The Baha'is of Iran

Socio-Historical Studies

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Seena B. Fazel, Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Seena B. Fazel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415356732
• eBook ISBN: 9781134250004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The Baha'i community of Iran is the country's largest non-Muslim religious minority. This collection of essays presents a comprehensive study of the social and historical development of the Baha'i community, and its role in shaping modern Iran.

Central to this study is the pioneering character of the Baha'i community in the late 19th and early 20th century, with chapters examining the role of women in the Baha'i community; the impact of Baha'i-run schools on Iranian society, Baha'i contributions to public health initiatives; and the influence of Baha'i thought and the actions of individual Baha'is on the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911.

Conversion to the Baha'i Faith is another important theme, as contributors investigate the phenomenon of large scale conversion to the Baha'i Faith from the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities.

Finally, although persecution of the Baha'is has drawn the attention of the Western media, until now few scholars working in the field of Iranian studies have chosen to write on the history or details of this persecution. Here, five prominent figures in the field redress this balance and look at different aspects of this persecution, including its historical background, the attitude of secular Iranians, persecution before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and human rights perspectives.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Iranian studies, Middle Eastern studies and comparative religion, and with many chapters authored by leading academics in Iranian studies, The Baha'is of Iran addresses both a gap in academic literature on the Baha'i Faith, and in the study of modern Iran in general.

1

Messianic Expectation and Evolving Identities

The Conversion of Iranian Jews to the Bahaʾi Faith¹

Mehrdad Amanat

In 1878, two physicians and early Jewish converts to the Bahaʾi Faith from Hamadan travelled to Tehran to bring the message of their new faith to Ḥakīm Nūr Maḥmūd, an influential Jewish physician. An all-night debate was held over Jewish prophecies and the rabbinic authority ‘on condition that no one else present should say a word’. Though their host never openly confessed the new faith, their message did raise fundamental questions in the mind of another young Jewish enthusiast. Rayḥān Rayḥānī (1859–1949), a peddler apprentice from Kashan carefully listened to the heated discussions from behind a closed door. By dawn, according to one source, he was infuriated at the Bahaʾis’ questioning the rabbinic authority to the point of being ready to attack them. Yet he could not find answers to claims the Bahaʾis had made about the coming of the Messiah and had trouble negotiating the labyrinth of identities he had encountered. As an orphaned teenager in Tehran, he was exposed to ideas of Christian missionaries and, perhaps through connections with Sufis, had even accepted the prophet Muḥammad as a messenger of God. For the following five years, which he described as years of ‘desperate confusion’, Rayḥānī intensely struggled to root out contradictions and inconsistencies in his beliefs, which he later deemed ‘fallacies and superstitions’ (khurāfāt va mawhūmāt). He had witnessed and was moved by public execution of Babis and Bahaʾis. His fears of not recognizing the Messiah compelled him to persist in his search and instilled in him a desire to meet more Bahaʾis. In this pursuit, he was unaffected by eccentric believers and the unscrupulous pretenders he came across. His agonies came to an end following his conversion experience in the form of a dream, a milestone in his evolving identity. Though as a Bahaʾi he experienced persecution and discrimination, he was also an accepted member of the community of mostly Muslim converts in Kashan.²

During the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, a substantial number of Iranian Jews converted to the newly founded Bahaʾi Faith which grew out of the messianic Babi movement and had attracted a large number of mostly Shiʿi Muslim followers. In many ways, the attraction to the Bahaʾi Faith was a novel phenomenon among Iranian Jewry. Despite their close historical ties with other sectarian movements, Iranian Jews never converted in large numbers to religions other than Islam. Although it was common among followers of any minority religion to adopt the dominant culture and the religion of the majority population, the story of the disadvantaged Iranian Jews who converted to the even more persecuted Bahaʾi Faith presents an important if not a unique exception.

Although reliable statistics are hard to locate, a number of foreign observers have made estimates about the number of Jewish Bahaʾi converts. Ephraim Neumark, a Jewish traveller, gives the exaggerated estimate of two million followers of the new religion in 1884, including ‘many Jews’ (Neumark 1947: 80). The British diplomat Lord Curzon’s estimates in the 1880s, prior to the early-twentieth century wave of conversions, are perhaps more representative of converts who publicly confessed their Bahaʾi convictions. His figures for Kashan, Hamadan and Tehran are 50 to 100 to 150 Jewish families respectively. His estimate that as many as 75 per cent of the Gulpāygān Jewish population ‘formally joined the Bahaʾi movement and their numbers have since increased considerably’ indicates mass conversions among the Jews (Curzon 1892: 496).³ Some 50 years later, the Jewish scholar Abraham Brawer estimated the number of followers in the mid-1930s to be ‘thousands and perhaps ten thousand of Jews’. He reported the number of converts to be ‘around a quarter of the Jews of Hamadan’ whom he estimated to be 8,000. He also reported that as many as seven hundred Jews in Tehran had converted to the Bahaʾi Faith (Brawer 1937–8: 22, 24, 31). These figures at first may seem inflated, yet given the fluidity and range of Jewish-Bahaʾi identity in this period, from sympathizers to propagators, these estimates may not be entirely unreasonable.⁴

Any assessment of the number of converts is complicated by the fact that many converted as migrants away from their hometowns. A more recent study extending to the 1950s contains an expanded list numbering some 150 families and individuals originally from Kashan most of whom converted outside their city of origin, and over 600 families and individual converts from Hamadan including members of extended families. These figures compare to an estimated Jewish population of 5,000 around the turn of the century and 8,000 by mid-1930s in Hamadan. Kashan’s Jewish population (including converts), prior to the mid-twentieth-century wave of migration to Tehran, is estimated at around 400 Jewish individuals and heads of households.⁵

Among Western observers and scholars who have attempted to tackle the question of Jewish Bahaʾi conversions, some earlier interpretations have attributed the Bahaʾi Faith’s appeal to its ‘cosmopolitan outlook on life’ and its belief in ‘peaceful relations between the different faiths’ (Fischel 1934). More recent views attribute the general trend of Jewish conversions to Islam and the Bahaʾi Faith to the ‘humiliation and persecution, suffering and torture’ and the Jews’ ‘ignorance in matters of religion’ (Cohen 1973: 54, 162–3). Such common charges of ‘ignorance’ and ‘simplemindedness’ are influenced by the views of nineteenth century observers. These often drew a one-dimensional picture of isolated and persecuted Jewish communities. Indigenous Jewish Iranian traditions, at variance with traditional European Rabbinic Judaism, did not allow the European Jews to identify with them. Another, more careful, study by a Bahaʾi writer has generally played down the role of social and economic factors in conversion (Maneck 1991).⁶

A brief historical overview may assist a more in-depth understanding of the roots and causes of conversion among the Jews. Throughout their age-old presence in Iran (as early as 700 BC) the Persian Jews made wide-ranging contributions to Iranian society and culture.⁷ Mutual influences between Judaism and Iranian religions are evident within numerous Jewish and Iranian sectarian movements as well as mainstream orthodoxy.⁸ Though often unrecognized, the role of the Jews was crucial in maintaining diversity in an environment often under pressures of cultural and religious conformity. During the Islamic period, the Jews of Iran helped fill gaps in some vital spheres of the economy discouraged under Islamic law (shariʿa), such as long distance trade, money lending and the trade and manufacture of precious metals. As wine makers, musicians and entertainers free from the restrictions of the conservative ʿulama, as well as scientists and scholars familiar with Hebrew and the Biblical tradition, they helped preserve and enrich Iran’s artistic and intellectual heritage (Loeb 1972).⁹ Iranian Jews were also important in the fields of Persian language and literature. The first known examples of written modern Persian are written in Hebrew script (Elwell-Sutton 1983: 20–1).¹⁰

Prior to the Safavid period, the overall record of treatment of Jews in Iran, at least in comparison with much of Europe in the medieval period, was one of relative tolerance.¹¹ Despite their long presence and extensive engagement with other Persians, mass conversions were not widespread among Persian Jews. However, pressures for conversion to Islam increased during the Safavid period (1501–1722) when Twelver Shiʿism became the state religion and its main source of political legitimacy. Even though many non-Muslims experienced periods of economic prosperity, a distinct change can be observed in the interfaith relations and the treatment of non-Muslims. The forced conversion of Sunni Muslims to Shiʿism became commonplace, while on occasion Jews were forced to convert to Islam – though in many instances communities of converts reverted to Judaism (Matthee 1999: 20, 42; Amanat 2006: 60–2).

During the Qajar period, the most notable case of forced conversion took place in 1839, when following a riot, the entire Jewish community of Mashhad was forced to convert to Islam. Despite rigorous pressure to publicly conform to Islamic practice, including regular attendance of public prayers, many converts continued to practise Judaism in secret for generations, only to openly confess Judaism some one hundred years later under secular Pahlavi rule.¹²

The rise of legalistic Shiʿism under Safavid rule brought forth another fundamental change in the condition of the Jews, namely the prevalence of the doctrine of ritual ‘impurity’ (nilāsat) which was present in Sunni Islam but more emphatically so in Shiʿism and more strictly applied to the Jews. This doctrine underpinned the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims with consequences that went beyond restricting social interaction. Though unevenly enforced during the Qajar period, these limits created major economic obstacles for the Jews who in many cities were banned from having shops in the main Bazaar. Such discriminatory practices were supposed to protect believers from the ‘impurity’ resulting from close physical contact with Jews. More significantly, they eliminated competition from Jewish merchants and contributed to a gradual decline in the Jews’ socio-economic status. Trends towards cultural participation became more restrained and were limited to occasional participation in Sufi orders, where Jews were more tolerated (Soroudi 1994: 164–5; Williams 1994: 72–89).

By the nineteenth century, regional and global factors led to a major economic dislocation making Iran more dependent on global trends, including recessions and currency devaluations. These developments caused further deterioration in the condition of the Jews in communities like Kashan, a centre of Bahaʾi conversion, where the Jews were an important part of a thriving textile industry and trade that suffered the onslaught of cheap industrial-age European goods and experienced a marked decline.

Increased contact with the West brought forth improved communications, notably print and telegraph, and a dramatic rise in the volume of foreign trade but also military defeat, diplomatic humiliation, monetary crises and financial dependency.¹³ At a time when Iran was deeply affected by war, famine and epidemics, political uncertainties and weakening central authority, faith was one of the few anchors of personal stability and community support.

Yet, the economic changes in nineteenth-century Iran also included more constructive processes. An expansion of domestic markets leading to the emergence of a national economy by the twentieth century was partly fuelled by new trade routes and an increased European demand for Iran’s products, such as carpets. Some members of the Jewish community, even those with little capital, benefited from these conditions by forming trading partnerships for domestic trade.

Hamadan’s rapid expansion into a major economic centre after the opening of the Basra trade in 1865 and Arak’s rapid growth in the 1870s as a carpet distribution centre attracted many internal immigrants and these cities became conversion centres. Many younger Jewish immigrants with no family and community support had to cope with new work environments and faced new challenges to their conventional beliefs. Hamadan also saw the establishment of a number of European-style schools, which helped open horizons and introduced doubts about traditional norms and values.

Conflicting modes of modernity accompanied overwhelming and deep-rooted changes in Iran. These challenges tended to reinforce religious conviction while at the same time posed fundamental questions about traditional belief systems and helped create a climate of religious ambiguity. Like some other Iranians who were attracted to a variety of unconventional belief systems ranging from messianic Babism to reformist Shiʿism, agnosticism, secular nationalism and later socialism, the Jews tried to confront what they viewed as their overwhelming economic and intellectual backwardness in conditions of crisis and turmoil by experimenting with unconventional beliefs and adopting new religious identities such as Christianity and the Bahaʾi Faith.

One important aspect of religious ambiguity can be observed in the acceleration of a primordial trend in the history of Persian Jewry, namely a sense of expectation for the coming of a saviour or Messiah (Mashiyah). Western missionary activities, though they attracted fewer converts, revitalized messianic fervour and introduced new options in terms of religious conviction. According to the Christian missionary Henry Stern, who visited Iran in the 1850s, the prominent Jewish physician Ḥakīm Hārūn had confess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contribution
• Note on transliteration, dates and names
• Introduction
• 1. Messianic expectation and evolving identities: the conversion of Iranian Jews to the Baha’i faith
• 2. The conversion of Zoroastrians to the Baha’i faith
• 3. Instructive encouragement: tablets of Baha’ullah and ‘Abdu’l-Baha to Baha’i women in Iran and India
• 4. Baha’i schools in Iran
• 5. Baha’i health initiatives in Iran: a preliminary survey
• 6. Baha’i discourses on the Constitutional Revolution
• 7. The comparative dimension of the Baha’i case and prospects for change in the future
• 8. The historical roots of the persecution of Babis and Baha’is in Iran
• 9. Anatomy of prejudice: reflections on secular anti-Baha’ism in Iran
• 10. Anti-Baha’ism and Islamism in Iran
• 11. The discourse and practice of human rights violations of Iranian Baha’is in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• Index