Aug20
“Never Again, Never More, Never in the Name of Iran”
On August 12, Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project, spoke these words at an event in support of the Baha’is in Iran: “Never Again, Never More, Never in the Name of Iran.”
During his speech at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, he described the “theological tensions” that lie at the root of Iran’s ongoing persecution of its Baha’i minority.
But there is also another reason for the obsessive zeal of many Shiites in fighting the Bahai faith. The Bahai’s message of peace in contrast to the Islamists’ increasing use of violence; the Bahai’s promise of gender equality in contrast to a faith where misogyny has long been a way of life; and finally the Bahai’s almost Jeffersonian devotion to the principle that in matters of faith there must be neither coercion, nor acceptance by happenstance of birth, but that children born to Bahai parents should at the moment of maturity decide for themselves their own faith in contrast to a state religion that mandates conversion a capital crime, punishable by death–all combine to create a glaring set of contrasts that render traditional Shiism sclerotic. In comparison, their nemesis faith is a harbinger of modernity and its incumbent reformation–a reformation wherein faith is a private matter between men and women and their own notions of the sacred.
Milani also extolled the various contributions Baha’is have made to the development of Iranian society, and called upon a democratic Iran to recognize its past injustices and grant Iranian Baha’is full citizenship rights.
Democratic societies, like healthy individuals, perpetually and critically contemplate their past, uncovering dark moments of injustice or inequity, and moving to end or amend them. For Iran, the treatment of the Bahais in the last 150 years, our society’s acts of omission and commission, what we said and did or failed to say and do, all create an embarrassing blot of shame on our history. Iran can’t become a democracy unless it has had a full reckoning with its Bahai problem. Iran can’t be a democracy unless the Bahais are considered full citizens of the society and their faith–like those of Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, or members of any other faith, belief, or even disbelief– is recognized as a private matter where the state, social institutions, or actors have no right of inquiry, interference, or harassment.
- Read Abbas Milani’s full speech in The New Republic.
- Learn more about the event in San Francisco.
- View his speech on YouTube, the first half of which is embedded below.
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