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The closing of all schools belonging to the Baha'i community in that country, as a direct consequence of the refusal of the representatives of that community to permit official Baha'i institutions, owned and entirely controlled by them, to transgress the clearly revealed law requiring the suspension of work on Baha'i Holy Days; the rejection of all Baha'i marriage certificates and the refusal to register them at government License Bureaus; the ban placed on the printing and circulation of all Baha'i literature, as well as on its entry into the country; the seizure in various centers of Baha'i documents, books and relics; the closing, in some of the provinces of the Haziratu'l- Quds, and the confiscation in some localities of their furniture; the prohibition of all Baha'i demonstrations, conferences and conventions; the strict censorship imposed on, and often the non- delivery of, communications between Baha'i centers in Persia and between these centers and Baha'i communities in foreign lands; the withholding of good- record certificates from loyal and law- abiding citizens on the ground of their avowed adherence to the Baha'i Faith; the dismissal of Government employees, the demotion or discharge of army officers, the arrest, the interrogation, the imprisonment of, and the imposition of fines and other punishments upon, a number of believers who refused either to cast aside the moral obligation of adhering to the spiritual principles of their Faith, or to act in any manner that would conflict with its universal and non- political character-- all these may be regarded as the initial attempts made in the country whose soil had already been imbued with the blood of countless Baha'i martyrs, to resist the rise, and frustrate the struggle for the emancipation, of a nascent Administrative Order, whose very roots have sucked their strength from such heroic sacrifice.
(363:1)
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