A Dress Rehearsal for Later Persecution

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No aggregate death toll is recorded for the 1955 campaign; its documented harm is institutional and material, a demolished national center and plundered Baha'i homes and property, rather than a body count. The Majlis bill to outlaw the faith outright failed to pass in 1955, but the campaign set a template the Islamic Republic would draw on decades later: most of Deputy Safa'i's failed 1955 proposals, banning membership, confiscating property, purging government posts, were substantially enacted after the 1979 revolution.

No international body has made a formal genocide or crimes-against-humanity determination on the 1955 campaign specifically; it is documented in human rights reporting and Baha'i historiography as the twentieth century episode that established the pattern later United Nations resolutions would repeatedly condemn once persecution resumed and systematized after 1979. The campaign opened as a clerically led effort, with a popular Shia preacher's state-amplified sermons providing the religious justification for what the army and civil government then carried out, turning on the Baha'i Faith's status as a post-Quranic religion claiming a Prophet after Muhammad.