Excerpt from: The Jerusalem Post, 7 June 1999 Hebrew University Dedicates World's First Bahá’í Chair, By HAIM SHAPIRO JERUSALEM (June 7) - Prof. Moshe Sharon, the first incumbent of the world's first academic chair in Baha’i studies, said yesterday that the post was being set up at Hebrew University of Jerusalem with the aim of doing away with “tremendous ignorance” concerning Baha’i. The chair, funded by an anonymous donor, is to be dedicated today. “People think it is a Moslem sect. The truth is that it is a new world religion,” Sharon said. He added that before he began his research in the field, the last academic work on Baha’i had been done 80 years ago. It is a fascinating faith, he said, with great intellectual wealth. There are over 100,000 documents, enough to provide work for researchers for a century, he added. Noting that Baha’i has spread rapidly throughout the world, including Asia and Africa, he described it as the perfect faith for the modern person, with its insistence upon complete equality between races and between sexes. The Baha’i faith’s origins were in Persia, where, in 1844, a youngman named Ali Muhammad Shirazi, known as the Bab, began to attract followers to a new religious idea. He was deemed a heretic by the Moslem religious authorities and a rebellious leader by the Persian government, which executed him in 1850. Among the Bab’s followers was Mirza Hussein Ali Nuri, later called Baha-ullah, who in 1863 announced that he was the expected prophet whose coming had been foretold by the Bab. He developed the movement, which had been persecuted in Persia, and authored its holy writings. Baha-ullah was banished from Persia and later from Iraq and other places, arriving in 1868 in Acre as a prisoner of the Ottoman government. He died and was buried there in 1892. The Associate is the newsletter of the Association for Bahá’í Studies (English-Speaking Europe), 27 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PD, UK. <<PREVIOUS • ASSOCIATE HOME PAGE • CONTENTS • ABS(ESE) HOME PAGE • NEXT >>