Posts from — April 2008

I must apologize that BQ was unavailable for quite some time earlier in the week. The server where it resides had suffered a power surge and resultant damaged equipment and files. It took some time for the server to be restored.

Technorati Tags: blogging, server

This is an exclusive offer. It excludes all those haven’t yet made the switch to Apple Mac™ .

If you go to the website of the Arlington, Virginia, Baha’i community, you will find a link in the sidebar on the right-hand side of the front page that downloads a calendar with the dates of all the Baha’i Feasts and Holy Days in .ics format. If you have iCal or other application that uses .ics, you can load it directly into your calendar - as I have just done.

By the way, this is not the calendar of events for the Arlington Baha’i community. It is the official calendar of the Baha’i Faith.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, calendar, Arlington

Shrine of Bahá’u'lláh © David Henderson

My very good friend David Henderson has set up a wonderful new website called Baha’i Words. It contains beautiful photos and the Words of Bahá’u'lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

If you subscribe (click on the “subscribe” tab at the top of the blog) you will receive a prayer and a reading each day by email.

Your email address will not, of course, be made public or used for any other purpose.

Do visit Baha’i Words.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Holy Writings, prayers, Baha’u'llah, ‘Abdu’l-Baha

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

It seems that one Iranian news site, Tabnak, is no longer accusing the Baha’is of carrying out the explosion in the Shiraz mosque.

Nope. It now says Bahais are so pleasure-seeking and chicken-hearted that they don’t even dare to identify themselves, let alone to plot a terrorist attack.

I’m confused now! Are we Baha’is the bombers or are we wimps?

Funny thing, when you come to think about it. Fifty-four chicken-hearted Baha’is in Shiraz, who, apparently, didn’t dare to identify themselves, were such pleasure seekers that they got themselves arrested for running an educational project for under-privileged Muslim children. The intelligence services in Shiraz must be clairvoyant.

You can find the story here, but only if you can read Farsi. Hat-tip to Erfan.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, Shiraz, mosque, explosion

Could the Baha’is in Shiraz be scapegoated for Saturday night’s explosion in the Hosseynieh Seyed al-Shohada Mosque in Shiraz? It would be quite convenient for the authorities and the ill-wishers of the Baha’is.

This story on the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website states that some observers are concerned that the Baha’is might be blamed for the explosion. Hojatoleslam Mohammad Enjavinejad, the mosque’s main cleric and leader of Friday prayers, regularly preaches against the Baha’i Faith and against Wahhabism.

Apparently Enjavinejad told Kayhan, a newspaper that is generally regarded as an Iranian government mouthpiece:

We believe that it’s possible that Baha’is had a hand in this.

Various listeners to Radio Farda have expressed concern about the possibility that attempts may be made to blame the Baha’is. One caller said:

For now the police forces are trying to portray this as an accident, on the other hand they’re pretending they’re the victims by showing the injured and dead. It seems that they want to use this in the right moment for their benefit; it means that because of what was being said against our dear Baha’is in the meetings [in the mosque] they want to put the blame on the Baha’is.

Fifty-four Baha’is, aged between 18 and 37 were arrested in Shiraz in May 2006. They had been involved in an educational programme for underprivileged children in the city for which they had official permits.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Islam, mosque, explosion, Shiraz, Iran

While I was shifting my blog to its new home, my permalinks got broken.

No, I didn’t have to go to the doctor to get them mended, but I did have to ask Alex, my service provider (and son) to fix something deep in the core programming of the server to allow me to use the permalink structure that I like - ‘almost pretty’ permalinks. So, for a couple of days, the permalinks were rubbish and I have a horrible feeling I may have lost some or all readers who subscribed using a feed reader.

Anyway, they are now mended and I hope we can get back to what passes for normality in BQ world.

What are they? They are the links that lie behind the headline for each post. They are what you see when you bring up a page with a single post on, rather than the page with the multiple posts that you see when you come to the blog’s home page.

So, if you see this, and you’re not getting my feed in your news reader, please subscribe again!

Technorati Tags: blogging, permalinks

Many news outlets have reported last night’s explosion at the Hoseyniyeh Shohada mosque in the Iranian city of Shiraz. According to the BBC report:

Most of those inside the Hoseyniyeh Shohada mosque when the explosion took place were young boys and girls affiliated to the Rahpoyan-e Vesal Association, which “holds weekly meetings every Saturday regarding misguided groups, including Wahhabis and Bahais”, [the] Fars [news agency] said.

The Aljazeera story mentions the arrests last year of Baha’is in Shiraz who were working with poor children:

Fars reported that the mosque hosted weekly speeches denouncing Wahaabism – a version of Sunni Islam - and the outlawed Bahai faith. Iran is a predominantly Shia country.

Iran had been the cradle of the Bahai faith in the middle of the 19th century. After the Islamic revolution in 1979, the faith was banned and the country’s constitution does not recognise it as a religious minority.

Bahai detentions

Last year, Bahai communities abroad said some of followers of the faith were detained in Shiraz while working with poor communities there.

It’s worth noting the language that Aljazeera uses in the last paragraph immediately above. It does not acknowledge the truth of the stories about the arrests of Baha’is in Iran, but subtly makes it look as if this is just something that we Baha’is outside of Iran have claimed, but without justification.

Here’s a story from the Baha’i World News Service about these arrests.

It is both disturbing and sadly typical that the people in the mosque at the time of the explosion were “young boys and girls affiliated to the Rahpoyan-e Vesal Association”. This organization has been putting out a lot of anti-Baha’i propaganda and is busy spreading the kind of prejudice and incitement against Baha’is that would be considered Islamophobic in the UK were an equivalent organization to incite people against Muslims.

Of course, I’m not blaming the young people - and I am very sorry that they have been caught up in such a terrible event. What is morally reprehensible, though, is that official and semi-official organizations are trying to shape young minds to be hostile towards members of faith communities that are not official recognized in Iran.

No doubt more there will be a great deal of obfuscation from the authorities in the coming hours and days before we learn what actually happened, who is responsible and why.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, `Iran, Shiraz, mosque, Islam, explosion

I’ve managed a temporary fix. You can now access single posts and pages. But the fix is not ideal, since it does away with my favoured permalink structure.

Technorati Tags: blogging, permalinks

A kind reader has emailed to point out that he wasn’t able to leave a comment on one of my posts (thanks, David). The main page with multiple posts is fine, but it seems like the single post pages (the ones you get when you click on a post headline on the main page) are showing up as not available.

As I said yesterday, tweaking will be required. First thing I need to do? Get the single posts showing and open the blog for comments again.

Sweating it up

I have been working on this for hours now and have not yet found a way to solve the problem. Please bear with me. I need to talk to the overlord of the server (aka my son).

Technorati Tags: blogging

Barnabas Quotidianus has moved!

We’re on the new server and visible again (thanks to help from Alex).

There’s some tweaking to do and the header picture to amend - and then we’ll be back to normal. As yet, I have not changed the theme - I’m going to give this some more thought.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Barnabas Quotidianus