August 13. On this date in 2013, Hushmand Fatheazam died in Vancouver, British Columbia. He served as secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of India from 1955 to 1963 when he was elected to the Universal House of Justice where he served until retiring in 2003.

 

August 13. On this date in 2013, Hushmand Fatheazam died in Vancouver, British Columbia. He served as secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of India from 1955 to 1963 when he was elected to the Universal House of Justice where he served until retiring in 2003.

Hushmand Fatheazam was born into a Baha'i family in Tehran, Iran, on January 8, 1924. 

He worked as a curator at the library of the Faculty of Arts at Tehran University from 1950 to 1952, and obtained Masters degrees in arts from Tehran University.

Fatheazam went to India as an pioneer in 1953, where he obtained a second Masters degree in Arts from the Wiswa Bharati University in 1954. Other Iranians who would follow Fatheazam in pioneering to Iran include Payman Mohajer, Borhanoddin Afshin, and Lesan Azadi.

Following his move to India to assist Baha'i development work there, he held the post of lecturer in Persian literature at Punjab University, from 1959 to 1963. He was staff artist at All-India Radio from 1955 to 1963. During that period, he was managing director of the Baha'i Publishing Trust, New Delhi.

Hushmand Fatheazam served as secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of India from 1955 to 1963 when he was elected in the inaugural election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963, serving on that body until retiring at the age of 79 in 2003.

After his retirement, he continued to give presentations, including his talk titled “Some Observations on the Scope and Value of Baha’i Scholarship,” which was the 26th Hasan M. BalyuziMemorial Lecture at the 32nd annual conference of the North American Association for Baha’i Studies, which was a four-day conference that concluded on September 1, 2008.

While underlining the vital contributions of Baha’i scholarship to the development of the Baha’i Faith and the progress of society, he cautioned against the temptations of intellectual pride that scholars from all traditions have historically been susceptible to, and urged Baha'is to pursue paths of scholarship with the utmost humility.

Mr. Fatheazam promoted scholarship as the continued independent search for truth incumbent upon all human beings. He highlighted the importance of this role by emphasizing the two identities of the Baha’i Faith, one as a religion, described through the analogy of the tree, and one as a limitless reality, described through the analogy of light.

A poet, author and playwright, he wrote an introduction to the Baha'i Faith, The New Garden, which has been translated into some 109 languages. He was married to Mrs. Shafiqih Fatheazam (nee Farzar-Asdagh) with whom he had three children, including his son Shahbaz.

He died on August 13, 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia.