Opening and Closing the Door: The State and the Bahá’í Schools in Iran
- Details
At the close of the nineteenth century, to the amazement of many Iranians, modern Bahá’í schools emerged, first in Tehran then in cities, towns and villages with numerous Bahá’ís. By the 1930s there were dozens of Bahá’í schools. Surprisingly, the secular and reform‐minded Pahlavi state (which shared some central Bahá’í principles, such as education and women’s emancipation), closed them in the mid 1930s. Why did the Qajar rulers, persecuting the Bábís‐Bahá’ís since the mid‐1840s, allow such schools to open? And what could have stood behind Reza Shah’s decision to close them? This paper attempts to answer those crucial questions.
Soli Shahvar
Dr. Shahvar teaches in the Department of History of the Middle East, and is Director of the Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Haifa. He holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of The Forgotten Schools: The Baha’is and Modern Education in Iran, 1899–1934 (IB Tauris International Library of Iranian Studies, 2009).
33rd Annual Conference
Environments
The views expressed in this recording are those of the presenter and do not necessarily represent the views of the Association for Bahá’í Studies, nor the authoritative explications of Bahá’í writings.