School Under Threat of Death

May 21 -- Sitting in an austere Tehran living room, her clammy hands threatening to soil her answer sheet, Sahar R. knew that it was not the usual fear of academic failure that was causing her a bout of "examination nerves."

It was the terror that security officials from unknown quarters of the Iranian government might swoop into the nondescript living room, where a small group of teenagers sat furiously scribbling their undergraduate tests in the early 1990s, that set her heart racing.

For if she was caught, the punishment was something the studious undergraduate preferred not to imagine. It could be a brief detention, a prolonged imprisonment, torture, even execution — one never quite knew in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and one was content not to find out.

As a member of the severely persecuted Bahai religion in Iran in the early 1990s, Sahar (her name has been changed to protect relatives who remain in Iran) knew she had precious few basic human rights.

Comprising Iran's largest religious minority, Bahais, who believe in the equality of all faiths, are considered heretics by the Shiite Muslim authorities that came into power after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

With no official recognition in the Iranian constitution as a religious minority, the list of persecutions and intimidations against Bahais is extensive and has been the subject of frequent condemnations by international human rights groups.

But for Sahar — who was a sprightly 10-year-old when the revolution shook her country — the government ban on Bahais attending universities or receiving any sort of higher education seemed particularly unfair.

"I always knew I would not be able to attend university while I was in school," Sahar said in a phone interview with ABCNEWS.com from Boston, where the 32-year-old Iranian refugee works as a clinical social worker with trauma patients.

"But as I got older in my senior high school years, it really started to sink in," she said. "All my Muslim friends were going to college and I couldn't. They felt bad of course, but there was nothing they could do about it — to be even seen as supporting the Bahais was dangerous."

But help arrived in the form of a clandestine underground "university" set up by the intrepid Bahai community, which has always placed a high emphasis on education.

An Underground University Is Born

Started on a small scale in 1987, the secretive BIHE (Bahai Institute of Higher Education) has been operating stealthily, under great duress, in Bahai living rooms, garages and offices across Iran.

In what has been called "an elaborate act of communal self-preservation," the BIHE valiantly attempts to provide an education for the community's deprived youth, bucking a state effort to prevent future generations of Bahais from reaching any positions of influence in Iran.

At grave risk to their lives, Bahai teachers, professionals and volunteers have cobbled together a complex system of administrative deception, offering a variety of subjects, disseminated mostly through smuggled course materials, photocopied and hand-delivered to students.