The Shi'ite Leopard: Iran's Religious Persecution

In the wake of the infamous nuclear deal with the hard-line Iranian regime, countries around the world, led by U.S. President Barack Obama, are busy trying to bring the Islamic Republic, so long sanctioned and held at arm's length by decent people, in from the cold. Business deals beckon, great claims are made of coming dialogue and a slackening of the tensions of the Middle East. We are told that war has been avoided.

But has the Shi'ite leopard, overnight, truly changed its spots? It still executes more people per capita than China, it still supports and conducts terrorist activities in several countries, its leaders still preach hatred for America, Israel, and the West. In reality, nothing has changed, yet the theocratic, human-rights-denying regime is now to be everybody's best buddy.

An important indicator of Iran's unfitness to be counted among the nations as a legitimate actor must be its treatment of its many minorities, above all its religious minorities. As with Saudi Arabia, the theocratic character of the state is most clearly exposed when it comes to its treatment of religions and sects that are not held by the majority. A strict interpretation and application of Islamic law unfailingly leads to disrespect for and harshness towards non-Muslims.

Iran's current president, Hassan Rouhani, came to power as a proponent of human rights and reform, and has been considered a reformer and moderate in the West ever since. During his election campaign, he made countless declarations of his intention to pursue a human rights agenda. On April 11, 2013, he said: "All Iranian people should feel there is justice. Justice means equal opportunity. All ethnicities, all religions, even religious minorities, must feel justice." In a Press TV interview that August, he repeated that his administration would guarantee equal rights for all Iranians: "no authority should differentiate between various ethnicities, religions, minorities and followers of different faiths." Every one of those promises has been broken, yet the U.S administration continues to put faith in Rouhani as an honest broker.

Twelver Shi'ism, which has been the official faith of Iran since the 16th century, has itself been a persecuted religion wherever its adherents have lived under Sunni rule. It was imposed on the population of Iran by the Safavid dynasty (1502-1736), and during the nineteenth century, its clerical hierarchy grew steadily more powerful. Despite setbacks in the twentieth century, the clerical elite came to supreme power during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since the Shi'a are a minority in the Islamic world overall, they are deeply conscious of a need to clamp down on any other religious movements that might threaten to destabilize their rule.

Ironically, Iran is also home to a variety of religious communities, the most notable being the Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Sufis, and the indigenous Baha'i religion. Jews, who had lived in Iran for some 2,500 years, numbered between 60,000 and 80,000 in 1978; after the revolution the following year, two-thirds of the community went abroad. The 2011 census showed less than 9000 Jews left in Iran. It has just been reported that the last synagogue in Borujerd, once home for a significant Jewish community, had to close because there was not a minyan, a minimum prayer quorum of ten men.

Iran's regime has tried to portray itself as tolerant towards Jews, but its fanatical hatred for Israel and Zionism has often exposed the community to accusations of espionage, arrests, and executions. Outwardly, Iranian Jews are not particularly molested, and are represented by a single Member of Parliament. They operate synagogues and ritual baths, celebrate festivals, and are granted the status of dhimmi people: protected by an Islamic government in return for discriminatory debasing requirements. The tolerance, however, is apparently skin deep, with anti-Zionism lying near the surface.[1]

The second of Iran's dhimmi faiths, Christianity, has not fared as well. The total number of Christians in Iran (of all denominations) has been estimated at between 200,000 and 250,000. Ninety percent of these belong to long-standing indigenous churches, for Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans. They do not seek converts and are relatively unmolested. But churches that have links to foreign countries are treated harshly. According to Minority Rights International:

"The Protestants, and particularly evangelical groups, face the most difficulties from amongst the Christian communities in Iran. Human Rights Watch estimated their numbers at around 10,000-15,000 in 2002. Churches have been closed down, the use of Persian in sermons banned, the publishing of Bibles restricted and Muslims strictly prohibited from attending sermons, with previous converts from Islam being put under particular surveillance. A number of Christian leaders have been killed or found murdered since the early 1990s: Assemblies of God Minister Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr was found stabbed to death in 1994; Reverend Mehdi Dibaj, pastor of the Church of the Assemblies of God, a convert from Islam 41 years previously, was released from prison in January 1994 but found dead by the authorities on July 2 that year; Reverend Tateos Michaelian, found murdered in July 1994; pastor Mohammad Bagher Yusefi, disappeared and was found dead in 1996, and pastor Ghorban Dordi Tourani was found dead in 2005.

Respected religious affairs journalist Ruth Gledhill has argued that, despite promises of amelioration from the current President, Hasan Rouhani, the situation for Christians has not improved at all. By the end of 2014, over 90 Christians were behind bars. Gledhill writes:

"Christians continue to be arbitrarily arrested and interrogated because of their faith. Some face 'severe physical and psychological torture' during detention, and simple prayer or Bible study meetings are regarded as political activities that threaten the national security of Iran.

...

"Christians disappear for weeks at a time while they are interrogated. They are held in solitary and questioned nightly, for hours at a time, beginning just after midnight. A key goal of the security services is to find and remove any New Testaments from the homes of Christians. Detainees are sometimes told they must to convert to Islam or their families will be killed."[2]

Despite such threats, it has been claimed by some missionary organizations that thousands of Iranian Muslims are converting to Christianity, resulting in a growth rate of 20% per annum. Mohammed Zamir, a church leader in the UK for expatriate Iranians, has stated that hundreds of thousands of Iranians are converting to Christianity, out of control of the authorities. These claims need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The longest-lasting and most indigenous faith in the country is, of course, the ancient Zoroastrian religion, founded by the Iranian prophet Zardosht (Zarathustra, Zoroaster) somewhere between 1700 and 500 BCE, but traditionally dated to around 600 BCE. Until modern times, the religion has remained largely confined to Iran and India (where Zoroastrians are known as Parsis, having moved to the sub-continent from Iran from the 8th to 10th centuries to avoid persecution by the Muslim newcomers).[3] Although the Qur'an mainly speaks of Jews and Christians when it refers to "the people of the book" (Ahl al-kitab), one verse (22:17) speaks of the Magis (al-Majus): "As for the believers [the Muslims], those who follow the Jewish religion, the Sabaeans, the Christians, the Magians, and the idol worshippers, God will decide between them on the Last Day."

After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran between 633 and 651 CE, it became a matter of urgency to define the status of the Zoroastrian population. Exegetes and jurists agreed that they should be treated as scriptuaries and not pagans, which led to a degree of toleration for them and their religious practices.

Under the Islamic regime, however, this toleration has been severely strained. In November 2005, Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati, chairman of the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, disparaged Zoroastrians and other religious minorities as "sinful animals who roam the earth and engage in corruption." When the Zoroastrians' solitary parliamentary representative protested, he was hauled before a revolutionary tribunal. There, mullahs threatened execution before sparing his life with a warning never to challenge their declarations again. A frightened community subsequently declined to re-elect him. Writing in 2011, Sanskrity Sinha commented that "Zoroastrianism in Iran is on the verge of dying an ignominious death, with only a few thousand living in a country where their rights are suppressed."

Sufism is another indigenous community that has suffered greatly at the hands of the Islamic regime. Sufism is the mystical trend in Islam, and in the Sunni world, across North Africa, the Middle East, and far beyond. In some periods, the many Sufi brotherhoods (tariqat) were followed by as much as 90% of the population. Sufism has been attacked in modern times, especially by the Saudi Wahhabis, and its numbers have greatly fallen. In Iran (and in regions such as Tajikistan, Afghanistan and northern India, saturated with Persian influences), although there were few orders, the culture was deeply embedded with Sufi mysticism. Persian poetry, for example, is considered one of the greatest canons of verse in the world. [4]

The Islamic regime will never dare ban the works of these poets, considered the highest achievement of Persian culture. But in a bizarre move, it has clamped down hard on Iran's best-known Sufi order, the Ne'matollahis.[5]

Today, even though members of it are fervently pious in their devotion to the faith of the Shi'a and their twelve holy imams, the Sufis, especially the Gonabadi branch, have been persecuted. In 2006, for instance, clerics in Qom (where the important Khomeinist seminary is situated) declared Sufis to be apostates and attempted to expel them from the town and to take over their Shi'i-style religious centre. Dervishes from across Iran travelled to Qom, held several days of protests around the centre, and declared their desire for peace, their commitment to the Shi'i faith, and their loyalty to the revolution.

In spite of this display of devotion, police suppressed the protest. Over 1,000 Sufis were arrested and the religious centre was burned to the ground. The anti-Sufi campaign then moved to other cities such as Bojnurd and Isfahan, where more centres were destroyed. In 2009, the shrine of Sufi poet and philosopher Dervish Naser 'Ali, situated in a local cemetery in Isfahan, was looted and then destroyed. Protesters who gathered outside the Majlis (Iran's parliament) were disrupted when police arrested sixty of them.

That same year, the Green Movement for democracy in Iran was violently suppressed. It had been supported by the Gonabadi Sufis. Since then, lawyers, website managers, and others have been imprisoned, tortured and killed. On September 10, four Gonabadi activists were arraigned in Shiraz for trying to appeal their earlier convictions. Their website describes this: "At the court hearing in the case of four dervishes, Mr. Saleheddin Moradi, Mr. Farzad Darviah, Mr. Behzad Nouri and Mrs. Farzaneh Nouri that was held in Branch 16 of the appeals court of Shiraz, the representative of the prosecution contemptuously emphasized the necessity of their penitence, to discontinue... website activities... and also the maximum punishment for the mentioned dervishes."

The attack on the Sufis of Iran reveals something particularly dark about the Islamic regime. Sufi mysticism, with its close ties to the most central aspects of Persian culture -- poetry, calligraphy, music, miniature painting, the rose, the nightingale, the garden -- is vital to the healthy working of Iranian society, yet the regime that asserts its right to protect the people under its rule has turned on it.

Not far from that denial of Persian values stands the greatest persecution of all: the ongoing attack made on Iran's largest indigenous religious minority, the Baha'is. "The Baha'is of Iran," according to Payam Akhavan, Professor of International Law at McGill University, have long been the canary in the mineshaft as far as human rights are concerned. Their treatment is the litmus test of the direction the leadership intends to take the country."

This is a subject that has resulted in a vast outpouring of articles, reports, government debates, websites, legal appeals, protests, speeches and encyclopaedia articles. Although there have been many executions, this is not a story like that of Islamists killing Christians in the Middle East. It is something more chilling than that. It's best parallel is the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s, before the move to a "Final Solution" -- a slow, steady, calculated, often bureaucratic campaign of attrition.

Baha'ism (the Baha'i Faith) is a monotheistic religion that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century out of a Shi'ite sect known as Babism.[6]

Today, it is estimated that there are about five million Baha'is across the globe, with their largest numbers among Hindu converts in India and Western converts in Europe, North and South America. The Baha'i temple in New Delhi, with over 100 million visitors, is considered by UNESCO to be one of the most visited buildings in the world. Although small in numbers, the Baha'is are racially, nationally, and religiously diverse, well organized and well integrated.

Where Babism was militant and grew embroiled in clashes with state troops in several places, Baha' Allah abrogated jihad, advocated world peace, equality of the sexes, world brotherhood and other teachings ultimately derived from Western sources. His religion, built on a mixture of Shi'i and Sufi beliefs, was nonetheless progressive in nature, at ease with modernity, and divorced from political intrigue. This combination of religious heresy and Western social themes brought it directly in conflict with the clergy of the day and through the twentieth century. Baha'is were martyred, imprisoned, and faced with daily suspicion and animosity. For all that, their stress on education and their openness to science and professional pursuits meant that they prospered as doctors, lawyers, teachers, academics, and technicians. Some even held positions at the Shah's court. More complicated is that many Iranian Jews converted to Baha'ism, despite this exposing them to harsher treatment.[7]

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