In the mid-1950s, a populist mullah took to the radio waves with official sanction to inflame the passions of Iranian Muslims against Baha’is. Every day at noon, he harangued a national audience with conspiratorial lies about Baha’is being Zionist agents, plotters against the government.
A nationwide campaign against Baha’is was undertaken by clerics and a secretive anti-Baha’i society. The National Baha’i Center was destroyed in the presence of the clerics and the military.
Destruction of Tehran Baha’i Center, 1955
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Baha’i communities were resilient in the face of the constant erosion of civil liberties, the bankrupting of businesses, the closing of schools, and the random acts of mob violence.
Iranian Baha’is still arose to go pioneering after 1953 when Shoghi Effendi launched the epochal ten-year crusade which established the Baha’i Faith for the first time as a worldwide religion. Its goals were:
The development of institutions at the World Centre
· Consolidation of the twelve countries where the Faith was well established
· Consolidation of all other territories already open
· The opening of the remaining "chief virgin territories" around the globe
This fanaticism reached Nayriz as a local cleric promoted anti-Baha’i sentiment and used to line family’s pockets by thieving from Baha’is. He did not even have any actual religious degrees, but he had the ability to use rhetoric to poison the minds of people who were easily influenced by a cleric.
Eshraghie, a Baha’i girl, was teased and bullied at school where the other children threw her books away, insulted her, and stole her lunch. A sensitive girl, this treatment hurt her deeply. Eventually she left school and, in time, had to accept a marriage proposal from a Muslim man who turned out to be unkind and mean-spirited towards her. Her new relatives harangued her about her faith to get her to recant and wanted her denounced in the mosque. She tried for fifteen years to repay their unkindness with kindness. Her in-laws prevented her from even having any communication with other Baha’is. She contracted tuberculosis but no one helped her; instead she was sent to her sister’s house in Shiraz where she died at the age of forty.
Shaykh Baha’i, the secretary of the local assembly, was told by the fanatical mullah to cease his Baha’i activities and correspondence but he continued. The breaking point came when my father suggested a public debate on behalf of the Assembly between the cleric and Tarazu’llah Samandari, a well-known Baha’i teacher at the time.
The governor of Nayriz was friendly to Baha’is and cancelled the debate because he suspected the cleric would use any outcome as fodder to promote violence against Baha’is. The cleric was angered and felt humiliated.
His henchmen kidnapped my father while he was on his way to his orchards. Several Muslim family members of Shaykh Baha’i’s rode out to rescue him. My father was brought back greatly bruised and with a broken nose.
The kidnapping convinced Shaykh Baha’i that his family had no viable future in this town. The cleric’s fanaticism and corruption brought intense economic and psychological pressure on all Baha’i families.
The cleric’s son went on to great prominence in Iran and would boast of his father’s accomplishment in ridding Nayriz of Baha’is. With few options, Shaykh Baha’i and his family were forced to leave town, never to return.