Review of The Forgotten Schools: The Baha’is and Modern Education in Iran, 1899–1934 by Soli Shahvar

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The Forgotten Schools: The Baha'is and Modern Education in Iran, 1899-1934. By Soli Shahvar. London: I.B.Tauris (International Library of Iranian Studies, Volume 1 1) 265 pp. + index, appendicesAMIN BANANIPerhaps my repository of memories and recollections can add a dimension to Professor Soli Shahvar's excellent book about the rise, flourishing, and ultimate suppression of modern Baha'i schools in Iran - for those schools are not forgotten by me!I have vivid memories of the morning of 23 September 1 934 ( 1 Mehr of the Persian solar year 1313), my first day at the Tarbiyat School for Boys in Tehran. I had attended the co-ed Baha'i kindergarten off Amiriyyih Avenue behind the Tarbiyat School for Girls the previous year, and this was my year of coming of age and experiencing the serious world of school for boys. The atmosphere on that first day of the new academic year was festive and there was a buzz of new things in the air. In the office of the principal of the school, the baton was being passed from the venerable old Mr. Azizu'llah Mesbah to the young and energetic Ali-Akbar Furutan, a native of Sabzivar, but grown up in 'Ishqabad and a recent graduate of Moscow University in educational psychology. In many ways this change promised many novel turns in the applied educational philosophy at the Tarbiyat School.As members of each class from the first to the twelfth lined up on the courtyard and in the alcoves of the school to hear the chanting of the opening prayer, the buzz of excitement that was palpable on that morning was about the first proclamation of the new principal ending the practice of corporal punishment at the school. There was the dramatic call for A. Husayn, the keeper and administrator of the chub-u-falak (the bastinado for flogging the feet) to break up his contraption. This was, of course, in compliance with explicit teachings of Baha'u'llah and Abdu'1-Baha against corporal punishment and, as such, a significant move away from the norm of other schools. It further fixed the distinctive identity of the Tarbiyat School for Boys. It might be added that the Tarbiyat School for Girls under the principalship of American Baha'i women like Dr. Susan Moody and Adelaide Sharp from the early 1920s on had already ruled out corporal punishment. Although the most immediate beneficiaries of the new policy were the rowdy students who were the most likely victims of the bastinado, the announcement was a great and general morale booster on that morning.The short few months that I attended the Tarbiyat School for Boys left a lifetime of impressions and influence on me. Most important among them was a devotion to excellence in school work. When the Tarbiyat School was abruptly closed in December 1934, we all expected the ban to be lifted shortly. Eventually, as described by Professor Shahvar, most of us engaged some of the Tarbiyat teachers as home tutors for the remainder of the year, and finally entered other schools the following year. I and a number of my Tarbiyat School friends were put in the Zoroastrian school.The official reason for the shutting, first, of the Tarbiyat schools in Tehran, and eventually all of the Baha'i schools in the country, was that the schools had closed without official permission on a Baha'i Holy Day (the Martyrdom of the Bab). Professor Shahvar relates the various accounts of the events and sources of pressure leading up to Reza Shah's order to close the Baha'i schools permanently. Much has been plausibly guessed as the reasons for shutting down what was undoubtedly the best school system in the country, attended not only by Baha'i boys and girls but also by the sons and daughters of the elite of the country including some of the shah's own children.The capricious treatment of the Baha'is by Reza Shah must be noted. He chose Baha'is for every position of personal safety and security, from chef to barber to chauffeur, as well as trustees of his personal and armed forces finance. …