On a quiet Sunday afternoon in Baha'i youth education, retired Tech professor Cosby Rogers is calmly encouraging five-year-old Amelia Lester to offer her interpretation of the day's Baha'i prayer. After several false starts, Amelia sings: "Oh my Lord, oh my Lord," and then, with a broad smile, "I love everybody!"
Half a world away and six years prior, Maziar Fahandezh Sadi arrived at his Iranian college entrance examination. He simply left the space on the form marked religion blank. He knew that filling in "Baha'i," a faith outlawed in Iran but founded by a Persian and still popular there, would ensure his inability to attend Iranian higher education.
When the administrator of the exam asked Sadi to fill in the line, he did.
The administrator ripped the paper up in his face. Now a junior computer science major at Tech, Sadi is one of roughly two dozen Baha'i in the New River Valley, 11 of whom are students at Tech. The expression of the world's second-fastest growing religion (behind only Islam) in Blacksburg is an interesting fusion between Amelia and Maziar, between the religion's Persian roots and its highly educated American converts.
It's not much of a stretch to say that practitioners of the Baha'i faith do, in fact, "love everybody," at least theologically, even when the majority of their presence in international news focuses on their persecution, specifically in Iran. While the second-fastest growing religion in the world owes much of its growth to explosive growth in India, the Baha'i of the New River Valley tell a story of cultural and religious fusion cloaked in the anonymity of its small size.
The Baha'i faith began in modern-day Iran during the first half of the 19th century when the faith's founding figure, known as the Bab, or gate, announced in Shiraz, Iran, that another messiah would come shortly after his passing. While the concept of a gate to higher spiritual knowledge was an established one in Shi'a Islam, the years following the execution of the Bab by the Shah of Iran saw the rise of the father of the Baha'I faith, Mirza Husayn Ali or Nur or, as his followers call him, Baha'u'allah.
Baha'u'allah proclaimed a religion that enfolded the world's standing religious traditions, saying that throughout history God had sent manifestations of himself to the world in order to instruct different peoples at different times in a process known as progressive revelation. Baha'is count Buddha, Abraham, Krishna, Jesus and Muhammad, for example, as manifestations of a God who is inaccessible directly. Following a series of exiles and imprisonments, Baha'u'allah came to rest in prison in Akko of modern-day Israel, where he died. A shrine erected in Akko as well as the Shrine of the Bab (his remains were disinterred and brought to Israel) in Haifa, constitute the Baha'i faith's most sacred places.
Persecution is rampant for roughly 300,000 Baha'i who still inhabit Iran. Several of their religious leaders are currently imprisoned for allegedly spying on Iran for Israel. Being a vast minority isn't new to Sadi, however, who said he was the only Baha'i in his middle school in Iran and who picked up his English through a job at a Whole Foods Market near his home in Northern Virginia when he emigrated to the United States shortly after his inability to attend Iranian higher education. Saied Mostaghimi, the head of the biological systems engineering department and a leading light in the Baha'i community, said that this persecution deals with the challenge that Baha'i theology poses to the Shi'a Iranian regime.
"Baha'is have always been persecuted in Iran and a lot of that is that the Baha'i faith is somewhat revolutionary in the beliefs we have and the principles we abide with such as dealing with the equality of men and women; we don't have clergy. We say we're the latest religion in Iran and Islam was the one before us, and if you look back in history, Jews persecuted Christians, and then Christians persecuted Muslims so this is not unprecedented," Mostaghimi said.
Ironically, it may be more difficult for non-Persian Baha'is in the New River Valley to gain acceptance for their beliefs than for Persians or members of other races. When Blacksburg architect Bob Rogers and husband of Cosby Rogers told a coworker about his newfound faith, the man's wife offered him a Christian book on cults. The most usual response, Cosby Rogers said, is simply, "What?" Both Sadi and Mostaghimi said they had encountered no negative reactions in their interaction with students, staff or community members.
"I don't feel isolated at all. I very much feel a part of the community of Blacksburg, and I think a lot of it is how you take it and how much you want to get involved. Our religion says you should support your community in any way you can ... some religious groups cluster or get into a section of town and stay by themselves. That's something Baha'is try not to do," Mostaghimi said.
While Mostaghimi doesn't feel isolated from the community, in 1984 when Mostaghimi came to Blacksburg, the Baha'i community in the New River Valley couldn't muster the nine persons necessary to form a spiritual assembly capable of voting on delegates to the Baha'is National Spiritual Assembly, a body responsible for addressing issues with American Baha'is as well as voting on candidates to serve on the faith's international governance body, the Universal House of Justice.
Those ranks have been swelled by converts like Suzanne Ament, a professor of Russian history at Radford University who declared her Baha'i faith before coming to the New River Valley, but who is now the group's resident musician.
Ament hesitated before joining a faith first introduced to her by her stepfather because, "in some ways, I thought the standard was too high," she said.
"Baha'i laws are like every religion. A lot of the laws are very similar (to other religions) in terms of prayer and fasting and marriage. My stepfather said if this really is the energy of the day, if this really is the life-force that God has revealed for this period of time, if you need help fixing or improving yourself in any way, why wouldn't you turn to that?' Even if you don't succeed, the point isn't to succeed, the point is to try," Ament said.
The consonance of Baha'i faith teachings and the generally more liberal opinions present within the academy offer a specific hook on university campuses. After his daughter Sarah declared her Baha'i faith in 1999, the seminary-educated Bob Rogers "was a little disturbed," Sarah said. "He was thinking, 'my daughter is joining a cult, what is she getting herself into?'"
But within a year, Bob "decided he was a Baha'i and just didn't know it," Cosby, a retired human development professor, said. Bob said that it was both a "curiosity" with his daughter's new faith - of which he was at first very wary - and "dissatisfaction" with his local Christian congregation that led him to become a "second generation Baha'i," referring to his daughter's previous conversion. Within several years, Cosby had converted as well.
Yet teachings like the equality of men and women and the importance of education aren't just wooing those with Ph.D.s, members of the Baha'i community are quick to point out.
"While it's liberal in some ways, it defies definition on a left-right scale ... People who were illiterate are accepting Baha'u'allah. It encourages people to make something of themselves," Ament said.
Moreover, the tradition does have very stark boundaries on some issues.
"There is a certain fundamentalism in a positive sense. It's an embracing of all the world religions, but it also encourages and requires people to be faithful to the religious tradition, to practice the virtues," Bob Rogers said.
Further still, the Baha'i beliefs fall on points across the left-right political spectrum.
"Baha'is are actually forbidden from participating in partisan politics. I think we know that there is truth in lots of things that people say. We don't write people off because they listen to Rush Limbaugh," Bob Rogers said.
This doesn't mean the Baha'i are passive observers, however. Both Sarah Rogers and her husband Mehrtash Olsen underwent a customary service experience abroad (Sarah in Zambia, Mehrtash at the Baha'i holy
site in Haifa) while Mostaghimi's son both volunteered in a Guatemalan orphanage and eventually went on to Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta.
"Universal peace and the unity of mankind is the great umbrella ... and whatever you can do to bring about the unity of mankind is what happens at the local level with the service activities," Mostaghimi said. "We think globally because we think of ourselves as world citizens. The world is but one country and mankind its citizens. That is really the thing that we live by on a daily basis and so it's a lot easier on a daily basis as a result of that that Baha'i communities are ethnically and educationally diverse, for example."
The struggle, then, for the Baha'i of Blacksburg is to maintain the humility that attracted many of them to the faith in the first place while sharing their message, Bob Rogers said.
"If everyone lived by their teachings, there would be no need for Baha'i. Over time, religions splinter. In the Christian faith, you see it with 38,000 denominations. At what point do you say, 'This one is correct?' It becomes a question of 'What is the truth anymore?' and some of that is part of the idea that now and then religion needs to be refreshed. It's not rejecting the older religions, but encompassing and honoring them."