Eugene Bahá’ís fear for co-religionists in Iran

By Laleh Rezaee and Marcia Veach

Smiling couple, Dr. Rezaee and her husband.

Dr. Laleh Rezaee and her husband have practiced dentistry in Eugene for more than 20 years.

Anyone who watches the news today can agree that human suffering is constant, and at times it is unbearable to keep up with the human rights crises plaguing our world. With so much information coming at us, we might not even realize that friends or coworkers right in our own hometown are being affected by something happening halfway around the world. This is the case for the religious community of Bahá’ís, who have had a congregation in the Eugene-Springfield area for almost 70 years.

Members of the Bahá’í Faith in Iran have been the target of religious and government persecution since the religion’s founding in that country in the mid-19th century, and they continue to be among the most severely persecuted religious minorities in Iran, with a stark increase in arrests and harassment this year.

The oppression of the Bahá’ís in Iran has taken many forms, including imprisonment and execution, and even denial of higher education for its members. Because most Bahá’ís are barred from employment in many fields, they have had to be self-employed to survive. But those businesses have often been shut down, too, leaving this struggling community with decreasing resources to support themselves.

The Bahá’ís there have frequently been unjustly accused of broad and vague national security and espionage charges, though they are exhorted to avoid partisan politics, to be peace-loving citizens, and to be well-wishers of people of all faiths.

While it seems hard to believe that the situation could worsen, the efforts to completely erase the Bahá’í faith in Iran have recently increased exponentially. New charges have been made of “propagating the teachings of the fabricated Bahá’í colonialism and infiltrating educational environments” including kindergartens, or of collusion “for the purpose of causing intellectual and ideological insecurity in Muslim society.”

Since June, the Bahá’ís have documented 200 separate incidents of arrests and detention, home invasions and searches, the destruction of houses and confiscation of property, electronic ankle-tagging, exorbitant bails, beatings and the denial of medication to prisoners.

And yet the Bahá’ís themselves are urged by their teachings and guidance to “seek justice and long for fairness and equity, but never pursue retaliation and revenge.”

This past month, United Nations experts called on Iranian authorities to stop the persecution and displacement of religious minorities and end the use of religion to suppress the exercise of fundamental rights: “We are deeply concerned at the increasing arbitrary arrests, and on occasions, enforced disappearances of members of the Baha’i faith and the destruction or confiscation of their properties, in what bears all the signs of a policy of systematic persecution…”

While the violation of human rights in Iran is worthy of condemnation by all, to Bahá’ís in Lane County—and especially those who have come from Iran—it’s personal.

Here in Eugene, Dr. Laleh Rezaee, who was born in Iran, has practiced dentistry with her husband for more than 20 years. Her family left Iran at the outset of the Islamic Revolution because, as members of the Bahá’í Faith, they faced some of the same challenges that are still ongoing today.

But she still loves the country of her birth, so she is especially disheartened about the violations of human rights in Iran — whether against Bahá’ís or others.

We implore our friends and neighbors to join us in prayer for the well-being of these defenseless souls. We ask that you also pray for the grief that the Bahá’í community in Lane County is experiencing, knowing of the tribulations of their coreligionists in Iran.

***

For more information: