Ridvan

Ridvan is the greatest festival of the Baha'i Faith, a twelve-day celebration (21 April to 2 May) commemorating the days in 1863 when Baha'u'llah, the faith's founder, first declared to his companions that he was the messenger of God whose coming the Bab had foretold. The declaration took place in a garden on the outskirts of Baghdad, on the eve of his exile to Constantinople; Baha'u'llah named the garden Ridvan, "paradise", and the festival takes its name from it. The occasion is regarded as the most joyful and significant in the Baha'i calendar, marking the open beginning of his mission.

Of the twelve days, the first, ninth and twelfth are holy days on which work is suspended, corresponding to Baha'u'llah's arrival in the garden, the arrival of his family, and his departure. Ridvan is a time of gladness, gathering and hospitality, and it is also the season during which Baha'i communities hold their annual elections: the local and national governing councils (Spiritual Assemblies) are elected during Ridvan, giving the festival an administrative as well as a devotional dimension. As the commemoration of the moment their faith's founder first announced his station, Ridvan is to Baha'is the "King of Festivals", the centre of their year.

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.