Light shed on underground education

SCREENING: Mike Fudakowski with a flyer for a documentary that highlights the non-violent struggle of young Baha'i striving for higher education in Iran. PHOTO/LYNDA FERINGA

A graduate of the Baha'i Institute of Higher Education - outlawed in its home country of Iran - will speak of his underground education at a film screening in Masterton about the organisation.

Wairarapa Baha'i Community member Mike Fudakowski said the documentary film by Maziar Bahari, To Light a Candle, tells the story of followers of the Baha'i faith in Iran, who chose to unflinchingly resist decades of state-sponsored persecution barring them from higher education in their own country.

According to an online Baha'i press release, the film uses interviews, personal stories, and archival footage - often smuggled out of Iran at great personal risk - to highlight the non-violent struggle of Baha'i in Iran striving for higher education.

Mr Bahari, who is not of the Baha'i faith, used the premiere of his documentary in Britain last year to announce an international Education is Not a Crime Day, which was marked for the first time on February 27 this year, which he hopes will raise awareness of the right to education.

Ramez Rowhani, who counts himself an Iranian New Zealander, graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the BIHE after five years of studying computer science.

He is to talk of his experiences as a student at the screening of the film at the Frank Cody Lounge on Wednesday, which coincides with the United Nations Humanitarian Day.

Mr Rowhani had completed high school and had earlier started at the institute, which was founded in 1987, but his studies were "interrupted when I was 19 years old, due to being arrested by security forces along with my mother for being a Baha'i".

Although many of his friends also studied at the institute, his only sibling, a sister, had left Iran and settled in New Zealand before the BHIE was established. "I received a couple of accusations and one of them was for studying at the BIHE. Another was contacting Baha'is outside of Iran because I was hosting a non-Baha'i Kiwi friend of my sister from Palmerston North, who visited us in Iran as a tourist. All of my classmates at the last year of high school were studying hard to sit for the entrance exam of tertiary education.

"However, I knew I was not going to be allowed to sit for that exam as this was the case of all the Baha'i youths. My entrance application was declined that year and the year after.

"This was quite a feeling of exclusion on one hand and at the same time a feeling of determination to fight back and to resist such discrimination. The BIHE gave me an opportunity to resist."

A core principle of the Baha'i faith is compulsory and universal education, he said, and the institute was a flowering of that belief for the Baha'i community in Iran.

He said greater than the threat of being arrested himself was the risk of "trouble for others who support you to study", including Baha'i families who offered their homes for use as a classroom or lab, or exam venue for a couple of hours, and the volunteer Baha'i lecturers who risk long jail sentences.

"We, as students, were leaving such places, sometimes one by one, cautiously avoiding anything that could attract any attention of neighbours and potentially putting the owner of the house at risk."

Mr Rowhani, who was one of the institute's first crop of computer science graduates, had come to New Zealand to undertake postgraduate studies that were not available through the BHIE.

He was continuing his education in New Zealand, and work as a remote tutor for the BHIE, with the over-arching aim of returning to Iran to teach.

"It is my dream to be able to return to Iran and to serve that country not only the Baha'is," he said. "Sharing my story of the BIHE is not depicting an image of a victim in your mind. Neither is it my intention to incite hatred towards anyone.

"It was a story of a severely persecuted minority that refused to take a role of victim, refused to be dehumanised, refused to take any revenge, refused to react by civil disobedience. The Baha'i community of Iran resisted educational exclusion by establishing their own university; it is a successful model of constructive resilience in response to ongoing oppression over a 35-year period."

The free public screening of the 55-minute film will be preceded by a question and answers session with Mr Rowhani from 7pm at the Frank Cody Lounge in the Masterton Town Hall on Wednesday.