Niloufar Sobhanian

New Era of the Dark Ages in Iran

Throughout the years of obtaining service hours, I have participated in
various humanitarian projects such as soup kitchen, coat drives, and recently
being involved with the Ludunation project where we focus on making the
transition of a new life easier on immigrant children, like myself. However, a
more serious project that I am involved in is Education Is Not A Crime. The
context is Bahais who are members of a minority religion in Iran called
Bahai are oppressed due to the government being run by Shiite Muslims.
They refuse to view Bahais as citizens and have been confiscating
properties, money, and assets from Bahais ever since the revolution has
happened in the 1970s.
Along with being deprived from having basic human rights
or any legal rights, Bahai youths who go to school in Iran are treated harshly
by teachers and administrators solely due to religion beliefs. They allow kids
to go to school so they can learn about Islam along with various other
subjects in order to alter their religious beliefs from what was taught from
the family to increase a chance for them to grow up to be a Muslim as well.
There are some schools that refuse to register children because of the
parents religion, forcing parents to register their kids at a school that may
very well be 30 miles away from their city.
After high school, if young adults have not changed their religious
beliefs and do not specify their religion in the particular question that is
included on their college application, their applications are automatically

Niloufar Sobhanian
denied. As a result, Bahais have helped to fund an underground,
internationally recognized university called Bahai institute of higher
education, or BIHE. The set up of this university is mostly based on online
classes in which people have to obtain filters to prevent the government
from spying on their internet activities. Laboratory classes are held
afterhours in a set up apartment and the fear of being caught by the
government is embedded into their heads when they travel to and from their
classes.
The government is trying to mimic the Romes dark ages and apply the
same concept to Bahai scholars. Education is deemed as powerful; the
concept that knowledge is power is taken quite literally in Iran. The
government believes that if the Bahais are deprived from education, they
will not undermine the government, they will not have the courage to rebel
and they certainly not understand critical thinking.
I was lucky enough for my parents to sell their
entire lives to come here for me to be able to go to school in peace at the
age of 9. I started becoming involved in the education is not a crime
movement when my childhood friend, the person whom I went to youth
group with from the age of 5 until we moved here, Sarmad Shadabi was
arrested when he was leaving the laboratory. He, like hundreds of other
people my age, are imprisoned, tortured and lack the quality of life solely
due to their thirst for knowledge.

When

a country prohibits a group of people from obtaining knowledge, it also does

Niloufar Sobhanian
a disservice to the world. This quickly became a global issue and I was
enraged that the lack of human rights has become to the extreme level that
it currently is. With the analysis of the cons of prohibiting people from
obtaining education, it became evident that Iran needs to be held
accountable. What if one of the youths who would have access to education
becomes the next Einstein or cures a disease?
The challenge of this campaign was to make people listen. After all, as
humans, we have the tendency to care about things we can relate to or
things that directly affect us. The good news is that some people, whom I
have met doing service, really care about what is going on around the world
and have spend their summers in Peru or Costa Rica, building schools in
unprivileged communities. Being in this class, I have also learned that to
make people think something is important, I have to show passion for it. I
had recruited two of my friends to be a part of this project by showing
enthusiasm, Elika and Nasrin. They were in charge of coordinating the event
for a showing at the University of Utah which will take place in Fall semester.
What can be concluded about working in this particular way is to find
something I am passionate about and work towards achieving the goal or
idea. It also took quite a bit of persuasion and deep conversations about the
purpose of the movement, the root, what it is trying to accomplish. The fact
that we may never go back to Iran to visit family because there is very well a
chance of being arrested at the airport for retaliation against the Islamic
government if we campaign via social media. There is an opportunity cost

Niloufar Sobhanian
with every decision and we had to evaluate the best scenario with the least
repercussions.

Due to the hardships that my

family had to endure because of beliefs and the war and hatred that people
have because of identifying with a certain religion, I have realized that I have
been avoiding the topic of religion and do not like to affiliate myself with a
certain ideology. The youth group that I teach, we focus on ALL religions, we
compare and contrast what each teaching has to offer and we apply the
concepts to our modern day and age and how we can use these teachings
improve our community for the better. I have realized that the modern
generations are leaning more towards spirituality or being a good person in
general. In my experience, religion has isolated more people rather than
bring them together which is the sole purpose of religion.