Educational Deprivation and Business Prohibition: The Life of Baha'is in Iran

One is in temporary detention, another is serving a sentence, and several others are awaiting trial and sentencing; younger individuals are deprived of education while older ones are struggling in government offices to lift the seals on their businesses. This is the daily reality that Baha'i citizens in Iran have been living for decades. In the latest action by Iran's security agencies and judiciary, Baha'i shops in the cities of Ahvaz, Abadan, Khorramshahr, and several other cities have been sealed. This is the voice of a Baha'i who spoke with Radio Farda under the pseudonym Soroush: 'Last year, all Baha'i shops in Ahvaz were sealed for almost three months, and the reason was that we do not work on our holy days and close our shops, and they sealed it because we closed our shop, saying that you are not allowed to close your shop and it must remain open on your holy days. After about three months, they reopened the shop. This year, exactly at the same time as our holy days, we closed the shop and did not go to work, and they came again and sealed the shop, and until now, whenever we go to court, they do not give us a proper answer, they do not tell us on whose orders it was or for what reason. Sometimes they say the responsible person is not here, come back tomorrow. Other times they say the secretary is not here or they do not answer... This is how they are harassing us.' The issue of sealing Baha'i businesses is one that the special assistant to the Iranian president on citizen rights promised to follow up on a year ago. Shahindokht Molaverdi said in December 2017: 'We have made inquiries from the legal deputy of the president regarding this matter, and we are pursuing it legally to find a solution.' It has been about a year since Ms. Molaverdi's remarks, but the sealing of Baha'i businesses continues, and no change has occurred in this situation. Varga, another citizen whose shop has recently been sealed, says: 'The reason given by the judiciary or the deputy prosecutor is that during our religious holidays, which are nine days throughout the year, we have a religious ruling to close, and working is forbidden for us, so we close our shops. Some of these nine days coincide with national holidays, like Nowruz, and three or four days during the year we usually close the shop. They view this issue as a promotional ruling. However, during the days we close, we perform our daily prayers, pray, or do family activities, many of us travel, just like a regular holiday that others can have. We have approached the relevant organizations, and none of them have responded so far. In different cities, we know from our relatives and friends that similar events are happening to them; there is a very specific system, and decisions seem to depend on the city officials. Everything is subjective. We know of shops in other cities that have been closed for two or three years now.' Baha'is have been denied the right to hold government positions for decades, but in many cases, they are also prevented from conducting private businesses. This action is what the Baha'i community calls 'economic apartheid.' Simin Fahandezh, spokesperson for the Baha'i World Community in Geneva, states: 'The concept of apartheid is segregation and discrimination, and if we look at the history of the persecution of Baha'is over the past forty years, we see that the Iranian government has done exactly this, trying to separate them from society and essentially eliminate them, and that these discriminations contradict the claims of Iranian government representatives speaking in international communities. In the past few years, since Mr. Rouhani took office, this situation has not changed at all, and economic deprivations against the Baha'i community in Iran have even increased.' Alongside the sealing of Baha'i businesses, several other Baha'is have been arrested in various cities in Iran in recent days, including in Karaj, Isfahan, and Tabriz. In these cases, neither the detaining agency is known nor the reason for the arrests. There is little information about the situation of the detainees. Payman, a Baha'i citizen whose mother, father, and brother have previously been arrested and sentenced to prison, speaks about the conditions of detention and interrogations: 'When my brother and father were arrested, my mother had already been arrested to serve her two-year prison sentence and was in prison, and I was the only family member outside of prison. They had no contact with family members. Only a short call was made by my father, saying that he was in solitary confinement in the information office and was fine, that was all. They could not talk about anything. There was no physical torture, but there was psychological torture. My brother describes some of the psychological and mental damage inflicted on him. For example, at three in the morning, they would bring my brother, blindfold him, and take him to a room to identify a criminal. The fear and terror he experienced were very intense. All interrogations were done blindfolded and facing the wall.' In addition to this, in recent months, several Baha'i youths have been deprived of their university education. Some of them were studying or on the verge of graduating and were suddenly expelled from the university. Individuals such as Shakibatimouri, Hanan Har, Soha Izadi, Sadaf Vajdani, Arash Razavian, Sougal Zabihih, Hooman Imani, Shaghayegh Shoghi, and Kiana Snaei. Maryam, a pseudonym for one of these individuals, tells Radio Farda: 'They did not give me any ruling, and said that I have been banned from studying, and whenever I asked them to give me my ruling, they said no, and just closed my account. After two semesters, they issued an expulsion ruling for me in absentia, I was expelled by phone. Whenever I asked for the reason, they did not tell me any reason, and after I spoke with Mr. Nourbakhsh at the Organization for Educational Testing, who is the head of the central selection committee at the Organization for Educational Testing, he said in the first sentence, you know that you are Baha'i, and in Iran, Baha'is have no right to education. I was deprived of education because I thought differently. They told me to write that I have converted to Islam and that I renounce Baha'ism so that I can return to university and study. I said that this is my belief for the past twenty years, and why should I change my belief for a degree? They said this is the only way you can [return to university].' However, some other Baha'is do not get the opportunity to enter university and are prevented from continuing their education right from the entrance exam stage. Morteza Ismailpour, a human rights activist who has been following the issue of Baha'is' deprivation of education, says this process has been ongoing for years: 'The Islamic Republic's efforts to identify Baha'i citizens and prevent them from entering university is based on a fatwa from Khamenei and the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution; this is a process that occurs every year, and when students enter the site to check their exam results, they encounter deficiencies in their files, and it is indicated that with this deficiency in the file, students go to the selection office of the Organization for Educational Testing, and they are generally not allowed to enter that section, but now students who have approached have faced the response that they have been deprived of continuing their education solely because of their religion and cannot pursue it because, under the laws of the Islamic Republic, the right to higher education for Baha'i students is prohibited. These students have also filed complaints and pursued various avenues, but so far they have heard no response.' And all of this is happening while Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, stated in May at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: 'Being Baha'i is not a crime in Iran. We do not recognize being Baha'i as a religion, but it is a belief, like someone who may not believe in God. We do not imprison him for being an atheist.' These remarks have drawn widespread criticism from human rights defenders and social media users. Arrests, convictions, and deprivations of Baha'i followers have been consistently criticized in reports and resolutions by the United Nations in recent years. Reports and resolutions that Iran describes as 'lies, biased, and politically motivated.' In this context, the protest of several religious intellectuals against the exhumation of Shamsi Aghdasi, a Baha'i citizen.