Posts from — April 2007

Our Baha’i National Convention opened in the North Wales Victorian seaside resort of Llandudno this afternoon at 2 p.m. (By the way, the town’s name is very approximately pronounced “thlandidno” - very approximately, that is.)

Convention from a delegate’s viewpoint

National Convention is one of the most important occasions in the Baha’i administrative year. Delegates elected by all adult Baha’is in 95 units across the UK come together to consider the annual report of the National Spiritual Assembly, the community’s national governing council, for the previous year, to consult about the Baha’i community’s work for the coming year, and to take part in electing the National Assembly.

Manchester delegate Darren Smith addresses Convention

Delegates Julia Havilland and Minou Cortazzi think about what they are hearing

This year’s delegates have a special responsibility. The nine people they elect tomorrow to serve on the National Spiritual Assembly will travel to the Baha’i World Centre in Haifa, Israel, in April next year as delegates on behalf of the UK Baha’is to take part in the election of the Baha’i international governing council, the Universal House of Justice. These delegates will play their part in linking the grassroots of the community to the community’s most senior administrative body.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, National Convention, election, delegates

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Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fight for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. [William Morris]

Adam Hochschild quotes Morris in the epilogue to his excellent book Bury The Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, which I have just finished reading.

Hochschild has done his research and, as Ian Thomson wrote in the Daily Telegraph

…has a novelist’s flair for narrative, and this is a horrifically readable history … a powerful account of the group of high-minded Englishmen who opposed a brute, mercantile greed and its arsenal of chains, whips and leg irons.

Why the quote from Morris? The British abolitionists of the 18th century fought from 1787 to abolish an evil trade in human beings, a trade that was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1807. Parliament voted through a further Act to abolish slavery itself and to emancipate the slaves in the British Empire in 1833. But the victory was tainted. Emancipation was to happen in two stages - former slaves were to work as “apprentices” for six years from 1834 without pay before full emancipation would take effect.

Parliament also voted to recompense the former slave owners with

It was great to see an op-ed piece by Bani Dugal, the Baha’i International Community’s Principal Representative to the UN, in last Thursday’s Jerusalem Post.

Entitled “Raising children of light”, Bani’s article shows what a threatening and deadly place the world is for so many of the world’s children:

To a child, the world must seem like a confused and perilous place. One need only to sit and watch the grim scenes unfold on television: hundreds of thousands of Sudanese children and mothers huddled together in refugee camps - their worn faces and bodies a testament to the rape and pillage they have survived. Or footage of mothers and children foraging for food in famine-racked North Korea. Or images of children in Southeast Asia, many infected with AIDS, sold to traffickers and living in slave-like conditions.

For many children, these scenes loom just outside the door. As mothers, what do we say to our children? How do we explain the seemingly ceaseless, senseless abuse, violence and killing? How do we do so truthfully and, at the same time, impart hope for a better future?

She then sets out what we - particularly mothers - can and must do to “impart hope for a better future”.

WHAT ACTIONS, then, can help our children become beacons of light? I would begin by helping them to understand the idea of connectedness - connectedness to their family, their community, their environment and the world. Over the past century, our lived experiences, coupled with scientific and social advances, have gradually broken down the barriers that once compartmentalized our world and its people.

We know that girls and women have the same rights as boys and men and that the oppression of girls and women contributes to the breakdown of communities. We know that, despite sinister notions of racial superiority, we are part of one human race. We know that our commercial activity has a direct and negative impact on our environment and our health.

In other words, there is no “us” and “them,” there is only “us.” This is what I want to teach my children.

Read the whole article. It’s quite short, but thought-provoking and encouraging.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, children, unity, oneness

Two railroads come together at Harpers Ferry, the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road, which runs along the Potomac River, and the Winchester and Shenandoah Rail Road. They cross the Potomac on bridges which converge at the mouth of a tunnel in the black cliff on the other side of the river. The sound of American engine whistles echoing off the rock faces in this beautiful and historically significant location is deeply evocative.

Technorati Tags: railroads, railways, trains, USA, Harpers Ferry

Erica and I have returned from our ten-day trip to Virginia and Washington DC.

We spent our first three days in Winchester, VA, a great centre for touring the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

Courthouse, Winchester, VA

The excellent Museum of the Shenandoah Valley is an essential starting point. The museum is well laid out and shows what life in the Shenandoah Valley has been since Europeans began to settle the area in the 18th century. Winchester itself is an attractive city, at least in the residential and downtown areas. Like most American cities, the centre is surrounded by a rash of malls and shopping areas. Unfortunately the centre, which depends on tourists, was a dead zone so early in the season.

We managed a short hike in the George Washington National Forest on Masanutten Mountain. We stopped off at a cafe in Strasburg on the way back to Winchester and found ourselves in conversation with a great-granddaughter of Joseph and Pauline Hannen, early American Baha’is. She herself is not a Baha’i, but she clearly had a great fondness for her Baha’i heritage.

Erica walking in George Washington National Forest

We also took a trip to Harpers Ferry, a place of considerable historic significance at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers.

The history of Harpers Ferry has few parallels in the American drama. It is more than one event, one date, or one individual. It is multi-layered

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Yes, I am thinking of the old Cliff Richard film and song Summer Holiday. No, I’m not going on my summer holiday!

But I won’t blogging for the next 10 days or so. I’ve not given up - just taking a break.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Will you be tucking into a chocolate Easter egg this weekend? If so, you might want to consider how the chocolate has been produced.

According to this story on the BBC News website, many thousands of children work long hours for no pay and little food on cocoa plantations in West Africa. The International Labour Organisation reports that 12,000 children have been trafficked to the Ivory Coast for this purpose. The ILO is campaigning to eliminate child labour.

The Stop the Traffik coalition wants chocolate manufacturers to declare chocolate “traffik-free” so that those of us who love chocolate (include me in this category) can be sure we’re not supporting child slave labour.

Of course, child slavery amongst West African chocolate growers is not the end of the story. Far from it. Rageh Omaar, a BBC correspondent who was born in Somaliland and whose mother was a nomadic shepherd, presented a programme on BBC TV on 26 March about modern child slavery. In this piece on the BBC website, he says there may be as many as 9 million children around the world who are enslaved. NINE MILLION! (Sorry, can’t help shouting at this point.)

When it is mentioned we tend to think of people, almost always black people; degraded, abused and bound in chains, and we tend to think of such images, and the word slavery itself, as belonging to another era.

We do not see slavery as belonging to our world, not as something which is still happening today.

Yet the truth is that if William Wilberforce were alive today and he travelled to different parts of the world - not just in Africa, but also in large parts of Asia, the Middle East, South America and even parts of Europe - he would find children living in conditions and circumstances which Wilberforce would understand and which I am sure he would describe as slavery.

How to define slavery? According to Anti-Slavery International, common characteristics distinguish slavery from other human rights violations:

A slave is:

Phillipe does a great job with his regular round-up of Baha’i blogs that have particularly struck him in the last week or so.

I’m amazed at the number of Baha’i blogs that are on the go - around 200-300, according to Phillipe. Of course, that’s a drop in the mighty blog ocean, and not a high proportion of the Baha’i population - even of the Baha’i population in the parts of the world that are likely to have access to the technology necessary to write blogs.

I shall be running a course on basic blogging for Baha’is at the Liverpool Baha’i Centre at the beginning of June. My aim is to encourage a few more Baha’is to dip a toe into this particular ocean.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, blogging

A gloriously sunny afternoon drew Erica and me out of doors for a walk this afternoon. Today’s a public holiday in the UK, so felt justified in abandoning our respective desks and tasks for the pleasures of the countryside.

We’re fortunate to live in an area that is well provided with footpaths and lanes that are away from the traffic and general hustle.

We walked up through the woods to the small village of Harmer Green. There are some beautiful houses in these villages between the northern tip of Welwyn Garden City and Stevenage.

Our walk took us down to Digswell and then north again along and over the railway.

The path follows the line of the railway. In fact, because the railway is in tunnels, the path is directly above the tracks.

At a number of points there are structures like this, like very large chimneys sticking out of the ground. They are ventilation shafts for the railway tunnel. We were close to one when we heard an uprushing of air from the chimney, followed by the sound of a diesel engine and the noise of a train rolling along the track. As the back of the train passed the opening below the shaft, it sucked the air back down the chimney.

If you didn’t know what they were, you could get quite a fright from these unexpected noises in the middle of the woods. No sign of a railway anywhere. Weird!

Technorati Tags: England, Hertfordshire, Welwyn, countryside, walking, railway

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News of the intensifying persecution of the Baha’is in Iran just keeps coming.

There have been two very disturbing murders of elderly Iranian Baha’i women in their homes.

Behnam Saltanat Akhzari, an 85-year-old resident of Abbas Abad, a dependency of Abadeh in Shiraz, was killed on 16 February 2007. The following day, Shah Beygom Dehghani, a 77-year-old Baha’i, was viciously assaulted by a masked intruder in her home in Mohammadiyyeh, in the province of Isfahan. Mrs. Dehghani died on 7 March 2007. The two women were unrelated.

The motive for these attacks remains unknown at the moment, but the similarity between the two murders is alarming. Both victims were elderly women who were alone at the time of the attacks, which occurred in their homes in relatively small towns.

The unknown assailants brutally assaulted each of the women. Mrs. Akhzari’s body was found in her house with her hands and feet bound and her mouth gagged. Mrs. Dehghani was lured out of her house in the middle of the night and then savagely attacked with a lawn rake. She suffered broken hands and ribs, head injuries, and critical damage to her liver and kidneys. When her screams caused the intruder to flee, she crawled to a neighbour’s home for help. Despite medical attention, her wounds proved fatal. She died on 7 March 2007, some two-and-a-half weeks after the attack. No suspects have been identified in either case.

Murders of elderly women in Britain would be headline news in the UK media, especially if there was a suspicion that the killers’ motives were racial or religious. I don’t suppose these murders of Baha’is merited even a short paragraph in any Iranian newspaper.

Although we don’t know who killed Mrs Akhzari or Mrs Dehghani and why, we do know who stole the home of the widow of a Baha’i who died in jail.

In an act of extreme callousness and cruelty, the Revolutionary Court of Yazd told Mrs Nahid Beygi, whose husband, Zabihollah Mahrami, died in prison in December 2005, that her home had been confiscated. After her husband’s death Mrs. Beygi had legally transferred ownership of her home to her four sons. Nevertheless, the court announced that the court order for Mr Mahrami’s execution included confiscation of his property; the house now belongs to the government.

Mr Mahrami, 59, had been wrongfully jailed in harsh physical conditions in Yazd for ten years when he died - just because he was a Baha’i.

As if these attacks were not enough, vilification and defamation of the Baha’is continues in Iranian newspapers and blogs and in a book published by Kayhan, a government-run newspaper in Iran. The Light and Shade of Bahaism is a compilation of the series of attacks against the Faith printed in Kayhan in 2005. An online review of the book on 6 March 2007 on the Sobhe Sadegh website is clearly designed to foment mistrust and hatred of the Baha’is.

In this book, the hidden relations and secret, seditious activities of the Bahaism sect have been unveiled.

The review encourages everyone to read it…

…as it reveals to some extent the intrigues of international conceit and arrogance towards Muslims.

Sobhe Sadegh, a weekly newspaper, is run by Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Iran

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