The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles

Hezbollah

113 Hezbollah Sheema Kalbasi It is absurd to close your eyes and pretend that the Bahá’ís have never been slaughtered or forced to convert to Islam, as if the executions of political prisoners or the Kurds were just part of a game, an unwritten law in a lawless land. Extended customs, mute prayers, grave to grave, Tehran cemeteries black from the flesh of the youth, and on the faces of the mothers chipped beliefs and spreading tears. The News shows the Godzilla regime —mourning over the tassels of demolished homes of the homeless in a country not even close to my land—sits on tinplates of power and announces another castration. This perhaps is a blessing from God that when there is a Friday Prayer in Tehran, we still cry over the Arab-Israeli War. Hezbollah, which literally means Party of God, follows the distinctly Shiite Islamist ideology developed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Bahá’ís are followers of the Bahá’í Faith, a global religion founded by Bahá’u’lláh in the nineteenth century in Iran. It is the forbidden faith in post revolution Iran. ...