Celebrated Openly Almost Everywhere Except Where the Faith Began

Baha'is in Iran, the country where the faith originated and where Baha'u'llah himself lived before his exile, have faced systematic state discrimination and persecution since the 1979 revolution, documented extensively by the United Nations and international human rights organisations, including restrictions on higher education, employment and property ownership, and periodic arrests and imprisonment of community members and leaders, conditions that have made openly organising the large communal Ridvan gatherings ordinary elsewhere in the Baha'i world difficult or dangerous for Iranian Baha'is, who in many cases mark the festival more quietly and privately than their co-religionists in most other countries.

This gap between Ridvan as the most joyful and openly celebrated festival of the Baha'i calendar in the great majority of the more than one hundred countries with organised Baha'i communities, and its constrained, cautious observance inside the very country of the faith's birth, is a documented and ongoing feature of the modern Baha'i experience that Baha'i institutions and international human rights bodies have repeatedly raised as a specific and continuing case of religious persecution, one the Baha'i community itself frequently notes stands in direct tension with the festival's own themes of joy and open declaration.