This interview with a young Iranian Bah?’? from Scotland can be found on the BBC website:

Iranian diaspora: Soroosh Khavari
MEET THE PANEL

Name: Soroosh Khavari
Age: 24
Lives: Glasgow, Scotland
Works: Dentist

My family fled Iran during the revolution because they follow the Bahai religion, whose followers suffer much persecution in Iran.

I was only six months old when we left.

The Islamic fundamentalists saw the Bahai community as a threat to Islam because it was becoming popular. The Bahai were denied many rights.

My parents’ people were denied education beyond a certain year and my father, a doctor, was told by his hospital that he would have to renounce his religion to keep his job. He was not prepared to do that.

So my parents escaped. They hired two men on motorbikes to take them over the border into Pakistan. My father held me - still only a baby - and my mother held my sister.

They had one little bag, everything else they left behind. If they had been stopped they would have been killed.

It’s well worth reading the whole of Soroosh’s story.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, dentist, Iran

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