Bahai On Trial In Iran Worries Brother From Afar

January 23, 2010

Author: Samuel G. Freedman

Source: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/us/23religion.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

For as long as Bahaism has existed, the forebears of Rezvan Tavakkoli have abided by it. And over the generations, since the faith’s origin 166 years ago, Mr. Tavakkoli’s people have paid the price of their devotion.

They have endured beatings, insults, arrest, vandalism, dismissal from jobs, denial of education and other forms of religious bigotry inflicted by the Iranian Muslims who consider Bahaism an intolerable blasphemy for its belief in a 19th-century prophet and his new revelation emerging from Shiite Islam.

Nothing in this pageant of hatred, however, had quite prepared Mr. Tavakkoli for the present moment. He sat this week in a home a dozen miles outside Washington, a 66-year-old man clad in flannel shirt and cardigan against the January chill, as his younger brother Behrouz awaited the verdict of a secret court in Iran, one of seven Bahai leaders facing a potential death sentence for charges of espionage, propaganda and the all-purpose calumny of “spreading corruption on earth.”