Habib Rezvani

Habib Rezvani
Born	c. 1927 Isfahan, Iran
Died	c. 2016
NSA member	Colombia 1961 - 1968
ABM	Americas 1969 - ????

Habib Rezvani (1927 - 2016) was a Persian Bahá’í who pioneered to Colombia where he served on the National Spiritual Assembly and as an Auxiliary Board member.

Background

Rezvani was born in Nadjafabad a village near Isfahan, Iran, in approximately 1927. He was a student of Hand of the Cause Mr Faizi when he pioneered to Nadjafabad. Habib pioneered briefly to Saudi Arabia and after a couple of years he was put in jail for professing a different religion than Islam. He was given 24 hours to leave the country and he embarked on a trip that would take him to Brazil in the 1950's.

Rezvani had pioneered to Colombia by 1960 and he traveled across the Guajira desert to visit isolated native communities to teach the Faith into 1961 securing approximately one hundred declarations. He was elected to the National Spiritual Assembly of Colombia when it was established in 1961, and participated in the election of the first Universal House of Justice in 1963. That same year He married Simin Derakhshan and had a daughter (Naghmeh) the following year in Barranquilla where they lived for a short period before moving to Bucaramanga where the family settled. He had his second daughter Taraneh in Bucaramanga where he worked as a teacher for 4 years

In 1966 Rezvani visited Venezuela and participated in the country's National Bahá’í Institute. As of 1969 he had been appointed to the Auxiliary Board for the Americas and he attended a teaching conference in Bolivia called by Raḥmatu’lláh Muhájir in August that year. In 1969 he was sent to Bolivia to deepen the friends on the covenant and settle a difficult situation of covenant breakers in that country where he remained for 6 months. He traveled with Dr Muhajir who taught him mass teaching and relied on him to share this experience with others in South America. He also traveled with Ruhiyyih Khanum during the Green Light Expedition. He continued to travel internationally throughout South America as a Board member visiting Venezuela 1970 where he and helped with a mass teaching campaign in Caracas in March, and attended the first All Quajira Conference in Los Mochos in May. In October 1970 he visited Brazil to promote mass teaching.

Rezvani continued to serve as Board member until at least 2005. In addition to promoting the Bahá’í Faith in his travels he also worked towards promoting literacy among indigenous populations and he established ninety local literacy schools in Colombia and thirty in Venezuela in his travels. While the majority of the schools he founded were later replaced by government funded schools one which remained opened until at least 2008 was the Nuevo Jardin school which became an officially registered school in 2005.

Habib was instrumental in the development of courses of the Ruhi Institute which Dr. Farzam Arbab implemented with friends in Colombia and was among the first groups that created materials for mass consolidation.

Rezvani passed away in 2016 and a memorial gathering was held at the Bahai Institute in Riohacha, Guajira, attended by about 500 people.