wfn.org | Baha'i news: Prominent Iranians call for religious liberty

[Sally Weeks <sweeks@bwc.org>]

>Baha'i World News Service
>http://news.bahai.org<http://news.bahai.org/
>For more information, contact: news@bahai.org<mailto:news@bahai.org

>Prominent Iranians call for religious liberty

WASHINGTON, 30 September (BWNS) - A best-selling author and an Oscar-nomina ted actress are among those who have called for religious freedom in Iran,  including an end to the persecution of Baha'is in that country.

Some 1,400 people heard Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran,"  and Shohreh Aghdashloo, Academy Award-nominated actress for "House of Sand  and Fog," speak at a public gathering this month at George Washington Unive rsity's Lisner Auditorium. Both Dr. Nafisi and Ms. Aghdashloo were born in  Iran, and neither is a member of the Baha'i community.

Dr. Nafisi spoke passionately about the common humanity of all people and t he suffering of one being the suffering of all. She particularly focused on  minorities in Iran and pointed to the example of the Baha'is.

"I ask myself," she said, "how does it feel to be deprived of every single  basic human right in a country you call your own, in a country where you ha ve been born into the language and the culture, a country where your parent s and your parents' parents ... have lived and contributed to, what does it  mean to be deprived of the right to education, of the right to property, o f even the right to life?"

She said the struggle is "not a political struggle, it is an existential on e." It goes beyond the Baha'is, she said, to "every single person in Iran w ho dares to be different, who dares to express his or her desire for the fr eedom to have a choice."

"Baha'is in Iran have become the canaries in the mine," she said. "You want  to know how much freedom the Iranian people enjoy today, you go to the fat e of its Baha'is."

Depriving people of their individuality is a way of killing them, she said.  "It is worse, in fact, that just being plainly murdered. To deny your huma nity, your individuality, is to be dead."

"The show trials that have been going on in Iran - all these people coming  from such different backgrounds, such different ages, such different politi cal and religious beliefs, all of them deprived of their individuality," sh e said.

The defendants, she said, were forced into confessing that "whatever they b elieved in, whatever lifestyle they led ... was a farce and sham. That is a nother way of killing people."

Ms. Aghdashloo, addressing the gathering via video from Los Angeles, said e verything she had "ever read or understood about the Baha'i Faith" is that  is stands for the oneness of humanity and inherent nobility of all human be ings.

"I stand with many others around the world in conveying our unified voice i n support of the Baha'is in Iran and wish to speak out against the ongoing  and deplorable actions of the Iranian government," she said.

The event in Washington, held on 12 September, was dedicated to the Baha'is  who are jailed in Iran, including the seven "leaders" who have been detain ed in Tehran's notorious Evin prison for more than a year on trumped-up cha rges of "espionage for Israel, insulting religious sanctities, and propagan da against the Islamic republic."

It was one of a number of gatherings held in recent months across the Unite d States to offer prayers for the prisoners, including events in Los Angele s, San Francisco, and now Washington.

In San Francisco - at the Herbst Theatre, where the United Nations Charter  was signed in 1945 - Dr. Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies prog ram at Stanford University, was the principal speaker.

"For Iran, the treatment of the Baha'is in the last 150 years, our society' s acts of omission and commission, what we said and did or failed to say an d do, all create an embarrassing blot of shame on our history," he said.

"Iran can't become a democracy unless it has had a full reckoning with its  Baha'i problem," he said. "Iran can't be a democracy unless the Baha'is are  considered full citizens of the society and their faith - like those of Zo roastrians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, or members of any other faith, belie f, or even disbelief - is recognized as a private matter where the state, s ocial institutions, or actors have no right of inquiry, interference, or ha rassment."

In Washington, one of the speakers was Dwight Bashir, associate director fo r policy at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

He quoted from U.S. President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo earlier this y ear, directed to the Muslim world: "People in every country should be free  to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and th e heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, b ut it's being challenged in many different ways. ... Among some Muslims, th ere's a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of  somebody else's faith."

"The last part of President Obama's statement is exactly what we are witnes sing in Iran today," Dr. Bashir said.

For photographs and video links to the speeches, go to:
http://news.bahai.org/story/731