Nobel Prize for Peace winner Shirin Ebadi talks to Channel 4’s International Editor Lindsey Hilsum in her Tehran office about harassment her legal work is facing. Defending the seven charged is lawyer Shirin Ebadi, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Peace. But now she too is facing harassment for her legal work – and her defence of women’s rights.
“I have received a few telephone threats in the last few days. They ask why you are continuing your work when we’ve closed your offices. You should stop all activities, not that we close one place and you set up in another. The callers are anonymous,” she tells Lindsey Hilsum.
February 25, 2009 1:21 am
With heartfelt gratitude to Iran Press Watch for echoing the suffering and unjust persecution of the Baha’is of Iran to the world, and to Ms. Ebadi for being courageous in defending the rights of the Iranian Baha’i citizens who are imprisoned by the authorities through falsification of the claims and evidences, I would like to bring to your attention that the statement of the Foreign Office as cited by the news caster of the channel 4 about the origin of the Baha’i Faith is misleading and baseless.
The news caster quotes the statement of the foreign office as”… even thou their Faith is an offshoot of Islam” is completely baseless and illegitimate as: The Bahá’í Faith is an independent world religion whose purpose is to unite all the races and peoples of the world in one universal Cause and one common Faith. As Baha’u’llah proclaims to the world: ”That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one common Faith.”
Bahá’ís believe that God’s Revelation is progressive as “Religion is the outer expression of the divine reality. Therefore it must be living, vitalized, moving and progressive. If it be without motion and non-progressive it is without the divine life; it is dead. The divine institutes are continuously active and evolutionary; therefore the revelation of them must be progressive and continuous.”
Baha’is are the followers of Bahá’u’lláh, who they believe is the Promised One of all Ages. “To Israel He was neither more nor less than the incarnation of the “Everlasting Father”, the “Lord of Hosts” come down “with ten thousands of saints”; to Christendom Christ returned “in the glory of the Father”; to Shí’ah Islam the return of the Imam Husayn; to Sunni Islam the descent of the “Spirit of God” (Jesus Christ); to the Zoroastrians the promised Shah-Bahram; to the Hindus the reincarnation of Krishna; to the Buddhists the fifth Buddha.”
In closing I would like to draw your attention to the fact that if we argue that the Baha’i Faith is an offshoot of Islam, we should accept the fact that Islam is an offshoot of Christianity and Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism.
Shervin Ashraf