‘A war of religion’: Iran accused of trying to convert young members of Baha’i minority to Islam

Iranian authorities appear to be stepping up a campaign of repression against an embattled religious minority, allegedly attempting to identify young members of the faith and convert them to Islam against the wishes of their parents.

Human rights advocates also describe raids on the homes of dozens of members of the Baha’i faith over the last few weeks and the seizing of property belonging to the religious minority.

“This is a war of religion,” said Karim Lahidji, of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), an advocacy group. “The existence of Baha’is in Iran is opposed to the ideology of the Islamic authorities. They call it a political faction, and not a religion. The repression has a political and religious goal.”

Originally a Shia Muslim reform movement in the 19th century, Baha’ism broke away from the Islamic sect’s clerical hierarchy and eventually established itself as a separate faith. It headquartered itself in Haifa, then part of Palestine and now in Israel, lending ammunition to regime claims that Baha’is are consorting with its regional enemies.

Scores of Baha’is were executed after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. They remain banned from higher education, barred from government jobs, targeted in the media, and have had their cemeteries and houses of worship destroyed. Numbers are sketchy, but estimates are that perhaps 300,000 Baha’is continue to live in Iran, down from perhaps twice that number before the revolution.

Small communities of Baha’is also suffer oppression in other repressive religiously conservative Middle East autocracies, including Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But Iran’s treatment of the members of faith, considered its largest religious minority, has drawn particular criticism over the decades.

The Paris-based FIDH recently obtained a document that suggests an effort by local authorities in northern Iran to identify young Baha’is and force them to convert to Islam. The document, the minutes of an official meeting held last September in Iran’s northern city of Sari, was issued by the local Commission on Ethnicities, Sects and Religions, which answers to Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council.

Mr Lahidji, an attorney, said his organisation had taken steps to verify the document, whose directives jibe with news reports and social media accounts.

The document orders local authorities to maintain “strict controls” on local Baha’is and to “increase the level of alertness and awareness” among school teachers and principals regarding “their handling of Baha’i students”.

It surfaced in recent weeks and was allegedly distributed to police, intelligence officers, the local commander of the hardline Basiji militia, school directors and other government officials.

Mr Lahidji and others said no evidence has emerged yet of any forced conversions of children taking place. Iranians often ignore or undermine the diktats of the hardline Islamist extremists in the judiciary and administrative leadership.

The directive coincides with other apparent attempts to increase pressure on the Baha’i community.  In April, Iranian authorities banned Baha’is in Iran’s capital, Tehran, from burying their dead at a designated cemetery and instead put them into mass graves before reversing course under international pressure and outrage.

There have also been reports from northern Mazandaran province of attempts to confiscate Baha’i-owned properties and businesses.

“They came and took farms and farmlands from 27 families in one village,” said Mr Lahidji.

Members of Iran’s Baha’i community describe harrowing encounters with the security forces that draw them into years-long Kafkaesque entanglements with courts and interrogators.

Niloufar Hakimi, was arrested in 2018 by Iranian regime enforcers who stormed into her home. The 29-year-old Shiraz kindergarten schoolteacher was swept up along with 11 others and charged with propagating against the system and membership in an anti-regime group. She was later also charged with blasphemy.

She was subjected to 12 days of what she described as mental and physical torture. Security forces damaged her phone and then ordered her to unlock it, and threatened her electrical shocks when she insisted she wasn’t able to open it. She was released on hefty bail and has spent a fortune on lawyers expenses. She continues to be hounded by intelligence officers who subject her to regular interrogations and faces the impending possibility of imprisonment. She is barred from leaving Iran.

“Some days I wake up with an excessive amount of stress and some nights I have nightmares of my interrogation sessions,” she said in an interview. “At some point, the mental torture, even though I was out, was too much for me to bear. But now I know that whatever they do, they cannot control how I think or feel.”

Baha’i activists allege that the aim of the pressure is to eradicate the faith, which also was suppressed under previous Iranian regimes of the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Such incidents are nothing less than an extensive government campaign, the aim of which is the systematic eradication of the Baha’i community as a viable entity,” said a statement issued by Baha’i activists in the UK.

Iranian officials insist that Baha’is are not suppressed for their faith, but acknowledge that the government does not recognize the religion as legitimate.

“Being a Baha’i is not a crime,” Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in 2018. “We do not recognize somebody as a Baha’i, as a religion, but that’s a belief. But being a Baha’i does not immunise somebody from being prosecuted for offences that people may commit.”

Attempts to suppress Baha’is often coincide with attempts by regime hardliners to consolidate their power. Other targets have included members of Sufi orders that adhere to ancient rituals considered unorthodox by extremist Shia clergy alarmed by the increasingly anti-clerical spirit of Iranians.

“People in Iran are losing Islam but they’re still religious and drifting going toward Christianity or Baha’ism,” said Mr Lahidji. “They were worried that after all these years that they have not been able to get rid of Bahaism despite killing them, barring them from jobs, and stealing their land.”