According to “The Egyptian Today,” a prominent newspaper in Egypt, schools in Cairo refused enrollment of Baha’i students after having received instructions not to accept applicants who are neither Muslim nor Christian.

Parents have filed a complaint with the Ministry of Education, but have yet to receive a response from any relevant officials. The deadline for school admissions was yesterday. Parents do not know the fate of their Baha’i children, who are being refused their education (despite them being citizens) simply because of their faith.

Yousef Labib, the child’s parent, said in a statement to al Masry Al Youm: “I went to admit my daughter to a school, but its administration refused to accept students who do not state their religion in their birth certificates.” Only Islam and Christianity are accepted as religions, without allowing Baha’i parents to discuss the matter further.

According to Labib, other Baha’i parents have already filed complains for the same purpose, but no action has been taken and these children do not know whether or not they will be able to receive a formal education during the next school year.

Iranian Baha’is have a similar problem, with citizens being deprived of their education due to their religion. We hope that Egypt will not be comparable with such extreme mistreatment, and that Baha’is will soon be treated as citizens with rights that the government is required to respect.

Why are Baha’is being the denied the right to education? For many years people have been asking this question, and yet still, not a single government official from either Iran or Egypt has offered a legitimate response.

Please leave a comment on this article and express your outrage on the absurdity of children being refused their education simply because of their faith. This is a clear abuse of the most basic human rights!

For further information you may also read this article by the Daily News Egypt. Quoting the source:

The Interior Ministry, however, has been slow in implementing the court decision and producing identity cards with a blank religious affiliation field.

We issued a comic inspired by this issue. You may view it again here.

In 1925, Egypt became the first Muslim-majority country to recognize the Baha’i faith as an independent religion. However, almost 80 years later, Baha’is in Egypt continue to face heinous discrimination, due to their failure to obtain identity cards. Identity cards are the key towards gaining access to education, health care, and economic opportunities. Without them, Baha’is cannot exercise their full citizenship rights. (See our video for more details.)

Although a landmark ruling in January decreed that Baha’is can obtain identification papers, the government has yet to implement the ruling, and recently, a lawyer for Egypt’s Islamic Research Council filed a challenge intended to stall the process.

…and in the meantime, thousands of Baha’is are left waiting.

Imagine an Iran where Baha’is are free to practise their faith. Imagine an Iran where Baha’is proudly proclaim their identity, without fear of retribution. Imagine an Iran where the National Spiritual Assembly is an active entity in leading the country towards progress. Imagine an Iran where the government actively seeks to protect Baha’i cemeteries and holy sites, and make necessary renovations.

We have a dream that one day in Shiraz, a city with a black history of persecution, little Baha’i boys and Baha’i girls will be able to join hands with little Muslim boys and Muslim girls as sisters and brothers.

Driven by that dream, our media team has created an ingenious satirical video, imagining a world where Ahmedinejad announces a dramatic shift in Iran’s oppressive policies.

On the 27th of June, 1980, Bahar Tahzib’s father was executed in Iran for no other than being a Baha’i. This wasn’t an isolated incident, but a part of a wide and systemic crackdown on the country’s peaceful Baha’i community in the wake of the Islamic Revolution.

Tahzib’s family finds itself once again reliving the horror, as her uncle Jamaloddin Khanjani was arrested along with six other leaders of the community, with no access to lawyers or due process.

The tragedy of Iran’s obsessive witch-hunt against its largest non-Muslim religious minority is that the Baha’is cherish an abiding love for their country and have remained there – despite intense persecution – because they wish to contribute to its progress and prosperity. Iran is their homeland, and as the cradle of their faith and others, they extol it as a sacred land. Their steadfastness in the face of oppression, and the evidence of their goodwill towards their countrymen is gaining increasing recognition amongst ever greater numbers of Iranians at home and abroad. Muslim campaigners are openly calling for the Iranian government to respect the human rights of its Baha’i population

Read more here

The situation of the Baha’i community in Iran is critical, as expressed in this urgent message from the Freedom to Believe Foundation:

Statement on Critical Situation of the Baha’i Community in Iran

The week of May 12th has been one of great importance to the international Baha’i Community. Friends from countries and territories all over the world have been distressed by the suffering of their human family in Myammar and China. The tragedies there have compelled us all to lament the condition of humanity, not just because of the havoc and human destruction from nature, but mostly because of our frailties in not being able to protect our fellow world citizens from the limitations of ideologies and practices that prevent us from helping those who are in the greatest need. This is the greatest tragedy, when we want to help one another, and we’re not allowed.

This is also the case in Iran. Our community feels powerless to help those who were arrested this past week with out just cause or having committed any crime. These men and women join thousands of Bahai’s in Iran who have been imprisoned, tortured and executed over the course of the last century strictly because of their beliefs. And what is their crime? They are world citizens who have a sane loyalty to their country and the desire to see their country thrive and prosper. They appreciate the contributions to civilization that Persia and Persians have made over the course of human history and are proud of their culture and people.

Because of their faith, they don’t participate in party politics and they hold steadfast to their convictions that all peoples should have the right to their conscience. They believe that ultimately the human race is one family, that we are guided and protected by one God, the Founder of all the great religions of humanity, who has taught all of us to respect one another, to appreciate diversity of belief and to love one another.

To hear of more arrests this week was both discouraging and profoundly sad. It reminded the Baha’i Community of the most recent pogroms in Iran in the 1980’s where the IRI arrested thousands, carried out a merciless campaign to execute the leadership of the Baha’i Community in Iran (executing over 200 Baha’i’s) and threw Bahai’s out of their jobs, their schools, defining them as non-citizens of the country they love. The Islamic Republic also destroyed Holy Places and cemeteries as if to obliterate every trace of the Baha’I Faith in the land of It’s birth. It has been described by some in the international community as cultural genocide but at it’s heart, it is a campaign to eradicate this community which represents the largest religious minority in Iran, numbering close to half a million people.

The Freedom to Believe Foundation has been organized in North America and many countries to come in order to combat this fanaticism and try to encourage understanding of every human being’s right to hold their own heartfelt convictions without fear of intimidation. The first project of the Foundation is to produce a feature length movie about ten women teenagers to grandmothers, who were executed in Shiraz, Iran by the government in 1983 for their beliefs. They were arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the authorities for nine months and finally hanged before dawn on June 18th, 1983. The youngest of them was a 17 year old girl, Mona Mahmudnizhad, who refused to recant her beliefs and the movie is based on her story and will be called “Mona’s Dream”. Shohreh Agdashloo, Oscar-nominated actress for “House of Sand and Fog” will play Mona’s mother in the film and Mona’s role will be played by Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar -nominated actress for “Whale Rider”.

The goal of the Foundation and the film will be to create awareness of these injustices and help support people of all faiths and no faith to be protected when their conscience is violated. Please join us in helping to make these ideas become successful on the world stage.

You may contact this foundation via phone at 1-813-770-0870 or e-mail at freedomtobelievefoundation@gmail.com

Please protest in any way that you can before the situation worsens. It is important for us to stick together regardless of our different faith or nationalities in order to help release these innocent individuals!

In a breakthrough verdict, Cairo’s Administrative Court issued a ruling to allow Baha’is to leave their religious affiliation field blank on official documents. This in effect would allow them access to education, health care and allow them to enjoy their rights as citizens.

The verdicts were handed down in the cases of the teenage twins Imad and Nancy Raouf Hindi, who have been prohibited from obtaining birth certificates, and Hussein Hosni Abdel-Massih who was suspended from university due to his inability to obtain military service postponement letters.

Baha’i Faith in Egypt has provided a roundup of coverage on this landmark ruling.

Let us hope that this is the beginning of a new chapter for human rights in Egypt

Prof. Leonard Lewisohn is the Lecturer in Persian, at Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies of the University of Exeter in England. Recently he posted the following notice on an internet list of Persian studies scholars and due to the significance of this issue for human rights in Iran, we wish to share his posting with our readers. The Editorial Staff.

Prof Lewisohn wrote:

In February 2006, I wrote a detailed report to scholars who subscribe to this list about destruction of the Ni‘matullahi-Gunabadi Hosseiniyya (Sufi Center or Khanaqah) in Qom, Iran. I described how on Feb. 13, 2006, a vigilante mob, abetted by the baton-wielding police of the Islamic Republic of Iran, seized, burned down and then bulldozed this Sufi prayer and meditation center, arresting hundreds of dervishes and wounding many demonstrators in the process. Unfortunately, that attack has proven to be but one in a series of ongoing attempted pogroms of Sufis in the Land of the Ayatollahs. The most recent attack took place a month ago in Borujerd, a city in the province of Loristan in the west of Iran, where some 1000 followers of the Gunabadi branch of the Ni‘matullahi Order currently live.

On November 4, 2007, an irregular armed, vigilante gang of thugs sponsored and funded by the fundamentalist, Islamicist regime, known as the Basij-i Mostaza‘fin (nicknamed ‘Basiji’), along with the state security services, attacked the center of this same group of Sufis in Borujerd. After pillaging all its possessions and furnishings, they burned it down. Some 70 people were injured and more than 150 dervishes or dervish sympathizers were imprisoned.

It may be useful to know something of the historical background to this event. Since 2005, several prominent exoteric clerics (‘ulama) in the city had been delivering sermons against Sufism, haranguing the populace about the evils of the Sufis, branding the Sufi mystical tradition in Islam as a dangerous heresy and aberration of faith. They incited their followers to destroy the Sufi Hosseiniyya (Khanaqah) there. In late October 2007, a conference on the greatest Muslim Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) of Iran, sponsored by the Institute of Philosophy in Tehran, was held in Tehran and Tabriz. A week after the conference the influential fundamentalist ideologue Ayatollah Safi Golpayegani issued a statement describing Rumi’s poetry as being full of “perverted and misleading ideas and against our principles [i.e. of the fundamentalist brand of Shi‘ite Islam propounded by the religious ideologues of the Islamic Republic of Iran].” The Hamshahri newspaper in Tehran furthermore reported him as saying, “I condemn this conference and its organizers… Its content comprised much dangerous innovation (bid‘at), including things such as listening to music (sama‘) and dance… Everyone should feel shame before the Imam of the Age that such a conference has been convened [in Iran].” Unfortunately, Ayatollah Safi belongs to that select group of mafioso clerics known as ‘Sources of Religious Emulation’, the pronouncements of whom, however outrageous, theologically biased and theosophically misinformed they may be, no one dares criticize, for to do so is to risk losing one’s job, or being blacklisted as an anti-revolutionary, or face imprisonment, or worse. I was in Tehran during the same week that Sign-of-God Safi’s comments were published so am a witness that none of the distraught organizers of the conference (friends of mine) dared raise their voice in the media to try to directly refute this mullah in order to expose the rank barrenness of literary and intellectual culture beneath his large turban. Safi’s characterization of Rumi’s Sufi poetry as being “dangerous innovation,” of course, provided just the right ammunition that the ideological enemies of the Ni‘matullahi Sufis needed. A few days later after Safi attacked Rumi, the Ni‘matullahi-Gunabadi Sufi center in Borujerd was appropriately razed to the ground—without, of course, hardly a word of protest at this religious vigilantism being voiced in the media. The psychology of this behaviour Rumi had described quite well incidentally: “The passional soul carries a rosary and the Holy Scripture in its right hand, but has a dagger and a sword up its sleeve.” (Nafs ra tasbih u mushaf dar yamin/ khanjar u shamshir andar asetin). (Mathnawi, III: 2554)

It should be emphasized that the Ni‘matullahi Order is the largest Sufi Order in Iran, with the members of all its various branches currently suffering persecution at the hands of the fundamentalist regime. The background, history and various details underlying this fresh assault on the Persian Sufi tradition, which are discussed and analysed by news-sites and other links in English and Persian, are provided below:

http://www.majzob.com

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/20071112_Sufi_site_attacked_in_Iran.html

http://WWW.30morgh-121.blogfa.com

http://WWW.soofee.blogfa.com

http://gonabadie-news.blogspot.com

http://soltanalishahi.blogspot.com/2006/02/blog-post_08.html

http://WWW.darvishan.info

According to the Turkish Daily News:

The Baha’i community in Turkey wants official recognition from the state and desires the elimination of prejudices and inaccurate public descriptions of their faith. The Baha’i faith has around 10,000 members in Turkey.

[…]

Rights once given to them between 1960 and 1990 were taken away when the Interior Ministry issued instructions introducing a new standardized code system that did not include the Baha’i faith.

[…]

“We await the amendment of the laws and code system to enable us to state our religion on identity cards,” said Suzan Merter, the Media and Public Relations coordinator of the Baha’i External Affairs Office. She is a third generation Baha’i who benefited from the former law enabling them to be registered. But she cannot renew her identity card and have her religion stated on it.

No hesitation to say I am a Baha’i Merter said she doesn’t hesitate to say that she is a Baha’i. “I don’t, because this is my identity. What you defend is right and good. We learned the Baha’i faith as a way of life. We learned to be hospitable, virtuous and welcoming of differences. We work for the peace and unity of humanity, which isn’t a thing to be ashamed of. So why should I conceal my religious identity?” she said.

Read full article here.

Turkey is a Muslim country. Religious tolerance is a prominent part of Islamic history. We as Muslims have no reason to deny the right for others to practice their religion freely. Exactly what threat does the Baha’i faith pose to us as Muslims, and what do we gain from oppressing them in countries like Iran, Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey?

To quote the holy Quran:

Surrah 2, Ayat 256:

“There is no compulsion in religion.”

We thus all have the right to choose our paths, and it is our duty to accept, respect, and tolerate one another.

We call upon Turkey to recognize the Baha’i faith and to respect it in the name of Islam. If they would like to do so in the name of politics, then religious tolerance is still key if they want to be considered for admission in the European Union.

About a year ago, 54 Baha’i youth were arrested in Shiraz, Iran, on charges of serving the poor in dispossessed areas surrounding the city by carrying out social-economic assistance.

It was announced that three of them, Raha Sabet, Sasan Taghva and Haleh Rouhi, were sentenced to prison for four years. The remaining youth were sentenced to one-year imprisonment.

While according to laws in Iran these sentences are unenforceable, on Monday, November 19, one of the governmental departments summoned the three named Baha’i youth on the pretext that their personal belonging was to be returned. However, upon arriving, instead they discovered that they were being arrested for dispatch to Adel-Abad Prison for the execution of their sentence of four years.

The Third Committee of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, 20 November 2007, passed a resolution (A/C.3/62/L.43) condemning Iran’s appalling human rights record.

In this resolution, the General Assembly expressed “its very serious concern” at a whole range of egregious human rights violations, including torture, flogging, amputations, public executions, stoning, execution of minors, violent action taken against women, and called upon the Iranian government to eliminate all its appalling and cruel practices.

The resolution condemns the… increasing discrimination and other human rights violations against person belonging to religious, ethnic, linguistic or other minorities, recognized or otherwise … and in particular attacks on Baha’is and their faith in State-sponsored media, increasing efforts by the State to identify and monitor Baha’is and prevention of the Baha’i faith from attending university and from sustaining themselves economically…

and calls upon the Iranian government… to implement, inter alia, the 1996 report of the Special Rapporteur on religious intolerance, which recommended ways in which the Islamic Republic of Iran could emancipate the Baha’i community.

We are encouraged to see the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran condemned in such strong language.

Only a few countries known for abuse of human rights defended Iran’s position, and these included Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Belarus and Pakistan!

The resolution now has to go before the Plenary of the UN General Assembly.