Iran jails members of the Baha'i Faith

Iran jails members of banned Bahai faith

From Alarabiya News Channel

TEHRAN (AFP)

Iran's judiciary said on Tuesday it has sentenced 54 members of the Bahai religious community, whose faith is banned in the Islamic republic, for anti-regime propaganda.

"Three Bahais have been sentenced to four years in prison for propaganda against the regime," judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi told reporters, adding that 51 received suspended one-year jail terms. He said the suspension of the sentence for the 51 Bahais was conditional on their attendance of courses held by state Islamic Propaganda Organization. The Bahais, who were arrested early last year, were proselytizing in the southern city of Shiraz under the cover of helping the poor, said another judicial official who asked not to be named.

In the past few months, conservative newspapers in Iran have criticized what they said was a rise in the activities of Bahais throughout the country, especially in Shiraz.The Islamic republic does not recognize the faith of Bahaism -- which was originally developed in 1863 in Iran -- and it is officially prohibited. Its followers are regarded as infidels and have been persecuted since the 1979 Islamic revolution and also under the deposed shah. Iran's constitution recognizes only Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism as minority religions.Bahais consider Bahaullah, born in 1817, the last prophet sent by God to the earth, while Muslims believe the last messenger of God is the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh).Bahaullah was banished and lived 40 years in exile. He died in 1892 and was buried in the Holy Land, close to what is now the northern Israeli port of Haifa.

http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2008/01/29/44884.html

A Bit More Religious Freedom

Egypt
CAIRO From The Economist print edition

Apostasy need not necessarily be punished by death

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, Egypt revised its secular constitution to enshrine Muslim sharia as “the principal source of legislation”. To most citizens, most of the time, that seeming contradiction—between secularism and religion—has not made much difference. Nine in ten Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and expect Islam to govern such things as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Nearly all the rest profess Christianity or Judaism, faiths recognised and protected in Islam. But to the small minority who embrace other faiths, or who have tried to leave Islam, it has, until lately, made an increasingly troubling difference.
Members of Egypt's 2,000-strong Bahai community, for instance, have found they cannot state their religion on the national identity cards that all Egyptians are obliged to produce to secure such things as driver's licences, bank accounts, social insurance and state schooling. Hundreds of Coptic Christians who have converted to Islam, often to escape the Orthodox sect's ban on divorce, find they cannot revert to their original faith. In some cases, children raised as Christians have discovered that, because a divorced parent converted to Islam, they too have become officially Muslim, and cannot claim otherwise.
Such restrictions on religious freedom are not directly a product of sharia, say human-rights campaigners, but rather of rigid interpretations of Islamic law by over-zealous officials. In their strict view, Bahai belief cannot be recognised as a legitimate faith, since it arose in the 19th century, long after Islam staked its claim to be the final revelation in a chain of prophecies beginning with Adam. Likewise, they brand any attempt to leave Islam, whatever the circumstances, as a form of apostasy, punishable by death.
But such views have lately been challenged. Last year Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti, who is the government's highest religious adviser, declared that nowhere in Islam's sacred texts did it say that apostasy need be punished in the present rather than by God in the afterlife. In the past month, Egyptian courts have issued two rulings that, while restricted in scope, should ease some bothersome strictures. Bahais may now leave the space for religion on their identity cards blank. Twelve former Christians won a lawsuit and may now return to their original faith, on condition that their identity documents note their previous adherence to Islam.
Small steps, perhaps, but they point the way towards freedom of choice and citizenship based on equal rights rather than membership of a privileged religion.

http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10697989