By N. WahidAzal © 2016
…By the time that Iranians were getting ready to tear down the very
foundation of Qajar monarchy in the course of the Constitutional Revolution…[during
1905-09; the son of the founder of Baha’ism, ʿAbdu’l-Baha] officially
sided with Muhammad Ali Shah…and went even further and was knighted by George
V, and under the British mandate established the center of his vanity in Haifa…
-- Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology, 2008, 83.
…I fully support a first strike on Iran's nuclear facilities
wherever they may be hidden and by whatever means are needed to destroy them.
If the Iranians deny us their oil, destroy their oil facilities - if we can’t
have their oil, neither will they... Regime change (one way or another) is
coming in the relatively near future and Baha’is must be there when a new
regime is established to make their mark on the new government and help move it
in genuinely new directions…
-- Ian Kluge, Canadian Baha’i scholar, public list: talisman9@yahoogroups.com, April
15, 2006.
The Nature of
the Controversy
For the past two weeks a scandal has been raging inside Iran centring
on Faezah Hashemi, 54, former parliamentarian and daughter of former president,
billionaire power broker and Assembly of Experts member Ayatollah ʿAli
Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Appearing to be part of an escalating power struggle developing
between the two blocs of so-called moderate-reformists (who recently took the majlis
and Assembly of Experts elections) and their ‘principalist’ (i.e. hardliner) opponents;
assorted principalist publications as well as leading figures in the Islamic
Republic of Iran have gone on the attack denouncing her and her father alike
for being traitors to Islam and the Revolution. Not losing a moment’s
opportunity to exploit the situation, and with all the typical warped exaggeration
and blatant misinformation of neo-colonialist perception management regarding
Iran’s apparently ‘abysmal’ human rights record in relation to the Baha’i
minority; the Western corporate media (and particularly the Persian language
sections of the BBC and the VOA) have launched a veritable blitz campaign around
the story not too dissimilar to what we have seen before.
The controversy surrounds Faezah Hashemi’s publicized house visit to
temporarily paroled Baha’i leader Fariba Kamalabadi, 52, with whom she apparently
shared a prison cell in 2009 when Hashemi herself was briefly imprisoned
following the post-election fracas of the Green uprising. One year before those
events, in 2008 Fariba Kamalabadi, along with six other Baha’i colleagues of
the seven-man ad hoc Iranian Baha’i administration known as the hayat-i-Yaran
(‘the Council of Friends’, henceforth ‘Yaran’), was tried on charges of
espionage and spying for Israel, found guilty and sentenced to ten years
imprisonment. What has particularly raised the ire of some principalists in
Iran is the group photograph of the house visit published in social media afterwards
by the Baha’is which shows Faezah Hashemi with Fariba Kamalabadi seated among a
group of other middle-class Baha’is somewhere in Tehran –- with the women all
notably unveiled -- with a picture of the Baha’i patriarch ʿAbbas Effendi
ʿAbdu’l-Baha (d. 1921) prominently displayed on the wall to the left of
the assembled party. The story with its photo(s) immediately went viral on
social media, precipitating a huge uproar throughout the Iranian establishment.
While a seemingly innocuous gesture to most foreign observers not
informed of bigger pictures, such an act under the Islamic Republic of Iran,
and especially one undertaken by a daughter of such a prominent, high profile
figure as Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, albeit symbolic, yet for all the wrong
reasons, constitutes an unambiguously subversive act of outright sedition against
the entire ideological edifice of the present system in Iran. Given its nature,
and especially since the Baha’i question has consistently been a successful disinfo
propaganda talking point for Western establishments to exploit and bludgeon
Iran with for thirty-seven years; this act by Faezah Hashemi can also be interpreted
as playing by design right into the hands of Iran’s enemies in the West, and
particularly the ‘regime changers’ and their agendas. More alarmingly, it may
also be signalling that some sort of alignment is possibly forming between the
moderate-reformist bloc, the Baha’is and the ‘regime changers’ abroad.
Publicly in word, at least, Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani distanced
himself from his daughter’s actions while simultaneously denouncing Baha’ism itself
as well. Yet, arguably, such a high profile and politically charged undertaking
by Faezah Hashemi would not have been possible without either some kind of
foreknowledge or complaisance, whether by her father personally and/or the
power bloc behind him, because the entire gesture reeks of wider political
manoeuvrings, and not just in Iran. As such characterizing the situation as
merely a “debate about religion,” as the New York Times has put it,[1] is not only simplistic but grossly
inaccurate, not to mention being the usual smokescreens and sleights of hand
well known as being choice discursive gimmicks of false narrative building and disinfo
propaganda engaged in by the Western corporate media, its agenda setters and
the Western imperial human rights industry.
There is a complicated and tumultuous history behind all of this that,
while located in Iran’s religious history during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, also holds explicit geopolitical dimensions which involves Iran’s
bitter encounter with the forces of Western imperialism, colonialism and
Zionism in the region, and, above all, with all of those trojan horse, native
informers inside Iran as well as abroad who have consistently undermined the
Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979 –- and even well before. The Baha’is are indeed
one of the more prominent among such groups of native informers. But let us be
precise here as to who it is we are actually talking about.
Haifan Bahaism
At issue is the Haifan Baha’i organization:[2] the uber-wealthy,
well organized and corporate-driven majoritarian Baha’i sect loyal to the
Baha’i ‘Universal House of Justice’ headquartered on Mt Carmel, Haifa, Israel, since
there also exist other schismatic Baha’i groups who are not loyal to Haifa but
stand in opposition to it (and who themselves have faced persecution by the
majoritarian Haifan Baha’is, viz. the so-called ‘Covenant Breaker’ Baha’is) --
groups which the Islamic Republic of Iran has little to no interest in.[3] This last point alone complicates
–- even outright negates -- the whole Western human rights narrative surrounding
the apparent persecution of the Baha’is in Iran and shifts all of its discursive
registers into other, more sinister contexts entirely. As an example of what is
being pointed out here, the quote above by prominent Canadian Baha’i scholar
Ian Kluge should give pause to any neutral observer as to the underlying
political motivations of the Haifan Baha’i establishment towards Iran.
Now, contextualized by a few Western social scientists under the rubric
of an NRM (New Religious Movement, which is to say, a ‘cult’) rather than,
technically speaking, a ‘world religion’;[4]
the origins of Bahaism are to be found during the mid nineteenth century within
a violent schism of the Babi movement that occurred in the territories of the
Ottoman empire.[5]
During that period, and while in exile after earlier being expelled from Iran
during the early 1850s; the founder of Baha’ism, Mirza Husayn ʿAli Nuri Baha’u’llah
(the Glory of God) (d. 1892), broke with his younger step-brother, the
appointed supreme pontiff of the Babi movement, Mirza Yahya Nuri Subh-i-Azal
(the Dawn of Pre-Eternity) (d. 1912), and proclaimed himself to be the
universal
messiah and penultimate divine messenger (or ‘manifestation of God’ in
Baha’i
technical language) come to establish a new global religious order that
is to
eventually succeed and supplant all religions and belief systems
throughout the
world. As a consequence of this violent schism, which included murders
and
assassinations by the Baha’is against their rival detractors among the
Azali
Babis, the Ottomans banished Baha’u’llah and his partisans to Acre in
Palestine while Subh-i-Azal and a handful of his followers were sent
over to Cyprus. Later on, the Azali Babis and Baha’is would stand at
opposite poles of the Iranian Constitutional
Revolution of 1905-09, with the Azali Babis not only supporting but at
the
forefront driving the people’s revolution while the Baha’is instead
stood with the
forces of the royalist reaction and the revolution’s Tsarist
Russian-sponsored
violent suppression by Muhammad ʿAli Shah Qajar (d. 1925).[6]
During the ministry of Baha’u’llah’s son and successor, ʿAbbas
Effendi ʿAbdu’l-Baha (the Servant of Glory) (1892-1921), further
schisms took shape inside Baha’u’llah’s own household with additional schisms
developing after the deaths of ʿAbdu’l-Baha in 1921 and that of his
grandson and successor Shoghi Effendi (d. 1957), who appointed no formal successor.
Since 1963 the dominant Haifan sect has been ruled by the all male, nine-man
body oligarchy (no women are allowed), viz. the Universal House of Justice. While
some recent scholarship in Iran demonstrates that as early as the mid 1850s
close contacts and linkages were already being actively forged between Baha’u’llah
and agents of Western imperialism in the region, such as Manekji Limji Hataria
(d. 1890) and Mirza Malkum Khan (d. 1908); it was under ʿAbdu’l-Baha specifically
that these relationships and contacts were openly formalized and strategically
solidified, particularly with the British and then the Americans. Close
contacts with Tsarist Russia had likewise existed since the early 1850s, only
to be interrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Notably in 1891, and
only one year before his death, Baha’u’llah was actively corresponding with
Baron Nathan de Rothschild (d. 1942), and in so doing openly forming an
alliance with the European proto-Zionist movement that was to be officially
launched only a few years later in 1897 in Basle, Switzerland.[7]
ʿAbdu’l-Baha himself became a key figure in the British war
effort against the Ottomans in Palestine during World War I, and in 1919 he was
officially knighted by the recently established British Mandate for Palestine
for his “…valuable services rendered to the British government in the early
days of the occupation.”[8]
Concurrently during the time when ʿAbdu’l-Baha was cooperating with the
British war effort and then soon thereafter being knighted by them, in Iran
itself the British had engineered a genocidal famine which, according to
historian Mohammad Gholi Majd,[9]
had wiped out between eight to eleven million Iranians in only two years. Some
recent sources even suggest an instrumental Baha’i hand in the rise of Reza
Shah (d. 1944) and the establishment of the Pahlavi monarchy. The role of the
British in bringing Reza Shah to power in 1921 is already widely known, with
the Baha’is here being one of the British empire’s trusted agents locally
facilitating his rise through the devices of the Indian Parsi agent and head of
British secret intelligence in Iran, Sir Ardeshir Reporter (d. 1933), who would
have acted as the go between.
Under the Pahlavis the Haifan Baha’is thrived economically as well
as politically in Iran, enjoying enormous perks and privileges with the elite
of that regime. Following the August 1953 coup d’etat against Mossadegh,
for example, industrialist and business tycoon Habib Sabet (d. 1990) –- a
lifelong member of the Iranian Baha’i leadership until the eve of the Islamic
Revolution in 1979 –- was awarded the Pepsi Cola and Iranian Radio &
Television franchises by Muhammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi (d. 1980) for his role in
supporting the Shah during that crisis. Additionally, the father of Prime
Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda (d. 1979) had been a lifelong Baha’i who had even
acted for some time in the official capacity of a personal secretary to
ʿAbdul-Baha in Palestine -- Amir Abbas Hoveyda himself being a Freemason.
The Shah’s personal physician, General ʿAbdu’l-Karim Ayadi (d. 1978), a long
time royal court insider and crony to his twin sister Ashraf Pahlavi (d. 2016),
was a Baha’i. The notorious Sangsari criminal warlord and underworld figure,
Hozhabr Yazdani (d. 2010), was a Baha’i. Parviz Sabeti, the deputy-head of
SAVAK –- being the man credited for much of the violent excesses committed by
that state security organization against the Shah’s opposition throughout the 1960s
and 1970s -– was a Baha’i (albeit the Baha’i establishment vehemently denies
the fact at present). Countless other examples such as this could be furnished
from that era. So given this, the Haifan Baha’is obviously occupied a
privileged place as a pillar of the Pahlavi ancien régime
as they arguably remain to the Empire’s anti-Iran initiatives presently.
Be
that as it may, technically speaking, the Islamic Republic of
Iran, while it does not constitutionally recognize or accord legitimacy
to
Bahaism as a creed, has no state sponsored policy of persecuting Bahaism
either. Baha’is as Iranian citizens are legally accorded full
citizenship
rights under the law in Iran. It is their creed (together with its
organization
and activities) which is not recognized, or granted legal privileges,
and not
their rights as citizens per se. This fact is consistently
misrepresented,
confused or totally glossed over in silence in the West. Nevertheless,
besides
the fact that at all stages of its history Bahaism has been consistently
sponsored and supported by the forces of Anglo-European imperialism and
colonialism against the interests and security of Iran; the issues the
Islamic
Republic of Iran currently has with the activities of Bahaism have to do
primarily with the reality that the Haifan Baha’i organization and its
leadership
have consistently enjoyed a tightly knit relationship with the state of
Israel,
its establishment and state apparatus. The Israeli establishment, quite
literally, has gone out of its way to protect the Baha’is since 1948 and
in
turn the Baha'is themselves have been one of the biggest beneficiaries
of the
Zionist state. The reader is invited to Google pictures of their Baha’i
World
Centre in Haifa to see for themselves the kind of allowances the Israeli
state
has made to this organization in the construction of their
megalomaniacal Hanging Gardens of Babylon on Mt Carmel. Independent
Israeli filmmaker Naama Pyritz even
confessed during her 2004 interview of Frederick Glaysher what she
believed to
be the Haifan Baha’i organization’s inordinately ‘special relationship’
with
the Israeli state (as well as with the United States and Great Britain):
a
special relationship which no other community or organization in Israel
presently
enjoys.[10]
As
such, given the history here, together with the central,
overriding fact that its very world headquarters is located in Israel,
the
activities of the Haifan Baha’i organization demonstrably pose a serious
national
security threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran in a similar fashion as
various
radical Islamist terrorist groups or violent irredentists (such as the
Basque
separatists and similar) would theoretically pose national security
threats to
Western governments and their internal national security interests. It
should
be noted as well that France banned Scientology and proscribes its
activities
by law, and to some extent Germany as well; and so, the situation of the
Haifan
Baha’i organization in Iran is legally similar to the situation of
Scientology
or, say, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in France and Germany. In Germany, for
instance, they are not even registered as a religious organization but
as an
NGO.
The
Western media often likes to blow the Baha’i issue in Iran beyond all
reasonable proportions while conveniently remaining silent or otherwise
downplaying similar parallels existing in Western countries. Almost
nothing is
mentioned by them about Baha’isms sordid history or eyebrow raising
linkages
and connections presently. This is precisely because these Western
establishments are engaging in carefully orchestrated neo-colonial
perception
management, consensus building and so information war against Iran due
to the
fact that the Haifan Baha’is have in fact been their dependable
comprador lackeys
and trojan horse in the region – and so, native informers -- for the
good part
of one-hundred and sixty-six years.
The Yaran, Faezah Hashemi and the
Converging Forces of Destabilization in Iran
Now, the Yaran referred to above had initially been allowed
to operate in Iran by the government of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005). But a
series of incidents during the period of his presidency involving corruption,
profiteering, the establishment of illegal front companies, hawala
networks and illicit property speculation as well as overall activities deemed to
be threats to Iran’s national security committed by Baha’is; where ostensibly
the openness of the Khatami years was being systematically abused by the Yaran
and its cronies; convinced the succeeding Ahmadinejad administration (2005-13) to
instead shut it down altogether, arrest and charge its seven-man membership,
initiate proceedings against it in the judiciary which finally culminated in
the 2008 sentence against the body. One sticking point of the case was the
active Baha’i missionary and mass conversion efforts underway during the Yaran’s
tenure (which the Yaran had earlier made written guarantees and explicit
undertakings to the Iranian government not to do), especially on Iranian
university campuses, which the Iranian judiciary determined in its 2008 verdict
to be a subversive recruitment effort in collusion with foreign powers, notably
Israel and the United States.
With that said, Faezah Hashemi’s key involvement with the Iranian
Green movement during 2009; that this movement was a linchpin for a specifically
Western coordinated regime change operation in Iran; together with the
persistent allegations that the Baha’is themselves were heavily involved in it;
transforms the nature, configuration and registries of the entire discussion
and locates it elsewhere besides questions revolving around religious freedoms
or minority rights in Iran. That quote above from Canadian Baha’i scholar Ian
Kluge says it all, so for Faezah Hashemi to be openly cavorting this closely in
public with a temporarily paroled leader and representative of the Haifan
Baha’i organization in Iran says that the concerns of her principalist rivals
are not entirely off the wall or misplaced, nor are they remotely predicated by
merely base sentiments of religious bigotry either.
Be
that as it may, the Iranian judiciary has called for Hashemi’s
appearance over the incident. But given who her father is, and the
muscle he
wields within the system (after all, in 1989 following the death of the
Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi-Rafsanjani was the proverbial king-maker),
it is
unlikely that much, if anything, will be done to muzzle her.
Nevertheless that
certain forces may be in the process of converging that include the
Haifan
Baha’is, foreign based regime-changers, the Rafsanjani family and the
moderate-reformist
bloc should give serious concern to any genuine well wisher of Iran
because it
signals that even though we have a nuclear accord and sanctions have
theoretically
been lifted on Iran as of February 2016, something dastardly may be
afoot and
of potentially far more menacing proportions than 2009. This, together
with the
Obama administration’s duplicitous behaviour in dragging its foot on the
unfreezing
of nearly 2 billion dollars worth of Iranian assets while also strong
arming both
American and European business and finance from dealing with Iran,
suggests it strongly. These developments are indeed connected, and the
Baha’i issue
is being strategically used by the West and its internal Iranian allies
as not
only leverage against the Islamic Republic of Iran but as an outright
weapon.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/world/middleeast/iran-bahais-kamalabadi-hashemi-meeting.html
(retrieved 20 May 2016).
[2] Originally http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Baha'i_Faith;
now https://www.scribd.com/doc/235458694/Baha-i-Faith-SourceWatch
(retrieved 20 May 2016); see as well, William M. Miller The Baha’i Faith:
Its History and Teachings, Pasadena, 1974, and Francesco Ficicchia Baha’i:
Einheitsreligion und globale Theokratie. Ein kritischer Einblick in die
Universalreligion, Münster, 2009.
[3] http://www.thesectsofbahais.com/
(retrieved 20 May 2016); see also http://www.orthodoxbahai.com/
and http://www.bupc.org/ as well as
Frederick Glaysher’s two websites https://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/
and http://www.reformbahai.org/
(retrieved 21 May 2016); also more recently, Shua Ullah Behai and (ed.) Eric
Stetson A Lost History of the Baha’i Faith: The Progressive Tradition of
Baha’u’llah’s Forgotten Family, Newark, 2014, and the two blogs and website
associated with this specific faction http://www.unitarianbahai.org/,
http://www.abdulbahasfamily.org/
and https://historyofbahaifaith.wordpress.com/
(retrieved 21 May 2016).
[4] See Denis
MacEoin’s entry “Baha’ism” in A Handbook of Living Religions, (ed.) John
R. Hinnells, London, 1984, and (writing under the alias Daniel Easterman) New
Jerusalems: Reflections on Islam, Fundamentalism and the Rushdie Affair,
London, 1993; see as well Juan R.I. Cole “The Baha’i Faith in America as
Panopticon,” originally published in The Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion, vol. 37, no. 2 (June 1998): 234-248; digitally republished on his
website http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/bahai/1999/jssr/bhjssr.htm
(retrieved 21 May 2016).
[5] See my “Invoking
the Seven Worlds: An acrostic prayer by Mīrzā Yaḥyā
Nūrī Ṣubḥ-i-Azal,” in LUVAH: Journal of the Creative
Imagination, Summer 2013, 1-37 (defunct), now here https://www.scribd.com/doc/269786896/Invoking-the-Seven-Worlds-An-acrostic-prayer-by-M%C4%ABrz%C4%81-Ya%E1%B8%A5y%C4%81-N%C5%ABr%C4%AB-%E1%B9%A2ub%E1%B8%A5-i-Azal
and here https://www.academia.edu/3588368/Invoking_the_Seven_Worlds_An_acrostic_prayer_by_M%C4%ABrz%C4%81_Ya%E1%B8%A5y%C4%81_N%C5%ABr%C4%AB_%E1%B9%A2ub%E1%B8%A5-i-Azal
(retrieved 21 May 2016); see also the website http://www.bayanic.com
(retrieved 21 May 2016); and especially, the works of British orientalist E.G.
Browne and the French diplomat A.-L.-M. Nicolas.
[6] See Siyyid Miqdad
Nabavi Razavi’s seminally important Tārīkh-i-Maktūm:
nigāhī bi-talāsh-hā’i
sīyāsī-i-faʿʿālān azalī dar
mukhālifat bā ḥukūmat-i-qājār va
tadāruk-i-inqilāb-i-mashrūtih (Concealed History: An investigation into the role of
Azalī activists in opposition to the Qājār regime and the
genesis of the Constitutional Revolution), Tehran, 2014.
[7] Cited in Moshe
Sharon (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), “Jewish Conversions to the
Baha’i Faith,” online http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/english/units.php?cat=3666&incat=3479
and http://bahai-library.com/sharon_jewish_conversion_bahai
and http://bahai-library.com/sharon_jewish_conversion_bahai
(retrieved 22 May 2016).
[8] The Handbook of
Palestine, (ed.) Harry
Charles Luke, et al., London, 1922, 59; online at https://archive.org/details/handbookofpalest00lukeuoft
and https://www.scribd.com/doc/283090248/Handbook-of-Palestine-1922
(retrieved 21 May 2016).
[9] See Mohammad Gholi
Majd The Great Famine and Genocide in Iran: 1917-19, Second Edition,
Lanham, 2013.
[10] https://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/archives/Bahais_in_My_Backyard%20-%202.wmv
from 3:40 and https://youtu.be/g2-oGfP2PbU?list=PLkL0BhAsTueiLqVCFxoLLR_mgM4TCcZSm
from 4:20 (retrieved 21 May 2016); see also the 2007 documentary film ‘Baha’is
In My Backyard,’ online at https://vimeo.com/22467795
(retrieved 21 May 2016).
