Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (37 page)

The Bahais practice a religion of peace and tolerance, avoid all political involvement, have no priests or public rituals, preach the importance of universal education, and are committed to upholding the laws of the countries in which they live. They advocate one-world government and the equality of all regardless of race or sex. They also teach that all religions are true, but that theirs, as the fulfillment of all religious prophecies, is truer.

In the eyes of many Iranian Muslims, who believe that Mohammad is the “Seal of the Prophets” and Islam the last revelation, that is apostasy. In the nineteenth century, the Bahais were given a choice: recant or die. Several thousand were executed.

Today, Iran’s religious leaders—and much of the Iranian public—view the Bahais as subversives as well as heretics. As early as the 1960s, Ayatollah Khomeini referred to the Bahais as “a destructive sect,” which he claimed had penetrated all areas of government and had collaborated with Israel. (The global headquarters for the Bahais is in the Israeli city of Haifa.) The Islamic Republic considers Bahais infidels and gives them no protection under the Constitution. Bahais cannot vote, but they have to pay taxes, and young Bahai men have to perform two years of compulsory military service. Their marriages are not recognized by the state, so their children are considered illegitimate.

Since Iran’s revolution, more than two hundred Bahais have been executed and about eight hundred imprisoned. The Islamic state has confiscated property and businesses owned by Bahais. Many Bahais who worked as civil servants before the revolution were dismissed from their jobs and forced to repay in full the salaries and benefits earned during their careers.

The Bahais have published what they claim is an official, confidential memo signed by Ayatollah Khamenei in February 1991 and disclosing the official attitude of the Islamic Republic toward their community. The memo calls for Bahais to be treated in ways “that their progress and development shall be blocked.” Specifically, it says that Bahais should be expelled from universities, prevented from attaining “positions of influence” in society, and denied employment and schooling if they identify themselves as Bahais. They are allowed access to passports, burial certificates, and work permits, the memo says, only “to the extent that it does not encourage them to be Bahais.”

But Bahais believe that they are required to profess their faith, not renounce it. So the persecution of Iran’s largest religious minority (there are about 350,000 Bahais in Iran and five million worldwide) is harsh, so harsh that refugee status in the West is nearly always granted to those who flee. In recent years, the Islamic authorities quietly began to ignore the rule that requires Bahais to denounce their faith before they are issued passports to leave the country. Like so many other thorny issues in the Islamic Republic, quiet abandonment has become the way out.

The Bahai community is politically active and well funded in the United States. But when I contacted some of its representatives and asked them to help arrange a meeting with Bahais in Iran, the reply was: don’t bother to try; the community is under such pressure that no one will ever want to meet you. But it turned out differently once I was in Iran. A friend of the mother of a friend is a Bahai, and one day I went to see her in her office.

The woman received me warmly. She was still working, so her husband, an engineer, invited me to their home. It was the first of several meetings. A third-generation Bahai, he was surprisingly calm, even serene during our meetings, which could have landed him in prison had they been discovered. Yet, he has no fear of death, no desire to leave Iran either. “We have a proverb in Persian that says, ‘There is no color beyond black,’” he said. “It means that when you are doing something you really believe in, you don’t think of yourself. If someone wants to kill me, it doesn’t matter.”

Against all odds, the sense of being Persian was keeping this man in this country.

The engineer showed me a photocopy of a banned book published in Dallas titled
A Tribute to the Faithful, 1978-1992: The Bahai Martyrs of
Iran.
It contained the stories of Iranian Bahais executed since the revolution. He gave me a running commentary, pointing out friends and relatives who had perished. “Kidnapped,” “whereabouts unknown,” “firing squad,” “body buried unbeknownst to family,” the entries read. He said that mere possession of this book could mean imprisonment and perhaps a death sentence.

The engineer told of executions denied by the authorities, even though the bodies of the victims were delivered to the families. He told how the special cemetery in Tehran reserved for Bahais had been razed, the cadavers removed and sent to unknown locations, and an Islamic cultural center built on the site. He told of hiding Bahai literature in the oven of his kitchen. He told of arrests and interrogations in which his captors knew the most intimate details of his personal and professional life. He told how his wife’s passport had been confiscated four years earlier, because she had been caught at the airport with books about the Bahai faith.

September 29, 1998, was a day the engineer would remember. That was the day Iranian security officials swooped down on more than five hundred Bahai homes and office buildings in at least fourteen cities around the country, arresting dozens of Bahais and confiscating equipment, teaching materials, documents, even furniture. The raid was an attempt to halt an extraordinarily brave act of communal preservation. Bahais are passionate about, even obsessed with, educating their children. And because Bahais are banned from attending universities in Iran, the Bahai community ran the Bahai Institute of Higher Education, a makeshift secret university, from their homes, basements, and offices.

Begun on a tiny scale in 1987, the university, which was taught largely by correspondence, grew every year. Advisers from American universities provided course materials and curricula. A network of couriers smuggled in textbooks and laboratory equipment. By the time the university was shut down, dozens of volunteer faculty members had been teaching nearly one thousand students in ten areas of study, including accounting, dentistry, mathematics, computer science, and English. One hundred fifty students graduated, and many of them went on to study at universities abroad, despite the university’s lack of official status. “Whenever someone wanted a class, we arranged it,” said the engineer, who, like his wife, taught at the university. “We welcomed them into our home.”

Then the crackdown came. “They confiscated everything they could,” the engineer said. “If they went into a private house and saw a computer system, they said, ‘Okay, this belongs to the university,’ so they took it. If they saw a good refrigerator or a set of dining room silver, they said, ‘These were used for the students,’ and took them. They were thieves in the name of Islam.” There was no official announcement of the closure of the Bahai university, no stories about it in Iran’s increasingly lively and daring press. Within a few months, the engineer said, the university secretly started up again.

The engineer sent his only son to the Bahai university before his escape was arranged from Iran to Turkey with the help of a high-priced smuggler in Tabriz. His son spent one night on the back of a truck heading to Turkey with strangers, who all turned out to be Bahais. They walked on foot across the mountains through the next night. The smuggler handed them fake Iranian passports for Turkish customs, then put them into taxis and pointed them toward the local refugee office of the United Nations. The engineer’s son telephoned his father and said, “Daddy, I’m in Turkey! And the women are not veiled here!” Months later, the son enrolled in medical school in Virginia.

The doorbell rang. I quickly put on my head scarf and tried to look normal. It was only the deliveryman with the newspapers.

I asked the engineer the same question I had asked the Christians and the Jews: do you ever think of leaving? “I will never leave this country,” he said. “If someone came here and said to me, ‘This is your American passport, and here is your job,’ I would say ‘No thank you.’ I am Iranian. I love this country.”

PART FOUR

———

Open Warfare

C H A P T E R   T W E L V E

Dark Nights, Fear of Waves

Along with malevolence came a hundred masks

To conceal the truth and reality from all sights

— RUMI, THIRTEENTH-CENTURY PERSIAN POET

Dark nights, fear of waves, and whirlpools so overpowering

How would those standing on the shore know what we are feeling?

— HAFIZ, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY PERSIAN POET

A
RASH
F
OROUHAR DISCOVERED
the bedsheets stained with the blood of his parents in the garbage bin behind the garden one day in the fall of 1998.

Most of his parents’ papers were missing. The diaries that his father, a secular Iranian nationalist, had written for nearly forty years, along with his speeches, writings, and photographs, the documents from his political movement, his passport and identity card, even the pistol that he kept in an upstairs cupboard for protection—all were gone. Gone too were a list of names and telephone numbers of students and young people aligned with Arash’s father’s movement and the letters his father had received decades before from his hero and mentor, Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist Prime Minister overthrown in the 1953 coup. Arash saw that his mother’s poetry was not there either, except for a rough, handwritten draft of a still-unfinished verse written to her husband.

At the time of sleeping

Keep your sword ready by your side

In the bend of every earthly road

Watch out for the shadows . . .

The killers of the grass and the flowers

Now wish to kill the trees

Listen to the sound of the waves

They warn against a dangerous storm.

The bedsheets had been left behind. The murderers—or perhaps the investigators who ransacked the house afterward—used them to mop up the pools of blood from the stab wounds. Why they bothered was baffling. Not to cover up the evidence. Dried, caked, purplish blood still clung stubbornly to the carpets. Not to spare the family more pain. The knowledge that someone had used his parents’ sheets as cleaning rags and then tossed them carelessly into the garbage turned Arash’s stomach.

Although Dariush Forouhar and his wife, Parvaneh, had few followers, the Ministry of Intelligence had kept them under twenty-four-hour surveillance for years. Yet Dariush, who was seventy when he was killed, had begun the revolution as a fervent believer. He had spent several years in the Shah’s prisons for opposing the regime. He had been the Islamic Republic’s first Minister of Labor, and while he was in that job thousands of people considered counterrevolutionary were purged from factories, banks, offices, schools, universities, and government agencies. But Forouhar had joined the revolution as a secular nationalist, not as an Islamic zealot, and he refused to hang photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini in his office or replace the traditional Iranian flag, with its centuries-old symbol of the lion and the sun, with the revolutionary flag with the double image of the word “Allah.”

Parvaneh, Forouhar’s fifty-eight-year-old wife, a poet, had unflinchingly supported his political activities. Whenever the Shah’s agents hauled him off to prison, she would stand at the door of their house and sing the national anthem as loud as she could. “I will never leave you even if they cut me to pieces,” she wrote to him in prison on their fifth wedding anniversary.

The crime of the Forouhars apparently had been to criticize the Islamic Republic’s human rights abuses in interviews with Western radio stations that beamed Persian-language programs to Iran. That brought them to the attention of Iran’s ubiquitous intelligence service. A core group of handlers visited often and warned them that they had been put under surveillance. Arash and his sister Parastou were interrogated and threatened so often that they secured berths in Germany as political refugees.

“They told me many times, ‘We know everything that goes on in your house before it happens,’” said Arash. “ ‘Anytime there is a meeting, we know who is there and what they are saying.’ They were so hungry for information that they tried to turn my wife into a spy. They knew she wanted to be an actress, and they told her, ‘If you cooperate with us, we’ll make you a star.’”

When it came to oppression, the Forouhars were veteran victims and veteran survivors. The year before the revolution, a bomb exploded in their house, shattering the windows into thousands of pieces of razorsharp glass and throwing Arash and his mother against the wall. The revolution didn’t make their enemies go away. Early on, when Dariush was Minister of Labor, he entrusted his security to an affable bodyguard named Soleiman. Soleiman lavished affection on the Forouhar children and pledged loyalty to his boss. When Soleiman died in a motorcycle accident, the Forouhars were devastated. But when they later sifted through his belongings, they discovered from his notebooks that he had been informing on them. The elder Forouhar took it all in stride, his son recalled. “Anyone who took a job in our house—a servant, a workman, a helper—I would say to my father, ‘Watch out, he’s a spy,’” Arash said. “He’d say to me, ‘No problem. Better we know him and know that he’s a spy than fire him for someone we don’t know.’”