Moral Panic and Power: The Means of Legitimisation of Religious Intolerance & Human Rights Violation against the Bahá’ís in Iran

Abstract

The case of the Bahá’ís of Iran, the country’s largest non-Muslim religious minority, is a “suspended” genocide and hence alarming. The human rights violations against the members of the Bahá’í community have been designed in such a way to draw as little international attention as possible. It is designed to eliminate slowly rather than to eradicate abruptly. Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic has actively pursued the policy of Bahá’í persecution. This paper focuses on one aspect of the tactics used by the Iranian regime to violate the human rights of the Bahá’í community in Iran. To do so, moral panic theory and Foucault’s power discourse have been used to offer an analysis of the Bahá’í persecutions as an underlying feature of Iran’s domestic policy of othering, religious intolerance and Shi’a supremacy.