Family deals with trials

As the trial of seven Bahai leaders detained in Tehran’s Evin Prison since 2008 gets underway in Iran, Burbank resident Nancy Rohanifard is preparing to embark on a trial of her own.

Her brothers, Soheil, 44 and Behnam, 29, were arrested nearly four months ago in Iran and held without charges, a reality the Bahai have been forced to endure since their faith’s origin 166 years ago.

A musician who produces what Rohanifard characterized as “apolitical music that speaks to the value of all religions,” Behnam was arrested after recording records and attempting to stage a concert, according to reports that reached the family.

Soheil, taken in two weeks before his brother, was jailed for the second time in six years. Authorities reportedly went to his house and took everything of value, including passports and a personal computer. His first arrest resulted in his five months of tortuous captivity, and those close to him have had a hard time connecting, Rohanifard said.

Unlike Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, Iran’s Bahais have not been granted religious recognition.

“The first time they tortured him,” she said. “They closed the blinds and they said, ‘We will kill you.’”

More than 7,500 miles away, their sister clings to the belief that “we’re all brothers and sisters,” that the self-sacrificing plight for religious freedoms outweigh her physical and emotional scars.

Still, all of this, she said, has become too much to bottle inside of her small frame.

“I can’t really put this into words,” she said, recalling the challenge of having to explain the arrest to her young niece. “You can’t go deeply to the emotion of a 5-year-old. I couldn’t answer her question straight.”

Regarded as the youngest of the world’s independent religions with more than 5 million followers, Bahaism’s central theme is its founder’s message of unity of mankind. But over the years they’ve been made to endure humiliation and beatings, vandalism and arrests, and the denial of education and work as members of the outlawed religious minority in Iran.

Rohanifard, who hails from the central Iranian province of Yazd, is no different. She recalled her father’s frame shop, where men stood outside the door and warned potential customers not to shop there.

The religious persecution forced him to shutter the business.

She was called “unclean” and forced from school and work before being smuggled out of the country by night on camelback, escaping the religious bigotry of Iranian Muslims who have long considered her faith blasphemous.

Her brothers, who only recently were able to communicate with their sister and her daughter in Los Angeles, have been less fortunate. Still, the family maintains that Soheil is an honest man, and Behnam, who moved his family to the capital city seeking more freedoms, has never denigrated the Muslim faith in his music.

“His [album] is nothing to do with the politics, nothing to do with the Republic of Islam,” Rohanifard said with the assistance of an interpreter.

Others who share her core beliefs, including Dennis Stafford, a Bahai organizer in Los Angeles County, can’t help but draw a nexus between the brothers’ legal troubles and the high-profile trial involving religious leaders — a case that has drawn condemnation from around the world.

“There has been no evidence to support any of those charges,” he said. “Everything we’ve seen, there’s no support behind them.”

That trial began Jan. 12 with the reading of the charges that included espionage, spreading anti-government propaganda, “collaboration with Israel” and “spreading corruption on Earth,” according to media reports.

Family members were not permitted in the courtroom Feb. 7 for the latest closed-session hearing, which drew denouncements from the European Union, the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International.