June 7. On this date in 1999 an article in the Jerusalem Post was titled "Bahá'í Studies chair dedicated in Jerusalem," stating "Prof. Moshe Sharon, the first incumbent of the world's first academic chair in Bahá'í studies...He added that before he began his research in the field, the last academic work on Bahá'í had been done 80 years ago."

June 7. On this date in 1999 an article in the Jerusalem Post was titled "Bahá'í Studies chair dedicated in Jerusalem," stating "Prof. Moshe Sharon, the first incumbent of the world's first academic chair in Bahá'í studies...He added that before he began his research in the field, the last academic work on Bahá'í had been done 80 years ago."

JERUSALEM (June 7) - Prof. Moshe Sharon, the first incumbent of the world's first academic chair in Bahá'í studies [in Israel], said yesterday that the post was being set up at Hebrew University of Jerusalem with the aim of doing away with "tremendous ignorance" concerning Bahá'í. 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 Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í faith's origins were in Persia, where, in 1844, a young man named Ali Muhammad Shirazi, known as the Báb, 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 Báb's followers was Mirza Hussein Ali Nuri, later called Bahá'u'lláh, 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. Bahá'u'lláh 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. Today the Bahá'í world center is in Haifa and the faith has shrines in Haifa and Acre. There are an estimated six million followers around the world, only a handful of them in Israel. - By Haim Shapiro. Copyright 1999 The Jerusalem Post. Reprinted by permission.

Who is Moshe Sharon? Frequently interviewed by Israeli media, he has been called "Israel's greatest Middle East scholar". Among his political views is that there is "no possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians whatsoever, for ever" and that peace agreements with Arabs are "pieces of paper, parts of tactics, strategies...with no meaning." He blames the Bosnians' being Muslim for the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990's and argues that "The only way to avoid military confrontation with Iran is to leave this military confrontation to powers bigger than Israel."
In the Israeli documentary film "Bahais in My Backyard," during an interview, Moshe Sharon denies the existence of Bahá'u'lláh's descendants in Israel. Despite Sharon's denial of the existence of such relatives, they do exist, and one of Bahá'u'lláh's great-granddaughters, Nigar Bahai Amsalem, is featured in the film. The denial of these descendants, no less by a purported academic who is "Chair of Bahá'í Studies" at arguably Israel's best university, is curious.
Moshe Sharon has close connections with the Bahá'í Administrative Order. For example, in December 2000, Moshe Sharon and Hossain Danesh, the Rector of the now-defunct Landegg Academy, a Bahá'í-sponsored institution of higher education in Switzerland, co-convened the First International Conference on Modern Religions and Religious Movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Babi and Baha'i Faiths at Hebrew University. The conference was covered in a Bahá'í World News Service article.