year jail terms. Baha’is, whose teachings forbid both politicizing and proselytizing, are the least likely people to be associated with propaganda of any kind.
Atrocities that violate human rights and freedoms abound with increasingly painful intensity, not the least of which are reports of the heart-wrenching xenophobic violence against refugees in South Africa. Mankind’s heedlessness of God’s call in this day continues to lead down the same awful roads and more often than not, the real victims are the totally helpless and innocent.
Yet, as blogger Phillipe Copeland put it, “I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how a religion [the Baha’i Faith] that brings people from all backgrounds together to work for a better world could be a bad thing. What possible threat can it pose to anyone? Why do its followers deserve harassment ... and even death?”
Just what dangers does any people or government perceive in an invitation to transcend the blind imitation of our limited identities and loyalties and recognize that true identity in which each of us has been made, the one that a Higher Authority has forged above any earthly — or ideological — barriers?
Those thousand united souls standing together at the international Baha’i convention on Israel’s Mount Carmel, transcending dozens of formerly perceived barriers, and the handful of individuals currently locked in an Iranian prison have all embraced the very remedy that could make so many of our most terrifying headlines disappear.
The multiplication of goodness and the love of humanity that they treasure — and extend to each member of their human family everywhere – are the steps on the path toward unity that our Creator is offering us. Yet seemingly so few seem ready to walk together upon it.