The always-readable and always-informative Michael Totten took a slight detour from his usual topics to compare and contrast several different Middle/Near Eastern & Southwest Asian countries faiths and cultures.
His jumping-off point was the question “What is Iran’s most repressed religious minority?” I initially thought “Jews”. Then I thought “Zoroastrians”. I was wrong on both counts.
There are only six or seven million in the entire world, and their spiritual home is in Israel. I am not, however, referring here to the Jews, but to the Bahais.
He now begins the compare and contrast between Iran & Israel:
Their world headquarters is in Israel, and they came during Ottoman times from Persian lands. The nation-state of one of the world’s oldest religions now hosts the holiest site of one of the newest, and the nation where the Bahai Faith was born vows to destroy the nation where the Bahai Faith had to migrate.
The strikingly different treatments of these people by Iran and by Israel infuses the looming showdown between the Middle East’s two most powerful countries with even more moral clarity than it already had.
To be fair, the whacked-out mullahs aren’t the first Iranians to try and eliminate the Bahais, just the most recent and vigorous.
In its birthplace, the Bahais have been all but wiped out; only about 300,000 remain in Iran (still ten times the number of Christians & Jews). The “headquarters of the Bahai faith is in Haifa, Israel, on one of the slopes of Mt. Carmel, where many Biblical events occurred.
The Báb, who started Bahai in the mid 1800’s, quickly gathered a following from among the people of the Iranian countryside.
This new religion alarmed the authorities as it spread. Shia Muslims were abandoning Islam and becoming Bábis, followers of the Báb. Pogroms followed, and 20,000 were executed, many in horrible ways. They were executed not because they were criminals, nor for political reasons. They were executed because they were heretics. The Báb himself was publicly executed in 1850 in Tabriz. [emphasis mine]
Sounds familiar, no?
Tabriz is now in an area of Iran dominated by Azeris (ethnic group of Azerbaijan), and is remarkably open in its attitudes toward women, virtually all of whom do not wear veils. Small wonder it is not governed by the Islamic nuts in Tehran; rather it is governed by a mix of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Bahais.
The remainder of the article talks about the history of the Bahai faith and includes a summary of the interview Totten had with Rob Weinberg, a Bahai adherent who works at the Bahai world spiritual center in Haifa and is well worth the read.
How can people stand to live in those circumstances? We are SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY that our ancestors got here to the promised land.
Now if we can just keep the gubmint (mostly Dems but some Pubbies too) from screwing it up any worse than they have already.
I used to work with an Iranian, whose family was Bahai. A lovely woman, who told me that her family had to be careful if they left their village, because they could be killed at any time, simply for having their faith.
How can people stand to live in those circumstances? We are SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY that our ancestors got here to the promised land.
Now if we can just keep the gubmint (mostly Dems but some Pubbies too) from screwing it up any worse than they have already.
I used to work with an Iranian, whose family was Bahai. A lovely woman, who told me that her family had to be careful if they left their village, because they could be killed at any time, simply for having their faith.