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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I was intrigued to find out that one of the members of our Baha’i Local Spiritual Assembly in Welwyn (that’s in England’s beautiful county of Hertfordshire) has won a newspaper competition.

thelondonpaper is a free sheet that is forced on innocent home-going commuters at London’s railway stations by purple-clad young people.

Maani Saafa has won the paper’s “inaugural male reader model competition”

A model Baha’i is one thing, but a Baha’i model is quite something else! I don’t think I’ve ever met a Baha’i model before…

Maani the model (Photograph

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Bilo’s post on an article in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm about Western coverage of the sufferings of the Baha’is in Egypt has been picked up here by the Middle East Interfaith Blogger Network.

(I found this out because Bilo’s link to one of my posts created a pingback from mefaith.com.)

It’s worth having a look at mefaith.com’s manifesto:

Through blogging, we are free to express our beliefs online and share them with the world in a way that is not possible otherwise. We cherish our right to free expression and freedom of conscience. As individuals with ties to the Middle East, we are pained by ongoing repression and conflict in the region, troubles fueled in part by religious differences and in part by a fundamental lack of communication.

Together, we are committed to helping Middle Eastern societies find a formula for genuine acceptance of difference. We ask the blogging community to provide an open environment for interfaith dialogue and education