Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education

The Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), is a unique open university in Iran, which has been portrayed as an underground university, established by the Bahá'í community of Iran in 1987 to meet the educational needs of young people who have been systematically denied access to higher education by the Iranian government. Currently, through a main faculty in Iran and an Affiliated Global Faculty from universities around the world, BIHE offers a total of 38 undergraduate and graduate programs in Sciences, Engineering, Business and Management, Humanities, and Social Sciences. More than 80 universities in North America, Europe, and Australia have thus far accepted the BIHE's graduates directly into programs of graduate study at the masters and doctoral levels. BIHE has a decentralized and fluid structure and uses a hybrid approach of offline and online delivery methods which has enabled it to grow under unusual sociopolitical circumstances. Despite numerous arrests, periodic raids, several imprisonments, mass confiscation of school equipment and general harassment, BIHE has continued and even expanded its operation. BIHE has received praise for offering a non-violent, creative, and constructive response to ongoing oppression.

Since its birth in the 19th century, the Bahá'í community of Iran has faced different forms of persecution including hostile propaganda and censorship, social exclusion, denial of education and employment, confiscation and destruction of property, arson, unjustified arrests and imprisonment, physical and psychological torture, death threats, arbitrary executions and disappearances.The Islamic Revolution of 1979 intensified the persecutions and made Bahá'ís - the largest religious minority of the country - the target of a systematic state-sponsored campaign of repression. Within this ongoing campaign, over two hundred Bahá'ís have been executed; thousands more have been imprisoned, have lost their jobs, been denied their pensions, been expelled from schools and universities, been denied health care, had their personal property plundered, and had their grave sites defiled. The modern persecution of Iranian Bahá’ís now continues in its fourth decade. In the 2016 annual report to the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, refers to the Bahá'í community of Iran as “the most severely persecuted religious minority” of the country.

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