The University of Toronto will be hosting a significant, historic international symposium on the persecution of Baha’is in Iran, July 1-3: “Intellectual Othering and the Baha’i Question in Iran” (http://iranianstudies.ca/bahai/).
Organized by the Toronto Initiative for Iranian Studies in cooperation with The Foundation for Iranian Studies, the event will feature a group of internationally recognized scholars that include widely published author and editor and current Director of the Iranian Studies Initiative at Yale University, Professor Abbas Amanat, as well as Firuz Kazemzadeh, Professor Emeritus from Yale and former member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Among the more than two dozen highly regarded speakers from universities in Canada, United States and Europe will be Professor Mohamad Tavakoli of the University of Toronto, Abdolakarim Lahidji, Professor Farzaneh Milani of the University of Virginia and author of “Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the freedom of Movement”, Professor Reza Afshari of Pace University and author of “Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism”, Mehrangiz Kar from Harvard University, former prisoner of the Iranian regime and recipient of the Ludovic Trarieux Prize, and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, author of 19 books, formerly professor at Rutgers and Columbia among other universities.
The conference is not organized or sponsored by a Baha’i institution. It represents a new stage of general academic and public interest in the Baha’i Faith and its history. In particular, it examines some of the background to the intense persecution which the Baha’i community of Iran has endured in the country of its birth since it emerged in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
While most presentations at the conference will be in the Persian language, there will be some translation into English. There will also be some TV and web broadcast of the conference and there is already significant Persian-language media interest in the conference.
The conference comes within weeks of attacks on the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, a program of higher education initiated by the Baha’is of Iran in order to overcome the systematic refusal of Iranian authorities to allow Baha’is to attend university. Sixteen individuals associated with the program were arrested, and, after interrogation, several were released. There are currently more than 70 Baha’is in prison in Iran solely because of their religious beliefs despite widespread condemnation from the international community and governments and organizations around the world.