The mother of Parvine Shahid, the owner of this website, and the writer of a number of the articles therein contained.
Her father, Nayer Ali Afnan, was the son of Sayid Ali Afnan, a member of the Bab’s family. He was the grandson of Baha’u’llah, as the son of Foroughyeh Khanum, the daughter of Baha’u’llah, who had married Sayid Ali Afnan.
Shoghi Effendi, appointed by Abdul Baha as the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, was her uncle, brother of her mother, Rouhnguise Rabbani Afnan, granddaughter of Abdul Baha.
Bahiyeh was less than 10 years old when, along with her parents and younger sister, Maliheh, they were excommunicated from the Cause into which they had been born and brought up. Nonetheless, she and her sister were brought up in a purely Bahai atmosphere, were taught their Baha’i prayers, and celebrated Baha’i feasts in the privacy of the family home. They had not been refused permission to visit the Shrines, both in Haifa and Bhaji, as tourists rather than members of the community.
As the whole family of the four daughters of Abdul Baha were members of this excommunicated group, there were a whole number of them living and practicing their faith, in spite of the “judgments” that saw them as outcasts.
Bahiyeh was educated at the English High School in Haifa, followed by three years of study at the Beirut College for Women, and then three more years at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. in the United States, where she earned an MA in political science. She then returned to Beirut where she married Hassan Jalal Shahid in 1964 — another family marriage Shoghi Effendi did not approve of, but it was a happy one nevertheless. Their only child, Parvine Shahid, was born in 1966.
Having lived her whole life through the strange situation where she was a member of the excommunicated family of Abdul Baha’s daughters, brought about by Shoghi Effendi as the Guardian of the Bahai Faith, he was her uncle and she his niece, but she never saw him. Instead, she grew up amongst all of his close and extended family members giving her a unique perspective of the circumstances and stories that ruled their lives.
This website was set up by Parvine Shahid to put forward the untold and unreported stories and accounts against the members of the four daughters of Abdul Baha, Zia Khanum, Ruha Khanum, Touba Khanum, and Monawar Khanum, and the treatment meted out to them and to their children by Shoghi Effendi.
Abdu'l-Baha's Family 