It’s a Saturday morning in Ballarat, 100km west of Melbourne. A group of about 60 people are gathering at a local primary school, enjoying a potluck breakfast spread of eggs, bacon, bread, cereals and freshly cooked dishes served up by local teenagers.
They’re all ages, from all cultures and faith backgrounds. Soon, they’ll break off into a series of activities aimed at promoting unity and encouraging them to give back to their neighbourhood – through raising funds for the local soup kitchen, planting trees at a nearby farm, teaching children music or working at a community garden.
It’s a humble yet profound process that has been unfolding in Ballarat for decades, spearheaded by the local Bahá’ís but open to all. I’m one of the facilitators, and even though I’m a Bahá’í, the majority of those who take part are not. The Bahá’í faith is an independent religion aimed at building prosperous communities through the unifying message of its founder, Baháʼu’lláh. The faith originated in what was then the Persian empire, or modern-day Iran, in the mid-19th century.
Some Bahá’ís, myself included, are Iranian or of Iranian descent – a natural byproduct of a faith which originated in Iran. During and after the 1979 Islamic revolution, Australia accepted many Iranian Bahá’í refugees, including my parents, who fled to escape religious persecution – my mother’s family to Spain and my father’s to Bangladesh before they secured visas to Australia. So while the faith is one of the most widespread religions in the world, with more than five million adherents, the Iranian Bahá’í diaspora have also settled widely.
Including in Australia.
From Ballarat to Townsville, Coonamble to Bendigo, Broken Hill to Coffs Harbour, rural and regional towns around our country are among the hundreds of communities home to Iranian Bahá’ís working alongside Bahá’ís and their friends of all backgrounds to build vibrant communities founded on the faith’s message of unity. But here’s the thing: if we were in Iran, where the Bahá’ís are the largest non-Muslim religious minority, we would be persecuted for promoting such a message. We would have our properties burned to the ground. We would be denied access to an education and have our businesses closed. We would have our cemeteries desecrated.
We would be arrested and tortured and sentenced to decades in prison.
This week, a new United Nations resolution by the general assembly’s third committee condemned the Iranian government’s human rights record, adding to several weeks of international focus on the plight of minorities in Iran, including the Bahá’ís. Just last week, a new report was launched in New York exposing the violence inflicted on the Bahá’ís since the faith’s inception, and the intensifying targeting of Bahá’ís over the past 45 years since the 1979 revolution. The report, prepared in partnership with Eleos Justice at Monash University, outlines three forms of violence as described by sociologist Johan Galtung: direct, structural and cultural, showing them to be part of the Iranian government’s systematic effort to eliminate the Baha’i religious minority from society.
The report came just as we received notice that a further 10 Bahá’í women were sentenced to a combined 90 years of prison, convicted of charges including propaganda against the Islamic Republic and participation in deviant educational activities contrary to Islamic Sharia law. These activities were related to organising English language, painting, music and yoga classes, as well as nature trips for Iranian and Afghan children and teenagers.
Activities similar to those I help facilitate every week in my local neighbourhood.
Hearing that the persecution of my Bahá’í brothers and sisters is intensifying makes me even more aware of the privilege I have living in Australia. Had my parents not fled when they did, it could very well have been them sitting in a dank cell in Evin prison, one of the country’s most notorious jails where so many Bahá’ís and other political prisoners serve out their sentence.
It has been more than two years now since the death of Mahsa Amini. But Iran’s human rights violations are perpetual and the systematic targeting of women only intensifies. According to a joint statement released last month by 18 UN experts, it also seems the authorities are increasingly targeting Bahá’í women through arrests, summoning for interrogation, enforced disappearance, raids and limitations on their freedoms. But these women deserve to gather in cities, villages and towns, regardless of what they believe or their backgrounds, and without being persecuted.
It’s at these moments in particular that I feel it is all the more important to use what little power I have to give a voice to those who do not have one. As Nobel prizewinning author Toni Morrison wrote: “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
These women, and so many others, have been imprisoned in my parents’ homeland for acts I carry out daily in my wish to contribute to something better. If that liberty has been taken from them, the least I can do is move forward in their stead and inspire others to do the same.
