The Iranian Revolution Triggers Systematic Persecution Of Baha'is

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution turned the birthplace of the Baha'i Faith, and the country that had once held its largest population, into the site of a systematic campaign of state persecution against the religion's own followers. The persecution was not incidental to the new government's policies; it targeted the faith's organised leadership directly and repeatedly over the years that followed.

In August 1980, the members of Iran's National Spiritual Assembly were forcibly disappeared and are presumed executed. When the community elected eight replacements to take their place, those replacements were arrested in December 1981 and executed without trial that same month, a second removal of the community's elected leadership within little more than a year of the first. In August 1983 the government moved beyond individuals and banned all formal Baha'i administrative activity outright, dissolving every local and national assembly the community had built. Amnesty International has recorded at least 201 Baha'is executed on account of their religion, predominantly during the 1980s.

What this changed for the Baha'i Faith's spread was the deliberate dismantling, inside the religion's own birthplace, of the organised community structure the faith depends on everywhere else in the world. Two elected national leaderships were destroyed within roughly a year of each other, and the formal administration binding local Baha'i communities together in Iran was outlawed entirely by 1983, leaving the faith's largest historic population to practise without the institutional structure the religion maintains elsewhere.