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Mehrdad Haghighi After a childhood in Tehran and an apprenticeship in India, Mehrdad Haghighi, a contemporary of Pari born around 1936, returned to his hometown , Shiraz, where he lived until the revolution. Forced to flee Iran in 1979, Haghighi lives in Los Angeles where Pari and I interviewed him in his office in 1990. I use his narrative as a chance to reflect on Baha’ism—the religion targeted as an enemy of the new Islamic nation. Ever since visitors began to record their impressions, Shiraz has been associated with gardens, poetry, beauty, and sainthood. In Shiraz on October 20, 1819, was born a certain Mirza Mohammad, later to be called the Bab, or “the gate” to truth and the hidden Imam. In 1844, he announced in Shiraz that he was the promised Imam whose message would complete that prefaced in the Qur’an. After the death of Mohammad Shah in 1848, the Babis provoked several badly coordinated revolts and were murderously repressed for four years. On July 9, 1850, the Bab was executed on the orders of Nasirudin Shah, an event that was not unexpectedly followed by a Babi effort to kill the Shah, which was in turn followed by the execution of many leading Babis including the leading and defiant philosopher, poet, and feminist Qurrat-ul-Ain. Bahaullah, the disciple of the Bab, announced in 1863 his claim to be the Imam predicted by the Bab. He had fled from Iran first to Iraq, then to Kurdistan, and finally to Palestine where he died in 1892. He softened and universalized the appeal of the Bab by declaring Baha’ism to be an inclusive faith that transcended divisions created by geography, nationalism, and culture . Unlike the Bab who declared open hostility to the monarchy, Bahaullah, while declaring himself nonpolitical, committed the allegiance of Baha’is to the Shah. This gesture further ruptured the traditional Islamic bond between God and Sultan, or in this case, between the Islamic Ulama and the monarchy , thus earning for Baha’is the continuous enmity of the traditional clergy. The extermination of the Baha’is by the Islamic Republic is another chapter in a long history of persecution and denial of the inherent contradiction between the claim that discrimination against minorities is anti-Islamic and the insistence that all Muslims are one nation in danger of being weakened 178 revolution: narrating upheaval by ethnic fragmentations. And this in a country in which religious and ethnic minorities constitute some 53 percent of the population. The persecution of Baha’is was declared acceptable because they were not “people of the Book” and because they were declared to be spies “just like the Tudeh [Communists]” (Benard and Khalilzad 1984, 133). I have cut from Haghighi’s narrative the story of his growing up into journalism , his studies in India and the Philippines, and his gradual politicization. I have also omitted his stories of the anti-Communist hysteria that followed the 1953 CIA coup when the label of Tudehi (Commie) was freely used to attack anyone against whom one held a grudge. After working as a youth for the leading magazine of political satire, Towfigh, he started with some friends a similar paper called Dakho. Like other Baha’is, Haghighi was surprised at the catastrophic changes he saw in what he assumed was a culture and a people he knew. He fled the country after the start of the killing of Baha’is in Shiraz. We asked him why he was here rather than there. Why did I come here? The revolution, of course. While I was away from Iran in India, I believed that our people were maturing into enlightenment, into thinking individuals. But alas, what I saw during the revolution proved that beneath the facade of enlightenment, we had kept our prejudices undisturbed. It was the unexpected eruption of prejudice and the abuse of power that caused my departure from Iran. I saw people using the revolution as an excuse to carry out personal vendettas. Anyone who had a grudge against another found it easy to get him arrested by accusing him of being against the revolution. A traffic officer was shot, for instance, by a taxi driver who had once in the past been ticketed by him. A student shot a teacher for once giving him a failing grade. A grocery was looted by a righteous mob led by someone who had once felt that the grocer was a price...

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