CLINTON, Md. — For as long as Bahaism has existed, the forebears of Rezvan Tavakkoli have abided by it. And over the generations, since the faith’s origin 166 years ago, Mr. Tavakkoli’s people have paid the price of their devotion.
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Jim Lo Scalzo for The New York TimesRezvan Tavakkoli, in Clinton, Md., is awaiting word about his brother, a Bahai leader in Iran who faces a possible death sentence.
They have endured beatings, insults, arrest, vandalism, dismissal from jobs, denial of education and other forms of religious bigotry inflicted by the Iranian Muslims who consider Bahaism an intolerable blasphemy for its belief in a 19th-century prophet and his new revelation emerging from Shiite Islam.
Nothing in this pageant of hatred, however, had quite prepared Mr. Tavakkoli for the present moment. He sat this week in a home a dozen miles outside Washington, a 66-year-old man clad in flannel shirt and cardigan against the January chill, as his younger brother Behrouz awaited the verdict of a secret court in Iran, one of seven Bahai leaders facing a potential death sentence for charges of espionage, propaganda and the all-purpose calumny of “spreading corruption on earth.”
It somehow matters to Mr. Tavakkoli, it compounds the sensation of impotence, that he is the eldest child of six in his family, the paternal figure, the one with the impulse to protect. “I am regretting I am here,” he said in his American living room. “My hands are tied at this distance.”
As for Behrouz, he was the third child in the household, seven years Rezvan’s junior. Even now, graying and balding and equipped with bifocals, Mr. Tavakkoli can easily remember Behrouz as a boy upset that neighbor children would smash birds’ nests for sport. He invited them, instead, into his family’s home in Shirvan, where he had concocted a way to use a shaft of sunlight, a magnifying glass and a film strip to project a sort of movie onto the wall.
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