Bahá'í Epistolary

Where do we go when we die? Yes, but where is that?

2009-11-29T01:44:00.003Z

Another podcast. This is a recent lecture I gave in Cambridge University, on the matter of life after death. While reviewing the well-known fundamentals of the Baha'i perspective on the after-life, it goes further, to approach matters that I have seldom if ever seen addressed in the literature, namely, once we grant that the Baha'i teachings posit the survival of the soul after death, how do we answer the question of where exactly is the after-life? And what connection, if any, does it have to this life, beyond bringing it to fruition. Can we reach that world, or those worlds, in this life? Are we already there? And what does all this have to do with traditional notions of union with God, of nirvanna, of enlightenment? And can we take our dog?

Nightingales: A Musical Offering

2009-11-27T02:21:00.001Z

This is a different kind of podcast, a song called Nightingales. It represents a preliminary version of a choral piece I composed many years ago around a beautiful, proclamatory poem of Baha'u'llah, which tells the nightingales that the season of roses, the blooming time is here, the seekers that what lay beyond their vision is now revealed to their sight, and the lovers that the adored one's face is in full view. The motifs, from Persian mysticism, are universal in their capacity to evoke. Like all else on this blog, this is not a finished thought, but a tentative beginning in a conversation, this time in musical form. Joining me in singing it are the extremely talented Smith family (Geoff, Michaela, Bonnie, and her cousin), and a friend called Paul. The provisional translation is by J. Cole. As soon as I get full names of everyone, I will give proper acknowledgement! It was a wonderful experience to record it at the Smith studio in beautiful Cornwall, after 12 years of holding it in my head, and I will always be grateful for the inspiration they imparted as an extraordinary, united, gifted family!

I share this song, not because it is finished, but because it is a beginning, in case anyone out there would like to collaborate in taking it to the next stage. I think it can do with cello, for instance, and twice as many voices, and removing some background sound, but it is enough to convey a sense of the musical vision that animates it, and I hope someone out there may like it. If you do, let me know, please.

You can find it in zipped format here

If religion divides - why join one? If truth is universal, why "label" oneself? Why call oneself "Baha'i", and not just believe, and remain open?

2009-11-12T14:30:00.009Z

Following good feedback, this is a podcast (my second!)of another talk I gave at Cambridge University, addressing the perennial question that Baha'is encounter: "I like the Baha'i teachings very much, I even love Baha'u'llah, but I don't want to label myself, I want to be free to be myself, and not divide myself from others by joining anything." I think people who state this view, have a point. You can find it in zipped format here.

Is unity always good? Really? Is diversity always positive? Really? Is there a measurable social impact to Baha'i community life?

2009-11-12T11:39:00.003Z

Is unity always a good thing? Is diversity always an enrichment? Do Baha'i claims and approaches to unity in diversity stand in light of scientific research on group functioning? Is there a science to being united? Baha’is speak a lot about the value of unity in diversity. Since this ideal was formulated by Baha’u’llah in the unlikely setting of 19th century, QajarPersia, an entire literature has emerged putting to the test, empirically, many of the assumptions and ideas contained in the Baha’i writings. What are the tensions, nuances, and insights, that the encounter between scientific and religious perspectives on unity in diversity may bring? I’d like to stimulate interest in the further exploration of this question, the nature of unity and diversity, beginning by recalling en passant what the current sociological, psychological, anthropological and related literature has to say about the subject. This will soon crystallise in paper form, so any references, corrections or additions you may have to share, would be most gratefully received.

Two dimensions of unity: ideational, and structural.

Let us begin with unity. It is seldom defined with the label “unity” in the social science literature. Other labels are used, which amount to cognates of the same unity concept. Among these are the concepts of social solidarity, group cohesion or cohesiveness, social integration, social capital, cultural consensus, social network closure and structural cohesiveness, etc.

These various perspectives seem to focus on defining or measuring unity in two primary ways, one being unity as an ideational concept, that is, how people think or feel, how united or attracted individuals feel to one another, or how united they feel their group is. And the second approach to measuring and exploring unity is a structural approach, how robust are the ties of the group above and beyond the perceptions of its members. For example, a group could feel very united, very cohesive. The individuals could feel that they belong, that they participate, that they like being part of the group, and that the group is very cohesive, and everyone could in fact agree about this, meaning there is a high degree of perceived or ideational unity in a group. However, if those bonds are dependent on the presence of one or two key members who are the key tie for everyone else, then the unity, however intense and profound, is quite fragile, because if one or both of those individuals leave the group, fall ill, or fall out with the rest, then the entire group could fracture. This is what frequently happens, for example in religious movements that are built around a charismatic figure, where everyone feels deeply united as long as that charismatic figure is alive and present as a nexus and cement between them, and the group of his followers love one another, are willing to die for one another, but the moment that leader dies and in the absence of a successful succession or routinisation of the leader’s charisma, then that group can split into sects and schism, and we discover that that group’s unity, however intense and authentic, was not very robust.

By contrast, you may have groups where the degree of mutual identification is quite weak, people feel they are mostly acquaintances, it is weak ties that bind them to one another, and yet, nonetheless, their connectedness is such that it does not depend upon one or another individual, i which case that unity is likely to be more robust because even if 2 or 5 or 10 of those members disappear, the group remains cohesive. This illustrates those two dimensions of unity, the ideational and the structural, which of course may also coincide: you may have a group which is simultaneously structurally very united and robust, and affectively and ideationally very united.

Spheres of Unity

In addition to these two types of unity, structural or ideational, the literature also introduces the notion of differing levels or spheres of unity. At first sight, unity may be thought of as uniformly good, but the literature suggests that unity in one sphere may be in conflict with unity in a different sphere, and may therefore not necessarily work well for the aggregate. For example, a neighbourhood that is very cohesive and united will reap the benefits of that, nevertheless, that very strong identity, that very unity that binds them could be a factor dividing them from other neighbourhoods, or the city wide or nation wide identity. Likewise, an ethnic group or community might be very cohesive within itself, yet that very cohesiveness lead to very little contact, interaction or embrace with other ethnic groups. We thus find that there are various places in the world where communities naturally cohere around their own religious or ethnic identity, yet they are quite divided from other identity communities. This is one example where unity at one level could be a source of disunity at another level. Certain gangs, criminal organizations, hate-groups, and, arguably, certain commercial enterprises, moreover, may be very united around values and activities that are designed to fracture the very bonds and values that hold society together. Thus, it is important to identify how unity at a given sphere impacts on unity at a different sphere.

Strong ties, Group Norms and Group Effects.

In addition to the distinction between ideational unity and structural unity, the literature distinguishes between strong ties, strong relationships of closely knit people, and weak ties, arms’length relationships with what can best be described as acquaintances. Each of these is associated with specific types of group effects.

One of the areas of unity which is affected by the relative strength of the ties binding a given group, is the evolution of norms of interaction guiding and harmonising its members. The the stronger the ties that bind group members to one another, the more united a group is, and the smoother the process of evolving and enforcing group norms. If you have a group where the boundaries are very lax, very thin, the networks are very loose, then chances are that the process of achieving common norms around cooperation or interaction will be more elusive. An example of this would be, when you have a youth group that you are running or participating in, if all the members know each other very well, they go to school together, they are already lifelong friends, then the chances are that the process of developing common values, common norms of behaviour is going to be quite smooth, so that effective communication and group dynamics, and the degree of group commitment is likely to be high, with everyone united. On the other hand, when you just start a youth group through what is sometimes described as detached work, and you go perhaps to the street to recruit lost of youth from different backgrounds who don’t know each other at all, and put them together in one room, the group behaviour is likely to be to quite variable. Some might be quite shy, others quite raucous and rowdy, and it will take some time, and getting to know each other and bond together, in fact cohering the group, for there to emerge some accepted and shared norms of behaviour.

The impact of group cohesion on the evolution of group norms is such, that one of the observable group effects of closely knit groups, is that the group values impact on and can even override the values of individual members. Thus if you have a very united group around a certain core of values, then those values are more likely to be present in the group, and practiced by its members, even when not all individuals fully share them. A group that for example places a great emphasis on formality, for instance certain types of work environment, where everyone wears a suit, everybody relates to one another in a formal way, hierarchies are significant. If this is consistent and the organization is tightly knit, chances are that even if you are an informal kind of guy, when you enter that group or organization you will tend to behave more formally than comes naturally to you.

Another aspect of unity affected by the strength of group ties, is the level of group commitment. So for example if you go to a gym regularly, you belong to that gym, you are a paid up member, you associate regularly with some of your fellow members, and it can be said that it is “your” gym. However, should you come across a gym that was nearer to your place, was cheaper and better equipped, then unless you have built quite a strong bond with people in that gym you are quite likely to desert the previous gym immediately for the new, better and more convenient gym. This might happen likewise in work settings, and various other environments.

The Strength of Weak Ties

On the other hand, one of the disadvantages of having a closely knit group is that such levels of closeness around a very specific group of people can make the structure less flexible, in times of change or adaptation where you might need new talents, new perspectives or new relationships, when instead of tapping into the capacities of new people, you might feel a sense of loyalty to the people around you, or a sense of safety in sticking to your group, that may hamper your capacity to adapt.

“Thus, the more a manager was strongly tied to a cohesive group of peers, the less able he or she was to adapt his or her communication network to the changes brought about by the global organizational change... viewed over time, a cohesive network may eventually hurt a manager's ability to enter and to promote new cooperative relationships involving people outside that network” (Gargioulo, M., and Benassi, M., 2000)

An example of this is when someone moves to a new neighbourhood, and develops very close friendships with two or three people that take up all her social time, which can be wonderful, and may mean she doesn’t have to spend much time with other people, that she may not have very wide networks, but she can really count on those three friends come hell or high water. If suddenly there is a power cut, however, and those three friends aren’t around, or are ill equipped, then the very strength of those ties, leading to the narrowness of her network, could influence the access that she has to other people who might be able to help. While if on the contrary she happened to have more acquaintances, more arms’ length relationships with people, more weak ties, she might not be able to unburden her heart to them, or leave them caring for her house, but she might have many people to ask for a candle in the supposed power cut.

White and Houseman (2002) explain:

“Granovetter showed that if a person’s strong ties are those in which there is strong investment of time and affect (e.g., close friends and kin), then it is paradoxically the weaker ties that connect a person to others and to resources that are located or available through other clusters in the network. In his Boston study of male professional, technical, or managerial workers who made job changes, he found that most workers found their jobs through personal contacts, but ones that were surprisingly weak: not close friends or relatives but often work-related persons and generally those with more impersonal ties with low contact frequency. Reflecting on Rapoport’s information diffusion model, and Travers and Milgram’s Small Worlds studies, he formulated his strength of weak tie hypothesis: strong ties tend to be clustered and more transitive, as are ties among those within the same clique, who are likely to have the same information about jobs and less likely to have new information passed along from distant parts of the network. Conversely, bridges between clusters in the network tend to be weak ties, and weak ties tend to have less transitivity. Hence acquaintances are more likely to pass job information than close friends, and the acquaintances of strategic importance are those whose ties serve as bridges in the network. “

They also mention, as a nuance, the Dodds, Muhammad and Watts experiment on 67,000 users. People avoided asking help from others with whom they had weak ties, such as casual acquaintanceships. They mostly used ties of intermediate strength, such as friendships formed through work or schooling affiliations.

Curvilinear relationships? Arriving at “unity in diversity”

So, different levels of intensity in relationships, each appear to have certain advantages, and also disadvantages. A mix of strong and weak ties seems to be the ideal, and of course each conditions and limits to some extent the other. Too many weak ties, and it will be hard to find the time to invest in a few relationships necessary to achieve truly close ties. Too much concentration on a few strong ties could impair the ability to interact with a wide enough array of people to build many weak ties.

A further concept that emerges from the empirical findings on group cohesiveness, then, is that there may be a curvilinear relationship to the benefits of unity, that is, an optimum level of unity above and below which the positive effects of group cohesion begin to diminish. Implicit in this notion, is that achieving this optimum point of unity depends on the presence of a degree of diversity, inasmuch as where cohesion is very homogenous, the adaptability and wider integration of a group may sometimes suffer, and viceversa.

This brings us to the issue of diversity. All would be easier, if much more boring, and perhaps not even easier either with regard to adaptability, and resourcefulness and variety of resources, as was mentioned earlier, but at least interaction might potentially be easier if in general we all were very homogenous in our values, ideas, backgrounds, thoughts, etc., and in fact we have a tendency to look for the similar and gravitate towards it. The Baha’i Writings state that “like seeketh like and deliughteth in the company of its kind”. This notion forms the underpinning of social categorization theory and social identity theory in psychology, that is, we seek similarity and flow toward it, instinctively avoiding what we perceive as different and other, potentially making diversity cognitively and socially difficult to assimilate. On the other hand, diversity also potentially enriches our resources, our creativity, our thought process, and this has given rise to two perspectives on the influence of diversity.

On the one hand is the idea that diversity can be very helpful to groups and collectivities because it will help in their creativity, it may avoid cliques, it will stimulate collaboration, maximise adaptability, etc. On the other hand, there is a current that suggests that diversity is in fact something quite negative for groups, something that hampers their activity, their interactions, precisely because we do tend toward that which is similar, and struggle with what is new or alien to us. There is abundant empirical evidence for both effects of diversity. It seems that where diversity is coupled with group cohesiveness, that is, when a group is at once diverse and united, then all kinds of advantages accrue to it compared to a group that is also united, but not diverse. Group cohesion is a key mediating factor in the impact of diversity on group performance and effectiveness, for instance. On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that the more diverse a group is, the more challenging it is to arrive at unity, so that the potential benefits of diversity can be offset by the potential hard work of making that group gel, and a homogenous group can consequently perform better than a diverse one.

One of the factors that has been demonstrated to facilitate, although not by itself determine, the process of liberating the positive effects of diversity, is having a positive outlook on diversity, an attitude that embraces diversity. Likewise, actual positive experiences of diversity in the individuals within a group can also help liberate the potential benefits of diversity in the functioning of the group as a whole.

As with unity, thus, so with diversity there seems to be a curvilinear relationship, that is, an optimum level of diversity. Too much diversity and cohesion becomes unwieldy, whilst too little diversity, and homogeneity impoverishes the group. So achieving that balance is important.
As with unity, there are of course different types of diversity. There is of course demographic diversity, but there is also cognitive diversity, differences in views, thoughts, learning styles, values, attitudes. There can be levels of consensus around values that create a coherent perspective, where everybody roughly shares a perspective of what are the values to pursue, and what is the organization, community or group. And there is weak consensus, where people are in broad agreement, and then there is difference, where you may have different subcultures with different cultural visions, and there may be stronger disagreements, where there is actual conflict. Other types of diversity like disparity, where someone has access to all the resources, others have very few, which is not necessarily conducive to group cohesion.

Preliminary Baha’i correlations

This is a necessarily superficial and general view in what remains a preliminary conceptual paper seeking to identify the potential of this whole area of research to Baha’i studies, and viceversa perhaps. How does this link up with Baha’i ideas?

Unity in Diversity

On the one hand clearly there are many resonances, first of all the concept of unity is the single most important teaching of Baha’u’llah, the teaching, Shoghi Effendi tells us, which is “the pivot” around which all other teachings revolve, the principle of the oneness of humanity. This is of course of relevance to us also because it is our key task and methodology, it is the way that Baha’is approach social change. ‘Abdu’l-Baha says that Baha’is first unite one another, and then seek to unity everyone else. So learning how to become cohesive, how to unite, has been the key labour, the key learning process that the Baha’i community has been advancing since the mid 19th century, and is the message that was sounded from the very inception of the Baha’i Faith and of the Baha’i community.

The Baha’i writings also speak of diversity as a key value. They say that unity without diversity would be very simplistic, and impoverishing, like a garden where all the flowers are the same – maasai anecdote. The concept of unity in diversity is described as the Baha’i Faith’s “watchword”, an interesting term to use, which would seem to imply that unity is, as the literature validates, not an unambiguously good benefit, unless it be sought and explored in the context of an embrace of diversity. Likewise diversity is not in itself a good unless it be subordinates, regulated or inspired and synergised by a greater unity. This seems to echo the empirical findings from social scientists that both of these need to balance one another to achieve their optimal benefits in human collectivities.

Two dimensions of unity: ideational, and structural.

Another key resonance is the significance of both ideational unity, interpersonal feelings and intimacy, and also structural unity.

“Let there be no mistake. The principle of the Oneness of Mankind -- the pivot round which all the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh revolve -- is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. Its appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and nations. Its implications are deeper, its claims greater than any which the Prophets of old were allowed to advance. Its message is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family. It does not constitute merely the enunciation of an ideal, but stands inseparably associated with an institution adequate to embody its truth, demonstrate its validity, and perpetuate its influence. It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.”

(Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, p. 42)

Which is to say that this spirit of brotherhood, this feeling of belonging and kinship, is not enough, rather, “it is associated with an order” with a structure, a system, to incarnate that spirit of unity and ensure its cohesiveness. Without such a structure, Shoghi Effendi says, this sopirit would become dissipated and be lost. And this structure is provided by the Covenant, which is what ensures the maintenance of unity after the passing of that pivot of unity that was Baha’u’llah, and subsequently ‘Abdu’l-Baha, and Shoghi Effendi, culminating in the establishment of the Universal House of Justice. In each of these transitioins unity was maintained through the provisions of the Covenant, through a certain structure, and of course through Administrative Order associated with that same Covenant, the structure of a Baha’i community that appears to privilege bottom-up structures that allow the entire system to be very robust, so that were you to take away an individual, no matter how prominent and significant her or his responsibilities, or even an entire institution, the overall unity of the Baha’i community would remain intact, as was indeed put to the test and discovered when Shoghi Effendi died intestate. The central node of unity of the Baha’i community disappeared, and yet so solid was the structure of the Baha’i community, so robust its network, that the system survived the shock of those stressors and maintained its unity unimpaired. This is a remarkable achievement, and is an evidence of the formidable level of both types of unit of course, not only the structural, but also the ideational or subjective unity, which was exemplified in the loyalty that kept the Baha’i community together and the extraordinary servant-leadership of the Hands of the Cause of God as Chief Stewards during the period of the Custodianship, steering the ship of the Cause to the safe port of the election of the Universal House of Justice.

Curvilinear relationships? Arriving at “unity in diversity”

“In the human kingdom itself there are points of contact, properties 68 common to all mankind; likewise, there are points of distinction which separate race from race, individual from individual. If the points of contact, which are the common properties of humanity, overcome the peculiar points of distinction, unity is assured. On the other hand, if the points of differentiation overcome the points of agreement, disunion and weakness result.” (Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 67)

"they strictly avoid uniformity and rigidity in all such practices. No rule whatsoever that would tend to be rigid and uniform should be allowed in such secondary matters"
(Shoghi Effendi, Arohanui - Letters to New Zealand, p. 47)

"It is not uniformity which we should seek in the formation of any national or local assembly. For the bedrock of the Bahá'í administrative order is the principle of unity in diversity, which has been so strongly and so repeatedly emphasized in the writings of the Cause. Differences which are not fundamental and contrary to the basic teachings of the Cause should be maintained, while the underlying unity of the administrative order should be at any cost preserved and insured."

(Shoghi Effendi, Dawn of a New Day, p. 47)

Another principle, the Baha’i principle of the protection and indeed promotion of minorities, has interesting linkages to the findings of social network theory, for instance.

Spheres of Unity

There are here also a number of themes that are validated by the Baha’i writings. We have already mentioned the scriptural support for the basic assumption of self-categorization theory, that we tend to identify with those who we perceive as similar, and gravitate toward them. The Baha’i writings likewise recognise that this very tendency can be a source of disunity, so that ‘Abdu’l-Baha states that “souls are inclined to estrangement”, and that means should first be adopted to remove the estrangement. We seem to gravitate toward those who are similar to us, but likewise we seem to have a tendency to avoid those who we perceive as different from us. To bypass this, both the literature and the Baha’i writings suggest, requires a degree of training, the cultivation of certain values, attitudes and behaviours that mediate our encounter with the different. Thus ‘Abdu’l-Baha speaks about those levels of unity, and how one level of unity is imperfect without the rest, so that one can be very attached to one’s family, but it requires a greater degree of moral development to extend that sense of attachment to larger and larger aggregates, eventually arriving at universal love for all humanity. The hallmark of this age, we are told, is the awareness of world citizenship, the sense of belonging first and foremost to the human race.

“Yea, in the first centuries, selfish souls, for the promotion of their own interests, have assigned boundaries and outlets and have, day by day, attached more importance to these, until this led to intense enmity, bloodshed and rapacity in subsequent centuries. In the same way this will continue indefinitely, and if this conception of patriotism remains limited within a certain circle, it will be the primary cause of the world's destruction. No wise and just person will acknowledge these imaginary distinctions. Every limited area which we call our native country we regard as our motherland, whereas the terrestrial globe is the motherland of all, and not any restricted area."

(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 300)

Another aspect of this research validates by the Baha’i Writings is the notion that not all types of diversity are positive, such as excessive disparity, where you have a situation of inequality and injustice.

“In the vegetable kingdom also we observe distinction between the various sorts and species of organisms. Each has its own form, color and fragrance. In the animal kingdom the same law rules as many distinctions in form, color and function are noticeable. It is the same in the human kingdom. From the standpoint of color there are white, black, yellow and red people. From the standpoint of physiognomy there is a wide difference and distinction among races. The Asian, African and American have different physiognomies; the men of the North and men of the South are very different in type and features. From an economic standpoint in the law of living there is a great deal of difference. Some are poor, others wealthy; some are wise, others ignorant; some are patient and serene, some impatient and excitable; some are prone to justice, others practice injustice and oppression; some are meek, others arrogant. In brief, there are many points of distinction among humankind.”
(Abdu'l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 189)

The Baha’i writings speak that only through justice can unity be established, and they seek to eliminate the extremes of poverty and wealth.

Strong ties, Group Norms and Group Effects.

At the moment most Baha’i activity revolves around group work. Group work seems to be the spirit of our time. Practically the totality of Baha’i activity seems to revolve around small groups. Groups of believers and their friends in study circles and devotional gatherings, groups of young people in junior youth groups, groups of children in children’s classes, groups of believers in teaching teams in intensive growth programmes, groups of believers in Baha’i institutions and committees. Clearly, some of the findings on the nature of groups are quite relevant. Since the focus of this paper is on unity in diversity I will not expand here on the relevance of the vast scientific literature on small group dynamics (those interested might wish to browse through the academic journal “Small group research”, for a flavour of what’s out there). Correlations of this literature with the Baha’i experience could benefit both the Baha’i community in refining its understanding and effectiveness, and the academic community, in bringing to light a distinctive and fascinating pool of collective experience in group functioning.

Here, I would like to explore some of the key aspects around cohesion and diversity that emerge from the literature. One of this themes is what are designated “group effects”, the power of small groups to impact on the behaviour and values of its individual members. Thus an individual may have a given set of values and ideas, but as they participate on a cohesive group, the group takes on a life of its own, and the values of the group become pervasive and permeate its members, even those whose point of departure is different. This puts into perspective the extraordinary service that the Baha’i community is rendering worldwide, in tens, hundreds of thousands of groups around the world, all based around the Baha’is values of unity, and embrace of diversity, etc. We are preparing a entire generation to meet the challenges of diversity. And what are the challenges of diversity? We have seen that diversity without cohesion can be a source of disruption, and that two of the key aspects or moderating influences that facilitate the emergence of cohesion are 1) a welcoming attitude/embrace of diversity, and 2) contact with diversity, experience of positive contact with diversity. These are great enablers of future adaptation.

Why is this relevant? Clearly, our societies have become more diverse, however perhaps not many of us have taken on board the degree to which this is likely to accelerate in the impending future. It is not merely that diverse communities within many, perhaps most, countries, are naturally growing in proportion to the majority population. In addition to this, we have very strong migratory pressures that are accelerating all the time, and one feels that in spite of various governments to restrict or control the flow of immigration into their countries (or emigration out of their countries), this is but a symptom of systemic inequalities that are only set to increase, and which no amount of punitive or draconian immigration policies can hope to master. As if this was not enough, climate change is adding a new, and dramatically accelerating migratory pressure, so that The UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security predicts that by 2010, there will be 50 million 'environmentally displaced people', most of whom will be women and children. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has suggested 150 million environmental refugees would exist by 2050. So apart from the current drivers of migration, quality of life, economic opportunity/poverty, persecution/discrimination, we are seeing an exponential migratory force in the impacts of environmental degradation worldwide. We are confronted with several island countries, for instance the Maldives looking to purchase a new territory from another country, to translocate their entire nation before it is submerged by rising waters (The Guardian newspaper, 10 November 2008), so that there will still be a country named Maldives on the map, only it might suddenly be, not in the South Pacific, but in Latin America, or Europe. This is without touching on the impacts of soil exhaustion in agricultural countries, or peak energy resources.

All this amounts to an ongoing and impending exponential and dramatic demographic transformation of all countries, with an increase in diversity such as has never in history been seen. Unfortunately, it would appear that the rise in cohesiveness is not yet keeping pace with this development, and more often than not, far from seeing a systematic and harmonious harnessing of diversity, we are seeing the rise of “identity politics” and conflicts, which present us with some worrying prospects, locally, nationally and internationally. Against this backdrop, the significance, and urgency, of the Baha’i enterprise, cannot possibly be exaggerated.
For of course, the increase of diversity is not inherently and inevitably a negative thing, but, the empirical literature suggests, is invested with unique and massive potentialities. Each culture, each person brings an extraordinary range of experiences, resources, networks, skills, attitudes and values that can potentially dynamise and enrich the various social settings. And indeed, as we have seen, it is precisely in times of significant change or crisis that diversity can be most useful, in opening possibilities for innovations and creative solutions that homogeneity would be hard put to match. But this depends on collectivities developing the attitudes, values and skills that will release the constructive potential of diversity and obviate its negative stresses. This is not a matter of choice, but of necessity, and in the not too distant future, perhaps even of survival.

Against this backdrop, the vision of hundreds of thousnands of small groups being generated and nurtured by the Baha’is, not only within their own community boundaries, but primarily in collaboration with others who do not fully embrace their own identity, but sympathise with some of their principles, we are seeing perhaps millions of peole engaged in an educational process that exposes them to diversity and that exposes them to values that help release the positive impacts of diversity, given what we now know about “group effects”, the way in which groups impact on the values of individuals, this is truly an extraordinary achievement, and one that could usefully be empirically documented and explored.

Weak Ties, and group effects.

Another aspect of the research is the power of weak ties, people who we see regularly, every so often, but with whom we don’t not share much closeness. Research shows that these ties can be instrumental to all kinds of positive variables, including a community’s sense of security, peace and collaboration. From this perspective, the Baha’i notion of a community of interest, the efforts to meet our neighbours and our co-workers, to create weak ties on a vast scale, and likewise the weak ties that our small networks impinge on, so that as we create a children’s class we develop weak ties with the parents of those kids, you can project certain kinds of insights. These impacts, when you aggregate the, are really quite staggering.

“200,000 worldwide have completed Book 1 of the Ruhi Institute, and many thousands have reached the level where they can effectively act as tutors of the study circles that, with increasing frequency, are held in every part of the globe, over 10,000 at the last count. The number of seekers engaged in the core activities has continued to climb, crossing the 100,000”
(The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 162, 2005)

By 2009, there were 1500 intensive programmes, 1000 programmes.

If weak ties are indispensable to afunctioning community. And Baha’is are systematically multiplying the weak ties in their neighbourhoods, often becoming hubs in an otherwise fragmented and fissiparous community, above and beyond the contribution this may make to Baha’i community building, it is reasonably to conclude that Baha’is are contributing large scale effects in community after community across over 2100 ethnic groups and populations, all with the aim to facilitate the assimilation of diversity, promote values indispensable to sustainable societies, and revitalise the social fabric of reciprocity and collaboration.

A Research Agenda

All these are interesting interfaces and overlaps between the Baha’i teachings and the discoveries of scientist today in relation to unity. Let us go further and ask what is the contribution that these empirical approaches can make to the Baha’i community?

One of the first contributions that comes to mind is that this literature helps us understand a lot of the Baha’i principles in terms of their effectiveness and day to day dynamics, but also other elements. These insights from the literature on unity in diversity can help us gain a sense of the significance of the efforts we are engaged in. We might think this is simply helping our own group, maybe even our neighbourhood, or that we are simply having a good and meaningful time with a group of friends, but really, we are in fact playing a leading role in engendering a collective capacity for leveraging the power of diversity on a global scale.

Clealrly the idea of aggregating the impacts, of measuring the social impacts which the Baha’i community’s activities may be contributing to the unity of the world, the cohesion of society is an area which begs for research and which could have all kinds of impacts on the ways we understand ourselves.

By conceptually, and empirically connecting our core activities to the social challenges of humanity, we might achieve a greater coherence in our discourse, in our attitude, and language. Such a perspective might also make it easier to engender commitment and participation in many Baha’is, as it becomes clear that our activities do not belong in a congregational culture, but that our efforts are really quite distinct, and distinctive within traditional religious community building.

Conclusion

The overall perspective that this literature brings out is that the Baha’i community is engaged in a labour if immense significance to the world, that its social activism, let us say, is dramatic, really. And even though its method is not one of pressure politics, intrigues and plotting, of power games, it is nevertheless of extraordinary range and impact. This brings us to the last element of this, which might be an interesting research agenda that this suggests.

Our aim is not to create another religious community that is bigger and better. Our aim is to reconcile the contending peoples and kindreds of the earth, and the Baha’i community is our instrument and our tool. If we want to grow, it is not so that we can have a bigger club, but so that we might have a more powerful instrument for the unification of society If we look at the history of Baha’i community building, we can see that it began in connecting and linking individuals. It then shifted to building up institutions which would become the instruments of our outreach to the world. In that phase our outlook was almost completely inward-looking. We only looked outward in terms of teaching the Faith in order to bring people “inward”, to activities that were for Baha’is only, which were the core of our activities until the advent of the 5th epoch, largely based around the Local Spiritual Assembly and the 19 Day Feast and giving ti to the Funds, which were all for baha’is only, and recruiting more people to support the existence and functioning of those essential instruments. The reason being that until we had that basic infrastructure, that cohesive structure, as opposed to purely cohesive individuals, not just the ideational, but also the structurally robust unity of our community, we couldn’t attain the task of uniting the whole world. It seems to methat this is a taks we are now beginning to explore, in accord with the Guardian’s quote regarding 2nd century. It seems to me we are now expanding our vision to the outside world. We have now built that instrument on a solid foundation. We can afford to los an Assembly, local or National, and the whole system will not suddenly collapse. We are now a unit that is self-sustaining. Accordingly, we are now focusing our core activities on outreach of a very specific nature, an outreach that involves an intersection of unity and diversity around certain key values, and as I was suggesting, one of the further research agendas that could be useful to explore here is the degree to which our purely Baha’i labours are fo much wider significance and contribution, in addition to our activities more directly associated with influencing social policy or effecting social and economic development. Far from being parallel activities, they are integral facets of one coherent effort to achieve unity in diversity in pursuit of the world civilization that is potentially within our reach.

This means that our activities redound not only to the strengthening of the Baha’i community, but to the strengthening of the whole of humankind.

The role that spirituality plays in this process, is one I have not had the chance to explore here, but would nevertheless like to plant, as a seed, by way of conclusion, by referring to ‘Abdu’l-

Baha’s Some Answered Questions:

“It is clear that the reality of mankind is diverse, that opinions are various and sentiments different; and this difference of opinions, of thoughts, of intelligence, of sentiments among the human species arises from essential necessity; for the differences in the degrees of existence of creatures is one of the necessities of existence, which unfolds itself in infinite forms. Therefore, we have need of a general power which may dominate the sentiments, the opinions and the thoughts of all, thanks to which these divisions may no longer have effect, and all individuals may be brought under the influence of the unity of the world of humanity. It is clear and evident that this greatest power in the human world is the love of God. It brings the different peoples under the shadow of the tent of affection; it gives to the antagonistic and hostile nations and families the greatest love and union.”
(Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, p. 300)

Who could possibly believe in God? How? How could we possibly know whether an unknowable God exists or not?

2009-09-26T11:07:00.011Z

'What is Truth, said jesting Pilate, but would not stay for an answer'

(Bacon, "On Truth").

I've given it a go at an answer... a wordy way of saying

"Who knows? ...Yet I believe."

and why.

What is the nature of religious conviction? Is it different from knowledge? And what would religious knowledge be anyway?

This is my first podcast, from a lecture I gave at Cambridge University a while ago. You can find it in zipped format here. Please let me know what you think of this format. Would you like more podcasts? And please let me know what you think about this podcast!

The file is large (54megs) and lasts an hour and twenty minutes. I have it is less heavy formats (under 20, and under 10 megs), but have no server in which to store them yet. If you need the lighter version, just ask, and I'll forward it to you...

Thanks is andvance for your feedback.

What have seven Baha'i prisoners, and the oppressed community they serve, achieved for the nation of Iran?

2009-02-28T21:36:00.012Z

As seven heroic souls in Iran await an impending trial on absurd and dangerous charges, which place their very lives at risk, while excluded from their lawyer, the brave Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, the question recurs: why?

Why this fear, this virulent hatred of a community so self-evidently committed to peaceful coexistence, sometimes criticised for its absence of partisan political activism, let alone any form of militant stance that might threaten a government, a nation, in the form of hostility, or that staple of government fabrications, espionage?

The nature of the activities of this extraordinary group of people, is explained by the editors of Iran Press Watch as follows:

"After the abduction and disappearance of the nine members of the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran after the revolution in 1980 and the summary execution of most members of the second such Assembly of Baha’is in 1983, the governing body of the Baha’i community in Iran voluntarily suspended its administrative activities in 1983, and the affairs of the Baha’i community were managed by small groups of three individuals in each locality.

"After a few years, this group of three individuals on the national level became more organized and was named the institution of “The Friends of Iran.” The main responsibility of this institution was managing the affairs of this large religious minority, such as recording marriages, handling divorces, assisting with burials, sending letters of introduction for traveling Baha’is, arranging for worship services, and similar activities. “The Friends of Iran” guided the Baha’i community through many tumultuous years, and provided hope and reassurance through critical times with a unified vision and exemplary resolve.

"The activities of the “Friends” were completely transparent and were devoid of any hidden agenda. Incidentally, during this period, a particular office was designated in the Ministry of Intelligence to follow the activities of the Baha’is. This office would contact the “Friends” directly with any questions about a specific activity. Even Ayatollah Dorri Najafabadi, Iran’s chief prosecutor, has referred to this close monitoring. At the time of the suspension of Baha’i administrative activities in 1983, a letter was sent by the National Assembly of the time to Mousavi Ardabili indicating that in exchange for this suspension, the Baha’i community requested that the government allow its high school Baha’i graduates to enter universities, that the dismissed Baha’i university professors be reinstated, and that the Baha’is fired from the public sector be given permission for employment. The government did not heed or honor any of these requests for minimal civil rights for the Baha’is of Iran."

Many have been the responses to such dismal and absurd charges. The most memorable for me are perhaps those of Mr. Hamid Hamidi and Moojan Momen. The former, non-Baha'i Iranian intellectual, in a truly remarkable, even historic talk, chronicles impartially with remarkable accuracy and passion the history and context of assaults against the human rights of the Baha'i community as fellow citizens in Iran from the days of Reza Shah to the present day. Moojan Momen's own statement specifically exposes the absurdity of each of the charges leveled specifically against those seven precious souls who gambled with their lives in service to their community, and to humankind. The context of egregious human rights violations in Iran, not only against the Baha'is, but against many sectors of the population, is eloquently and movingly expounded by a Baha'i uniquely qualified to do so, former UN War Crimes Prosecutor, Payyam Akhavan, reminding us that the world Baha'i community's struggle for the rights of its cherished brothers and sisters in Iran is part of a wider struggle for justice for all, of whatever faith or none.

Against this backdrop, I was encouraged by a friend whom I deeply respect, to share some excerpts from a paper I wrote in 2001, for an academic journal by the name of the Middle Eastern Studies Association Bulletin, exploring the reasons for the comparative silence of scholars of the Middle East, and of Iran in particular, in relation to all things Baha'i.

As I pondered the suggestion, I reflected that perhaps the discussion that he felt was relevant to what is happening today, was the general exploration of the continuities and discontinuities which the Baha'i Faith represented upon its emergence in the 19th century, and which led to its becoming an "Other" to the people of Iran, to the extent of disappearing from sight, and, if successive governments had had their way, as chronicled by Mr. Hamidi in the link above, dissappearing from existence altogether. In fact, revisiting that paper in the context of today's fearful persecutions, one finds, not gloom, but extraordinary hope.

For if Baha'is were non-existent then relatively speaking, if one were to judge by their utter absence (outside frequent polemics that form part of their oppression)from the written discourse of their fellow countrymen, intellectuals, activists, artists, journalists, inside Iran and abroad, Iranian Baha'is certainly "exist" now in the voices and the minds of their compatriots, as never in this Faith's 165 year history.

It is almost a truism for Baha'is, borne out not only scripturally, but by long experience of repression, yet one that cannot ever lose its pathos, that each wave of persecution, each effort to erase this Faith's existence, is unfailingly accompanied by an unprecedented victory, that only digs its roots the deeper, and establishes its claims before the sight of men. The preceding chapter of extreme and nation-wide oppression, in the 1980's, achieved in fact, globally speaking, the Baha'i Faith's emergence from obscurity, and endowed the Baha'is with an extraordinary capacity for global concerted action, that countless activist organizations admire and respect, as Baha'is across the world for the first time arose as one voice in creative and united ways to seek reddress and protection for their fellow believers, mobilising public opinion from city councils and local press to the European Parliament and the United Nations, and averted genocide.

The most immediate victory that the present episode of persecution has already achieved in a manner that has astounded observers, foremost among them the Baha'is themselves, is the final integration of the Iranian Baha'is into the broader identity of their nation. For the first time in their history, the Baha'is are not the Other which I observed in my paper, they are, for a rising, mighty wave of non-Baha'i Iranians, the prominent and the obscure alike, elite and ordinary people, from all walks of life, "one of us", fellow citizens, and the silence of the past is not only finally and irretrievably broken, but explicitly repudiated, and for all time.

Achieving this, such an extraordinary victory over mass prejudice sustained by unremitting propaganda and lies, from earliest childhood to the grave, is not just a victory for the Baha'i community, but for the people of Iran, and facilitating such a leap of consciousness, such a broadening of hearts, of minds, and social consciousness, is an extraordinary service which these seven prisoners have rendered the noble Iranian nation, together with the ranks of fellow believers who even now languish in dark incarceration, mourn loved ones killed for their religious identity, and strive to contribute to the welfare and prosperity of their country while the avenues of education and livelihood are either severely limited, or altogether shut.

Why did so many millions shiver, irrespective of their politics, when President Obama gave his inaugural speech? Because the United States, as a nation, had achieved a thing of wonder, it had placed an "Other" that arrived in bondage and slavery, in the highest place of honour it was in its gift to choose. And in so choosing, beyond honouring President Obama, beyond honouring a given minority or minorities, as a nation, it honoured itself, to such an extent, that many souls beyond its borders felt honoured too, at their own humanity's potential to transcend the universal legacies of hate.

This turning tide began most noticeably, as may be followed in the remarkable website, Iran Press Watch, with Iran's foremost and most prominent human rights advocate, Shirin Ebadi, agreeing to represent the Bahas'is as defense lawyer. More recently, history was made when 267 personalities, not Baha'is, from famous academics to Iran's most well known pop star, from the most famous student dissident, to the former Miss Iran and second runner up to Miss World,in other words thinkers, journalists, cultural and popular icons, who for decades held their peace, now spoke and said: "we are ashamed", of the silence that for so long signalled to their Baha'i compatriots, "you are not Us", while oppression weighed on them. The Iranian Writers' Association has likewise made its own voice heard, as have writers and journalists of Kurdistan. Even the first President of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1980-1981) has spoken in support of Baha'i rights, and, more astonishing still, one of Iran's most caustic attackers in print of the Baha'i Faith, has compellingly been moved to write in defense of a community he spent three decades attacking. Similarly Ayatollah Montazeri, once one of the very highest ranking clerics in Iran, and who in his memoirs recorded proudly his youthful persecution of Baha'is in the 1950's, broke new ground by proclaiming them legal citizens. The record of new voices continues, as political prisoners in a prison in Karaj raised, amidst their own captivity, a “proclamation in support of our Baha’i countrymen”, while 26 Muslim students in a university of Mazindaran protested the expulsion of Baha'i fellow students. The non-Baha'i Iranian journalist Ali Keshtgar captured the spirit of this mighty victory of non-violent example and resilience over the fear and exclusion of centennial prejudice in the title of his piece: "We are all Iranian Baha'is".

To grasp the extent of this trajectory, and its cultural significance for Iran, I return, as requested, to that paper from 2001, with the following excerpts which might be germane to this discussion:

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Baha’i faith could be aptly described as an underground messianic movement. Nevertheless, it was not the first such movement. The tradition of Persianate religious radicalism goes back to the origins of Persianate Islam and has always been linked in significant and often predominant ways to chiliastic fervor. The work of scholars such as Madelung, Hodgson, Dickson, Daftari, Corbin, Nasr, Modarresi, Arjomand, and, more recently, Amanat, Babayan, and Cole, has shed much light into the character of these movements, and permitted the beginnings of an integrated picture to emerge. Babayan in particular has sought to identify, following Hodgson and Madelung, common features that, amidst the bewildering diversity, provide grounds for seeing, in the recurrence of certain outlooks and motifs, a tradition of religious innovation in a Persianate context, rather than a collection of sporadic and more or less isolated incidents and movements. At the center of ghulati movements, suggests Babayan, has been found what she describes as “a sense of immediacy in the desire to experience a utopia on earth.” The ghulat are often “idealists and visionaries who believe that Justice could reign in this world of ours”:

"Reluctant to await another existence, perhaps another form, or eternal life following death and resurrection, individuals (ghulat [exaggerators]) with such temperaments emerged at the advent of Islam expecting to attain the apocalyptic horizon of Truth.…They do not see the universe in linear terms of a beginning and an end, but as successive cycles where the end of one era spontaneously flowed into the beginning of another...there is no Final Apocalypse, no End-Time as is believed by “mainstream” Jews, Christians and Muslims....What distinguishes each cycle is a new prophetic vision, each time unveiling layers of the mystery of the universe. And since the cosmos was understood to be alive, endlessly unravelling new dimensions in a way that ultimate Truth was inexplicable, almost unfathomable, creativity and new imaginings saw no bounds for the ghulat."[Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran]

I have cited rather extensively because in this one paragraph a distinguished scholar seeks to encapsulate the essence of a specific tradition of religious innovation in the Persianate world. I would like to compare the citation to the following messianic proclamation by Bah’u’llah:

"It is evident that every age in which a Manifestation of God hath lived is divinely ordained, and may, in a sense, be characterised as God’s appointed Day. This Day, however, is unique, and is to be distinguished from those that have preceded it. The designation “Seal of the Prophets” fully revealeth its high station. The Eternal Truth is now come. He hath lifted up the Ensign of Power, and is shedding upon the world the unclouded splendour of His Revelation."[Bah’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah, (London: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1978), p. 59.]

Clearly, Baha’u’llah’s messianic message strongly resonates with the themes enunciated by Babayan and may be regarded as emerging out of that tradition. This view finds further reinforcement from the fact that Baha’u’llah repudiated finality for his revelation, holding fast to a cyclical yet evolutionary approach to eschatology that envisaged no end to the periodic and progressive (re)appearance of divine Messengers.

Such links with the tradition of ghuluw are of course as much historical as intellectual, the Baha’i vision having evolved in direct engagement with the Shaykhism of Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai and Siyyid Kazim Rashti, various strands of irfani and sufi thought and, above all, the rich and living heritage of Siyyid Ali Muhammad, the Bab. The use Baha’u’llah made of this tradition, however, was fundamentally not imitative but creative, resulting in a radical transformation to which we will return below.

It takes, however, more than a messianic figure to make a messianic movement; the response has to be forthcoming. In the case of Baha’u’llah (and of the Bab before him) the response was considerable not just in numbers, but in spread. Among the sectors from which the leadership of the Baha’i community was drawn in Baha’u’llah’s time, according to Momen, were: major `ulama, such as mujtahids, and imam-jum`ihs; minor `ulama, such as religious students (tullab) and sufi darvishes (rawdih-khans); the nobility, including members of the royal court, Qajar princes, governors, high government officials, and military commanders of rank of sartip and above; major land-owners and factory-owners (sahib-kar); minor government officials, secretaries, couriers, and soldiers; wholesale merchants (tujjar) and financiers (sarraf); retail merchants, usually guilded; skilled urban workers such as guilded craftsmen (asnaf) usually ustad (master craftsman), and traditional service workers (for example, tabíb, doctor); unskilled urban workers; peasant and rural workers; tribal peoples; and eventually modern professionals as well. Not only Iranians of Twelver Shi’i background were represented, but also Zoroastrians, Jews, Ahl-i Haqq, Afshari turkomen, Kurds, and Lurs—and this list is drawn only from within the borders of Iran itself. Baha’i presence in urban settings was only slightly more important than in rural settings.[Moojan Momen, “Iran” l] It is suggested that the swift emergence of a substantial Babi, and subsequently Baha’i, following in Persia constitutes a landmark response to ideological tensions that go back to the beginnings of Persianate Islam, and belongs to, yet also breaks with, the Persianate tradition of religious dissent.

In his seminal interpretive essays on the birth and demise of the late Antique world Browne emphasizes the cultural tensions engendered by the irruption of Arabo-Muslim culture into Sassanid Persia. Islam was the space where these tensions were played out. On the one, it was used as a source of legitimacy and a tool for cultural and political hegemony by the initially Arabized rulers of Persia. On the other hand, Islam served as an instrument for cultural and political appropriation and survival by a distinctive Persianate society. The result was a Persianate religious idiom that remained distinctive, far-reaching, and fragmented. Thus, we see in Persia and its cultural sphere movements and belief systems take root and develop which in the epicenters of the Arab cultural sphere stand out (in the main) as both foreign and alien―examples ranging from orthodox Shi’ism, Twelver and Sevener alike, to much of Sufism and, of course, ghuluw. These religious currents, it is suggested, reflect enduring attempts to appropriate Islam into a Persianate idiom and resolve tensions going back to late Antiquity between a Persianate (gnostic/cyclical) religious heritage, and a Semitic (nomic/linear) worldview inherited from Islam.

From the outset of Persianate Islam, successive political regimes in Persia evolved and jealously guarded Islamic identities that buttressed their power by imposing cultural hegemonies over a volatile cultural mix. In this context, radical religious innovation not only challenged the cultural hegemony of a given Islamic identity, but inescapably undermined the legitimacy of the political order that upheld it. With such weight accruing to ideological conformity in a milieu brimming with cultural tensions, it comes as no surprise that Islamic heresiography should have specially flourished in the Persianate sphere, as groups fought for political power through cultural control. Religious dissent was inevitably political dissent too. Such links between political revolt and religious radicalism are certainly not unique to Persia. What makes Persianate religious dissent distinctive is its persistent attempt to reconcile its Islamic identity with a pre-Islamic heritage that refuses to relax its ideological grip. We thus find, for instance, formulations of the Islamic escathon not only turning to pre-Islamic theological orientations, but even making room for pre-Islamic Iranian legend, as in the case of the radical Sufism of the Safavi period. Or should we say rather that an enduring pre-Islamic Iranian mindset made occasional room for Islamic eschatology?

True to the Persianate tradition of religious innovation, Baha’u’llah’s vision was able to transcend a strictly Islamic worldview through realized eschatology. Only, Baha’u’llah appropriated not merely the pre-Islamic past but, crucially, the non-Islamic present, to predicate a post-Islamic future. In the past, Islamicate religious dissent had been used to challenge other Islamic cultural hegemonies. Persians who embraced Baha’u’llah’s message, and, even more, Persians who embraced the Bab’s message, were responding to similar pressures, seeking to resist cultural encroachments from a new religious-political hegemony fractiously championed by the ‘ulama and, to a lesser degree, the secular rulers of Qajar Persia. The Baha’í teachings, typically, criticized the clerical establishment and formulated an alternative, spiritualized, and disestablished view of its place in society, legitimizing the sovereignty of secular rulers independently of clerical authority.

For the first time, however, equally strong pressures on identity came from a source outside the Islamicate world altogether: the Western world, whose expansion was accompanied by a subtle but insidious assertion of cultural hegemony in the form of Empire, one of the drivers of globalization. The Baha’i teachings gave nineteenth-century Persians who wished to do so a vehicle to resist the cultural (hence social and political) hegemony not only of the ’ulama, but of the intruding Western world. The Baha’i teachings could appropriate the idiom not just of Persianate Islam, but also of the West and use it to resist its cultural hegemony, in the same way as Islam gave the Sassanids a means to appropriate the cultural idiom of the Arabs to resist their attempt at cultural dominance. In other words, the Baha’i teachings opened an avenue for a new, post-Islamic identity that promised to overcome and finally resolve the cultural (and by implication political and social) tensions of the day. They also posed an unmistakable challenge to the existing order. What was seen by some as the fulfillment of Islam, was regarded by others as its open subversion.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that through the far-reaching political and social changes that have taken place since the days of Nasir-i Din Shah, the repression of Iranian Baha’is has remained constant, varying only in intensity, regardless of the prevailing order of the day. Coverage of these persecutions has focused on the Qajar period and the persecutions under the Islamic Republic, but Baha’is also suffered periodic persecutions throughout the whole Pahlavi period, not least being the country-wide campaign orchestrated against them in 1955. Even in quiet periods under the Pahlavis, the Baha’is never achieved rights as basic as having their marriages legally recognized. The consistency of this persecution suggests powerful cultural, social, and political continuities that may easily pass unnoticed by scholars of the ever-changing Iranian socio-political landscape.

The Baha’i Faith as Departure

Having concentrated on historical continuities, we may now elaborate on the discontinuities. For even as there can be little doubt that the worldview and community that crystallized around Baha’u’llah has inextricable connections with the rich currents of tradition, there can likewise be little doubt that in Baha’u’llah’s hands, the traces of tradition were embedded in something altogether new, something Other, something amounting, both in intent and consequence, to a new religion. The theological transition from Islam has recently been mapped by Buck. The author describes Baha’u’llah’s doctrinal teachings as “an ideological bridge to a new worldview.”[Chris Buck, Symbol and Secret (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1995), chapter 5] This new worldview implied sociological innovations too. Traditionally, the energies released by large-scale Islamicate responses to a messianic claim have sought outlet in military enterprises. Such indeed was the case with Babism. The idea of the conquering Mahdi or Qaim pervaded prophetic expectations, and the conquest was expected to occur by military and supernatural means. This Islamic ideal of messianic conquest, like so much else in the Islamic heritage, was not rejected by Baha’u’llah, but it was recast in spiritualized form, community building, and moral regeneration taking the place of physical combat as the proper instruments of victory. Baha’u’llah would eventually conquer the world, but would do so by spiritual means, through the attraction of hearts, and the battle would be waged by Baha’is through a consecrated dedication to community building and the cultivation of moral rectitude. Not surprisingly, a doctrinal outlook that appropriated the prophetic expectations of all religions yet upheld the relativity of truth led to early experiments in multiculturalism. On the one hand were the imperatives from Baha’u’llah to consort with the followers of all religions; on the other was the conversion of non-Muslim minorities, which initiated a slow and gradual process of cultural rapprochement between converts from these various backgrounds, as has been broadly examined by Stiles-Maneck.[“The Conversion of Religious Minorities,” Journal of Baha’i Studies 3. 3 (1991)]

At this juncture it would be worth asking what contemporary Persians themselves regarded as innovative about Baha’u’llah’s teachings. One testimony comes from a Baha’i convert from the later period of Baha’u’llah’s ministry, a former cleric, writing in 1911 when the Baha’i community had been securely established in the East and had begun to penetrate into the West. The features he highlights as the most significant innovations of Baha’u’llah include: abstaining from crediting verbal traditions; prohibiting individual claims to authoritative interpretation; abrogating conflict and controversy on the basis of differences of opinion; the prohibition of slavery; the obligation to engage in allowable professions as a means of support, and obedience to this law being accepted as an act of worship; the compulsory education of children of both sexes; the command prohibiting cursing and execration and making it obligatory upon all to abstain from uttering that which may offend men; the prohibition on the carrying of arms except in time of necessity; the creation of the House of Justice and institution of national parliaments and constitutional governments; the exhortation to observe sanitary measures and cleanliness, and to shun utterly all that tends to filth and uncleanness; and the provisions of inheritance laws designed, in his view, to prevent the creation of monopolies.[Mirza Abu’l-Fadl Gulpaygani, Letters and Essays, 1886-1913, trans. Juan R. I. Cole (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1992)]

The concerns highlighted in this testimony are not unique, or even rare, although the specific responses are distinctly Baha’i. They reflect issues exercising the minds of many contemporary Persians, regardless of their faith. Iranian Baha’is, like the Baha’i teachings, were distinctive, but far from incomprehensible to fellow Iranians.

...As an outsider to the field, I would have anticipated that at a time when the study of ‘minorities’ is in vogue, the largest religious minority in Iran today would have generated more interest. The absence of even one solid academic monograph on the Baha’i faith in Iran is positively intriguing. This absence is in stark contrast to the volume of work devoted to Persian Jewry, for example, which has, I suspect, received notice outside of Jewish circles.

Similarly, the prominence which the recent persecutions of Baha’is in Iran has had in the Western world has hardly sparked discussion about the roots or cultural significance of persecution, or even the socio-cultural impact of 150 years of continuous repression against a substantial segment of the Iranian population. The place of the Baha’i persecutions in Irano-Western political discourse has hardly been noted, even when major NGOs, numerous national parliaments, the General Assembly of the United Nations, and major heads of state such as former President Clinton have issued condemnations and resolutions and even sent commissions to Iran to investigate human rights abuses against Baha’is.[45] Such contemporary prominence of the Baha’i faith in Irano-Western relations appears to be deeply uninteresting to scholars, to judge from the attention it has received. Even more intriguing is to find that Baha’i historical documents have not been mined in areas such as the social and political history of Qajar Iran, even though they are often extremely rich in detail and broad in geographical spread.[46]

Figures in the history of Babi and Baha’i who attracted the attention of Browne’s generation, such as Qurratu’l-Ayn, scholar-poetess-prophetess, or Abdu’l-Baha, who pioneered the successful translation of a Persianate religious idiom into a Western milieu, have recently received little attention, notable exceptions merely proving the rule. Qurratu’l-Ayn’s ritual unveiling appears to be a particular omission, given the emergence of feminist scholarship on Iran.[47] The transplantation into over 2100 ethnic groups of a Persianate nineteenth-century religious innovation, touching as it does on processes of globalization, modernity, tradition, nationalism, and more, also has passed virtually unnoticed in the literature, perhaps as something that has nothing to do with the Persianate and Middle Eastern milieu that witnessed its genesis.

Finally in this review of, to me, puzzling silences, is the place of the Baha’i community in the drive towards modernization that ran through Iran in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Baha’i community of Iran at the turn of the century was closely linked to agricultural reform and elementary education at the village level. Modernization extended to educational formats and content as well, as Iranian Baha’is established schools for boys and, significantly, for girls, in partnership with American Baha’is, enjoying, until they were banned, a substantial intake of students from outside the Baha’i community. No serious attention has been given to these schools, nor to Baha’i medical clinics and hospitals or to the role of Baha’is in the introduction to Iran of Western pharmaceutical knowledge. The eradication of illiteracy among all Iranian Baha’i women under the age of forty in the 1960s and 1970s likewise does not appear in the history of Persian women.

In most disciplines, a social movement that sweeps across a country, touches virtually every demographic segment of a population, and has a 150-year history would have a solid body of literature behind it. Is my puzzlement legitimate, or is it merely due to my lack of experience in the field? One possibility is that silence breeds silence, insofar as it might be thought that if leading scholars have not written about a subject for almost a century, there is probably good reason. The question is, what is that reason? Regardless, it is likely that silence does reinforce and perpetuate silence in its own right...

There is one other possibility for the neglect of Baha’i studies. Could it be that in the orthodoxy of Iranian and Islamicate studies, like in the orthodoxy of Iranian religion, a stigma attaches to all things Baha’i? Could it be that beyond academic considerations a certain amount of prejudice is at work? Allow me to explore this question. It appears that, given the prominent presence of the Baha’i faith in Iran historically, the wealth of material available, and the precedent of serious academic study of its history and doctrines by the foremost Iranologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the more recent silence on the Baha’i faith and the complete indifference even to Baha’i historical sources mark a definite boundary which designates it as Other. Other, that is, from the perspective of a disciplinary paradigm from which it is largely excluded.

This exclusion is significant. The nineteenth-century Persians who converted to the Baha’i faith evidently felt that the boundary between the Islamicate world to which they truly belonged―they could belong to no other―and the Baha’i faith was bridgable. Members of this faith were nineteenth-century Persians, representing a microcosm of Persian society, steeped in its culture, its traditions, its values. They were both Baha’is—they belonged to a distinctive community, with traits that differentiated them from all other Persian communities—and they were Persians—they shared with their compatriots a common education, common material circumstances and pressures, and a great deal more. Yet, in current Islamicist scholarship they are not integrated into the spiritual, social, religious, or political landscape of the nineteenth-century Middle East in the way that the Zoroastrians, Jews, merchants, or ’ulama might be. Nor are they even explicitly excluded. Instead, they are negated.

Let us discard conspiracy theories. I do not believe that many academics in this field would consciously choose to exclude a range of potentially relevant sources merely because they were tagged Baha’i. Rather, the Baha’i faith occupies a disciplinary blind-spot in the perspective of scholars of the Middle East, so that when we look at the Persianate world we do not see the Baha’i faith, when we search for sources we do not notice Baha’i sources, and when they come into our field of vision we push them aside so we can see more clearly what we are examining. It is as if the disciplinary paradigm of contemporary Persianists is predicated on an ‘imagined’ nation, to allude to Anderson, which, emulating the imagined nation of many Iranians throughout the century and across all political divides, cannot explain or even accommodate the existence of the Baha’i faith in Iran. In other words, it may be that an element of cultural bias has filtered into the discipline of Islamics, in a sort of inverted Orientalism, in which the Iranian Baha’i community is exiled from the Iranian cultural experience.

If this is so, then we might be missing an entire dimension of the Islamicate, and particularly the nineteenth-century Persian landscape. In the throes of modernization and the first deep encounters with globalization, we contend that the Baha’i faith opened up possibilities of identity to which nineteenth-century Persians could relate even if they could not always accept the faith. To integrate the Baha’i faith into the nineteenth-century mentality might well change many of our understandings of the multilayered processes of identity formation, affirmation, and development in nineteenth-century Persia. The same might apply to present-day Iran. Who is Baha’u’llah? Who are the Baha’is? What did these questions mean in nineteenth-century Persia? What do they mean in Iran today? Is it not likely that by completely ignoring their existence, we may have a distorted picture of nineteenth-century Persian society? By ignoring their presence in Iran today, their situation, and their place in contemporary Iranian religious and political culture (and international relations), do we not distort our understanding of contemporary Iran?

Uber-"teaching" in the congregation, or changing the world? My community is bigger than yours, or birthing the new community?

2009-02-09T12:01:00.019Z

In the wake of 41 Baha'i Regional Conferences, gathering tens of thousands of Baha'is from every corner of the world to reflect on the present moment and stimulate the multiplication of "intensive growth programmes", the wider question, (whatever for?), rings on my mind. Are we yet another congregation, buzzing ourselves up to proselytise more keenly, or is there something distinctive about the enterprise of growing the Baha'i community? Is this an inward-looking, bums on seats (we have no pews), my congregation is bigger than yours mindset we are cultivating? Or has this vision of growth anything deeper to offer to a world fast slipping from our fingers? We want, like most religious groups, to grow our community. Does our concept of community change the nature of the enterprise?

The New Paradigm for Bahá'í Community Building

In sociological terms, the Bahá'í community falls into what Scherer described as a synthetic community: “an attempt to build and develop a community consciously and deliberately.” Unlike communities into which we are born, or communities with an established history into which we merely enter, synthetic communities involve a conscious effort at community building. The Baha’is are engaged in just such a venture, on an epic scale, for the very raison d’etre of the Bahá'í community is precisely to engender, in Jaqueline Scherer’s definition, "a ‘core of commonness’ or commonality that includes a collective perspective, agreed upon definitions, and some agreement about values... [A] context for personal integration” of truly global scope.

We are, however, yet to identify what Baha’is specifically mean by community, what it is that should be the end product of the sacrifices of 160 years of community building effort. First, what it is not.

"To mistakenly identify Baha'i community life with the mode of religious activity that characterizes the general society--in which the believer is a member of a congregation, leadership comes from an individual or individuals presumed to be qualified for the purpose, and personal participation is fitted into a schedule dominated by concerns of a very different nature--can only have the effect of marginalizing the Faith and robbing the community of the spiritual vitality available to it." Universal House of Justice, 22 August 2002.

What, then, in light of the Baha’i experience so far, and under the impact of a Revelation that aims to altogether transform the current conceptions of humanity, is the Bahá'í meaning of community?

The answer is perhaps most clearly and most directly articulated by the Universal House of Justice in their message to the Bahá'í world for the festival of Ridvan, April 21, 1996:

“A community is …a comprehensive unit of civilization composed of individuals, families and institutions that are originators and encouragers of systems, agencies and organizations working together with a common purpose for the welfare of people both within and beyond its own borders; it is a composition of diverse, interacting participants that are achieving unity in an unremitting quest for spiritual and social progress.”

This definition is both descriptive, and prescriptive. It describes a “comprehensive unit of civilisation”, emerging from the interaction of three key constituents (individuals, families and institutions) originating and encouraging “systems, agencies and organisations”. The majority of local Bahá'í communities, and many national Bahá'í communities are really, from this description, at most embryonic entities, with very crude systems, agencies and organisations in place, a limited number of individuals and families, and few institutions to speak of beyond a Local Spiritual Assembly and the Nineteen Day Feast.

Nevertheless, the fourth and particularly the fifth epochs of the Cause (1986-present) are witnessing a sea-change in this area, as local communities generate a broad infrastructure of “systems, agencies and organisations” arising singly and collaboratively from the individuals, families and institutions in the area. I refer of course to the development of study-circles, mostly focused around individuals; children and junior youth classes, mostly revolving around families (Bahá'í and others); devotional meetings which, with socio-economic development activities, are the seeds of future local Mashriq’u’l-Adhkars; the ever evolving training institute in each country; and where these elements are in place, socio-economic development projects (increasingly a spontaneous, organic feature of Baha'i community clusters in process of intensive growth), as outlined in the letter written by the Universal House of Justice to the Counsellors of January 9, 2001.

If the second and third epochs of the Cause were about building institutions, then the fourth and fifth epochs have been and are about building communities.

But in saying that the call of the day requires building a global network of local “Bahá'í” communities, the word Bahá'í makes the usage of community distinctive. For the definition gifted to us by the Universal House of Justice is not merely descriptive, but also prescriptive. It consists, yes, of a unit made up of individuals, families and institutions originating and encouraging systems, agencies and organisations (nothing uniquely Bahá'í about that). But for this community to be worthy of the Most Great Name, it must, further, be “working together with a common purpose for the welfare of people both within and beyond its own borders”.

So the communities Baha’is are now building are not simply communities, but altruistic communities.

Moreover, they are not inward looking, concentrating on the welfare of people within their borders, but also "beyond" their borders. This illuminates the focus of the current Plans on home-front pioneering, area clusters, and intensive growth programmes. Clearly, again, the aim is not merely to generate an increased flow of individual enrolments or fill-up vacant LSA spaces, but also and above all, to instil into the emerging communities of the fifth epoch a sense of interdependence, whereby a given community will work organically and inherently for the welfare its own locality, and of localities “beyond its own borders”. To the well known Bahá'í notion of the “locality” we now therefore add the compass of a “cluster” of localities to which one also belongs and with whom one systematically interacts and builds community.

The borders the new Bahá'í communities are expected to cross are, furthermore, not merely geographical, but also, and most challengingly, of identity. It is crucial, again, to notice this outward-looking emphasis in the systems, agencies, and organisations Baha’is are called to build in this new Epoch.

“It is evident, then, that a systematic approach to training has created a way for Bahá'ís to reach out to the surrounding society, share Bahá'u'lláh's message with friends, family, neighbours and co-workers, and expose them to the richness of His teachings. This outward-looking orientation is one of the finest fruits of the grassroots learning taking place." (The Universal House of Justice, January 17, 2003, Progress of Five Year Plan -- Learning in Action, p. 1)

"The culture now emerging is one in which groups of Baha'u'llah's followers explore together the truths in His Teachings, freely open their study circles, devotional gatherings and children's classes to their friends and neighbours, and invest their efforts confidently in plans of action designed at the level of the cluster, that makes growth a manageable goal. " The Universal House of Justice, August 22, 2002

The key building labour of the Baha’i community in the 20th century (perhaps counter-intuitively known to Baha'is as the Century of Light), the 19 Day Feasts, Local Spiritual Assemblies, and Bahá'í funds through which the Ark of God has been erected on Mount Carmel, were designed exclusively for Baha’is. The new key agencies, institutions and organisations Baha’is are building are, explicitly, not for Baha’is only.

Thus we are told that the purpose of Baha’i children’s classes is not the education of Bahá'í children, but the Bahá'í education of children. Animators of Junior Youth groups are even warned explicitly not to view their youth groups, or the outreach carried out to establish them, as direct instruments of expansion, but as a Baha'i oriented service to the community, whose primary intention, providing guidance and friendship to young people in a given neighbourhood, at the critical age where they establish their moral framework, should never be lost sight of in the desire for numerical growth. Study circles are meant to include both Baha’is and their friends in their number. Devotional meetings are not to be designed for or focused exclusively on Baha’is, anymore than the services at the great Bahá'í Houses of Worship are. Like them, they are meant to be gifts of the Baha’is to the world at large, and an integral part of a vision of community that inherently incorporates the Other:

“O ye lovers of this wronged one!” exclaims ‘Abdu’l-Baha, “Cleanse ye your eyes, so that ye behold no man as different from yourselves. See ye no strangers; rather see all men as friends, for love and unity come hard when ye fix your gaze on otherness.”

“In every dispensation," he writes elsewhere, "there hath been the commandment of fellowship and love, but it was a commandment limited to the community of those in mutual agreement, not to the dissident foe. In this wondrous age, however, praised be God, the commandments of God are not delimited, not restricted to any one group of people, rather have all the friends been commanded to show forth fellowship and love, consideration and generosity and loving-kindness to every community on earth.”

As a personal orientation, this is an outlook that Baha’is have been cultivating since Bahá'u'lláh first attracted a company of god-intoxicated lovers (ashiqan) to the Abode of Peace, near the banks of the Tigris. We find this perspective in a letter written in 1867 by the Bahá'í community of Baghdad to the United States Congress petitioning support against the oppression of the Persian and Ottoman empires, at a time when religious segregation remained a fact upheld, institutionalised and sustained by religious belief. The letter was delivered to the Secretary of State William H Seward, immersed in dreams of grandeur that drove him to finally purchase Alaska in the course of that same year, even as the Union struggled to rebuild the country after the carnage of the Secession. It is not known whether that former cabinet colleague of Lincoln and master of political intrigue read the exotic letter, telling of

“…a perfect, wise and virtuous Man” Who “appeared in Persia, he had knowledge of all religions, laws and knew the history of wise men, kings and the rules of nations; he saw that the people oppose, hate and kill, abstain and [are] afraid to mix with each other. Nay, they consider each other unclean, though they are all human beings, having different and numerous religions, and that the people are like unto sheep without a shepherd - That learned and wise man wrote many works containing the rules of union, harmony and love between human beings, and the way of abandoning the differences, untruthfulness, and vexations between them, that people may unite and agree on one way and to walk straightforwardly in the straight and expedient way, and that no one should avert or religiously abstain from intercourse with another, of Jews, Christians, Mohammadans and others. That wise man revealed himself till he appeared like the high sun in midday”

The embrace of the other is thus a long-standing Baha’í virtue in a general sense. The systematic and deep engagement of local Bahá'í communities with the world outside their borders of place and of identity, is, however, relatively new to a Bahá'í world that has spent the greater part of the last century concentrating on the accumulation of “individuals, families and institutions” within the banner of the Cause, andºerecting and maintaining at great personal cost a basic infrastructure of thinly resourced administrative bodies: not having the luxury of looking very much outside.

This sacrificial labour, however, was the essential prerequisite for building the “systems, agencies and organisations” which will enable what we have always called “local Bahá'í communities” to truly become, and for the first time, “comprehensive units of civilization”. This profound shift, described by the Universal House of Justice as “a new paradigm of opportunity” has required from us, and continues to call for, what the Universal House of Justice” has referred to as “a new mindset” and “a change of culture.”

As this outward looking, inclusive focus deepens, the boundaries of Baha'i identity soften, and what Baha'is call the "community of interest", become allies in this building of a new civilization amidst the current, evidently tottering one (see Chris Martenson's prescient analysis for a good sense of things to come. I hope to blog on this later!). It is thus not only Baha'is who are empowered by the new culture of Baha'i community life to fashion the "systems, agencies and organizations" of a new civilization:

"The nature of the core activities of the current Plan—children’s classes, devotional meetings and study circles—permits growing numbers of persons who do not yet regard themselves as Bahá’ís to feel free to participate in the process. The result has been to bring into existence what has been aptly termed a “community of interest”. As others benefit from participation and come to identify with the goals the Cause is pursuing, experience shows that they, too, are inclined to commit themselves fully to Bahá’u’lláh as active agents of His purpose. Apart from its associated objectives, therefore, wholehearted prosecution of the Plan has the potentiality of amplifying enormously the Bahá’í community’s contribution to public discourse on what has become the most demanding issue facing humankind.

"If Bahá’ís are to fulfil Bahá’u’lláh’s mandate, however, it is obviously vital that they come to appreciate that the parallel efforts of promoting the betterment of society and of teaching the Bahá’í Faith are not activities competing for attention. Rather, are they reciprocal features of one coherent global programme. Differences of approach are determined chiefly by the differing needs and differing stages of inquiry that the friends encounter. Because free will is an inherent endowment of the soul, each person who is drawn to explore Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings will need to find his own place in the never-ending continuum of spiritual search. He will need to determine, in the privacy of his own conscience and without pressure, the spiritual responsibility this discovery entails. In order to exercise this autonomy intelligently, however, he must gain both a perspective on the processes of change in which he, like the rest of the earth’s population, is caught up and a clear understanding of the implications for his own life. The obligation of the Bahá’í community is to do everything in its power to assist all stages of humanity’s universal movement towards reunion with God."

This, it seems to me, is the key context in which to view the spirit behind the goal of growth of the Baha'i community, and the overarching logic in the evolution of each Baha'i "cluster" toward the capacity to launch and sustain "intensive programmes of growth": "to assist all stages of humanity’s universal movement towards reunion with God", not in sole collaboration with fellow believers who accept without reservation every claim of Baha'u'llah, but also in full interelationship with those not prepared to take that leap, who yet grasp the power of the global vision animating our efforts, the authenticity of its spirit, and the beneficence of our intentions.

Nor is enrolment the goal, but rather a stage that may coincide with enrolment in the Baha'i community, but is more likely to take the rest of our lives and possibly our existence: "reunion with God". Between interest, attraction, commitment, servitude, consecration, sanctification, and complete evanescence before the Will of God, dying to ourselves and living in Him, is a journey that cannot be reckoned in words, or group identities. We are not a community of the elect, but of the determined improvers, so to speak, where, wherever we were yesterday, we seek again each day to "find" our "own place" in the "never-ending continuum of spiritual search". Together.

And as we come to this spiritual core of our visionary, divinely aided, if broken winged efforts, we recall that this is not some recent fad, or corporate rebranding, but of the essence of our genesis, a genesis to which we must return to grasp the heights that yet await us, in the claim which the example of those gone before us insistently makes upon us, legatees of a heroic history.

Indeed, in remarking on the distinctive aspects of this stage in the evolution of the Baha'i community, it is also important to recognise that, as a fundamental process, the labour of community building is not a new endeavour for us. On the contrary, it is a quintessential part of being a Bahá'í since the earliest origins of the Bahá'í community in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Dawnbreakers, first believers and heroes of the Baha’i Revelation, after all, embodied the spiritual process indicated by the Universal House of Justice in their above-cited description of Bahá'í community as “a composition of diverse, interacting participants that are achieving unity in an unremitting quest for spiritual and social progress.”

“"Most of those who surrounded Baha'u'llah," wrote Nabil "…exercised such care in sanctifying and purifying their souls, that they would suffer no word to cross their lips that might not conform to the will of God, nor would they take a single step that might be contrary to His good-pleasure." "

…The joyous feasts", comments Shoghi Effendi", "which these companions, despite their extremely modest earnings, continually offered in honor of their Beloved; the gatherings, lasting far into the night, in which they loudly celebrated, with prayers, poetry and song, the praises of the Bab, of Quddus and of Baha'u'llah; the fasts they observed; the vigils they kept; the dreams and visions which fired their souls, and which they recounted to each other with feelings of unbounded enthusiasm; the eagerness with which those who served Baha'u'llah performed His errands, waited upon His needs, and carried heavy skins of water for His ablutions and other domestic purposes …these, and many others, will forever remain associated with the history of that immortal period”

Such stories are not merely inspiring, they are crucial to what it means to build a Bahá'í community today, and provide an indispensable lens through which to understand the efforts of the last century. For Shoghi Effendi linked the “efficacy” of the “instruments” Baha’is fashion, the institutions, systems, agencies and organisations of the Baha’i community, to the spirit of those breakers of the dawn, writing:

“For upon our present-day efforts, and above all upon the extent to which we strive to remodel our lives after the pattern of sublime heroism associated with those gone before us, must depend the efficacy of the instruments we now fashion -- instruments that must erect the structure of that blissful Commonwealth which must signalize the Golden Age of our Faith.” (Shoghi Effendi, Dispensation of Baha'u'llah)

The Bahá'í vision of community thus harmoniously integrates the structural approach of sociologists of community; the personal and interpersonal approach of psychiatrists; and the visionary approach of artists, idealists and revolutionaries, embedding all three perspectives on community in the transformative context of the Day of God and the oneness of humanity.

The potential significance of the labours of the present-day Baha’i community is therefore breathtaking. Baha’is are not merely building local Bahá'í communities in clusters and localities, but they are building the basic units of a civilisation which Shoghi Effendi declares will constitute the “fairest fruit” of the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, and signalise the advent of the promised “golden age”.

One’s degree of awareness about the nature and significance of such task, allows one to work towards this vision not merely consciously but, crucially, in a systematic manner. The pattern of such evolution is not dictated by accidents of geography or language, but by an understanding of organic growth, a focus on process, and vast stores of inspiration and guidance.

The achievement of a world-wide Bahá'í community made up of diverse individuals and families and a global infrastructure of local administrative institutions, has enabled the Baha’i community, in this second half of the second Bahá'í century, to turn its attention at long last from the building up the Administrative Order, to the birthing Bahá'u'lláh’s New World Order. Of this opportunity previous generations have been deprived, as Shoghi Effendi himself testifies:

“The second century is destined to witness a tremendous deployment and a notable consolidation of the forces working towards the world-wide development of that Order, as well as the first stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nucleus and pattern---an Order which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influence over the entire planet, will proclaim at once the coming of age of the whole human race, as well as the maturity of the Faith itself, the progenitor of that Order.” (Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America 1932-46, pp. 96-7; letter 15-JUN-46, "God Given mandate")

It is now, in this second half of the second Bahá'í century, that the work of the Baha’is entails, as unveiled by Shoghi Effendi, the ushering in, on a global scale, of the first stirrings of Bahá'u'lláh’s new World Order. The last one hundred years saw the raising up of a wide-ranging network of basic administrative and spiritual instruments of community building. The task that faces Baha’is today is the building a wide-ranging network of comprehensive units of civilisation that, patterned on sublime heroism and working to a common purpose, promote the welfare of those within and outside their borders, achieving unity in a collective pursuit of spiritualisation and social progress. This, it seems to my obfuscated eyes, is the essence of growth, and the distinctive nature of our task.

New Letter on Baha'i Scholarship and Entry by Troops from the Universal House of Justice

2009-01-16T16:03:00.003Z

Dear all,

I share the following letter on Baha'i scholarship from the Universal House of Justice. I think it is remarkable. It is not the entire letter as the details of the addressees and the particular, as opposed to the generic matters addressed in the letter, as agreed with the addresee who gave permission for the letter to be shared, have been removed. The first paragraph includes the most emphatic declaration of the validity of Baha'i scholarship in the current processes, identifying three key contributions and concluding that "Far from being a diversion from the worldwide effort to advance the process of entry by troops, Bahá'í scholarship can be a powerful reinforcement to that endeavour and a valuable source of new enquirers." The next paragraph sets out the Universal House of Justice's vision for the institutional evolution of Baha'i scholarship around the world. The last paragraph validates individual scholarly endeavours, and encourages them to support existing Baha'i journals and, where present, ABS institutions.

With love,

Ismael

---------------------------------------------

THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE
DEPARTMENT OF THE SECRETARIAT
24 April 2008

Dear Bahá'í Friends,

Your email letter dated... has been received by the Universal House of Justice, which has asked us to respond as follows.

The House of Justice is fully committed to fostering the development of Bahá'í scholarly activity in all parts of the Bahá'í world. Through their scholarly endeavours believers are able
to enrich the intellectual life of the Bahá'í community, to explore new insights into the Bahá'í teachings and their relevance to the needs of society, and to attract the investigation of the Faith by thoughtful people from all backgrounds. Far from being a diversion from the worldwide effort to advance the process of entry by troops, Bahá'í scholarship can be a powerful reinforcement to that endeavour and a valuable source of new enquirers.

The hope of the House of Justice is that, as the Bahá'í community develops in each country, the concerned National Spiritual Assembly will encourage those so inclined to embark
on Bahá'í scholarly activities. When the number of believers involved reaches a sufficient size, an Association for Bahá'í Studies may well come into being and act as a focus for support and encouragement; in due course, such an association may be moved to launch, under the aegis of its National Spiritual Assembly, a journal by which the findings of those engaged in this pursuit can be shared with others. Such associations are generally formed at a national level, although the situation in Europe is such that transnational associations have, at this time, been permitted within that continent. In time the House of Justice will give consideration to whether or not the objectives of the Faith would best be served by the formation of some international organization to coordinate the work of the associations and to stimulate the creation of new ones in other countries and whether an international journal should be brought into being.

When there are relatively few believers engaged in Bahá'í scholarly activity in a country, the formation of an association there is not viable. However, believers from any part of the world are free to submit papers to Bahá'í journals being published in other countries or to seek to make presentations at meetings arranged by the existing associations elsewhere.

...The individuals having an interest in Bahá'í scholarship are, of course, free to pursue their own scholarly endeavours and to submit their conclusions to existing
journals in Europe, North America or elsewhere. They should also be advised to consider means by which they can participate in the work of existing associations.

With loving Bahá'í greetings,

Department of the Secretariat

Counter-Intuition: A Manifestation of God in a human body? Surely we know better...

2009-01-05T02:24:00.014Z

The following musings consider how very difficult it is to believe, for any thoughtful, awake individual, that a fellow human could ever be a voice of the divine, more, in Baha'i parlance, a Manifestation of God, in a transcendent, numinous degree. With the accumulated dissappointments that human folly and human wisdom both have furnished us throughout our history, never more so than in the 20th century, with the betrayals of so many hopes by so many leaders, teachers, philosophers, gurus, caudillos, revolutionaries, both the nefarious and the well-meaning, to believe that from our familiar, imperfect human fabric could come a divinely perfect, absolutely flawless pattern, would seem to be to ask too much. And yet, as Baha'is, we recognise in a Persian nobleman of the 19th century, Mirza Husayn Ali, a perfection compelling enough to place capitals before His name, and see in His humanity, the Manifestation of God, Baha'u'llah, and in His teachings the remedy that a travailing world, mostly unawares, is seeking. What, subjectively, does such a leap against common sense, entail?

Many and high are the claims associated with the Founding Figure of a world religion. Their startling and frequently iconic elements come to dominate the image that we form of Him to the extent of overwhelming our earthly, but in truth no less startling, point of encounter with that same prophetic figure. In the case of Baha'u'llah, Prophet-Founder of the Baha'i Faith, this is so to a pronounced degree, the claims advanced being superlative to the point of astonishment.

"Verily I say, this is the Day in which mankind can behold the Face, and hear the Voice, of the Promised One. The Call of God hath been raised, and the light of His countenance hath been lifted up upon men. It behoveth every man to blot out the trace of every idle word from the tablet of his heart, and to gaze, with an open and unbiased mind, on the signs of His Revelation, the proofs of His Mission, and the tokens of His glory."
(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, section VII)

Our first instinct, upon being brought to an encounter with such remote, such far suspended words, is to reach out, to attempt immediately to fasten somehow upon their contents in full flight, without pausing to take in the unmeasured feat of their having reached our ears in the first place. It is to remain unapprehending of a compelling tale implicit - unsyllabled and untold - in the trajectory traversed by those actual words, not in claimed heavens beyond our reach and ken, but in the prosaic earth that bears alike, and bears in common, our feet of clay, and prophets' own.

It is in fact, counter-intuitively, our shared human condition with that putative prophetic figure that makes it possible for our sobered sight (for life takes care more soon than late to rein in our flights of fancy) to dare to see beyond the human: to yield perhaps uneasily to a sense of Divinity transcendent in the soul of an otherwise merely remarkable human being.

'Errare humanum est', the old wrinkled pirate in the adventures of Asterix was fond of repeating with each new sinking of his ship - to the perennial irritation of his captain. Any dimly honest introspection will touch without much seeking (more were too much) the tender spots where we find our own too personal confirmation of that melancholy, else compassionate and consoling maxim.

And if to be human is to err, we must know better than to seek redemption in however heavenly a human's voice. We should know, surely by now, that heaven is too large to fit into the upright frame of the unplumed, smooth-skinned biped that is man. We should know better, all the more with so much red and bloodied history behind us, than, as Marx might put it (Groucho, not Karl), join a club that would have one like us, a fellow human, for its prophet.

And yet, historically, something stops us again and again from resting in such good old common sense. Something pricks us in our complacent wisdom. Something inconveniently insists in our wistfulness and just won't let it lie. It is the indefatigable consciousness that, if to be human is to err, yet to err is to have dreamt, or sought or tried or dared to yearn or yet aspire unto something other than our error, something which in erring was intuited but mistook, misplaced, misdone, was misadventured. It is to affirm that before, and after, and above our error, was and is the faint, yet lingering trace of a pure, or at any rate purer intention, or conception, or reality, than its crude and at times devastatingly destructive trail of unintended consequence.

And here lies an asymetry that gives birth to human thirst and human tragedy, and to nobility, and genuine heroism, to compassion, and defiant joy of the impossible experienced, the redemptive surprise of grace. I refer to the uncomfortable realization that, notwithstanding our limited capacity, we come to the world equipped with an infinite thirst, and are fated to live in the paradox of our apprehension of immensity, and our experience of constraint, our indwelling yearning for transcendence, and the very limitations on which our experience of transcendence is, by definition, grounded. And this, said the Persian to the Theban at the banquet table, is the bitterest sorrow: 'to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action' (Herodotus 9:16).

For it is not capriciousness impels us to more, to all, in our loves and our desires, whether as children or grown adults (for though we learn in adulthood, as learn we must, to tame and domesticate our will to possess all that our irrepressibly unsated hunger desires, our insatisfaction still wags its tail with every morsel in anticipation of more, even in the foreknowledge that less is forthcoming).

It is rather that deep within, for some consciously, for others, just beyond the limen of awareness, stirs the intuition of totality, not as a thing external to ourselves which indifferently contains us as one more constituent atom, but rather as constituent of ourselves, totality as contained within us: not as an item is contained in a box, but as is a feeling in a melody, contained not so much inside, as through us, as if totality in some sense was us, yea, and more than us.

It is as if at the back of our minds we carried the feeling that it was so nearly within our gift - on the tip of our tongue - to join the letters kaf and nun, the cosmic B and E, and that, just beyond recall, but only just, awaited in readiness the words we at some indeterminate occasion ('when was it?') were the first in existence to ever pronounce: Fiat Lux!

And there was light.

What a contradiction! We go about in earnest or by default collecting evidence of our frailty, piling up conclusive proof of our fragility, disavowing whatever magic we may have invested in our innocence, and then knowingly embark on dreams and enterprises and loves and gambles beyond our capacity to realize. Sartre's vacillating Hugo in that relentless play, Les mains sales, on the verge of a terrible deed and a terrible error he's struggling to commit, gives a fellow youth, in passing, non-sequitur, the advice that life itself, and history, would give those who ponder on the lessons afforded by the pageant of youthful dreams with their stillborn issue:

‘Te charge pas de ce que tu ne peut pas faire. Apres ca, ca pese trop lourd... Je ne sais pas si vous avez remarquee: c'est pas commode d'etre jeune.’

'Take on nothing that you cannot do. After that, it weighs too heavily... I don't know if you have noticed: it's not comfortable being young.'

And so, reckless youth gives way to cautionary maturity. Santa takes visa. The grand Houdini drowns in the chains he himself selects to exhibit his ingenuity. They were too heavy.

We arrive at the 21st century with our innocence broken, no longer prey to the tragic, collective aspirations that inflamed our imaginations and convulsed our history in Hobsbawm.'s Age of Extremes. We now know better: it can't be done, and after that it is too heavy. So much hope betrayed, so many dreams discarded, cheapened or trademarked, mass produced and commercialized. Socialism, Democracy, Revolution, Empire, the American Dream, Woodstock, Esperanto, the United Nations, internationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, political activism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Union, country, planet and religion: gone are the dreams, only pragmatism remains.

We remain active, but compartmentalized. We work for the possible, not for the best. We'll work with many for a moment, only with a few for a long time. We'll join no communities, we'll follow no man, we'll think thrice before marrying, we'll embrace no flag. We'll not be labeled, will not be defined. And if we are called by a Dreamer, to dream the Dream of Humankind, we'll remember the betrayals of last century, and, leaving Virgil to Dante, taking Candide as our guide, we'll not hesitate to reply:

'C'est bien cela, mais allons cultiver notre jardin.'

'All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.'

Pero sa muove, as Galileo was said to have written in his prison, in the midst of his capitulation. And yet it moves. There are still, even now, after everything, after so much, many, me too, incorrigibly, who grant all this and simply dream again, and again, and then again, without reneging or detracting one jot or tittle from the peripateia, the dramatic fall from great heights, that has accompanied, in the long run, each and every one of our elaborate and millennial dreams, time after time, after time, after time.

And still and all, these many recalcitrant children of our century do affirm, do steadfastly maintain with Emerson, that, in the matter of human aspiration, 'the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and vain. We give the past to the objector, and yet we hope... We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? ...The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descended into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment.' ( The Oversoul)

And it is this capacity to be surprised by abundance that keeps us receptive, sometimes against our protestations and better judgment, to the irruption of unexpected magic into our lives, to taking on that which we cannot do, and perchance doing it beautifully: to falling in love; to baring our irredeemably solitary sorrow to a listening ear, and finding in it the capacity to hear; to finding in the glance of our child the confidence to believe in the embrace of life; to be capable of discerning, in a fellow human being, dazzling suns of interminable light.

And at such momentary instants of dramatic epochee, when we involuntarily, joyfully and astonishedly suspend our disbelief long enough to take in life emerging naked and enravishing like Venus from the deep, we find our voice once more in Sartre's desperate, if not despairing Hugo:

'Et ca aussi c'est de la comedie. Tout ca! Tout ce que je vous dis la. Vous croyez peut etre que je suis desespere? Pas du tout: je joue la comedie du desespoir. Est ce qu'on peut en sortir?'

'And that too is a play. All that! Everything I was saying to you. You believe perhaps that I am desperate? Not at all: I act the play of despair. Can one exit from it?'

This is, indeed, a pressing question, recurrent in the life of the individual who would approach with sincerity the hard business of living, and more urgent perhaps than ever for a global society whose will to act, whose will to consciously build a functional world order, seems paralyzed by a despairing poverty of aspiration.

'I act the play of despair. Can one exit from it?'

We know that, on a personal level, even at our most desperate, despondent periods of defeat, moments come intermittently that interrupt us with a smile. From a good comedy on television, to a newborn's random gurgle, from a sudden thing of beauty to a dish that was just right, from a book that reshapes our insights, to a chat that changes our life.

The answer, then, to our question, is that one can, in fact, authentically, and legitimately, transcend the narratives, the tedious or self-defeating enactments of past experience, by a moment that fills its gaps.

An instant, it will be objected, is an instant, and a life is a life. But - in this too Emerson had something to say - 'There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all experiences.' (The Oversoul)

So what does all this have to do with the figure of Baha'u'llah? It is that, before faith, our starting point is no more, but no less, than the fragile dignity of our common humanity. That everything in our experience should predispose us to reduce the Prophetic Figure that confronts us to the fallible clay out of which we ourselves are kneaded. And it is that same predisposition that equips us to distinguish in so familiar a play, a new Character. It is, if it be there, the capacity of this new Character to tap into and fulfill that part of our human paradox that aspires beyond our incapacity, that subjective sense of the totality within us, that is capable of engendering an Emersonian 'moment of faith', weighing more than all the years of life without it. It is a test, simultaneous and reciprocal, of the authenticity of the Prophet's claim to the Real, and of our openness to receive the Real into our ever approximate actuality, the duration and degree to which that moment of faith is capable of suspending our well grounded disbelief in the transcendent possibilities of our own nature, not in the abstract, but in the irreducibly personal, which alone can motivate the motion of our inner life.

There is more. Going about our business generations and societies distant from the person of Baha'u'llah, the degree to which His entry into history may be regarded as remarkable, may be judged by the chain of impacts and transmissions necessary for so improbable a scenario as is your reading, even now, these words about that Person, first written by a lonesome Mexican in a far-flung island on the outer edge of Africa, continuing to extend a multiplied 'moment of faith' carried from mouth to mouth, passed on from heart to heart, journeyed with, traveller by traveller, from shore to shore, country to country, city to city, hamlet to hamlet, home to scattered home, handed down and lived vicariously from year to year, and decade to decade, past a century and onto a second century, and still counting, memorialized and appropriated, identity by identity, race by race, nation by nation, tribe by tribe, from tens, to hundreds, to one thousand and more than one thousand fractious ethnicities with all their divergent prejudices and dreams, and arriving to me, for one, in the utterly inauspicious, suburban English neighbourhood of Beeston, Nottingham, no less than miraculously, from its genesis in that pestiferous and now inextant dungeon where the Qajar Emperor Nasiri'd- Din did gaol a cast-out, ragged and humiliated scion of the Persian nobility, before exiling Him to the far reaches of a moribund Ottoman empire.

How did notice of Baha'u'llah arrive to you from that black pit, by what tortuous trajectory, by what chain of events, as you might be able now to trace it with approximate exactitude? Attempt the exercise, and marvel at the result.

It is likewise as a human, indeed, with a personal history, a history dramatic but familiar also, that Baha'u'llah would have been encountered by His contemporaries, and it would have had to have been something exceptional in His very humanity that would alone have led those that came to believe to entertain the possibility of a higher reality in Him.

Some would have met, and others heard of the precocious Child of the talented and ill-starred minister, Mirza Abbas Buzurg, in the dangerous gossip of court circles, where reputations were made and unmade, and insinuation could be enough to lose a man his position, his freedom, and his head.

They might have sighed condescendingly, genuinely commiserated, or pompously moralised about the terrible misfortune that befell Baha'u'llah's father, beginning with a great flood that rose from the mountains of Mazindaran and swept up his splendorous house, as an omen and figure of the more terrible flood of calamity that would bring down his household, a flood long in rising, and unchained by one fugitive word critical of the prime minister's petty murder of his best friend, in a confidence betrayed by a disloyal correspondent, that made the young, uncannily perceptive Child, be witness to the decimation of His father's fortunes and his independence; the humiliating, excruciatingly public and vindictive dissolution of a truly catastrophic royal marriage; the painful, and for a child no doubt agonic spectacle of his father's bastinado by the prime minister's agents and collaborators; the fragmentation and dispersion of his household, and his father’s premature death in isolation and despair.

Or they might have nodded sagely at the undiminished brightness of that Youth's prospects,even in the wake of His father's reverses, noting admiringly the early signs of skill at the perilous game of navigating despotic favour and steering a path across the shallows of paranoid and ephemeral cabals of patronage, emerging unscathed, repeatedly, from frontal contests with the same prime minister who was the architect of His father's fall.

They might have marvelled at and celebrated the geniality of His intercourse, the vigour of His intellect, the liberality of His hospitality and the abundance of His charity. They might also have expressed astonishment or concern at His disregard for personal advancement, his aloofness from political intrigue, and his religious preoccupations. They would undoubtedly have been perplexed and troubled by His eventual advocacy of the religious conflagration which a young Shirazi Mercer had enkindled with His claim to be the Instrument for the advent of the promised Day of God. Many would have felt themselves compelled to join Him at all costs, or impede Him by any means, in His fearless and ensorcelling summons to the Cause of Siyyid Ali Muhammad, the Bab.

But nothing, nothing could have prepared them, or perhaps us, to see in Him the Manifestation of the Godhead, the Inaugurator of a five thousand century prophetic cycle, or, in purely worldly terms, the force capable of fulfilling, and recasting, the Message announced by the Bab, and imparting it to every single country of an as yet well nigh interminable world - against the combined efforts of two emperors and the categorical, mortal fatwas of the highest and most powerful guardians and regulators of Islamic doctrine, from the mujtahids of Persia to the Ulama of al-Azhar.

Once more, we, like they, are challenged to discern, in the familiarity of Mirza Husayn Ali's humanity, the unfamiliar element that produces in our hearts the subjective certitude in His reality as the Glory of God, as Baha'u'llah, a realization that, if it be true, must rank as the supreme fulfilment of our soul's inherent, inborn search for Truth.

To do so, to glimpse the subtle element, the elusive inner logic, to locate the unfolding, of divine manifestation in an otherwise recognizably human personality, we must venture into the objective facts of what must remain an inaccessible, and in the final analysis, if we have the intellectual humility to recognize it, an incomprehensible subjective experience of divine revelation.

This frank acknowledgement of limitation is an absolutely critical point of departure. For in seeking to understand the subjective experience of a fellow human being, in understanding their self-descriptions of inner states and transitions, we inevitably proceed by analogy. No man can know, nor is a man ever likely to do so, what it feels like to give birth to a child. One may, I speak here as a man, seek in women's descriptions handholds for one's own experience, analogies to one's own sensations, and perhaps one will find enough to evoke memories of pain, of wonder, of anxiety, of concentration, of exhaustion. One might even find that he is better able than less capable speakers, by dint of eloquence, to describe, transmit and integrate the descriptions received from various women, to convey in words the nature of the experience. But a man will still be none the wiser, not a hair's breadth closer to comprehending what it is like to have a new life beating within one's body and to perform the arduous miracle of ushering it into extra-uterine life.

Similarly, who can lay claim to be able to grasp, let alone interpret or explain the intensely private, incommunicable experience that gives birth in a single heart to a future world religion? Who would be so arrogant as to pronounce him or herself on the meaning of a Prophet's subjective experience of God, beyond possibly presenting, ever tentatively, His own statements on the subject? Even these statements must be understood not as explanations or straightforward descriptions of subjective experience, but as oblique analogies to a reality and experience deemed to be ineffable, and beyond language's capacity to apprehend or yet approximate. They must be understood, not as transparent, unambiguous expressions of spontaneous self-exposure, but as didactic compromises with our capacity of comprehension, designed, not to evoke in the reader familiarity with an experience that less than ten men in recorded history may be said with any plausibility to have experienced (engendering, each one, a whole civilization), but rather to affect our own sense of identity and our relationship and response to that Prophetic Figure.

To analyze human psychology and social organization with a theoretical and conceptual framework derived from the study and description of the most complex and sophisticated apes, would be to do violence to the infinitely richer complexities of human interaction, notwithstanding concrete points of close and even startling similarity that push back the boundaries of our distinctive natures. It is hard to see how one would describe in simian terms Milo's Venus, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Rumi's Mathnavi, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Dome of the Sistine Chapel. One would be hard put to place, even in the most exquisitely tender mating rituals of the gorilla or the chimpanzee, the odes of Pablo Neruda.

It would seem no less fatuous to attempt to reduce to conceptual models derived from the normal fabric of human consciousness the self-awareness of Souls Whose thoughts and ways tower so far above the commonality of mankind as to bring within their aggregated compass the vast majority of mankind, including its most distinguished and influential individuals. To say of such Souls that they felt this, or they thought that, beyond the apparently unambiguous self-descriptions in their writings, is to presume too much, as would any such statement with regards to human thoughts and feelings that started from the conceptual framework of zoology. At most we can say, such a Soul said this, or acted thus, which may raise the following questions, and evoke the following responses in the reader, or the beholder. When we understand that no statement from such a Educator is gratuitous, and that access to their inner experience is a foregone matter, we may more profitably ask ourselves, what response could this disclosure be sought to trigger in the reader, what notion, what aesthetic, what relationship to implant in the reader, rather than what does it tell us about what was going on in the depths of His mysterious heart.

With this in mind, we can venture, if curiosity, else devotion, spurs us, with stumbling feet into Baha'u'llah's descriptions of His encounter with the Divine from the perspective of the human in Him, and in His words find a bridge to our own deeply personal, truly human, ever approximate and potentially life-changing encounter with Him.

How to read the Word of God? Reflections on the Book of Certitude

2008-12-23T20:53:00.014Z

How read, how truly read, words claiming to descend from God, claiming to clothe truth transcendent in mere syllables and sounds?

How achieve that elusive goal, "true understanding"?

Is the Book sufficient unto us?

Or is "your own book" needed also, the one we have already, if seldom read, within our souls?

A journey into the Book of Certitude that ended taking this incapable reader into some deep waters...

“In the name of God, the Exalted, the Most High. No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.”

With these words opens Baha’u’llah’s Book of Certitude. Without warning, without pause, perhaps even unawares we are transported to the edge of dilemma: do we identify ourselves with the type of reader which the book assumes is glancing at its pages - a reader devotedly seeking shores of oceanic understanding? Or do we resist the identification, proceeding as an audience other than the one presumed (intended) by Baha’u’llah? And if we do recognise in the quest for true understanding our own aspiration, do we accept the challenge of detachment as formulated in the text? More to the point, do we accept the book’s authority to prescribe at all? Or do we here part company with Baha’u’llah, choosing to measure the book by standards other than those laid out in its pages?

On our conscious or unconscious answer to these questions rests our subsequent experience of the text. These choices and decisions, not explicit in the text, lie implicit in the prescriptive authority assumed by Baha’u’llah throughout the work. The extent to which we either acquiesce to Baha’u’llah’s authorial voice, or distance ourselves therefrom, dictates a diversity of possible relationships between text and reader which in turn give rise to various ways of experiencing its meanings. It is this link between interpretation and experience, as conceived by Baha’u’llah, which we wish to explore in greater depth.

Let us return, then, to the beginning. “No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.” Implicit in this passage is, as we have said, an audience desirous to attain the wondrous vista, the “shores of the ocean of true understanding”.[1] The generic tone of the address, as of the work as a whole, further indicates that the book’s intended audience is not only one particular person seeking to attain unto these shores,[2] but rather a type or even archetype of reader, seeker-aspirant of this glorious destination.[3] Implicit in this aspiration, furthermore, is the fact of separation, of distance from one’s goal (true understanding), for one cannot aspire to attain a goal one has already reached. An unspoken recognition of the reader’s remoteness from true understanding thus provides or rather signals the point of departure. It evokes receptivity - a willingness to listen openly and sincerely to an authorial voice that speaks as if from deep within or far above in the preamble of the book.

But such desire to attain, such awareness of the distance, are deemed insufficient: “except” we be “detached from all that is in heaven and on earth”, we shall in no wise “attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding”. The use of the conditional (“except he be detached...”) implies that detachment is not inherent in the journeying. It is possible to travel towards true understanding without detachment, but though one may indeed thus travel, one will never thus attain.

Expatiating on the meaning of these initial words the next paragraph states:

“The essence of these words is this: they that tread the path of faith, they that thirst for the wine of certitude, must cleanse themselves of all that is earthly - their ears from idle talk, their minds from vain imaginings, their hearts from worldly affections, their eyes from that which perisheth.”

In what could almost be considered a paraphrase of the earlier passage, the book’s ideal reader is defined still more clearly. Not only must he desire to attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding; he must also “tread the path of faith” and “thirst for the wine of certitude.” Unlike detachment, which quality the conditional clause implies could be absent during the journey, the other three requisites are treated as a given, a sine qua non of the journey itself. An intention - to attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding; a designated and ongoing action - treading the path of faith; and an inner state - thirst for certitude’s mystic wine. Bereft of these three, not just the goal, the book advises, but the very journey, are beyond reach.

The Author thus seems to be emphatically inculcating certain attitudes in the audience. An ideal reader is being not merely hoped for or awaited – but rather actively cultivated. It becomes clear that there are preconditions imposed by the book upon its reader without which one may not fully participate in its paradigm. Unless these conditions apply to us as readers, while reading of the book will still be possible, our attempts at understanding it ‘from within’ will be in fact precluded. For unless we are in actual fact upon a quest for true understanding, treading the path of faith, and thirsting for the wine of certitude, we will fall outside the scope of the book’s intended, or at least implicit, audience.

This of course does not mean that only those who fulfil or desire to fulfil these requisites will be able to derive meaning from the Book of Certitude. The literary, philosophical, even aesthetic contents of the Book of Certitude may be equally accessible to readers who recognise and readers who reject the Author’s claim to prescriptive authority. Both audiences may well arrive at similar or identical conclusions as to the meaning of a text. But the psychological effect of arriving at those shared conclusions is likely to differ in relation to one’s attitudes to the Author’s claims to authority, implicit in his interpretive demands. Readings which do not accept the Book of Certitude’s underlying premises; readings which do not, for instance, involve the intense spiritual seeking so emphatically inculcated in its opening pages, will result in an experience of the text other than that expected by its Author.

One of the most significant then, if least obvious themes of the Book of Certitude, is what may be termed the psychological, or more precisely the mystical, dimension of hermeneutics. In linking true understanding – the quintessencial subject of hermeneutics – to spiritual states, Baha’u’llah aligns the hermeneutical process to what is best described as mystical experience. The exploration of a sacred text, when undertaken under the pale of Baha’u’llah’s exhortations, becomes a journey of the soul into the realm of the spirit: the mystical City of Certitude and the Word of God become indistinguishable. True understanding becomes inseparable from specific personal qualities. Hermeneutical success is conditioned upon a re-orientation of the reader’s aspirations, will and worldview. According to this rather demanding measure, a reading that fails to positively transform, is a reading that fails to truly understand.

From this perspective, Baha’u’llah’s Book of Certitude appears intended primarily, not to impart certain information or expound a given set of opinions (which any intelligent reader is likely to be able to grasp), but to have a specific existential/mystical effect which only a spiritually engaged reading can induce. The hermeneutical process is thus harnessed to the goal of spiritual education. Rather than focusing on dispelling the obscurities of a specific set of escathological traditions as voiced by Haji Mirza Siyyid Muhammad, for which a more traditional tafsir approach would have been perhaps more appropriate, Baha’u’llah uses the Haji’s questions as a means of directing him, and by extension the full compass of the intended audience, to the qualities of mind and heart that according to the Book of Certitude can alone enable a reader to truly understand, that is to say, truly experience, the allusions at hand and others akin to them.

The underlying method involves linking the text’s message to a series of interpretive obstacles which act as spiritual stimuli. These obstacles take the form of premises and attitudes which must be developed or overcome in order to attain the goal of “true understanding”. They function simultaneously as gates mediating entry into a privileged experience of the text, and as barriers defending or concealing the full meaning of the book from audiences regarded as unworthy to receive it or unready to accept it. Hence, the Book of Certitude may perhaps be said to have a less obvious intended audience than might at first be imagined: a reader who, though not yet fulfilling its criteria for true understanding, is yet desirous of fulfilling them, and willing to spend the necessary effort.

In reality, our approach to Scripture, to the practice of “sacred reading” more generally, and to our investigation of life itself, proceeds, if we are to follow Bahá’u’lláh’s injunctions and the vistas they unfold, in the reverse direction to that followed in this essay. It begins, in fact, in the striving for a spiritual condition which is the fundamental prerequisite of true understanding, and which the Book of Certitude explicitly, and the whole Bahá’í canon implicitly, seek to stimulate. It is out of this inner yearning, and sincere labour, that wells out the true intellectual humility and compassion that make possible an open-minded and loving eye. The receptivity, self-awareness, and independence of thought that such a spiritual condition and hermeneutical attitude engenders, empowers us to engage with the ambiguities, perplexities, contradictions and paradoxes of real life, in all its overwhelming immensity and plenitude, without yielding to either despair or dogmatism, and impels us, and makes us ever more capable, to achieve reconciliation in an increasingly fissiparous world.

^{^[1]} the word here translated as "true understanding" is irfan, a word rich in mystic resonances. The word is present in the short Baha'i obligatory prayer, as well as in the opening paragraph of Baha'u'llah's Most Holy Book, and in both texts it is held up as the purpose of existence. Irfan is further translated by Shoghi Effendi as "knowledge" and as "recognition" of God and His Manifestation. Islamicists usually translate the term as "gnosis". Its prominence in Islamic mysticism may be inferred from the fact that the word irfan, according to Siyyid Hussein Nasr, was used in post-Safavid Iran, especially in the nineteenth century, as a euphemistic way of referring to sufism when the latter was repressed and socially unacceptable. Irfan is sometimes described as "relational knowledge" as opposed to purely rational or analytical knowledge, and is said to involve spiritual communion, mystic insight and love.

[2] Such as Haji Mirza Siyyid Muhammad, the maternal uncle of the Bab in answer to whose questions the Book of Certitude was written.

[3] Confirmation of the broad scope of the intended audience may be gathered from the following passage of the Book of Certitude concerning its own contents: "We have variously and repeatedly set forth the meaning of every theme, that perchance every soul, whether high or low, may obtain...his share and portion thereof...'That all sorts of men may know where to quench their thirst.'"KI187"

Baha'i Epistolary is back!

2008-12-23T20:44:00.002Z

"After a near death experience, Baha'i Epistolary has miraculously received a new lease of life, to report on the light it saw at the end of the tunnel, and report on the tunnel too (is that not what life in this world is about too - walking through the confinement of our limitations with our gaze firmly fixed on the ever distant light, that yet caresses our skin and illuminates our path?)... Hopefully, it will still find readers out there, and even better, people to leave their comments. So, if you get to see this, or the coming posts, make some noise, and let me know that this is indeed an epistolary, and not a solliloquy, and there is someone on the other side!

With love,

Ismael"

Fanaticism or Relativism: Can a Bahá'í be Certain?

2007-07-06T06:46:00.000Z

At the heart of most religious conflict, but also at the heart of most religious altruism, lies the conviction, nay, the certitude, that one is right about one's most fundamental beliefs. When a Bahá'í states his or her belief that Baha'u'lláh's message is divinely suited to the needs of the age, is he or she right? Can he know that this is the case beyond the shadow of a doubt, even unto death itself, a degree of conviction the Iranian Bahá'í martyrs have consistently manifested? Is not such degree of conviction the very basis of religious fanaticism? On the other hand, if one cannot be sure about the reality of any truth claims, how does religious truth differ from personal opinion, and what opinion can inspire the degree of conviction required to engender the level of commitment and personal transformation called for by contemporary challenges to social cohesion and environmental sustainability which threaten our very survival on this planet? The following comment seeks to explore, if not fully answer, these questions.

-------------------------

I have been following the discussions on exclusivism and on scripture
as unchallengeable truth.

One of the questions being asked is, I gather, how do we KNOW? how
does my conviction about something compare with someone else's?

If I believe that Baha'u'llah is the Manifestation of God for this
Day, and someone else doesn't, who's right? Can I say you are wrong
but I am right? Is there a difference between saying 'you are wrong
and I am right' and saying 'I am convinced that you are wrong and I am
right on this one'?

When seeking knowledge of reality, we are faced with a sea of
uncertainty. There are four criteria, 'Abdu'l-Baha stated in Some Answered
Questions as well as in Promulgation of Universal Peace, by which we
understand. Sensory experience, reason, inspiration, and tradition.
The last applies specially to scripture, but I assume we could
stretch it to anything we believe on the authority of another. But,
'Abdu'l-Baha goes on to explain, our senses easily deceive us,
telling us for instance (and for centuries convincing us) that the
Sun revolves around the earth. Our logic is similarily unreliable,
leading us to believe one thing at one time and another at another
time (‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives Plato as an example). Inspiration he describes as
the promptings of the heart, promptings which now lead us to God, now
to Satan, our own insistent self. Finally, tradition, even where
recognised as infallible as in the case of Holy Scriptures, is
dependent upon our reason for its understanding, and so is subject to
its limitations. We are left, then, where we started, in a sea of
uncertainty. With all criteria flawed there would seem to be no
grounds for real conviction, only for an acknowledgement of
inescapable relativism; only for humility, above all, sheer
powerlessness.

And yet, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá leaves us one rock to grasp for refuge, and that is the
Holy Spirit. Through Its guidance, we can arrive at truth, unerring
and infallible. Thus He explains in Paris Talks that when man allows
the Spirit, through his soul, to enlighten his understanding, then he
contains all creation. This may be similarily linked to the
passage in the Iqan where Baha'u'llah states that the understanding
of the scriptures is dependent, not on human learning, but "solely"
upon "purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit",
attitudes which presumably allow the Spirit to enlighten our
understanding. Again, this may be linked to the statement of
'Abdu'l-Bahá in Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá that
when the quest for knowledge is joined to the love of God it
becomes fruitful, whereas without the love of God it is devoid of
fruit, "nay it leadeth unto madness". Understanding being thus
linked to the Holy Spirit, scholarship becomes, in essence, a mystic
quest, in which context alone it fulfils itself.

But I'm digressing. Just as we might sigh with relief at having
found a source of certainty, we ask ourselves the question, "Am I
inspired of the Holy Spirit?", and we're thrown back to the four
criteria of knowledge, back to the sea of uncertainty. For where
everything is relative, the very notion of doubt and certainty
becomes irrelevant.

It seems to me that the primary result of a recognition, conscious
or more often unconscious, of the relativity of understanding is a sense
of powerlessness, a sense of meaninglesness which might in some ways describe
the character of human experience in the 20th century. If all opinions are equally
valuable, then all opinions are equally meaningless. If Hitler's
views were as valid as Ghandhi's then one's views don't mean that
much in the first place.

This breakdown of paradigms as a result of the recognition of relativism
is what I understand to have been the insight of Nietzche's madman.
He saw in the 19th century revolutions not only a sense of liberation but primarily
a sense of breakdown. When God dies, the whole of Western morality dies as
well, and with it Western civilization as a whole. While this
collapse was conceived by Nietzsche to be liberating to himself and
kindred spirits, he also foresaw that it was apocalyptic in its
implications for civilization as a whole.

Like a man whose ship of certainty shipwrecks on a sea of relativity, we are
confronted with two choices: either we cling ever more firmly to
whatever remnants remain afloat, clinging for very life and refusing
to let go or entertain alternatives; or we abandon the shipwreck and
try to swim in the direction of land. In the former case we focus on
answers, in the latter, on questions. In the former we find our
security, our certitude, in location, in the latter, on process.

Thus we find, for instance, among religions,that on the one
hand, we have ecumenism; on the other, fundamentalism. Politically,
countries where this fragmentation of certainty is particularily
evident, like the former U.S.S.R., evince both strong pulls towards
openness, internationalsim, etc., and also towards nationalism and
racialism.At an individual level, similarily, the recognition of relativism and
the human need for meaning may give rise both to humility and to
intransigence. The former is born of a sense of transcendence; the
latter, from insecurity and fear, indeed, paradoxically, for lack of
certitude in the absence of certainty.

And yet we cannot live our lives with such a model. I trust that
there is a computer, so I type this message, which I'm convinced will
be read by you. I trust I exist, no, it's not even a question in my
mind. If you didn't believe me I would not bother with trying to
prove it to you, so certain am I about my existence. Indeed, if you
really did not believe I existed when knowing me personally, I should
think there was something wrong with you. But my certitude is no
grounds for certainty; a distinction to which I will return later.
Indeed, in believing I exist I'm merely using the four criteria
mentioned above, all of which I recognise as flawed. So my
certitude, in the last analysis, is in essence an intelligent act of
faith.

Those of you who are into Wittgenstein will recognise echoes of his
thought. I strongly recommend the posthumously published volume of
his notes on the nature of certainty, appropriately titled On
Certainty. In this book, as I understand it, he asserts the impossibility of
absolute knowledge, taken to mean a sense of knowing something which warrants
that knowledge as fact, that is, a sense of knowing something which
absolutely precludes the statement "I thought I knew." He thus makes
the distinction between knowledge and certainty, asserting:

"One does not infer how things are from one's own certainty.
Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how
things are, but one does not infer from one's tone of voice that one
is justified."

One may perhaps re-label the distinction between knowledge and
certainty as one between certainty and certitude. Certitude denoting
a conviction which does not warrant its subject as fact, and
certainty denoting conviction which warrants its subject as fact.
This might be the difference between the conviction of a
Manifestation, whose conviction that something is true warrants it to
be a fact at some level (not necessarily a literal or historical
one), and that of human beings, none of whose convictions imply such
warrantee (except, I suppose, in the case of conferred infallibility).

Be that as it may, for human beings, as far as the above categories
go, certitude would appear to be the highest form of conviction one
can reach, certainty being an impossibility by virtue of the
epistemological limitations inherent in our nature.

Now, given these limitations, all conviction becomes an act of faith,
more or less rational, as the case may be. Certitude, in this
perspective, becomes the most intense form of faith, almost to the
point, perhaps to the point, of precluding doubt. It is not that
doubt becomes impossible, it is rather that it becomes unthinkable.
Thus I have certitude that I possess a hand, it is not something I
would question, it is a given. I undertake a great many actions
which assume its existence. On the other hand there are beliefs
which I hold which are far more tenuous. Is there life in other
planets? If so, what is its nature? What do the readers of these lines look like?

"It might be imagined," writes Wittgenstein, "that some
propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened
and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were
not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in
that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid."
Paragraph 96

One man's certitude then, might be another's doubt. So, to return to
our question, who is right? How do we Know? How do we decide? For
decide we must, at least to a degree. If I see someone mugging an
old lady or beating up a child, I'm not going to argue with myself
whether or not he is right to do so - I'll try to stop him. In the
same way, when I call myself a Baha'i, I have actually made a
decision. I recognise in its teachings the best answer to the
dilemmas of humanity as I perceive them. More, I recognise its
teachings as Divine, hence normative, not just for me, but for all
society. It would seem illogical to recognise it as normative for me
and not for others, as if Baha'u'llah had really meant to speak to
Ismael alone, and not to humanity. Others, however, do not see in
the Baha'i teachings a divine revelation, but at most a partial
inspiration which is normative only insofar as it agrees with other
propositions which are, so to speak, hardened in one's mind. Which is true?

This may be answered at three levels.

1) Apodictically (as it is in itself): Is apodictic knowledge
possible? According to 'Abdu'l-Baha it is not humanly possible to
know the essence of a thing. Hence knowledge is relative and varies
according to our point of view. From this perspective all knowledge
is both relative and fallible, and thus one can never truly Know
whether a given proposition is true, false or merely different,
though one may have fairly strong convictions on the matter. In this
perspective Wittgenstein and 'Abdu'l-Baha appear to be in agreement.
However, 'Abdu'l Baha postulates yet one more dimension: the Divine.
From this perspective one may indeed KNOW. Whatever the Holy Spirit
unveils is right and true, is certain. Should the Holy Spirit
enlighten our understanding of any matter we would, to that extent
and to that extent only, know with certainty. However, as mentioned
before, we can never know what aspects of our convictions have been
illumined by the Holy Spirit. Apodictic knowledge is possible, then, but not with
certainty. The possibility of apodicticity is there, but not
the possibility of certainty. We can trust that some of our
knowledge is true apodictically, but we can never absolutely know to what
extent. In other words, reality is not a relative concept, though it
is relatively experienced. Similarily apodictic knowledge of reality
is possible, but not apodictic conviction. Only God knows what,
in all our convictions, is actually true. This allows us to go
beyond the position that there is no such thing as truth, whilst
avoiding the position that we KNOW that we are, as Baha'is, the main custodians
of it, or at least of some aspect of it.

We might believe so, we might give our lives to testify to our certitude in the truth of God's Self-revelation in Baha'u'llah and to vindicate our belief in His teachings, but we are also aware that our conviction, by itself, does not warrant our certitude as fact.
In this perspective, the abrogation of Jihad and the substitution of the sword for wisdom and utterance acquires significance. We renounce the notion of apodictic conviction, though not of apodictic knowledge. By recognising the basis of our conviction as relative, whilst having absolute certitude in its truth, we exchange the quest for conformity for the quest of intersubjectivity, which is the next level at which
we may approach the question.

2) Intersubjectively: If we cannot apodictically know then we cannot
apodictically prove something to be right. Instead of trying to
prove, we attempt to persuade, to arrive at a consensus as to what is
right or true. In this light, a given conviction proves its validity
by its capacity to generate agreement around its subject. The
proposition that the earth circles the sun has validated, though not
proved, itself by the degree of agreement it has generated throughout
the centuries. Similarily Newton's theories, so long accepted so
widely, have to a large extent been superseded by Einstein's work,
which "proved" itself to be right by becoming more intersubjectively
accepted. When the disciples of Jesus accepted him, they had nothing
but their own certitude and their grounds for such a certitude to go
by. The capacity of their beliefs to generate agreement around their
subject matter has given them intersubjective validation.
Similarily, Baha'is cannot "prove" their beliefs, but they can
increasingly help others to make sense of them, in the faith, nay the
certitude, that others will similarily recognise them as the true
answer to the needs of the world. Recognise them, that is, not
apodictically, but intersubjectively.

Which brings us to the third level:

3) Subjective: At this level, one's own convictions become the
criteria by which we decide the truth of a given proposition. The
highest degree of conviction we can reach is certitude. Certainty is
beyond us. In accepting this we can accept diversity without
compromise; that is, we can agree to disagree. We follow our own
convictions in the hope that time will show the correctness or
otherwise of our positions. Above all, in recognising our
powerlessness, we renounce any ideas of imposing our beliefs, though
not necessarily of winning others to our way of thinking. In other
words, we aim at intersubjectivity, and not beyond.

Poems of the Journey: Absent Beloved

2007-07-06T06:11:00.000Z

I cannot describe or present this latest poem of the journey, the sigh of a fractured, if loving soul, which only utter Beauty and utter helplessness might explain.

-------------------------------------------
Poems of the Journey: Absent Beloved

Absent Beloved

You see me immobile, straining to step into your court, unable even to fix my gaze upon your winged feet.

I fail utterly to rest upon invisibility, even when the visible has lost its power of conviction over my soul. Incapable to lure any longer my dreams, my hopes and expectations, it is still able to persuade, for moments upon accumulating moments, my full attention, the transient motions of my being, when all round me solidity presses its suit and promises in its all-surrounding embrace momentary escape from your absence's burning pain.

Desire overwhelms me, and all but undoes me. I can no longer tell what atom of this yearning is not you, for in your absence every shadow takes on your silhouette and torments my waking dreams. I call to you, with every tear and every smile (I can no longer tell them apart) while hope, exhausted, falters, and thirst images all round me a thousand empty mirages, which I readily discern as insubstantial, yet my unheeding, thirst-consumed limbs pursue in overwhelming need of respite, my will only at the very last imposing itself over this pointless career toward the emptiness of you, leaving my spirit not unscathed.

There is no part of me that has not sought you, no prayer left unsaid, no supplication unuttered, no tear unshed. There is no doctor, earthly or heavenly, to whom I have not turned to help me bear your absence, else draw it to a close. I have travelled the earth and joined every company, and also closed my eyes and sought you alone and quietly in the privacy of my habitation. I have sung to you songs of love where the wise gravely discourse; wept for you until more tears were impossible, yet keep on falling. I have kindled one hundred hearts in joy at your evocation - wounded hundreds more with the consequences of my majnun-like search of you.

I have sought you, beloved, from my youth, with all my innocence and vigour, and have aged prematurely upon reaching your door, and receiving your invitation, and hearing your most sweet voice, and smelling your exquisite perfume, and feeling your touch upon my skin - and discovering myself unable to respond, to step into your open chamber, cross your threshold, and join you, my love, my goal, my genesis, my all.

I know not what else to do, where else to go. You alone know the extent of my efforts. Only you can plumb the depths of my disappointment, the measure of my failure, the scale of my self-defeat, the accumulated grains of loneliness that add up to this desert of longing.

And yet, goal of my heart, perhaps your greatest miracle in me is that I am still far, very far from losing hope. Your tender, flashing eyes, even in the distance, even behind the luminous veil that hides your face, speak intimately to my heart such ravishing beauty and compassion, that I know, I know however far I seem destined to remain, yet you are nearer. I do not understand this statement of mine which my throbbing heart beats when I lift my gaze to yours. But what is the logic of words where beauty reigns?

Beloved one. You know my heart. You know my desperate, if not despairing need, and the exact limits of my strength.

Do not abandon me.

I know my undeserving. You know my sincerity, all there is of it.

I do not ask relief, best beloved - my tears and searing sighs are your kisses upon my neck - but only faithfulness. The strength to come to rest without distraction in your invisibility, rest fully, joyfully and undeviatingly, else be granted in my weakness a visible path to rest in you.

You know what is in me. I know only my desire to be yours without remnant or delay, and be granted the insight and ability to court you in deeds that destroy in triumphant celebration the lukewarm traces of mediocrity in love.

Whatever I am, I am yours. All else is my love for your mirrored image upon creation's troubled waters, and my unwise and self-destroying impatience with your absence. Even my failures in your path are signals of your conquest. Like Jami's Zuleika, if I slit my own hands while preparing the banquet, it is only because you just stepped into the room, and I lost my concentration.

Poems of the Journey: Preamble to a Wish

2007-06-22T00:42:00.000Z

Here is another "poem of the journey", as I have chosen to refer to these burning sighs. This one is the fruit of my reflections on the preamble to the Long Obligatory Prayer, which in truth may be an entire journey, in itself, into the heart of obligatory prayer, and a gateway to sincerity. May we be confirmed in our quest for authenticity at the moment, that unique, atemporal moment, that kairos, of true prayer.

PREAMBLE TO A WISH

“Whoso wisheth...”

Whose own wishes

spread like canvas

for His hand to trace

its wishes on?

Who

so wishes

so longs

so yearns?

Who so wishes

“let him stand up”

above what

inclination

from what

reclining state

“and turn”

at last away from all

inertia?

“unto God”

advance

approach

the Wish of Him

Who wishes

we might wish so?

Who so wisheth

to recite this prayer

let him stand up

and turn

unto God.

Seeing the end in the beginning: the Birth of the Báb

2007-06-19T23:16:00.000Z

Meditation on the Occasion of the Birth of the Báb

Continuing what might be called my meditations on the Bahá'í Holy Days I share here a meditation on the Birth of the Báb which I wrote for the 20th of October of 2001. It includes little known accounts of what He was like as a suckling, and His mother's memories of His infancy. It speaks not just of yesterday, but of today, and of tomorrow, and brings us sweet perfumes from the city of Shiraz.

On the night of October 20th 1819, on the first day of Muharram in the year 1235 A.H.,1 slumbering humanity slept on, and few were the souls that rose to greet the birth of Siyyid ‘Alí Muh?ammad, the Báb, in the home of Áqá Mírzá ‘Alí, His mother’s uncle, in the fabled city of Shíráz.

Shíráz, fortunate city! Well did the celebrated E.G. Browne speak of you as “the home of Persian culture, the mother of Persian genius, the sanctuary of poetry and philosophy, Shíráz.”2 A thousand times over was Háfiz's supplication granted, when he cried out in his love for you:

“Sweet is Shíráz and its incomparable site!
O God, preserve it from decline!”3

For on that sacred night, unbeknownst to your sleeping children, you attained to your greatest accolade, becoming the dayspring of revelation and birthplace of the One Whom the Tongue of Grandeur designated as King of the Messengers.4 Today you are honoured among His lovers, who long to kiss your blessed dust, set apart by the Most Great Name as a site of pilgrimage unto the people of Bahá.

And yet, Shíráz, notwithstanding such bestowals, incarceration and martyrdom were the only welcome forthcoming from the majority of your dwellers and their compatriots to One whose name they had for a thousand years invoked. On the anniversary of His own birth, ensconced within a fortress, buried like a seed fertile under the oppressive soil, the Primal Point recalled, in a supplication to the All-Merciful, the night Shíráz attained to its heart’s desire:

“Through the revelation of Thy grace, O Lord, Thou didst call Me into being on a night such as this, and lo, I am now lonely and forsaken in a mountain. Praise and thanksgiving be unto Thee for whatever conformeth to Thy pleasure within the empire of heaven and earth. And all sovereignty is Thine, extending beyond the uttermost range of the kingdoms of Revelation and Creation.

“Thou didst create Me, O Lord, through Thy gracious favour and didst protect Me through Thy bounty in the darkness of the womb and didst nourish Me, through Thy loving-kindness, with life-giving blood. After having fashioned Me in a most comely form, through Thy tender providence, and having perfected My creation through Thine excellent handiwork and breathed Thy Spirit into My body through Thine infinite mercy and by the revelation of Thy transcendent unity, Thou didst cause Me to issue forth from the world of concealment into the visible world, naked, ignorant of all things, and powerless to achieve aught. Thou didst then nourish Me with refreshing milk and didst rear Me in the arms of My parents with manifest compassion, until Thou didst graciously acquaint Me with the realities of Thy Revelation and apprised Me of the straight path of Thy Faith as set forth in Thy Book”5

And so in a Shírází merchant’s home the Báb was born “from the world of concealment into the visible world”, twenty-five years, four months, and four days before the birth of His Revelation, the promised Day of God yet unseen and pulsating within the soul of a newly born Child.

A touching evocation of His earliest days and months comes from the words of His fortunate mother, the noble Fátimih Bigum, who was frequently heard to recount:

“Often He was serene and made no noise. During the twenty-four hour period, He would desire milk only four times and while nursing would be most gentle and no movement was discerned from His mouth. Many a time I would be disturbed as to why this Child was not like others and thought that perhaps He suffered some internal ailment which made Him not desire milk. Then I would console myself that if indeed He experienced some unknown illness, He would manifest signs of agitation and restlessness. Unlike other children, during the weaning period, He did not complain nor behaved in any unseemly manner. I was most thankful that now that the Exalted Lord had granted me this one Child, He is gentle and agreeable.”6

How dimly the world suspected the significance of the birth of that Unique One, to outward seeming an ordinary Child, yet Bearer of an extraordinary destiny: an Infant “naked, ignorant and powerless” yet with all the mysteries of creation and revelation latent within His rarified Soul!

Indeed, far from celebrating, the chosen land of Persia was dressed in mourning. For the night of the Promised One’s birth coincided with the first of ten days of ritual lamentation for the third Imam’s martyrdom, the sublime Husayn, killed at the hands of the Umayyad armies of the caliph Yazíd on the plains of Karbilá, some eleven centuries earlier. This melancholy occasion undoubtedly constitutes the most important, and most tragic commemoration in the Shí’i sacred calendar, and so it was amidst the mourning and loud weeping of the masses that the very stones of Shíráz cried out in the sheer joy of reunion. Lost in their lamentation were the weeping crowds, “bereft of discernment to see God with their own eyes or hear His melodies with their own ears”.7 And thus bereft, those eyes shed a river of tears for the Imam Huseyn on the day when the he himself surely rejoiced at the birth of His glorious Kinsman. Those same weeping eyes that remained dry on the day 750 muskets pierced the breast of the true Joseph.8

As the earth rejoiced and the tears of the people rained down on the sacred night the Báb was born, pathos and joy embraced as long-parted lovers clinging the one to the other like candle and flame, reconciled henceforth.

One hundred and eighty two years later one wonders how often, for lack of discernment, we weep for yesteryear when jubilation beckons in seemingly ordinary births, if only we had eyes to see. How often do the revelations of His grace “issue forth from the world of concealment into the visible world” in modest garb, hidden in the mountain of material life and sight awaiting recognition in the realm of insight and discernment, and within that realm, awaiting celebration. The realm of insight where within the ordinary the extraordinary is grasped, and in the captive seed the luscious fruit is intuited and even tasted before the youngest shoot springs forth.

For the prayer revealed by the Báb on the anniversary of His birth, tracing His journey from conception to maturity, might speak also for every one of His lovers in our community of broken winged birds, and for the metaphorical children born of our servitude in His path. The prayer gives praise for each stage of development, from existence in the darkness of the womb, through birth into powerlessness and dependence, to ultimate arrival at the gate of God’s good pleasure. Might this trajectory not be observed, in its own way, in relation to the many instruments of our servitude and worship, be it study circles or Local Spiritual Assemblies; scholarship or the arts; devotional meetings or children’s classes; firesides and nineteen day feasts; or quiet acts of hospitality like those of Jináb-i-Mírzá Muhammad-Qulí, that faithful brother of the Blessed Beauty who would simply “pass around the tea”, “always silent”, holding fast to the Covenant of ‘Am I not your Lord?’9

It is the eye of discernment alone that makes it possible to look upon nascent institutions and infant instruments of service, “naked, ignorant of all things, and powerless to achieve aught”, and yield praise for the revelation of His transcendent unity in the simple fact of their existence; their having issued forth, powerless and fragile, “from the world of concealment into the visible world”. It is spiritual discernment, again, that gives us the joy and patience to nourish such infant creatures “with refreshing milk” and rear them in our arms “with manifest compassion”, till they become acquainted, in the fullness of time, “with the realities of Thy Revelation” and apprised “of the straight path of Thy Faith as set forth in Thy Book”

How great the temptation, as we nurture our communities and our own souls amidst the conspicuous signs of our relative immaturity, “to be disturbed”, like the mother of the Báb, “as to why this Child was not like others” and think that “perhaps He suffered some internal ailment which made Him not desire milk”. Whereas the eye of discernment might perceive, amidst the fissiparous forces of a distracted and distracting world, amidst the materialism and indifference and strife that tear apart the society to which we all belong, that which might, with Fatimih Bigum, make us “most thankful that now that the Exalted Lord had granted me this one Child, He is gentle and agreeable.”

The birth of the Báb is a call to celebration then, but also a call to spiritual discernment. So that, should a night arrive like unto the night in which we were born and find us prisoned in a forbidding mountain, be it built of heart’s fragments or of cold stone, we might with the Báb exclaim to God:

“Praise and thanksgiving be unto Thee for whatever conformeth to Thy pleasure within the empire of heaven and earth. And all sovereignty is Thine, extending beyond the uttermost range of the kingdoms of Revelation and Creation.”

Glad tidings!

1 See, Nabil-i Azam, The Dawnbreakers, (trans. Shoghi Effendi) p.73, BPT, Wilmette, 1970
2 EG Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (1893), p.283, Century Publishing edition, London, 1984
3 Cited in ibid. p.287
4 Bahá'u'lláh, Tablet of Ahmad, Arabic, Bahá'í Prayers, BPT, UK
5 Selections from the Writings of the Bab, p.173-74, Baha'i World Centre, 1982.
6 Cited in Mirza Habibu'llah Afnan’s account of the Bab in Shiraz, translated by Ahang Rabbani, Translations of Shaykhi, Babi and Bahá'í Texts, No. 11, Dec 1997, H-Bahá'í
7 Bahá'u'lláh, Tablet of Ahmad, Arabic.
8 Cf. The Qayyúmu’l-Asmá’, cited in SWB, p.4
9.Memorials of the Faithful pages 70-72

A tribute to ten Shirazi women

2007-06-18T20:27:00.000Z

On the night of the 18th of June, 1983, ten Bahá'í women were hanged in Shiraz for refusing to deny their faith.

"Two days later, Mona and the other nine women were told that they would be given one more chance to recant their Faith or be sentenced to die. It was their last chance to remain alive. That night, Mona had another dream in which she was in prison saying the long obligatory prayer. Abdu'l-Baha came through the cell door and sat on the bed on which Mona's mother was sleeping. Tahirih Siyavushi was sleeping on the floor. He patted her mother's head and raised His other hand towards Mona, who thought to herself that He might leave if she continued saying her prayer. So she sat on her knees in front of Abdu'l-Baha and held her hands in His. 'Abdu'l-Baha asked Mona, "What do you want?" Mona replied, "Steadfastness." 'Abdu'l-Baha asked again, "What do you want from us?" Mona replied, "Steadfastness for all the friends." Abdu'l-Baha asked for a third time, "What do you want?" Mona again replied, "Steadfastness." Then Abdu'l-Baha said twice, "It is granted. It is granted." "

"Mona replied, 'Mother, If I knew that during each year I spend in prison only a few people become Baha'is, I would wish that I could spend a hundred thousand years in prison.'

'And if I knew that because of my execution, all the youth of the world would arise, join hands in service to humanity, become selfless, teach the world about Baha'i ideals and try to move the world, I would beg Baha'u'llah to give me 100,000 lives to sacrifice in his path.' "

* * * * *

It is with trepidation that I begin to write these words. My heart’s vocabulary of emotions seems unequal to the object of my contemplation, how much more the groaning structure of my words. I have prayed with all the fervour of my heart for the sincerity to feel, the eloquence to express. And yet, at the gateway, my knees weaken.

Tahirih Siyavushi, when she placed her neck upon the noose, was my age as I write these lines. Mona Mahmudnizhad, when she breathed her last, was my age when I became a Bahá’í. Mrs. Yalda’i was the same age as my mother is today, when they killed her after whipping her two hundred times, blending her clothes with her skin. Mrs Ishraqi was only four years younger. Her daughter Roya, Zarrin Muqimi, Shirin Dalvand, Akhtar Sabit, Simin Sabiri, and Mahsrid Nirumand, were all younger than I am.

This very night, perhaps this very hour at which I am now writing, twenty four years ago, they were killed for a Faith whose name I bear.When I think of them, I remember the living.

Not in the abstract.

I remember a young Shirazi woman in the lonely town of Felixtowe, England, who taught me to pray, not in words, but in the fervour of her supplications, and the burning fire in her gut at the perplexity of being alive, of being spared, when those ten women, when Mona, her own friend, were not. I think of her brother, and his dreams of Bahá’u’lláh, and his unassuming, yet unflagging and fruit-bearing dedication to servitude to His Cause. I think of the same outwardly disciplined, inwardly consuming flame in the serenely fervent eyes, brimming with unshed yet constantly flowing tears - of devotion and pain and longing - of a lone woman scholar of Shiraz, of the same generation, who now quietly but powerfully sheds her light in far distant Northern climes. And I think of those ten women’s fellow prisoner, who blessed my house with her stay, and befriended my three year old child, with whom I was united, for brief hours, in their remembrance, as I laboured to bring her voice, and their memory, to tens of thousands of readers of two publications in Scotland. And I remember a husband and wife I briefly met at the Guardian’s resting place in London, on a brief respite from some six years spent in different Iranian prisons, on their way back to Iran to likely future incarceration. They invited me to be their guest, should I ever visit the land of my heart’s desire. I felt they were my hosts already, as they shared of the abundance of their sorrow-seared, joy-irradiated, hearts.

That quiet intensity in the eyes of these cherished companions, or rather, to use a Persian idiom, that burning in their liver - something at once intensely spiritual, and visceral, instinct at once with light and only just contained emotion, like a voice that says, at every moment “Do not rest! Do not falter! Do not betray the trust!” - is to me pure evocation, lingering perfume of a moment, a moment that broke through the bars and walls of Adelabad and Seppah, and refused to become past, remaining instead present, ever ongoing, long after the fingers that type these fugitive words join the earth that entombs their precious if ephemeral bodies.

Perhaps my thoughts turn so immediately, so instinctively to these friends of mine, who belong, not by design or by appointment, to what the Bahá’í writings call “the remnant of the martyrs”, even as their forebears were the “remnants of the sword” (baqiyyatu’s sayf), because they seem to hear most immediately and pressingly, most continually and urgently, an admonishment that these ten women, and their fathers, and husbands and friends who shared their fate call out to us, in that silence that speaks when words avail not, call out insistently, in the manner of their death, to the manner of our lives.

I do not know by what means to fit my feet into their crimson footprints. My spirit breaks with love and inadequacy. Many are the things I hoped to say in this brief tribute. None have the strength to make it past my yearning. I can only hope the heat of their affliction is such as to burn at least some links in the long chain of self-defeat that holds me back from flying as my innermost spirit visions and desires, and that the selfsame heat does make me move, move an inch, a mile, a frasakh:

“While Persia remains heedless and unaware and its sorely-tried friends are beset by grievous repressions and cruelties, the hosts of life, the bearers of the divine Message of salvation are moving far and wide over the extensive territories of the free world, and bending their energies to capture the citadels of men's hearts. The motivating impulse, the driving power which is responsible for the successful achievements of these sanctified beings is derived from the heat and flame and the influence released through the relentless persecutions and ordeals which the pure-hearted friends in Persia are enduring. Wherefore has the Master said: When the light of God is ignited in the East it will shed illumination upon the West and its evidences will become visible both in the North and in the South.” (Shoghi Effendi, Fire and Light (Nar va Nur), section III)

How inert my motion feels in relation to the flame that burnt up those ten hearts this night in 1983 - and their pain was real, and trying, and their supplications for firmness constant (perhaps an indication of an equally constant awareness of a dangerous fragility under inconceivable mental, and emotional, and spiritual stress), however triumphant and spiritually jubilant the final outcome.

And yet, I look inside my heart, and I find the fragrance of their sacrifice in the very depths of my aspiration, I find a love for their spirits, for their humanity, and for the manner of their love. I find within myself a yearning for faithfulness to the trust of their sacrifice, for answer to their call, in Mona’s case explicit and unequivocally, for a reaction from us all, a reaction to their deaths in the form of genuine, burning servitude, and I cannot ignore that indeed, in their sacrifice is, even for such an indigent one as me, a “motivating impulse”, a “driving power”, that does “shed illumination” over the farthest reaches of my soul.

It is up to me, with God’s assistance, for the “evidences” of such a driving power as their martyrdom contains, so far invisible and folded in the recesses of unrealized aspiration and longing, to “become visible both in the North and in the South.” I feel unequal to the task, but cannot rest in such a feeling. I lack the language to address those 10 women, to lift my heart in prayer and give expression to my feelings. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s own voice gives vent to my humble request to Mona, Roya, Zarrin, Shirin, Akhtar, Simin, Mahsrid, Mrs Ishraqi and Mrs. Yalda’i:

“O ye who have suffered martyrdom! O trustees of His Revelation! …O illustrious and noble ones! May my inmost reality, my spirit, my entire being and whatsoever God hath bestowed upon me through His bounty and grace be laid down as a sacrifice for you.

I bear witness that ye are the radiant stars, the gleaming meteors, the resplendent full moons. the brilliant orbs in this wondrous Revelation. Well is it with you, O birds that warble in the gardens of divine unity; blessed are ye, O lions that roar in the forests of detachment; happy are ye. O leviathans that swim in the waters of His oneness. Verily ye are the signs of divine guidance. ye are the banners that flutter in the field of sacrifice.

I beseech God to bless me, through the breezes of holiness wafted from that glorious centre of sacrifice, and to quicken me with the reviving breath of heavenly communion blowing from that blessed region.

I beg you to intercede on my behalf in the presence of the ever-living, sovereign Lord that He may graciously suffer me to quaff my fill from the choice sealed wine, may grant me a portion from the unbounded felicity that ye enjoy and may exhilarate my heart by giving me to drink from your chalice which is tempered at the Camphor Fountain. Verily my Lord is merciful and forgiving. By bestowing the bounty of sacrifice in this realm of existence, He aideth whomsoever He willeth with whatsoever He pleaseth.”

((‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Fire and Light (Nar va Nur), section XX)

And so, as I remember these ten women, and the 200 believers who were executed in those years, and the afflictions that still rain down on the sweet and valiant friends of Iran, and as I approach the day in which the King of the Messengers was martyred, I cannot but evoke the glorious company which those ten women joined on this, their festal night:

“How well is it said:

'The worldly wise who garner the ears of grain

are unaware of Layla's secret, For unto none was accorded the great glory

but Majnun --

he who set the whole harvest afire.'

“... In this way most of the favoured ones of God offered up their lives as martyrs in the field of sacrifice. He Who is the resplendent Morn of divine guidance, the Exalted One [the Bab] sank below the horizon of sacrifice. Quddus sought companionship with the Beloved through glorious martyrdom. Mulla Husayn opened a new gate to the field of martyrdom. Vahid distinguished himself as a peerless figure in the arena of sacrifice. Zanjani [Hujjat] offered up his life as a martyr upon the plain of tribulation. The King of Martyrs hastened forth to the place of sacrifice. The Beloved of Martyrs was enraptured with ineffable gladness when he offered up his life for the sake of God. Ashraf attained the heights of honour as he unflinchingly set his face towards the arena of sacrifice. Badi', as he breathed his last, exclaimed: 'Magnified be my Lord, the Most Glorious!' The martyrs of the land of Ya [Yazd] drank their fill with relish from the draught of glorious martyrdom, and the martyrs of Shiraz laid down their lives in the arena of ardent love to the tune of sweet and wondrous melodies. Those massacred in the land of Nayriz were inebriated with the brimful cup of sacrifice, and the martyrs of Tabriz were seized with ecstatic joy and unleashed new energies in the field of sacrifice. Those who renounced their lives in Mazandaran exclaimed: 'O Lord! Destine for us this cup that brimmeth over with the choice wine'; while the martyrs of Isfahan laid down their lives with utmost joy and radiance.

“…In truth those that are guided solely by their reason would be unable to perceive the sweetness of this cup, but the ardent lovers will be overjoyed and enraptured by the holy ecstasy which this wondrous draught doth produce. Every discerning observer who hath gazed upon the countenance of that graceful Beloved was prompted to lay down his life as a martyr, and every receptive ear which had hearkened unto that celestial melody suffered its listener to become so enravished with joy as to offer up himself without hesitation as a sacrifice. The moth which is animated by love will burn its wings as it flitteth round the lamp of God and the phoenix of tender affection will be set ablaze by the fire of ardent desire. No unfamiliar bird can partake of the heat of this Fire, nor can the fowls that dwell upon the dust plunge forth into this heavenly Ocean. However, praise be unto God, ye are the leviathans of this ocean, the birds of this pasture, the moths of this lamp, the nightingales of this meadow.

And upon ye rest the glory of the Most Glorious!”

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Fire and Light (Nar va Nur), section XIII)

Poems of the Journey: In Circumambulation

2007-06-12T20:03:00.000Z

Given the rather dense nature of recent postings, I feel a need to look upwards, to the Beauty that, in the final analysis, is the single point of knowledge, which the ignorant have multiplied, the beginning and the end of the journey, the very thing that in the end, makes us recklessly throw caution into the air and, forgetting what we read in the books of the grammarians, the stronghold of our certainties, cast ourselves into His sea.

"The death of self is needed here, not rhetoric and grammar
Be then as nothing, and walk upon the waves".

In Circumambulation

I go around in circles seeking entrance to Your dwelling, and each time my very soul cries out - thus far, no further. The hair’s breadth that separates us stretches to infinity when I try to bridge the gap. Circling Your home, I return always to this spot. Circumambulating Your presence, I arrive once more to my starting point.

Cherished one! The love of You has filled me and exceeded me and therefore broken me. What is this union whose taste is separation? This caress that makes clear I cannot touch You? What is this water that makes athirst, this sobering wine, this food that sates with yet more hunger?

And yet though alone, disconsolate and helplessly enraptured, I remain intoxicated, drunk with Your majesty, sighing with relief amidst anxiety in the intuition of Your name, the Merciful. No voice is sweeter than Yours, no comfort real outside Your arms. All else but You in the end falters, and I cling to You, and am pacified. I place my trials at Your feet like petals, and inhale Your own fragrance, the perfume of Your grace. The consciousness of Your presence, beyond my separation, fills me with joy, and the colours of this world dissolve in the radiance of Your face, and the murmur of the world is stilled at the sound of Your footsteps, and I with all creation watch, breathless, the miracle that is Your gait.

Beloved! Watch me melting, dissolving like clay in the ocean of Your name, the All-Glorious. Be with me, my friend, my protector, for I fear oblivion, I fear perpetual, final separation. I fear to go down into Your waters as a little ball of clay, diminished but unvanished. Forgive me, precious one, my want of trust. Overlook my fears. Visit my soul.

Bahá'í Excommunications and Takfirs

2007-06-11T22:21:00.000Z

The idea of Bahá'í excommunication or Bahá'í "takfir" (the Muslim declaration of unbelief) has acquired prominence in polemics directed against the Bahá'í community generally, and specifically against the Universal House of Justice, to the degree that it has gained remarkable currency even in the informal discussions of individuals, members, ex-members and non-members of the Bahá'í community, critical of Bahá'í institutions, even in non-polemical contexts. It has been applied, in good faith and without polemical animus, to the loss of administrative rights and expulsion of a Local Spiritual Assembly of two openly gay believers, as in the beautifully open and sensitive critique of the Bahá'í position on homosexuality posted by Andrew as a comment on my homosexuality post.

More elaborately, inflammatorily, or influentially, it has been prominently emphasised in blogs, internet lists, and even serious academic journals by individuals with a clear and long-standing opposition to the administrative institutions of the Bahá'í community. Concretely, the accusation of Bahá'í excomunications and takfors centre on the very exceptional disenrolment, over several years of a handful (or less than a handful) of individuals, by the Universal House of Justice, on the grounds that their public statements and actions are not judged by the Universal House of Justice to be compatible with membership in the Bahá'í community.

Such decisions have been taken to equate with excommunications, takfir, human rights violations, and even, on ocassion, with the notion of theological tribunals. The present essay integrates a number of postings I made in response to reactions to one prominent case of disenrolment, examining such decisions by the Universal House of Justice in the light of the sociology of community and through a comparative analysis of Bahá'í disenrolment and the terminology of takfir and excommunication.

Dear all,

It is very far from my purpose to engage in polemics of any kind, which
in my view always and inherently obscure, rather than shed light on truth,
and make intersubjectivity all the more elusive.

I do regard the present story as saddening, in all of its aspects, including, but not limited to those that have been shared. What is very clear to me is that, before being academics, or believers, we are human beings, and that these tensions, which in the
past resulted in immense, large scale traumatic fractures in religion hurt us
in very human ways (one recalls Eusebius' accounts of early Christians about
to be martyred yet holding different theological perspectives and refusing
to be martyred together!). Clearly, there is, even in the best of
cases, a great deal of hurt in these long-term and, I suggest, in fact universal processes.

I suspect however that history will be kinder than some present voices - voices
both in defense and in detraction of the decisions of contemporary Bahá'í
institutions - in its judgement of the manner in which these tensions are
being handled, by comparison to the way such tensions have been managed
over the centuries.

The voices that are arguing for radical, nefarious and highly pessimistic
readings of these events are speaking, in my view perfectly legitimately,
from within their own, innevitably painful experience of these processes.
But I still feel that when one looks beyond the painful crux of this encounter, one sees very much a natural, long term process of community development inherent in the
nature of religious community itself, not always harmonious, and typically
infinitely more explosive than is the case today, notwitstanding the very
explosive tones in which protagonists of these tensions may address it.

With all of the intense feeling expressed in these posts, with all of the
arguably severe decisions of Bahá'í instituions, we are a far cry from
the thundering jeremiads of Eusebius, the Spainsh Inquisition, the witch
hunts of James the VI, the fatwas and takfirs of Khomeini, or the secular
purges of Stalin and Mao - or even the comparatively tender probings of the
McCarthy era. I think it is perfectly correct to identify an area of tension in
outlook and, I would add as being even more important, in communication
culture, between the Universal House of Justice and those intellectuals
who have run into this kind of conflict with it. I sense that to some extent
the nature of the conflict is not primarily doctrinal as processual, but
that is my perspective which I don't expect others to necessarily share.

Were the situation to be reversed, and the Universal House of Justice
have absolute compatibility with the perspective put forward by these
intellectuals, I don't believe that, a century and a half
into community building, we would not find ourselves here in any case,
that is, with an evolving and often painful process of boundary maintenance
that would be incompatible with a different population's outlook, views or
approach to action and communication. It might look totally different in
terms of the issues that provoke and define it, and even in the manner of
engagement, but in the end, the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, of
individual interpretation and community cohesion, of institutional
authority and individual freedom, would remain, as they do in every single
long-standing community, religious or secular.

There is pain and there is anger. That is fair and inevitable, as it is
fair and inevitable that it informs our perspective of events (for all
concerned, whether as intellectuals, as members of institutions or as both at once).
But really I feel that taking a long, comparative view, informed by what
we know about the dynamics of community building and community development
(my professional field for the last 15 years), this seems to me, particularly
in light of current events in the world, not a scenario of extremism, human
rights violations and the end of academic freedom for all Baha'i
academics, but really a most painful, yet altogether mild and benign culmination of a process of competing discourses and identities within a constituted,
institutionalised community setting.

That within such a setting the perspective of a community's elected institutions
should come to prevail, is only to be expected. That such an in my view inevitable outcome should not be accompanied, notwithstanding the suggestions that this is the case, by
calls for attacks and hostilities, but rather a respect for dissenting
individuals's conscience, and for their right and freedom to express
their thoughts on the matter outside of the community the institutions have
been elected to guide and indeed shape, that is to me a credit to the process.

As we move onto weighing the impact of this sad development, I think that the concerns expressed regarding its potential fallout are legitimate and inevitable.
There is no doubt that this event can be neatly fitted into the narrative of such as perceive or advocate a "culture war" in the Bahá'í community. On the other hand, others might see it as simply one fairly reasonable manifestation of a complex
and age-old challenge common to all religious traditions and communities, namely, harmonising the challenge of individual self-expression with that of community cohesion.

Traditionally where the balance has weighed on the former, schism has been the result, while
where the balance has weighed on the latter the result has tended to be the denial of the
individual's right to freedom of conscience. In this case the head of the Faith, in
excercising its legitimate and constitutional right to determine the qualifications for
membership in the Bahá'í community, which is a voluntary act and is in no way demanded or
expected of anyone, has excluded an individual from membership on the basis of an "established pattern of behaviour and ...statements published" which it considers incompatible with membership in the community, without however adding
anathemas, questioning his right to publish such statements, seeking retractions, casting
aspersions upon his character or otherwise infringing on his freedom of thought or of
expression. This surely represents a comparatively benign way of dealing with a
situation that has confronted every religious community from its origins and led to some of the most bloody and fractious episodes in history.

From this perspective, it is perfectly fair for an individual to determine his own opinions,
beliefs, and actions, even as it is perfectly fair for the responsible institution to judge
their compatibility with its own criteria for membership and with the dynamics of community
development that it cosiders appropriate. This principle would seem to apply quite logically
even outside the religious sphere, where voluntary membership in a constituted association
implies acceptance of its constitution, and where the ultimate decision on whether this is the case lies with the constituted body's governing institution.

This is radically different from the Catholic concept of excommunication
(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05678a.htm) which has as its aim forcing a change of belief
or action in the excommunicant, to be expressed through penance, thus infringing on freedom of conscience. The consideration by an elected, constituted body that a set of individual
statements and behaviour are incompatible with its criteria for membership does not carry with it a demand for a change of opinion, much less a call for penance. It is even farther removed from the catholic concept of anathema, which, in addition to the excommunication, condemns the anathemised person to everlasting hell.

It is likewise far removed from the Muslim practice of takfir. The takfir or decree of
unbelief, while in some ways analogous, is generally not primarily a determination of the
membership status of an individual but a moral judgement frequently attached to punitive
measures (hadd) and a reduction in political, military and/or judicial rights (as opposed to
membership rights). It implies eternal damnation and at the very least it is a measure designed to stimulate a hostile response in the community:

"The “fatawa of condemnation” [takfir] constitute an extraordinarily provocative genre of response in the annals of Islam. They provoked action; they aroused rebuke; and they served to banish from the fold of Islam the most troublesome elements, who threatened to unravel the fabric that bound one Muslim to another." (John Ralph Willis, “The Fatwas of Condemnation,” in Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas, eds. Mohammed Khalid Masud et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 153.)

In contrast the termination of membership status in this case has been communicated privately to the individual and to the institutions concerned (and could have remained largely anonymous without affecting wider interactions outside his immediate Baha'i community, depending on the choice of the individual), without a hint of
moral judgement or condemnation, and in no way calls for or implies a hostile response from
believers, as a passage of the Guardian cited by the House of Justice in its letter on theocracy from 1995 makes clear:

"...the mere fact of disaffection, estrangement, or recantation of belief, can in no wise detract from, or otherwise impinge upon, the legitimate civil rights of individuals in a free society, be it to the most insignificant degree. Were the friends to follow other than this course, it would be tantamount to a reversion on their part, in this century of radiance and light, to the ways and standards of a former age: they would reignite in men's breasts the fire of bigotry and blind fanaticism, cut themselves off from the glorious bestowals of this promised Day of God, and impede the full flow of divine assistance in
this wondrous age." http://bahai-library.com/uhj/theocracy.html

Hence, while the recent policy of disenrolment of a relatively few individuals (I am aware of less than five), could be cast in the rather inflammatory discourse of
excommunication or takfir, I think a much closer parallel would be the much more common, and much less controversial cases of disenrolment from all kinds of voluntary associations, sometimes acrimonious, but never entailing the moral judgements, metaphysical consequences, and demands for recantation associated with the religious practices reviewed above, and entirely inapplicable to this and similar cases.

This is important to bear in mind because the tensions that have led to this impasse are
tensions universally associated with the phenomenon of religious community around the
world and across history, and hence it is likely to reccur as the years go by, one hopes in
decreasing frequency as we develop a more creative, more cohesive discourse that liberates
our capacity for self expression by engendering a richer and less contentious culture of dialogue.

Even so, I think it is unrealistic to expect or demand that such tensions cease to stimulate
intervention from a constituted body vested with the task of ensuring, according to its best
judgement, the unity of the community above and beyond the diversity of perspectives it
demonstrably tolerates and even fosters. As with any other religious community without exception, such tensions are bound to result from time to time in both, principled individual dissent, and principled institutional action.

What must be borne in mind I feel is the distinctiveness of the response, which in my view
combines a sense of collective stewardship over the development of the community the Universal House of Justice has been elected to guide and nurture, with a respect for the sacrosanct right to freedom of conscience in the individual, effectively saying that the individual's views are his or her own concern, but their compatibility with membership requirements and community dynamics in their turn are its own legitimate concern. Where it perceives a conflict, without restricting or even condemning the individual's principled perspective, it may legitimately act within the sphere of its constitutional responsibilities.

Thus the disenrolment is in no way accompanied by warnings or encouragements to
cease from writing or acting in the vein that has led to the disenrolment. It is simply made clear that it would be inappropriate to do so within the context of Baha'i membership as defined by that membership's elected, ruling body.

I am not suggesting that takfir does not have to do with membership status. In fact there are indeed some analogies, precisely relating to this aspect of the decision. However, when one is disenrolled from an association on the basis that its guiding body does not consider statements or actions taken in its name as compatible with membership therein (an example is the recent expulsion of Yehudi Menhuin's son Gerard from his father's eponymous
society for comments made in various articles that were incompatible with the
aims of the association), although great controversy may ensue, no one would
suggest that someone is losing their political, judicial or military
rights, but rather his membership rights which do include participation within
the membership body's structures. The Bahá'í community, after all, is a
membership organization, with very clear constitutional structures, and
what is being rescinded is specifically membership in that body, with,
obviously, the privileges, no less than the limitations, attached thereto. That is a
perfectly legitimate thing for any constituted body to do, within or
outside religion. In practice, the decision of the Universal House of Justice
means an individual will no lnger be able to contribute to Bahá'í funds, elect or be
elected onto institutions, or participate in the 19 Day Feast. Apart from that
no space of Bahá'í community is closed, no association curtailed, no Bahá'í
activity forbidden. He may continue to write as he wishes, and publish as
he wishes.

To confuse this with political, judicial and military rights is to cloud the
issue. The courts, the government, the police, his freedom of movement,
speech and interaction have in no wise been curtailed. Only such spaces
as attach to membership in a specific and quite small membership body have
been cut off, naturally enough, along with membership therein.

Now, I think the differences from Takfir should be most apparent! The
Universal House of Justice in its letter does not make any declarations
on an individual's belief, or declares him an unbeliever. It addresses specifically
his "membership", not his belief, in "the Bahá'í community", in the light,
notof his beliefs, which it leaves to himself, but of behaviour and
statements that it considers, perfectly within its rights, the individual in question has himself clearly stated, in conflict with the qualifications of membership in the
constituted association known as the Bahá'í community. No pronouncement on his
relationship with God is made, only with the Bahá'í community as a
membership body under its authority and care.

This is radically different from takfir situations, which, as all the
legal literature on takfir will reveal to the most casual observer, is to be
followed by an appropriate hadd or punishment additional to the severance
of membership. In the past this has frequently tended to mean execution...
We are, if we be fair, rather far from such dimensions. I do think, and
there will be enough expertise here to clarify the matter in case I am
mistaken, that the greater Kufr or unbelief, on the basis of which a fatwa of
takfir is issued, does carry the necessary implication of damnation, unless
repentance is made. Here the House of Justice is not saying, you may not
believe as you do, let alone you will rot in Hell for it, it is simply
saying that the positions advanced are incompatible with its criteria for
membership, as happens daily in hundreds of thousands of membership
bodies around the world.

It seems exaggerated therefore to equate the House of Justice saying that a number
of ideas, statements and behaviours are incompatible with membership in the
Bahá'í community, to say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie,http://www.iranian.com/Pictory/2003/February/fatwa.html
or in the most benign of cases, as in the case of the takfir against
Shaykh Jassiem of South Africa, implying at the least being declared one to whom
is "denied admittance to mosques and Muslim burial grounds, to whom marriage
is prohibited by Muslim law, and with whom Muslims should not associate" (p. 115 of Appeal Court Judgment).

The equivalent is clearly non-existent here. No temples are closed, no
marriages impeded, no association forbidden, no burial forsworn. Simply
membership in a membership body is suspended by that body's governing
institution, without, it is true, the privileges attached thereto in
relation participation in that body's institutions, but likewise without
the constraints associated, such as Bahá'í review and obedience to its
governing body.

In relation to my emphasis on terminolgy, it has been written "whether it is takfir or not", but clearly, as in the examples given, this a very important distinction, since if it is takfir it carries a far more explosive, contentious and intrusive implication than
if its is, as it in fact appears, a disenrolment pure and simple. That it
is a punitive measure, I think it is perfectly legitimate to hold, as is
disenrolment in any and all membership bodies, but not in the sense of
say, administrative sanctions, which have as their aim to induce a change of
behaviour and compliance and hence being accompanied by warnings and
exhortations.

One may indeed disagree with the decision, but to makse such disagreement
the basis of vehement accusations of takfir is to disregard the nature,
and legitimacy, of a perfectly common, perfectly legitimate, if not for that
palatable or even correct decision by a membership body's elected, governing
institution. Thus I have no problem with someone considering this
decision wrong, but do think it unreasonable to present it in the loaded and
inappropriate garb of takfir, anathema, or excommunication, or to present
it as a priori illegitimate, or to equate it with a violation of political,
judicial or human rights at a time when the eggregious violation of such
rights is endemic and infinitely more serious and far reaching than the
suspension of membership in a voluntary religious association. To equate
the latter to the former is to trivialize one and sensationalize the
other.

Finally, as regards the notion of doctrinal tribunals, the very point
here is that there is no attempt to infringe on the individual's liberty of
thought, no requirement to change his beliefs, his statements or even his
behaviour, hence no congregation for the doctrine of the faith, no
theological trial, much less the rather explosive and potentially
inflammatory concept of "theological crimes"! This is not about belief,
but about community.

One can pounce on this very sad episode as a lurid attempt to purge the
Bahá'í community of its intellectuals, to infringe on people's civil
rights, to silence their voice and pronounce fatwas of takfir against them. But
I suspect that most dispassionate observers will see this rather as one
fairly low key manifestation of a universal tension in religion between
individual scholarly interpretation and community cohesion, which does not spell the
end of rigorous intellectual production within its ranks (surely the
worth of work produced by the likes of Buck, Lawson, Momen, Lambden, Knight,
Quinn, etc., will be judged for its scholarship and not for its faith
allegiances) ; an episode which no court of law would consider a human or
even civil rights violation, but a constituted body's legitimate (correct
or incorrect) action, implemented discretely and as far as possible
protecting the privacy of the individual concerned (his immediate institutions were
logically notified of his being unable to serve on them, but apart from
them this in no way impled, as you put it, "a very public" act, none of us
would know about it, nor most of the Bahá'í world, had it not been shared by
the author himself); and, while expressing institutional disagreement with a
given position (surely a perfectly reasonable thing to do), and judging
it outside its membership criteria - yet making no calls on it to be
modified, much less muted; and while implying potentially an ethical disapproval
(surely an equally reasonable possibility for anyone) in no way accompanied
by the extreme condemnations and proscriptions associated with takfirs or
excommunications.

In the hope that this clarifies somewhat my understanding, and contributes
to engendering a less fractious, more nuanced discourse on a universal,
if unuplifting situation inherent in the phenomenon of religious community
itself, and linked (not condemned) in social science to the need for
boundary maintenance, the processes by which a community seeks to build
an identity that promotes commonality and cohesion and which, while
legitimate, is not always harmonious,

With love,as ever,

Ismael

Problems with the Ruhi Model

2007-06-05T00:17:00.000Z

This post is the result of honest exchanges on the challenges, the tensions, the heartaches that many of us have found in the process of integrating the Ruhi study circles into our communities and our lives.

Among the questions addressed in this post are: pro-Ruhi vs. anti-Ruhi; how do we judge if is it a good or a bad methodology? Painful Ruhi experiences, successful Ruhi experiences, rigid attitudes and disenfranchisement of fellow Bahá'ís, discarding firesides and deepenings for Ruhi, dealing with narrow community responses, participation and abstention, fostering change. And throughout reflections on the Ruhi model, on tutoring, and on Books 2 and 6 of the Ruhi sequence.

The following, then, is one attempt at understanding the place and implementation of the Ruhi model in the processes of community growth and cultural change, and addressing some of the very real and painful tensions that arise along the way.

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Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the world Bahá'í community today is the imperative to a change of culture whose magnitude we are still, it seems, very far from begining to conceive. The timescale contemplated for this change stretches from 1996 to the year 2021, the end of the first century of the Formative Age of the Faith.

I don't think the vast majority of us, myself included, have grasped the degree of change that such a timescale implies. Rather, we seem to approach, with great frustration, the changes being introduced into our community processes as a rather full-scale make-over, which nevertheless remains purely cosmetic. We are yet far from recognising 1996 (the moment when this process of conscious culture-change was propelled by the Universal House of Justice), as "a turning point of epochal magnitude." (Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 153, 1996)

As this process has gathered momentum, it has become increasingly, virtually universally, linked to the Ruhi Institute, bringing in its wake, the world over, both great successes and formidable cultural tensions. In the midst of the undoubted trials accompanying the profound tranformation we are undergoing (and it is a profound transformation, which, as these exchanges aver, is painful all over, however pregnant with promise), I find solace, direction and power in the moving and instructive words of the Universal House of Justice.

"Let no excessive self-criticism or any feelings of inadequacy, inability or inexperience hinder you or cause you to be afraid. Bury your fears in the assurances of Bahá'u'lláh. Has He not asserted that upon anyone who mentions His Name will descend the "hosts of Divine inspiration" and that on such a one will also descend the "Concourse on high, each bearing aloft a chalice of pure light"? Step forth, then, into the arena where all His loved ones are equally summoned, equally challenged and abundantly blessed. For to teach, Bahá'u'lláh Himself affirms, is to do the "most meritorious of all deeds". And at this extraordinary moment in the history of the planet, nothing whatever is of more critical importance than inviting people of every sort and every gift to the banquet table of the Lord of Hosts." (Ridvan 152, 1995, p. 3)

What I frequently feel in discussions of the Ruhi process is the presence, explicit or implicit, of "excessive self-criticism" and/or "feelings of inadequacy, inability or inexperience", which generate frustration, can provoke disunity, and, in the end, "hinder" us, and cause us "to be afraid", for the future of the Cause, the viability of its processes, or our own space and sense of belonging within its community. And really, it is only through that spirituality that breaks through us when "the heart giveth way, and willing or not, turneth humbly in prayer unto the Kingdom of the Lord", that the promises and assurances of Bahá'u'lláh achieve the inner plausibility and eventual certitude to act as a genuinely compelling counterweight to the ubiquitous material evidences of our inescapable "inadequacy, inability and inexperience", before what, with the eye of faith, is a Plan which is firmly in the mighty grasp of God, under the stewardship of His Universal House of Justice.

I have seen and shared in dismal, disempowering study circles. As I reflect upon them, my negative experiences of Ruhi have teded to take place at early stages of its implantation in a new cultural context, be that a national community or a cluster or locality. I remember it from the very beginning of the process in Scotland and encountered it again much later at a similar stage on the local level in different places, and again when I moved to Tenerife. There are two tendencies which I see in the early stages of the application of Ruhi, and which I have personally observed in some 5 communities in different countries, and heard echoed in other places too. One is to take a minimalist approach to Ruhi, which basically, as the experiences so reccurrently shared in this dialogue also painfully illustrate, may mean that only those who have done the relevant book are to do the core activities. Alternatively it may mean that only the core activities are to be done, and the anecdotes shared about Auxiliary Board members declaring that deepenings were a thing of the past, or the local discouraging of firesides, or the dismissing of Association of Bahá'í Studies meetings because they lacked a skills component, etc. This flies in the face of all the guidance which on the contrary urges us to be entreprneurial as individuals, to experiment, to initiate, wherever we might be or not in the sequence. The other extreme, which I have seen in the early stages too, is the maximalist extreme, where the instruments, instead of mastered, are altogether recast into alien if more familiar configurations. Here Ruhi becomes a poor deepening. A third hamstringing of the Ruhi model is, in my experience, to divorse it from the simultanoues and equally crucial elements of the new paradigm of growth, namely, the concept of the cluster and its stages of capacity building, and the concept of core activities. Isolated from these complementary elements, the effectiveness of Ruhi in consolidating and propelling community development becomes mutilated and hence distorted.

On the other hand, I have also found consistently, in my own personal experience, the Ruhi model's power to transform, to motivate, to unite and inspire, both new and old believers, from all social classes and levels of education and understanding, at the same time. In a recent Book 1 that finished last december, I had the precious gift of tutoring a circle which began with 10 non-bahá'ís and 3 Bahá'ís. The beginning was wonderfully fun and challenging, with an age range of 16-82, all women bar me. By the third or fourth session there were only 5 of us who could make it regularly, me the only Bahá'í, with occasional "parachutists" who dropped in and spiced the circle. They all became Bahá'ís. One more who had to leave the circle, became a believer the week after, and finished the book in her own town with different tutors. The transformations were palpable. One man, disabled and obese, with low self esteem and a serious problem with his temper, transformed so dramatically within the first few weeks, actually within the first few days of initiating the excercise of reading the writings morn and eve, with the single prayer he had been given, that first he remarked upon it, then his mum phoned another participant, without any idea that her son was involved in anything, to say that he had tranformed beyond recognition for the better. The atmosphere itself was transforming, so that one old lady that two of the participants were employed to care for, and who did not really follow very much, softened and revived, to the point that her relatives and acquaintances asked her carers whether they had been putting new make-up on her because she looked so well. I could go on with the stories. They proved successful in raising human resources too. The four new believers had been attracted in the first place by the single new believer with whom we started the circle. Only last week, some three months after ending book 1 and one month into book 2, the same man I mentioned, who has no eloquence, no apparent "leadership" qualities, and very limited knowledge, brought another soul into the Cause. The neighbouring circle had similarly strong results, with three of the four participants becoming believers and the other one a closet Bahá'í. One of those new believers brought, almost concurrently, the week after her declaration, another soul into the Faith. Another of those believers initiated a regular devotional in her home. For unit convention, they could not make it, but all sent postal ballots. The believers in my circle had had no previous contact with the Faith. One was a mormon, another a Catholic, another a more synchretic seeker. From the other circle they all recently went to the World Centre on a 5 day visit, without much money, all of which they spent on the trip. You can understand that such an experience can be deeply moving, and it was so for me. The bonds I have made I will take to the next life with me.

Now, this is just one successful experience. As I say I have also had pretty poor ones. And anecdote by anecdote we can build either picture. What is going on? That the process of developing, implementing, refining, transplanting, implementing, refining, multiplying, refining again, and disseminating reformulated models of cummunity learning, is a developmental, laborious, time-consuming and non-linear process, that obeys the more general dynamics of Bahá'í community-building:

"The Faith advances, not at a uniform rate of growth, but in vast surges, precipitated by the alternation of crisis and victory."
(The Universal House of Justice, A Wider Horizon, Selected Letters 1983-1992, p. 53)

"The Faith of God does not advance at one uniform pace. Sometimes it is like the advance of the sea when the tide is rising. Meeting a sandbank the water seems to be held back, but, with a new wave, it surges forward, flooding past the barrier which checked it for a little while. If the friends will but persist in their efforts, the cumulative effect of years of work will suddenly appear."
(27 July 1980, written by the Universal House of Justice to a National Spiritual Assembly)
(The Universal House of Justice, 1993 Nov 09, Promoting Entry by Troops, p. 11)

We are, still, in the "cumulative years of work" stage. In this respect it is instructive to recall the stirring, and to many of us dangerously so, call from the Universal House of Justice for pioneers. Whereas in the past pioneer movements obeyed a spatial priority, where do we need more Bahá'ís to create or sustain fragile National Assemblies, the priority today is qualitative: where do we need more Bahá'ís to establish successful models of community that may be applied to communities in earlier phases of the community development process, understood in terms of cluster categories. When we have this critical mass of working models of community generally, and of the core activities specifically, it is logical to expect the focus to shift from model-building, to diversified application and adaptation of tried and tested models of success. I imagine and sense however that we are close to a qualitative leap, the "sudden effect", for the empirical base of good practice is very rapidly accumulating, built on multiple and formidable piles of average, mediocre and plain bad practice in our efforts to reach the heights, like the many dead ends, detours and scenic routes one takes to find the way to the centre of the labyrinth. Such meanderings are indispensable and inevitable parts of the process of finding the right track, however, once that track is found, and mapped from different starting points, the subsequent comings and goings are smoother and infinitely and more efficient. One can begin to focus on beautifying the paths, rather than simply discovering them.

This to me is precisely the point of getting the system fully in place and understood before judging and modifying it. Book 6, for instance, suggests that the process of launching a teaching campaign focused on a receptive population might and should take something approaching two years of preparation, consisting of a number of systematic, iterative pilot projects, evaluation and refinement. That kind of rigour or such timescales for a teaching campaign is not something we are used to. Likewise, I think the timescales involved in establishing, implementing, and understanding the three new concepts of core activities, sequential training, and capacity-building segmented clusters, are much longer than most people work with to arrive at judgements of their efficacy or adaptability. I am sure, and several letters allude to this, that after a good few years more, during which uniformity of format allows for validity of comparisons, there will be a phase of regional modification and adaptation, but one based on a worldwide, large-scale empirical process of action research, over several years, going on even as we speak and stewarded by the ITC, with a solid statistical and qualitative base in each country of the world. Only then will we be in a position to know what is essential and what is non-essential to the working models we have only begun to put in place.

The simple process of selecting those concepts, (core activities, sequential training, and capacity building segmented clusters) to build the present working model, took close to a decade of cross-cultural comparison, pilot projects and experimentation, as I discussed in my paper, not to mention the decades that went into building the alternative models from which the selection was made. Anyone with professional experience of community development will recognise the timescales and incredible resistance involved in incorporating participatory structures into communities, and the even longer timescales involved in making them work, as well as the conflict they almost inevitably engender as they disrupt existing structures and replace, not do away (in this I agree with the sceptics) existing hierarchies. What changes, in my view, is not the existence of hierarchy, but the more widely accessible processes underlying them, and the more transparent criteria and processes for establishing them. Again, anyone with solid grassroots experience in participatory democracy, will know how in the process of change a good number of immature power-games operate, on all sides, which become increasingly marginal, if the strategy is truly participatory and process focused, as the new structures gather momentum, familiarity and efficiency, that is, as they become integrated into the commonality of a new community culture.

I agree entirely that to see Ruhi-propelled firesides, devotionals, etc., as the invention of the wheel is both inaccurate and inhibiting. As I suggested in earlier messages, the distinctive element of this Epoch is that Bahá'í activities are integrated in a subtle and complex yet overarching context that involves Ruhi, not as a stand-alone activity, but as part of a system and model of community building and community development that also includes clusters categorized in accordance to community capacity and core activities tried and tested and eventually arrived at as the key generators of Bahá'í community. I this respect it is interesting to note that the quest for these key elements, for the most important activities to focus on to build and develop communities, began systematically in the first 9 Year Plan, and only after immense experimentation and further systematic pilot projects it was found that these three, now four core activities, are the support of the proverbial lever.

In other words, what makes the new paradigm of Bahá'í community distinctive is not the concrete activities. As Century of Light explains, by the 1980's there was not an activity or approach that had not been tried. Rather it is their integration into a coherent, globally applied systemic model that enables systematic community learning to take place, and, out of the immense range of Bahá'í activity, identifies, not on the basis of theory or personal preference, but on the basis of exhaustive trial and error across decades and countries and ethnicities, those "core" elements that have the capacity, within a sufficiently large yet coherent geographical area with a basic institutional and community capacity (several functioning LSA's , a good number of capable believers who understand and support the new systemic processes of growth), to achieve a multiplication and enrichment of
Bahá'í community activity, and a context that facilitates growth. This coherent and shared model makes possible the meaningful comparison of data and achievements, which in turn enables refinement to the model. Thus the core activities began as three, but as the model was applied in a variety of contexts, it became apparent that the education of junior youth played a no less important, foundational role in the gestation of community as the previous three activities. We now have 4 core activities. Again, the devotional meetings and study circles were originally built into the model as Bahá'í only activities. The accumulation of comparable experiences within a coherent model allowed for a further refinement that first encouraged further experimentation in opening these activities to the wider community, and then made such involvement of the acommunity of interest in these core activities absolutely pivotal to the global model we are applying, going as far as designating them portals for entry by troops. This change was reflected in the new statistics of non-Bahá'í participation that began to be gathered. In the Canaries, devotionals that don't include non-Bahá'ís are no longer quantified, for the statistical needs of the model have moved on.

The point I'm making is that by linking our individual initiatives to the new mechanisms of this epoch, the core activities, the Ruhi focused institute process, the cluster and its area committees, the community of interest, the capacity building movement through cluster categories, what we are doing is not merely, or I would argue primarily, contributing in a frequently haphazard way to our local community. Rather, we are participating in a systematic process of cummunity learning on a global scale that, for community development professionals, is an incredible, awe-inspiring achievement. We do so, not only by our own reflection on how to make the new tools work for us, but specially by furnishing a unqiquely individual, precious atom of experience that, when systematically viewed alongside thousands of similar contributions, will reveal, under the inspired guidance of the Universal House of Justice the parts of our experience that are genuinely in tune with the potentialities of our moment, those which are redundant, and those that are obstructive. This is a feedback loop that makes the community, as opposed to individual, insights incomparably keener, more widely accesible to more diverse participants, and better skilled at growth, change and maturation.

In this light, it is important to recognize that Ruhi itself is very far from static, and that the empirical evidence that has been and is being gathered through its application in diverse cultural contexts has already dramatically changed its contents from its original Colombian incarnations. To cite but one example, in Colombia the arts played no significant part in the Ruhi methodology. In book 7 it is critical. Again, in Colombian Book 7 itself did not exist, and the sequence was not always the same. Originally Book 1 began with Life After Death. So, as with every other tool (examples could be added of change in our modelling of clusters, and I am certain the same will happen before long with junior youth, as the three core materials become tested and tried in enough environments for enough time).

With this in mind I, for one, consider myself very far from being in a position at such an early stage in the game and with such geographically limited experience, to really get what Ruhi is about. Each time I study it some more, and particularly each time I creatively and receptively apply it once more, as well as each time I see it applied in a new cultural or social or even individual context, I realize that there is more to it than I previously thought. What I feel though is enough confidence to recognise when its failures are due to parrochial and inevitably ephemeral applications of the process, and when they appear to stem from structural aspects in the methodology itself. The biggest barrier to the successful implementation of Ruhi, not as either an exclusive endoeavour, or as a panacea for all challenges and problems, but merely as a crucial tool in propelling and integrating the learning-in-action of our community on a global scale, is the often alien and particularistic conceptual models we use to approach it and define it even before studying or experimenting open-mindedly with it in a spirit of learning to use a new instrument.

An example of such particularistic "either/or" models, which the Ruhi books set out, in fact, explicitly to challenge, is sadly furnished by the examples, which I have also seen in many, many places, with similarly discouraging impacts on so many Bahá'ís who feel disenfranchised when the either/or becomes naturally embodied in us/them relationships (both by advocates and detractors of Ruhi), is the perception that firesides and deepenings are somehow, if not a thing of the past, then at least in competition with Ruhi study circles and at a lower order of priority. Faithful application of the books' methodology, however, shows this to be a serious distortion of the model. The House of Justice letters on this subject are almost repetitive. Not only is Ruhi not a replacement for firesides but on the contrary firesides are enjoined as an essential part of the current pattern of community activity, for many years now, and measured in the statistics as measures of community capacity, vitality and progress. Deepenings, likewise, far from being marginal to the process, are the main service activity together with home visits of book 2, and there are many letters suggesting their indispensability and complementarity. Again, many letters emphasize the inadvisability of replacing other activities with Ruhi, rather Ruhi is seen as an engine to stimulate a multiplication of precisely such activities. That in early stages the result is the opposite is to be expacted, as the priority becomes having a core of trained resources. That happened here in Tenerife, as it happened in Nottingham, the two areas of which i have some close experience of the process. Then, as the priority for completing the sequence became less when a sufficient number of tutors became available, the focus precisely shifted onto the complementary activities indispensable to the success of Ruhi. Thus, the Ruhi sequence hardly covers the administrative order, and we have found that as new enrolments take place through Ruhi, devotionals and firesides, the need to deepen on this theme was pressing and obvious.

ut even within this framework, the minimalist approach, can be excessive, so that deepenings that are not vernatim recitations of Ana's talks, or firesides that likewise depart from the given texts in Books 2 and 6, are somehow seen as deviations, or at most approximations with regard to the ideal deepening and fireside. When one reads them closely, one discovers that the deepening, home visit and fireside contents are not prescriptive but indicative. Book 2, for instance, specifically suggests that the talks provided are starting points. The participants, including the tutor, have enormous room for creativity when applying the basic concepts and skills cultivated in book two to thei specific local and individual contexts, another thing that is explicitly encouraged in Books 2 and 7. The same applies with Book 6. The teaching campaign is offered, like Ana's talks in Book 2, as a template, but the group is encouraged to arrive at its own daily programme and campaign through consultation on its specific needs. The public talks suggested as part of an intensive campaign have titles that bear at times no resemblance to the templates given earlier. It is here that is suggested that the process of identifying a receptive population, getting to truly know and understand its needs, developing appropriate materials and approaches, and finally designing, on this basis, a comprehensive campaign, is likely to take some 2 years. Hardly a reified prescription or a rigid formula to be followed...

All this is very well in theory, but what to do when face to face with narrow attitudes (on either side of the proverbial fence), with inadequate implementations of the process, or with categorical judgements of its merits wholly on the basis of personal preference, local experience, or anecdote? What to do when a community, local, regional or national appears to be either apathetic about the nationally adopted Ruhi model, or else excessively, discouragingly and polarizingly rigid in its application? After all, what prompted this discussion are the real life experiences of pain before inadequate applications of the model, regardless of the merits that it may possess in theory, or that it may possess in paractice in more receptive or more experienced environments.

In the last analysis, what is described in such negative, and very, very far from universal experiences, is to me simply more evidence of the conceptual distance yet to be traversed by one community to understand better what the Universal House of Justice, and for those who care to read attentively, the Ruhi model itself, advances.Here, as in everything in the Bahá'í community, the nobility of our endeavours lies in our persistent arising before an ever more palpable consciousness that we are but mere approximations of what we most cherish and seek and are bidden be. We can retard things, but not stop them, The Word trumps all things, soon or late, every time, for love, in the end, rules in our hearts. If the House of Justice says, deepen, have firesides, do home visits, do external affairs, scholarship, SED, as well as the "core" activities, then, some communities quicker than others, we will respond, because the power of the Covenant ultimately impels us. You can only ignore the guidance, with good intentions, so many times before you "get it", then it's there for keeps. Now, the responsibility we bear in understanding and responding to it with promptitude is undoubted, and our progress, our "spiritual velocity" and community development are dependent on that. Thus there have always been diverse levels of achievement and vitality in different communities, as some engage fully with the guidance earlier or more wholeheartedly than others. Nor is this static. The British Bahá'í community was at the very vanguard of the world Bahá'í community, precisely because of the promptitude and consecration of its response to Shoghi Effendi's guidance. A recent message from the Universal House of Justice suggests that this community lost vitality over many long years, and has only just reclaimed its destiny, through a leap in response to the guidance of the Supreme Body. I found it interesting that, in highlighting the most distinguished achievements in community building, Century of Light dwelt exclusively on communities in the global South, even war-torn communities such as those in Liberia, with none of the more established communities with clear destinies, such as the United States or Britain, being singled out for praise, save in the area of external affairs. And while the institutions have an essential, a critical role in leading the community's engagement to the guidance of the Supreme Institution, there can be no doubt that the power of response is fundamentally vested in us as individuals, and it is when a sufficient numbers of individuals respond fully and intelligently, within and outwith institutions, that a community achieves the potentialities that invest it with destiny and vitality.

I am sure that is the case with Ruhi as well, with some communities having a more rounded and engaged perspective than others. I also think this is why there is such a focus on priority A clusters, because we need a good number of functioning models of the potential of the new processes, not only for expansion but also for consolidation, for a community that is rich and varied and rounded and abundant, in diverse contexts, to be able to disseminate that learning and change, gradually, entrenched or short sighted attitudes and cultures in less discerning or responsive contexts. To return to the example of the British Bahá'í community, it was the success of the American 7 Year Plan that prompted the UK Bahá'ís to request a plan of their own, being given a ridiculously ambitious 6 Year Plan by Shoghi Effendi. Far from responding on time, the British community lagged dramatically in it arising, so that the Guardian was forced to offer to postpone the deadline a few months, saying it is the most I can do. Hugh McKinley tells of Marion Hofman visiting every believer in the final year of the Plan to say: "Friends, you know why we are not accomplishing more? Because we don't understand the station of Shoghi Effendi. Not his function as Guardian, but his spiritual station as the Sign of God on earth, as the Will and Testament refers to him. If we did, we would not delay one instant." This message, as well as the Guardian's urgent pleas, in other words, the vitality of their love for the Centre of the Covenant, made them finally arise with such vigour and sacrifice as to win all goals in time and have the distinction of being the community which, in war-time and under the Blitz, sent forth more pioneers, some 60% of the community uprooting themselves entirely, if memory serves. Perhaps a more spiritual, more loving, more reverent and consecrated understanding, not only of the function, but of the station of the Universal House of Justice might accelerate and refine our level and quality of spiritual response, and in that leap increase not only our commitment, but our spirituality and success.

And in the meantime, here we are, still, with the same question: all that is very well, and the community may indeed advance gradually toward its destinty, and all things get better, but in the meantime, we are, many of us, still confronted with unpropitious community environments, feel left out, see better ways of doing things, would wish Ruhi study circles would be applied in different ways, and that frustration does not go away, and sometimes carries on growing.

Here I sense the importance and urgency of people who would not naturally gravitate toward Ruhi (I include myself), to get deeply involved in its processes, to go through the sequence, learn to make it work for them, increasingly, and then, from the spiritual leadership that success in close alignement to the guidance and thrust of the Plans naturally engenders (I'm not talking institutional leadership, but the simple power of attraction), we are in a position to bring our individuality to bear on the collective processes, and ensure, through our diversity, that the notes we hear that pass others by become part of the music, and that the notes we cannot yet make sense of and others seem to hear so clearly gradually resonate within our consciousness. This is not a narcisistic endeavour, but rather one the Universal House of Justice explicitly furthers:

"The advancement of the Cause is an evolutionary process which takes place through trial and error, through reflection on experience and through wholehearted commitment to the teaching Plans and strategies devised by the House of Justice. Believers ...who appreciate the opportunities thus provided, can be of great assistance by encouraging their respective countries and assemblies to similarly invest themselves in the process." (22 August 2002, to an individual)

In fact, not only as a tutor, but even as a participant in the Ruhi process one can stimulate such rounded applications of the process, simply by carrying out the practices involved in a way that personally makes sense. Anyone who gets to book 2 has an ample field indeed, as part of the course, even as a participant, to initiate a wide-ranging series of deepenings. That is an essential, critical part of Book 2's requirements. One of the key skills it seeks to develop. I have found that in my participation, even when the tutor is not switched on to the practice elements of the books, which are increasingly being emphasised at all levels now that the hurry simply to complete the sequence is over and the focus is on completing it well, I can, simply by offering a personal initiative to fulfill the Book's requirements, not only make deepenings and home visits happen, but stimulate others to feel more confident about doing so too, and in any case imparting an impulse to this dimension of the process.

Now, if one does not participate in these books, if one does not bring one's power of individual initiative and spiritual leadership based on attraction and consultation, if one does not engage with the actual practices of the learning process that lift the method from a conceptual, spiritual excercise to a life-engaging, life-challenging, and life-transforming iteration of prayerful study, action, and reflection around a common and spiritually informed purpose, then, as Moojan points out, the speed at which we will finally apply effectively the Ruhi system, with its concommittant implication of a multiplication of deepenings, firesides, teaching projects, arts events, and social interactions, will be much slower. The Faith relies on our diversity to achieve maximum effectiveness. As long as all the people who are instinctively resistant to the initial applications, and conceptualisations, of the Ruhi process, fail to become engaged in enriching and transforming it to fully include their distinctive orientations, the process will be distorted by the undoubted insights, and undoubted blindspots, of that population of Bahá'ís that resonates immediately with its early, woefully inadequate application.

The Native American experiences and perspectives on the Ruhi process, shared earlier, are highly instructive in this regard, and echo my own experiences of seeing the sequence applied the sequence in a Spanish, evangelical gypsy context. If, when encountering applications of the Ruhi sequence that silence the voice and diversity of the Native American, or Gypsy, or any range of populations relatively marginal to the cultural bias of a given Bahá'í community's culture, (might one include the formally trained scholarly population?) the reaction was non-involvement, not to speak of passive resistance, the maturation of these new processes would be hamstrung and retarded. It is on the contrary by their full engagement with the core guidance that unites and makes equal all Bahá'ís, that a space is created, a very empowering space, to broaden and enrich the cultural content and practical expression of the shared model of the Ruhi process. And, again and again, we find that that process will engender resistance, but more consistently and lastingly, engenders success, such as that reported among the Native American believers and their community of interest, and in the growth engendering circles here in Tenerife, and in the successfully inclusive study circkes in Nottingham and in the groundbreaking study circles with evangelical ministers among the gypsies of Spain. It is that success that eventually leverages cultural change, for the drive to succeed in applying the divine guidance is ultimately a more powerful motivator for Bahá'ís than that of preserving the status quo, which we cannot but be, if it is our primary cultural referent, very strongly attached to.

When I hear the reports of the distorted implementation in these very early stages of the process, and personally witness them too, and then hear the voice of those who feel somehow disenfranchised by the current application of the new processes, I silently pray that those, the disenfranchised, become fully engaged in the processes, "even unto tutoring", for I know that on this depends, in very significant measure, the pace of our eventual arrival at the working model that Ruhi has been systematically tested and modified to be, over several decades in several continents, or, in our case, to become. When it is fully in place, when we can say that the overwhelming majority of Bahá'ís in a community are applying the Ruhi methodology in all its aspects, with the proliferation of devotional meetings, deepenings, home visits, personal teaching plans, firesides, small group teaching projects, artistic creativity and empowering of local artistic traditions, and intimate informal socializing, all focused on a multitude of small groups of increasingly spiritually intimate friends deeply engaged with and authentically enriching their family, work, neighbourhood and friendship networks, only then, will we have a basis to judge the effectiveness of the Ruhi system, and be in a position to identify, from a position of experiential as well as statistical and theoretical insight, the adaptations and modifications that might refine its workings in a given local or national context.

This may sound like pie in the sky, but it is in fact the daily, if far from prosaic experience of a multitude of study circles the world over, which as yet constitute but a tiny proportion of the whole. This whole, the entirety of the thousands upon thousands of study cricles running worldwide, may be said to be distributed, in different concentrations en each national and local community, along a spectrum ranging from simple learning by rote, skipping "boring" or "simplistic" sections, else turning them into interminable discussions of personal opinions, without a practical or even an emotionally or intellectually engaging component, and an artistic element, if any, at most stretching to doing kids' drawings ;-), where membership is limited, sometimes by design, to Bahá'ís only, and only the right kind at that, (I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been part of such scary circles); all the way to empowering, dymanic and intellectually and spiritually exhilarating study circle experiences such as those described by in Native American communities, and such as I witnessed among the ministers and leaders of the Gyspy evangelical churches, and in my own little group, and such as doubtlessly many, many more people have experienced, dotted around the globe and building slowly a critical mass of good practice. When this is in place, when we have finally enough truly compelling, and sufficiently diverse "successful embodiments" of the Ruhi process the world over, its maturation beyond the simplistic polarities of an early conceptual framework with a budding and in many communities virutally non-existent and undiversified experiential base, will, I am certain, dramatically accelerate, as we stop having to reinvent the wheel, which we still largely have to do in most local contexts.

In this, as in all things in this Cause, in the absence of a clergy, depending entirely on the ultimately unfettered consent and participation of the individual, else his or her non-involvement, change takes place, engagement is effected, participation is leveraged, reflection and reconsideration are prompted by, primarily, the mighty power of example. Hence the priority now is, clearly, achieving the necessary number working models, of compelling examples, of a rounded, abundant application of the Ruhi process and the other key processes associated with this Epoch, that can be relevant, not universally but singly, to large rural communities, large urban ones, tiny urban ones, tiny rural ones, mainstream, alternative, ethnically mixed or homogenous, upper, middle, working class, and "lumpen", global North and global south.

As time goes by, and I understand better the Ruhi method, and get more experience under my belt, and put more fire into it in my own process of maturation, I find that my wonder increases, and my sense of its immense potential deepens. It also emphasises for me the developmental nature of the skilling and capacity building process. In our cluster Ruhi almost paralysed everything for some two or three years. Now it is beginning to act as a catalyst of further activity, but that is also linked to the equally developmental and still unwieldy tools of the cluster itself, of the area committee, and especially the budding intensive cycles, all of them new tools we are but learning to develop. It took the World Centre itself, as I discussed in my paper on community, some 5 years to develop a working model with hand-picked communities. We are but 6 years into a process of integrating counter-cultural methods into frequently ill-equipped communities without the benefits of direct and daily support, participation and guidance from the Counsellors . To judge the effectiveness of these tools at this point in time seems to me a bit like trying to measure the worth or beauty of a building when the foundations are still being laid, or the speed and maneuverability and flair of a car while driven by someone who only just got their license, and frequently by those like me who are still learning to drive.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that the reply of Candide to the theoretical meanderings of Pangloss after a long journey of personal experiential testing of reified mental models, is most apt: "all that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden." Let's create, each one of us, models that work, that we can share and contribute from our individuality and diversity, within the shared context of the processes of this Plan, which will give the fruits we pluck from our individual plot, a currency and impact that will undoubtedly go far beyond our little garden. It may be that some of the communities that don't get it, might do so yet, and that when they do the potential for making up for lost time might very much be there.

It makes me think of one of the most suggestive and touching passages of the Master:

"The blessings of Bahá'u'lláh are a shoreless sea, and even life everlasting is only a dewdrop therefrom. The waves of that sea are continually lapping against the hearts of the friends, and from those waves there come intimations of the spirit and ardent pulsings of the soul, until the heart giveth way, and willing or not, turneth humbly in prayer unto the Kingdom of the Lord."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 192)

That is how I see the processes of the change of culture, of the new mechanisms and the inherent, hidden blessings in the Universal House of Justice's guidance in this challenging new Epoch: as lappings of divine grace against the hearts of the myriad variegated communities that make up the people of Bahá. Eventually, each and all will give way, and, "willing or not", discover the bounty of knowing that He is the prayer-hearing, prayer-answering God. In the end, as that tablet further declares: "Ye live, all of you, within the heart of 'Abdu'l-Bahá."

Is that not beautiful and brimming with certainty?

With love,

Ismael

UPDATE

2007-06-01T12:39:00.000Z

Dear all,

Just to apologise to the people that so kindly left comments before, and also to the subscribers to my feed, for the trouble I had with the site. As early visitors can tell, I've had to revamp and redo the whole thing, and until a few minutes ago the feed was not working! Well, I think and hope it is now... There's a saying in Spanish: "echando a perder se aprende." You learn by messing up. So, do comment again, and, unless the evil djinn of cyberspace conspire against me, your comment will stay! And keep subcribing, and, unless the plotting Iblis gets the best of me, you will get this, and any future updates to my blog!

With love, as ever,

Ismael

"Due Process" and the Bahá'í Community

2007-05-27T08:32:00.000Z

The following is a reflection on the relationship of the concept of procedural due process in relation to the principle of Divine Justice that the House of Justice states is the framework for due process in the Bahá'í administrative Order.

The absence in Bahá'í administration, in particular, of a formal set of procedures to be universally applied for the discovery of facts necessary for the adjudication of a case and the application of sanctions for the infringement of Bahá'í law, has figured prominently in the anti-Bahá'í polemics of the last 20 years, frequently in relation to administrative responses to academic Bahá'ís and former Bahá'ís engaged, in the words of one such academic, in a "culture war" against perceived flaws in the current workings and leadership of Bahá'í institutions.

In this sense due process is defined in terms of procedural justice, and within that, in terms of the participation model of procedural justice. It is argued that a lack of such procedures, and in particular procedures modelled after the participatory model of procedural justice, leads to systemic unfairness, and conversely, that the elaboration and application of such a framework of universally applicable procedures modelled on Western legal systems would ensure fairer processes and outcomes.

In a letter of the Universal House of Justice, the notion of due process as a constitutional principle of legal fairness is endorsed, while the notion of due process as a universal set of formal procedures to be applied is rejected:

"The concept of due process, in the sense of a legal principle which may be embodied in a constitution and which requires the government to treat people fairly, is clearly encompassed by the Bahá'í principle of "Divine justice," a principle characterized as "the crowning distinction of all Local and National Assemblies." It is also implicit in the qualities of rectitude of conduct to be manifested "in every verdict which the elected representatives of the Bahá'í community . . . may be called upon to pronounce.

"The term "due process" is also used to indicate a set of formal legal procedures designed to protect the rights of persons accused of wrongdoing. These procedures vary from place to place and may reflect the prevailing political ideology. The Administrative Order has not adopted a formal set of procedures to be applied universally in the Bahá'í community for dealing with infringements of Bahá'í law. Rather, the Spiritual Assembly in its operation is guided and constrained by the Teachings and committed to protect and preserve the rights of both the individual and the community. Hence, while there is no fixed procedure for the discovery of facts necessary for the adjudication of a case, it is a matter of principle that Assemblies must, before passing judgment, acquaint themselves, through means they themselves devise, with the facts of any case.

"The principal motive is not to condemn and punish the individual but to assist him, if necessary, to bring his behavior into conformity with the Teachings and also to protect the community."

(Letter written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice, datedJuly 20, 1988, included with a letter dated January 1, 1989, to a National Spiritual Assembly)

* * * * *

Dear all, I have been following this discussion with great interest. There is no doubt that the issues at stake are crucial, and likely to grow in importance in relation to both the growth and longevity of Baha'i communities, and in relation to the Faith's emergence from obscurity. The way we deal with dysfunctions, wrongful behaviour, and judicial matters (in the broadest sense) will have an immense impact on our culture, our engagement with wider society, and most crucially on our unity.

I must say that I profoundly sympathise with the concerns raised. There are few things as testing to a sincere Baha'i as being misrepresented or even legitimately "inquired" into. Whatever the actual administrative consequences of such a process, its spiritual and emotional impact should in no way be minimised. Even should such an inquiry proceed no further, it is not an experience anyone would wish for. Likewise, the degree of discretion available to LSA's and other institutions is such that institutional or spiritual immaturities, or even simple ignorance, can have an enormous impact. Often Baha'is affected will not feel able or inclined to take it any further, so communities don't always learn from their mistakes or trials.

This inclines me to agree to the view that some measure of guidance on "due process" would be beneficial, although I do feel closer to the suggested communitarian emphasis on mutual responsibilities (which implies but does not over-emphasise the notion of rights), than to the more legalistic approach likewise put forward. Law, as exercised and understood currently, is in no way a guarantee or even a prerequisite of justice. In point of fact, in UK, for instance, most crime goes undetected, most detected crime never makes it to the courts, and a great deal of the crime that makes it to the courts results in no conviction. In civil law, the situation is not much better, and generally speaking, factors other than due process or validity influence outcomes. Not only the design, but the operation of the law is demonstrably biased against certain social groups, notably ethnic minorities and the poor, and in many areas of the law, women. Due process, for all its rigour, even where followed, is a long way from ensuring justice. Attempts to tackle racism through increased legislation for instance, barely touch the surface, making dents so small as to be hardly noticeable. What is needed, as has been pointsed out, is not, primarily, refined procedures, but a spiritual transformation, as 'Abdu'l-Baha often remarked in relation to the proliferation of legislation in the West.

There are also certain radical problems in my mind about legal procedures that, it has been suggested, if I understand correctly, we incorporate into Baha'ipractice. We can already turn, as individuals, to assistants, Auxiliary Board memebers and Counsellors for advice in our relations to an LSA. This is, however, very different from the idea of "counsel" as it operates in the courts and is implied in legal documents on due process. The idea of a"defense" counsel, whose job is to defend his client regardless of what he might consider to be the truth, is a position I would not envy anybody, and the same goes for the prosecution. The generally lackluster movie Devil'sA dvocate jumps to mind, in the acquital of a pederast whose defense knew him to be guilty. Last Christmas I had dinner with a young man who is today inprison, convicted of rape, on the testimony of a woman who, it emerged after the trial, had made a string of similar accusations before, which had proven false. He was very drunk at the time and did not remember much. Upon his conviction, the prosecution lawyer apologised to his family, and is now helping him with his appeal! There was not, in this case, a single violation of due process, in fact the opposite, it was through due process that the prosecution was impelled to work for a conviction even when, as it became apparent after the fact, the prosecution lawyer considered such an outcome unfair. Be that as it may, a talented young man's life has been shattered.

These are dramatic examples to suggest that the notion that detailed laws and formal processes are the basis of justice is, by itself, flawed. I would invert the equation. The current, litigation based view of "counsel", can be as destructive as it is constructive, and involves an inherent logic that can often pitch it outside the quest for truth. In small community and group settings, in fact, detailed legal codes are no prerequisites of justice, and may often obscure it, in a way that consultative approaches at community level may or may not depending on circumstances. Attempts to import western legal procedures into communal legal processes among indigenous peoples in the Americas have very frequently ended in disasters,and triggered new injustices. I wonder whether any lessons - good and bad - might be shared from the experience of more communitarian styles of justice as practiced among the Navajo? The Zapatista uprising in Mexico in January 1994 focused all its political capital some years later in an attempt to alter the Mexican constitution to respect and protect the indigenous, communitarian judicial processes of the Mayans and other indigenous peoples in Mexico, under the conviction that they were considerably more effective at a community level among their people, than the Roman law that had been imposed on their communities with frequently devastating effects.

Finally, in this problematic, the current discourse on rights tends to come from a conflictive perspective, and has led in the States, and increasinglyin UK, to a culture of litigation that has nothing to do with the original vision of the framers of the Declaration of Human Rights. A recent human rights case in UK involves a prisoner pleading the prohibition on his receiving gay pornography as a fundamental violation of his human rights. The man has a point, since heterosexual pornography is allowed for fellow inmates, but somehow I see a big leap from the ethos and aspirations behind the Universal Declaration. The problem does not lie with the notion ofrights, which the Constitution of the Universal House of Justice explicitly protects, but it does lie in the spiritual, social and legal paradigm within which those rights are interpreted and pursued. It is here where I would return to the emphasis adduced earlier on the covenantal duty of consultation, true consultation, as the basis of the embryonic (if that) Baha'i communal legal practice.

The ethos of litigation which underpins current notions of due process seems to me to be as far removed from the Baha'i spirit of consultation as can be. Where is the prayerfulness? Where is the trust in the group process, and the ownership of ideas, suggestions, and opinions by the group, not the individual? Where is the presence of 'Abdu'l-Baha? American lawyers recognise that their chances of success are often dependent on their careful picking of a jury! To the consultative principles suggested, I would add one more, which is the principle of transcendence. The notion that our true judge is in fact God, and that it is to Him that we are accountable. Neither the wrongful sanction nor the wrongful acquittal by an Assembly will determine our innocence or otherwise, its integrity or otherwise. This means that even in the direst circumstances we retain the freedom of which 'Abdu'l-Baha spoke in prison. This is important, since few if any of our noblest Baha'i heroes have not experienced wrongful accusations, sometimes from each other (think of Lua Getsinger; Louis Gregory; Corinne True; among others; think of 'Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi!). In the last resort, there was a deeper reserve of legitimacy they could turn to for vision, authenticity and dignity, than the never less than painful opinions of fellow believers.

Notwithstanding, I still think that the idea of some guidance on dueprocess would be invaluable, as small communities of volunteers "improvise"their way around being a responsible Baha'i Assembly. At a time when one assembly constitutes the entire community, and another oversees the affairs of a community thousands strong, such guidance needs to be very flexible and probably minimalistic. I would suggest a "recommended" rather than a binding code of guidance from NSA's, including broad suggestions or quotes on such basic things as what constitutes "blatant or flagrant"; the importance of gathering the facts; the importance of a spirit of love and humility; on mechanisms of appeal; on consultation with the learned arm, assistance available through pastoral care committees of the NSA and the like; on dealing with criminal behaviour; on referrals to qualified professionals; etc. It could be made available on its own, as a point ofreference that Assemblies would turn to when in need of advice.

In any case, thank you for raising these points, and best of luck on your further investigations in this area.

With love,

Ismael

Daring to be Vulnerable

2007-05-27T08:29:00.000Z

This meditation was a response to a touching comment by one of the students at the Wilmette Institute, that addresses the nature, power, and imperative of vulnerability as largely unnoticed yet prominent ethical principle in the Bahá'í writings.

You write regarding the foundation of trust and communication in our communities: "My own observation is that the greatest healing moments come when an individual takes the risk to be vunerable and reach out to another individual. Those healed relationships ripple outwards."

How very true that seems to me too! It recalls to me 'Abdu'l-Baha's injunction to "expose your breasts for a target mirror bright". There is an immense strength in the act of vulnerability, and in fact it seems to me that it is precisely through the power of vulnerability that the Messengers and Chosen Ones of God have established their ascendency and effected change in society beyond their contemporaries' wildest dreams. It was not through the might of arms or wealth or dissimulation or guardedness that They conquered the hearts of humanity, but rather through Their willingness to trust in human beings when all around Them was betrayal and outward disappointment. It was Their willingness to offer love to those who would spurn Them, even unto torture and death. It was Their acts of self-disclosure when the mere thought of the risks entailed in Their unveiling would be enough to throw a lesser being into utter consternation - as Baha'u'llah Himself tells us in the Iqan referring to the Bab's divine mission:
"Another proof and evidence of the truth of this Revelation, which amongst all other proofs shineth as the sun, is the constancy of the eternal Beauty in proclaiming the Faith of God. Though young and tender of age, and though the Cause He revealed was contrary to the desire of all the peoples of earth, both high and low, rich and poor, exalted and abased, king and subject, yet He arose and steadfastly proclaimed it. All have known and heard this. He was afraid of no one; He was regardless of consequences. Could such a thing be made manifest except through the power of a divine Revelation, and the potency of God’s invincible Will? By the righteousness of God! Were any one to entertain so great a Revelation in his heart, the thought of such a declaration would alone confound him! Were the hearts of all men to be crowded into his heart, he would still hesitate to venture upon so awful an enterprise. He could achieve it only by the permission of God, only if the channel of his heart were to be linked with the Source of divine grace, and his soul be assured of the unfailing sustenance of the Almighty." (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 232)

This passage, at the same time, seems to me to give us the secret of this most healing of vulnerabilities: "He could achieve it only by the permission of God, only if the channel of his heart were to be linked with the Source of divine grace, and his soul be assured of the unfailing sustenance of the Almighty."

It seems to me that, to effect healing and build genuine spiritual intimacy within our communities, we need to achieve this spiritual vulnerability, this self exposure before one another that can deepen and refine love, but that to do so, this vulnerability should be "linked with the Source of divine grace" and sustained by the assurance of the "unfailing sustenance of the Almighty." In other words, in our vulnerability and powerlesness, in expressing our frailty or identifying our brokeness, whether as individuals or as communities, we should not do so expecting reddress or relief from one another, but rather depending on the bounty of the Lord God. For we are all ultimately a community of broken winged birds, and our flight is very slow. "We come with no provision but our sins, with no good deeds to tell of, only hopes" as 'Abdu'l-Baha wrote in the exquisite prayer that forms the second section of Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l Baha.

I have come to think that an inevitable effect of bringing diversity together, not only of ethnicity or culture but also of temperament, inclination, personality, emotional strength, etc., is the noticeable emergence of blindspots that keep us from appreciating or effectively honouring each other's distinctiveness. Our very diversity means that of necesity, as we get to know each other, we will tread on each other's sensibilities, display ignorance about each other's values and, generally inadvertently, act in ways that unconsciously exclude one another from full heartfelt participation in our emerging community. In this context, our readiness to be vulnerable can act both as healing water that gently fills the gaps in our understanding and our insight into each other, or as fuel to fan the flame of disharmony when tied to expectations of each other that are unrealistic, or when expressed in language that is immoderate, or when touched by bitterness or lingering resentment.

When the act of vulnerability is divorced from consciousness of the presence and almighty assistance of God, it generally comes to depend on human or material means for fulfilment, exposing one to disappointment in each other, to hoplesness, and disconnection. When, on the contrary, the act of vulnerability is "linked with the Source of divine grace", then spiritual abundance sustains the act of self exposure, confidence in ultimate fruition in God's will informs the manner and tone of our communication, and the possible outward disappointments and rejections we might suffer are powerless to disillusion or divide us. For such a link with the Source of grace implies a trust in Him above and beyond this world, which is the source of true inner peace and contentment. Indeed, it seems to me that this spiritual vulnerability is captured in the sublime words addressed by the Master to Hand of the Cause Tarazullah Samandari, whose bounty it was to have known Baha'u'llah:

"O thou who art turning thy face towards God! Close thine eyes to all things else, and open them to the realm of the All-Glorious. Ask whatsoever thou wishest of Him alone; seek whatsoever thou seekest from Him alone. With a look He granteth a hundred thousand hopes, with a glance He healeth a hundred thousand incurable ills, with a nod He layeth balm on every wound, with a glimpse He freeth the hearts from the shackles of grief. He doeth as He doeth, and what recourse have we? He carrieth out His Will, He ordaineth what He pleaseth. Then better for thee to bow down thy head in submission, and put thy trust in the All-Merciful Lord.

(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 52)

This means to me that, even as we turn to address the challenges and problems that affect or afflict our community or our relationships within it, in our hearts we seek the remedy from God "alone"; becoming independent and free from material causes and human capacities; depending in Him and trusting in His merciful Will. We supplicate to God, as in our Long Obligatory Prayer, even in the midst of our ardent yearnings and desires, "Look not upon my hopes and my doings, nay, rather look upon Thy Will that hath encompassed the heavens and the earth". Then, in the words of Baha'u'llah, will we feel "the winds of divine contentment blowing from the plane of the spirit." Then will we burn away "the veils of want, and with inward and outward eye, perceiveth within and without all things the day of: “God will compensate each one out of His abundance.” (Baha'u'llah, The Seven Valleys, p. 30)

Our vulnerability, then, begins in a consciousness of God's omniptence and mercy, and human beings' ineradicable imperfection and inadequacy of response (our own included):

"Look ye not upon the creatures, turn ye to their Creator. See ye not the never-yielding people, see but the Lord of Hosts. Gaze ye not down upon the dust, gaze upward at the shining sun, which hath caused every patch of darksome earth to glow with light. O army of God! When calamity striketh, be ye patient and composed. However afflictive your sufferings may be, stay ye undisturbed, and with perfect confidence in the abounding grace of God, brave ye the tempest of tribulations and fiery ordeals." (Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 75)

Only in such a plane will we attain the divine meekness to which Baha'u'llah called His own son when he counselled: "Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men." (Baha'u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 95)

For with the detachment implied in our absolute reliance "on Him alone" and not on each other, comes, inseparably, a meekness towards one another which Baha'u'llah Himself exemplified to us, and which is to me the very essence of the vulnerability the transforms and heals communities:

"Exalted, immeasurably exalted, is His detachment above the reach and ken of the entire creation! Glorified, glorified be His meekness—a meekness that hath melted the hearts of them that have been brought nigh unto God!" (Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 244)

It is this divine meekness that holds the secret of unity, as explained by 'Abdu'l-Baha:

"His reason for putting on the heavy iron chains and for becoming the very embodiment of utter resignation and meekness, was to lead every soul on earth to concord, to fellow-feeling, to oneness; to make known amongst all peoples the sign of the singleness of God, so that at last the primal oneness deposited at the heart of all created things would bear its destined fruit, and the splendour of ‘No difference canst thou see in the creation of the God of Mercy,’[1] would cast abroad its rays." [1 Qur’án 67:3 ]
(Abdu'l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, p. 264)

May we, through His unfailing bounty, attain to such meekness, and thereby taste of such concord, fellow-feeling, such primal oneness deposited, already, at the heart of all created things. Thank you, luminous Debra for your reflections, and accept these broken thoughts as a token of affection in this wonderful festival of Ridvan.

Your friend in Baha,

Ismael

Divine Retribution against Jews: Beyond Anti-semitism

2007-05-27T08:26:00.000Z

The following message addresses a very difficult subject. The notion of divine retribution, the avenging God. Even more troubling, it arose in response to a thread expressing perplexity before the clear association made in the Bahá'í Writings between the Jewish rejection of Christ, and the subsequent destruction of the Temple, and the massacre and forced dispersal of the Jews. I myself am Jewish on my mother's side. My grandma (even the Mexican postman knew her as "granma") left Brooklyn for Mexico in the romantic 1940's, to marry my grandfather (a permanent but definitely less than romantic tie). Her parents, grandparents, aunts, and assorted extras, left Brestlitovsk, on the edge of Belarus, for New York City in the early 1920's. Anyway, this is a meandering way of saying that the awareness runs in the family of how this association between the Jewish rejection of Jesus, and the calamities the Jews underwent at the hand of the Romans, was made into one of the intellectual pillars of a brutal and enduring antisemitism and reppression for centuries to come. To find the association categorically asserted in the Writings, and used as a parallel to and illustration of what the destiny would be of Bahá'u'lláh's detractors, can be, and in this case was to many of the discussants, spiritually taxing.

Here is the quote in question:

"Compare the evidences of Divine visitation which befell the persecutors of Jesus Christ with these historic retributions which, in the latter part of the first century of the Bahá'í Era, have hurled to dust the chief adversary of the religion of Bahá'u'lláh. Had not the Roman Emperor, in the second half of the first century of the Christian Era, after a distressful siege of Jerusalem, laid waste the Holy City, destroyed the Temple, desecrated and robbed the Holy of Holies of its treasures, and transported them to Rome, reared a pagan colony on the mount of Zion, massacred the Jews, and exiled and dispersed the survivors?
Compare, moreover, these words which the persecuted Christ, as witnessed by the Gospel, addressed to Jerusalem, with Bahá'u'lláh's apostrophe to Constantinople, revealed while He lay in His far-off Prison, and recorded in His Most Holy Book: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the Prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings!" And again, as He wept over the city: "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation." (Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, p. 176)

Against the backdrop of antisemitism, any effort to address this dilemma runs, like the discussion on homosexuality, into an explosive mix of accumulated grief and grievance, that threatens to derail, before even starting upon it, any attempt at dialogue. The following is a frail bridge to a possible context within which the very concept of divine retribution, itself perplexing to modern ideas of a loving God, can be understood not as whim, vindictiveness, or disproportion, but simpy as evolutionary process, as the effects of a vacuum of urgent and vital insights that elude us when we fail to recognise and, going farther, seek to suppress, the very tendencies that push toward our emancipation from whatever past enablers, now turned obstructions, of our adaptive processes of growth and maturation.

* * * * *

Dear all,

Trembling, again, at the magnitude of a difficult subject, I still attempt to offer, lovingly, some half-baked thoughts on the issue of divine retribution. I am far from any books so these unfinished thoughts will also be but vaguely supported, and when scripturally supported, it will be from memory. I pray, however, that through His bounty, the Giver of gifts may "endow my utterance with inspiration from the traces of Thy supreme Pen, that it may attract the reality of all things", as the dear Hand of the Cause Dorothy Baker used so frequently to pray in the words of 'Abdu'l- Baha.

The beloved Guardian refers to World War Two as both an act of divine retribution and a healing influence, and refers in similar terms to the afflictions of our age stating that they are designed ultimately to weld, in the fires of suffering and experience, the conflicting
peoples of the world into a united world.

The Manifestation of God, the Sun of Truth, the Educator of all beings, is said to appear in the world to renew its spiritual and social life, to adapt the eternal principles to the exigencies of the
age. He is said to embody the perfections of the age, and to appear in the winter of civilization, when the existing guidance is no longer sufficient to ensure prosperity. In His divine Law - which to God's lovers is wine of love - are contained the seeds of a new civilization, and His pure breath, as the Most Great Branch explained with such evident eloquence in Some Answered Question, educates humanity in the physical, human and divine levels. The Cause
which the Prophet brings, in the midst of patent stagnation, thus acquires the character of an Ark, designed to take us from an old and dying world unto a new heaven and new earth, and to offer shelter from a flood of impending afflictions which, beginning as a mild rain of obfuscations and confusions soon becomes a torrent of tribulation as the old order begins to totter.

In this light, at the time of the appearance of Jesus, the "signs of impending afflictions and chaos" could then "be discerned," inasmuch as "the prevailing order" appeared to be "lamentably deffective". Jesus' teachings, like those of Moses before Him, constituted a "most
great", a "new World Order". Those who, rising high above the world of names, felt the heat of the sinaitic fire from His beautiful face, took to building that new order, and were equiped with the vision necessary to respond to the present. They were able to broaden and expand their sympathies to include previously irreconciliable groups and nations, and were endowed with a new vitality . Those who rejected the guidance of that Essence of meekness, on the other hand,
found themselves powerless to adapt, to evolve, to face the tests that were so soon to come: powerless, indeed, to stay the same.

Principles which formerly were essential, became accidental, laws which formerly were enforced with utmost vigour became forgotten, and though the spiritual light of Moses shone still with undiminished splendour in the pages of the Holy Bible, His social teachings increasingly eroded, with none to turn to for authoritative guidance to adapt to very different times. Whereas the Jews became marginalised, the Christians, from being a most insignificant Judaic sect, gradually became mainstream. This, not because the Christians were morally superior, but because their vision was more suited to the times.

In other words, the Prophet reflects the maturity of His age, and His teachings liberate humanity from certain values and practices when these values and practices cease to promote the unity and welfare of the human race. Thus the Sign of God, that precious pearl, in The
Promised Day is Come, attributes to the rejection of the kings the calamities with which not only they, but subsequent generations were afflicted. If the kings and queen(s), the Pope, the political and spiritual rulers had obeyed Baha'u'llah - established collective security, reduced taxation, developed democratic processes, held fast to consultation, and generally strove to apply the exhortations of Baha'u'llah regarding peace and servitude to God - there is no doubt
that we would not have suffered two world wars and a myriad more calamities. Those same kings would today be glorified and we would be thankful for all the good they had achieved.
More likely than not, monarchy would not have become a fleeting memory and empty title.

Similarily the same inspired pen ascribes the end of the Quajar dynasty to their oppression and rejection of that celestial Youth. By the same token, 'Abdu'l-Baha states that if the rulers
of Persia had accepted the Blessed Beauty, Iran would have found itself exalted and privileged; and had it paid heed to Baha'u'llah's counsels and refrained from persecution, Baha'u'llah would soon have gained ascendancy over Europe where freedom of thought would have
ensured that His teachings spread and took root in the hearts.

When we reject a Manifestation, we reject at least some of the insights He brings into the world. It is precisely these insights that the merciful Lord reveals in each age to ensure the advancement of humanity. Today, those who cling to conflict, to fanaticism,
unbelief, oppression, sectarianism, unfettered nationalism, etc. in whatever form and under whatever garb, cannot in the long run prosper and develop, for these things are contrary to the stage in which we find ourselves. On the other hand, to the degree to which we truly
follow the guidance which a Bountiful Bestower has graciously proferred unto us, to the degree to which we cling to consultation, the equality of men and women, to the extent to which we see with our own eyes, work towards the establishment of a just and united world along the guidelines we have been given, to that degree we will ensure that we evolve in this new paradigm, this new era, this new Day. I believe that as time goes by the Baha'i Faith will become more mainstream, and the world more sympathetic, and similarily positions that are contrary to it will loose hold. This of course, is a statement of faith. This sort of belief, moreover, does not imply exclusivity. "Unto you be your religion, unto me be my religion". It is not about labels but about growth and truth and present times and change. I see life moving in the direction of Baha'u'llah's vision.

But that is only my belief and I have nothing to prove it except the warmth and light and the thousand voices that seem to cry it out to me. And God knows best. If, as it happens, something else takes place, and life is not as I've conceived it, I will be equally happy, for it is not personal opinions that matter, but rather reality and truth. Allah'u'alam.

" Peace is not only possible but inevitable, it is the next stage
in humanity's evolution. Whether it is to be attained now, by an act
of consultative will on the part of all humanity, or is to be reached
only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity's stubborn
clinging to old patterns of behaviour, is the choice of all on
earth." (Paraphrase of the opening paragraph of the Promise of World
Peace.)

"... unimaginable horrors precipitated by... stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour..." Such is divine retribution. It is inherent in the process of evolution itself, and its ultimate fruit is not destruction but growth - liberation. So not just Jews and Muslims, but everyone of us, in our daily lives, faces this challenge. We either choose to fulfill our purpose and grow, or we are led to by necessity. Whilst some may speed to the valley of true knowledge in a single breath, I dare say most are carried in the first place by the redoubtable steed of pain.

"Perish the lover which distinguisheth between the pleasant and the poisonous in the path of his beloved!"

I pray that I may not have thrown too many crimson herrings, and look forward to seeing these unfinished thoughts, which are "as words that are written on water", shake off the dross and wing their flight, that they may catch a scent from the qamis of the long-lost Joseph.

"In thy soul of love build thou a fire,
and burn away all thoughts and words entire."

Astounded at your patience :-),

Ismael

The Sacred in Motion: A Bahá'í encounter with Lakota spirituality

2007-05-27T08:06:00.000Z

This reflection was born from a moving and fascinating exchange with Paula Bidwell, a Lakota Bahá'í, and medicine woman, on the subject of spiritual motion, one of the most crucial, and most subtle, spiritual concepts in the Bahá'í Writings, which in Lakota spirituality is associated to the term seminal term "Skan". For me, encountering Paula was a beautiful moment of light, someone from whom I learned much, and who touched my heart. A sign and ambassador of the promise that 'Abdu'l-Bahá beheld in the nobility and spiritual capacity of Native Americans.

The most critical concept in Paula's words is the notion of Skan. As she writes in her initial message:

"The foundation to everything I have to say revolves around the Lakota concept of "skan" (movement). In a medicine or holy context this means themovement of the universe including everything in it, the seen and unseen."

Skan represents movement, not only physical but also, primarily,metaphysical movement. It would be more accurate perhaps in this context to capitalise the word Movement, as in the Dakota tradition Skan is not only aconcept, but a facet of Divinity, indeed, traditionally, a god.

The notion of many gods, common to many belief systems, seems to me to belargely compatible, under a specific lens, with the Bahá'í approach to the Names and Attributes of God. God's essence, unknowable, inaccessible, ismanifested through His Names and Attributes. Bahá'u'lláh links specific cosmogonical and metaphysical events to specific Names of God, so that HisName, the Creator, is the source of all creation; His name, the Fashioner, of the arts and sciences; His name, the Merciful, transmutes sin and revives mankind. He specifically states that each name is accompanied by a like manifestation of power and calls on God to bestow blessings through a multitude of Names, among which the Most Great Name stands transcendent and supreme. This is strongly reminiscent of the function and description of the various gods in so-called "polytheistic" religious systems. Bahá'u'lláh goes further in "concretising" the names and attributes of God, in onefamous instance describing a visitation by Trustworthiness, in the form of a maiden in a pillar of light speaking to its devotees. This is as close as it gets to the language of many gods. It provides a valuable bridge to the language of native american traditions, which likewise have a layered, dynamic relationship to such concepts, often coexisting with a monotheistic vision in a manner reminiscent of the monotheistic vision that suffuses the polytheistic language of many Upanishads in Hinduism.

But to return to Skan. Skan, or Motion, I suggest, is an attribute of God, and a mighty attribute indeed, whence existence springs and of which existence inherently partakes. The absence of movement, the absence ofSkan, is the absence of existence. All creation is an expression ofSkan/Motion. This emphasis is not the one most Baha'is typically stress inrelation to their Faith, yet a survey of the writings shows that it is entirely appropriate. Bahá'u'lláh writes:"He. Who is both Stillness and Motion, is now manifest before your eyes. Behold how, in this Day, out of Stillness Motion hath been engendered." GWB168

From His stillness, then, He has manifested Himself in motion. All motion proceeds from Him, and in that sense, God is in all things, in His name, the Mover.

"For He, the Mover of all beings, that glorified Countenance, is the source of such potencies as neither this wronged One can reveal, nor this unworthy people comprehend. Immensely exalted is He above men's praise of His sovereignty; glorified is He beyond that which they attribute unto Him!" (KIp.124)

"Know thou moreover that all else besides Him have been created through thepotency of a word from His presence, while of themselves they have no motion nor stillness, except at His bidding and by His leave." (GWB p.109-110).

All motion, then, is His motion, all skan His Skan, though not all direction is His direction nor all purpose His purpose. As we prostrate ourselves in prayer, in the dust of worship, Bahá'u'lláh's sublime words rise from our lips:

"Say: O my Lord, my Best-Beloved, the Mover of my actions, the Lode Star ofmy soul, the Voice that crieth in mine inmost being, the Object of mine heart's adoration!"

"my Aim and the Aim of all things, my Mover and theMover of all things"

"Thou art He Who from everlasting hath been the King ofthe entire creation and its Prime Mover" (GWB p.310, PM p.59, PM p.262)

God's attribute, "the Mover", is so sublime, His motion, His skan, takes place in such an exalted sphere, that we are powerless to extol, much less comprehend it:

"How can, then, such a man succeed in befittingly extolling the One through a motion of Whose finger all the names and their kingdom were called into being, and all the attributes and their dominion were created, and Who, through yet another motion of that same finger, hath united the letters B and E (Be) and knit them together, manifesting thereby what the highest thoughts of Thy chosen ones who enjoy near access to Thee are unable to grasp" (PM p303)

And so, our origin and the origin of all things, the origin, even, of all names, begins in motion, and existence itself consists of the motion traced by those sublime fingers, uniting the letters B and E in one. This concept, of the inseparability of motion and existence, which is the axis of Paula's post, was one which 'Abdu'l-Baha was at pains to convey toHis Western audiences, both while imprisoned in Palestine and in His heroicjourneys in both Europe and America. This emphasis gives the impression of His trying to impart an insight which the West particularly needed to grasp. To Laura Clifford Barney He explained:"Know that nothing which exists remains in a state of repose--that is tosay, all things are in motion . Everything is either growing or declining;all things are either coming from nonexistence into being, or going fromexistence into nonexistence." (SAQ p.233)And in Paris He devoted an entire talk to the subject, saying that:"Absolute repose does not exist in nature. All things either make progress or lose ground. Everything moves forward or backward, nothing is without motion . From his birth, a man progresses physically until he reaches maturity, then, having arrived at the prime of his life, he begins to decline, the strength and powers of his body decrease, and he gradually arrives at the hour of death. Now let us consider the soul. We have seen that movement is essential to existence; nothing that has life is without motion . All creation, whether of the mineral, vegetable or animal kingdom,is compelled to obey the law of motion; it must either ascend or descend.But with the human soul, there is no decline. Its only movement is towards perfection; growth and progress alone constitute the motion of the soul. In the world of spirit there is no retrogression. The world of mortality is a world of contradictions, of opposites; motion being compulsory everything must either go forward or retreat. In the realm of spirit there is no retreat possible, all movement is bound to be towards a perfect state.`Progress' is the expression of spirit in the world of matter." (PTpp.88-90)

He returned to the subject several times, sometimes in extenso, in the United States. In one particularly significant statement, He articulated concepts that could have emmanated from Paula's reflections on Skan."Creation is the expression of motion. Motion is life. A moving object is aliving object, whereas that which is motionless and inert is as dead. Allcreated forms are progressive in their planes, or kingdoms of existence,under the stimulus of the power or spirit of life. The universal energy isdynamic. Nothing is stationary in the material world of outer phenomena orin the inner world of intellect" ( PUP p.140) Likewise in His tablet of the Universe, 'Abdu'l-Baha states:"Divine and all-encompassing Wisdom hath ordained that motion be an inseparable concomitant of existence, whether inherently or accidentally, spiritually or materially." (p.1)

And returning to the theme of Bahá'u'lláh's meditations, 'Abdu'l-Baha states that "Motion without a mover or cause of motion is inconceivable." (PUP p.307). The very same concept formed a foundation of His divine response to the eminent Swiss scientist August Forel.Thus the Mover who originates the motion of existence and Who is Himself Motion as well as Stillness, generates creation, and invests it with His motion. Creation itself is the expression of motion, which leads us back in an ascending arc towards the motion of His pen, towards the ultimate stillness of the Unknowable, through His name, the Mover. Towards skan. And as the embodiment of all His names and attributes, we have seen that Him Who is both Stillness and Motion, Him Who is both Stillness and Skan, is at last manifest in Baha'u'llah. And the Bab while imprisoned in Adhirbayjan, proclaims the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy which He cites in a powerful tablet, from that fount of mystic knowledge, the Imam Baqir. The prophecy also establishes the response expected:"What must needs befall us in Ádhirbayján is inevitable and withoutparallel. When this happeneth, rest ye in your homes and remain patient aswe have remained patient. As soon as the Mover moveth make ye haste to attain unto Him, even though ye have to crawl over the snow.' " (SWB 17)

And so we have the Manifestation of God as the supreme embodiment of Skan, the Mover Who moveth. And by our own responsive motion or inertness we determine the quality of our spiritual life. Salvation is motion towards Him, perdition immobility, which is nothing less than drifting away from Him, for nothing is still. And when we move towards the Mover, even if crawling through snow, we warm and vitalise the entire universe, so that Bahá'u'lláh admonishes: "Be thou as a throbbing artery, pulsating in the body of the entire creation, that through the heat generated by this motion there may appear that which will quicken the hearts of those who hesitate." (TB p.142) And so, it is for us to become pure vehicles for skan. And as hearts quicken, hesitation vanishes. And motion, skan, quickens even history, sot hat perhaps the 20th century, in spite of all its shadows, will come to be regarded as the Century of Light precisely on account of the unprecedented motion it engendered, as joyously proclaimed by 'Abdu'l-Baha: "This is the century of motion , divine stimulus and accomplishment, the century of human solidarity and altruistic service, the century of universal peace and the reality of the divine Kingdom." (PUP p.143) Perhaps the motion, skan, towards peace, altruism and solidarity, however long it takes to reach fruition, will be seen to have been generated in this twentieth century, and to this very skan, this same motion, will our eventual maturation be traced. And so our generation is the last to have experienced the tumultuous trials and victories of this Century of Light, this Century of Motion, this Century of Skan.

May we become embodiments of skan, letting His skan, move us toward Him, Who is both Stillness and Skan, and who is manifest in this Great Day. May skan lead us to Him, even should we crawl over the melting snow to reach Him.

Failure, Grace and Self-Disclosure

2007-05-27T08:04:00.000Z

The following is a moment in one of my most unforgettable and spiritual experiences of correspondence, with an unbalkingly sincere, and powerfully intelligent, veteran soul that I am grateful and privileged to be able to call my friend. It was a burst of spiritual encounter that lasted a few days only, and turned words into rivers of fire, and left its traces for eternity. Every few years we get to exchange pleasantries, converse a little, and not much more. And yet that moment of conversation, for me at least, simply IS, and remains.

I remember reading Ruhiyyih Khanum's obituary of Enoch Olinga (she inherited her compelling gift for obituaries from her mother), where she recalls a metaphor of which Enoch Olinga was fond. It likens man to a guitar, that wishes to be tuned by God to be strummed by His hand. God explains the guitar lacks the capacity to serve as His instrument. The guitar begs nonetheless for the boon. So God tunes one string up and up until it snaps. The guitar, undeterred, beseeches Him to try anew. And yet another string strains and breaks. And another. And another. And another. Until the very last string snaps.

That's it? That's it. The metaphor at first repelled me as a statement of hopelessness. It now sings to me as capturing my striving for perfection. "The ability to contain the maximum paradox is the definition of true heroism". How true. You mentioned the shattering paradox of the Manifestation of God in the body and soul of a human. That is the extreme paradox of the Arc of Descent. Is not the supreme paradox of the Arc of Ascent our infinite thirst and finite capacity? Our systematic pursuit of misunderstanding and subsequent panicked flight from spiritual law; our desperate climb of irrational walls built out of immense amounts folly; and the final, mortal leap to self destruction leading to the disconcertingly serendipitous resurrection of reunion, so tentative, so fragile? Why do we strive with all our might after mis-conceived or mis-shapen goals, only to find our heart's desire lightly tapping our shoulder from behind us, not merely disconnected from our deserving, but even from our trajectory? To seek His face in these conditions is surely a mad heroic paradox that makes the unpredicted coins of the spirit spin.

So our strings collapse. Each and all. The sins of the righteous are the good deeds of the near ones. Then what's the point? The point is that invisible line of yearning, of regret, and aspiration, that continues to rise when the line of actuality crumbles in a heap. The line of our innocent dream, our unguarded hope, that precedes and heroically survives the savage wound, frequently buried in bandages.

"Is it possible to tell the tale of one's self in such terms without a kind of spiritual vivisection taking place?"

Yes! It must be. That is what Yourcenar's Ana Soror is all about. But that, after all, is fiction. And yet, there is a rare and infinitesimal space, I think, in which such matters may be told beside fiction. The space occupied, not by the confessor and not the therapist, but by the friend. There is no merit in sharing shame, but something is created, restored, in the exchange of fragments of broken hearts in a state of supplication. It is in the dust of our collapse that we find the meekness to pray. It is in the wounds of irrevocable errors that we find the tears to love. It is in our consciousness of indelible failure that the awareness of the infinite potency of His grace, and might and compassion dawns. It is, finally, in the precipice of impotent despair that the awsome impact of His name, the Unconstrained, the Self-subsisting, destroys our self-sufficiency and gives birth to the seed of tavakul, of reliance upon God. Alí Nakhjavani sealed this budding realisation in my heart in just five minutes that I once shared with him, in the course of a concentrated, abrupt transmission of longing as he returned from crying out his prayers at the Guardian's sacred resting place.

Do we dare trust that the space exists in the madness of our conversation? Dare we expose the points of collapse that make the line of ascent an invisible one? It is a reckless adventure, but one which dangerously yet tentatively calls to me in our encounter. Can we learn something from meeting one another in the defended spot whence our suplication rises? Can we reach out with our hands into one another's heart and draw them out white? Or is this a song best apprehended in silence, by indirection, turning to what in 17th century literature became known as 'conceits'?

I only know that the little of "the rest" which you shared with me evoked dimly yet irreducibly the bridges of fire which in an earlier letter I intuited you had crossed. No one speaks with your voice without having been broken first. I myself fear unwisdom, yet feel inclined, with trepidation, to explore with you moments of krasis, where hope and despair mingle with guts and tears and flesh and joy and are transmuted into landmarks, bridges or lifelines from which we climb out of the mesh of self-absorption toward the arms of the Slayer of lovers.

Something more than our personal encounter impels me in this direction. It is the consciousness that as a community we do not know how to embrace our shadows. We remain scared, and therefore lonely. We must tap the wellsprings of spirituality that vitalise the finer, subtler language of compassion. We should open our eyes to the purity and ardour, the intransigent heroism that keeps us striving for perfection in the sea of our own folly. For this is the true tie that binds us a believers, did we but know. Not our meetings, not our services, not even our interactions - but our undefeated yearnings, even when the things we touch with trembling fingers turn to dust and it's our fault, and we cut the tree of our hope with our own hands - yet still yearn, still wish our touch had been more delicate, our aim more true, our obfuscation less. The invisible line remains unbroken even when hidden to our own eyes. The bond of undiminished yearning in the face of infinite frailty, the inescapable attraction of His face even when our eyes are shut against the storm - that is what binds the people of Bahá in the beginning that has no beginning and in the end that has no end.

I speak to you in the fire.

Bahá'í Scope for Political Activism

2007-05-27T08:01:00.001Z

A great many Bahá'ís, impelled by the social vision and insistent imperative for justice, find themselves frustrated with the limits placed on their involvement in political activism. Those limits however, are not fixed, but appear in fact to have expanded with time. This message seeks to explore the stretching yet undeniable boundaries of political action within the Bahá'í community.

Thank you all for the urgent and thought provoking comments in this thread.

I too feel the issue is less clear than may at first appear. The culture ofthe Baha'i community is changing, and things that would have been unthinkable in the past are now becoming acceptable. Non-involvement in partisan politics is less clear than it used to be. For instance, Century of Light is a highly political statement, far more specific in its analysis than we have ever had. Its critique of communism, given the existence of communit regimes like Cuba and North Korea, where Baha'is dwell, is trenchant and specific, naming names, well beyond the Guardian's own generalised critique of communism. Likewise its allusion to desaparecidos is a live political issue that polarises discourse throughout Latin America and beyond. The critique of Western cold-war politics, exposing aid efforts as a toolf or political control, and pointing out the policy of arming and encouragement of what it calls "authoritarian regimes" (p.88), would never have appeared in a Baha'i joural before Century of Light. The same document identifies the Ethiopian regime of the 1980's as "a brutal dictatorship". At a timewhen Ethiopia remains a politically devided country, mostly along tribal lines, such assertions are enormously political and potentially inflamatory within an Ethiopian context. Contemporary happenings in Cambodia are unequivocally characterised as "a campaign of genocide". The statement, on page 136, that "Tragically, what Bahá'ís see in present-day society is unbridled exploitation of the masses of humanity by greed that excuses itself as the operation of "impersonal market forces", could be construed aspolitically loaded.

Nevertheless, the document concludes: "for a Bahá'í the ultimate issues are spiritual. The Cause is not a political party nor an ideology, much less an engine for political agitation against this or that social wrong. The process of transformation it has set in motion advances by inducing a fundamental change of consciousness, and the challenge it poses to everyone who would serve it is to free oneself from attachment to inherited assumptions and preferences that are irreconcilable with the Will of God for humanity's coming of age. Paradoxically, even the distress caused by prevailing conditions that violate one's conscience aids in this process of spiritual liberation. In the final analysis, such disillusionment drives a Bahá'í to confront a truth emphasized over and over again in the Writings ofthe Faith: "He hath chosen out of the whole world the hearts of His servants, and madethem each a seat for the revelation of His glory. Wherefore, sanctify themfrom every defilement, that the things for which they were created may beengraven upon them.[150]"

It seems to me that the parameters for Baha'i political discourse have extended. Silence is no longer straightforward. Non-involvement has acquired novel nuances. Examples abound. In UK, for instance, there was an opening for the Baha'is to have a representative in the House of Lords, not affiliated to a particular party. The UHJ gave its permission, in principle, for Baha'is to avail themselves of this opportunity. This would have gone against the grain of popular Baha'i understanding of non-involvement in politics. The proposals for reform of the House of Lords did not go through and the precedent did not take place. Again, the UK NSA (at least), with permission of the UHJ, used the Baha'i community as an instrument to collect signatures petitioning the establishment of an International Criminal Court. The first time in my experience that Baha'is were being asked by an NSA to sign a political petition issued by outside institutions to lobby political decision makers on an issue not directly related to the welfare of the Baha'i community.

If these are the ambiguities present in our institutions, how much more with individuals. The UHJ, in an unpublished letter validates what they refer to as "various forms of public protest", when"motivated by the dictates of conscience, as opposed to such reasons as the mere venting of personal frustration or violence for its own sake". Such protest, they say, contributes "in no small measure to the awakening of public concern and to the required revision of public policy. Obviously,the effectiveness of such intervention depends on the extent to which the"conscience" motivating the activity is itself enlightened and its dictates relevant to the situation." (on behalf of UHJ to an individual, dated 27November 2001)

So, if Baha'is can participate is public protests born of enlightened conscience; if Baha'i institutions can be part of the very machinery of national government (in principle); if they can lobby for the creation of political institutions; identify publicly "brutal dictatorships"; critique Western aid policy, etc., yet not support a campaign such as Jubilee 2000 for the ending of the debt or join Amnesty International; we face a context of greater ambiguity than is normally thought. Thus I would suggest that we are in a new territory, that there are no easy answers, and we are at this juncture "experimenting" to find the boundaries and duties imposed by our commitment to social justice and our commitment to unity both. This range of experiments and approaches are, I would suggest, necessary. As the UHJ explains in the above quoted letter, there are certain parameters within which our pursuit of social justice and response to injustice operates, among which they highlight the following:

1) "The most obvious parameter... is, of course, the moral obligation to demonstrate in our lives the sense of justice that the faith teaches."

2) non-involvement in partisan politics. "This principle should not,however, be misunderstood. The programme of the Baha'i Cause itself operates in the political realm to the extent that it is concerned with inducing changes in public policy and behaviour at local, national and international levels... In doing so, its efforts are scrupulous to avoid entanglement in the agendas that serve the interests of particular parties, factions, or similarly biased political forces."

3) That our actions, even if not involving "inappropriate politicalbehaviour", should not harm long-term the Cause or reflect negatively on it.

Having listed these parameters, the UHJ comes to the very crux of ourdicussion:"In the context of such parameters, each one of us must determine the priorities that will govern his or her efforts... This is, admittedly, a process of experimentation which, like all experimentation, entails a degree of risk. Risk is, however, a part of life and cannot in itself be allowed to deter us from fulfilling our responsibilities as Baha'is."

The powerful quotes that have been shared, to my mind, clarify the parameters within which the dilemmas present themselves, but do not eradicate the dilemmas themselves, do not answer them. Non-involvement in politics is not an answer, it is a question demanding a multitude of individual responses, "experimentation", "risk". Like many here, I am profoundly distressed by the events in the Holy Land. I cannot condone the siege, not only of militias, but of refugees and priests in the Church where Christ is believed to have been born. I cannot condone the destruction to dozens of frequently politically disengaged and entirely innocent teenage lives by suicide bombing. I cannot accept that a man should be made to sit for 27 hours next to the decaying bodies of hiswife and uncle, prevented from burying them by tanks and soldiers that claimed their lives. Nor the tear gassing and violent dispersion of a non-violent, quiet peace protest of Israelis, Palestinians, and Europeans, nor the indoctrination of little children that leads an 8 year old girl to grab a knife and announce, in all earnestness, that she is going out to kill Jews, an indoctrination reinforced and even sealed by the sound of tank and missile fire disturbing her young sleep.

These are things that transcend parties and factions. They are violations of the human spirit, whichever way you look at it. Conflict is never simple. Blame is always a suspect quantity. Injustice, like justice, is no respecter of national identities or political affiliations. Injustice to one is injustice to all, and the line between ends and means is not always clearly drawn.

The point for me is that I need to act, and act constructively. I need to build something solid. In my own little corner but also in the Baha'icommunity. I must live what I hope others will follow; and I must work with genuine urgency, with consecration, to build the Baha'i community, likewise, into a living example of what we preach to others. Above all, I need to live, to demonstrate, what I dream about. And apportioning blame, given the urgency of the times, is most frequently a wasteful distraction that makes torpid my imagination, through which I search for, create, new avenues when none are apparent, even if they involve a lot of walking. When the obstacle is very large, getting around it cant ake time. I can only seek the right direction and walk towards it at the pace of my capacity, making friends along the way, trusting that in time I, or my children, or their children, will get to the other side, as theBeatles said, with a little help from my friends, and theirs, along the road.

It's early times yet, a mere century and a half, but I believe we're getting there. The second Baha'i century would witness, the Guardian said, the stirrings of Baha'u'llah's new World Order. Our challenge today is, it seems to me, to mediate the encounter of the Baha'i community and the wider world. Merely to engage fully with the world "outside", merely to communicate effectively across the gap of values, merely to maintain hope in the future, hope in the present, and demonstrate its basis in our practice and ourd iscourse, is challenge enough.

Future generations will take on the task of reconstruction, though we can indicate some broad directions and make some crude beginnings even now.

Always your friend,

Ismael

Dealing with Racism within the Bahá'í Community

2007-05-27T07:58:00.000Z

In the course of my travels to various Bahá'í communities, and in my correspondence with Bahá'ís of various backgrounds, I have become keenly conscious that one of the greatest challenges of being a Bahá'í lies in the fact that the Bahá'í community brings us to a frontal encounter with cultural diversity, and, inevitably, with cross-cultural tension. No one can be expected to know adequately and relate effectively to a culture to which they have been but little exposed, more so when some kind of stigma attaches in wider society to a given ethnic or cultural group.

The response below is addressed to such a situation, when friction becomes excessive, and its burden well nigh intolerable. It looks to 'Abdu'l-Bahá for possible avenues of approach to overcome the painful, tragic deadlock of racism when it raises its ugly head among what remain, even so, with the whole human race, our brothers and our sisters.

Dearest,

I must say that I was shocked at the message you shared, and it is a very sad example on the alienating impact of unkind words and harsh attitudes, that add to the pain of cultural misunderstanding the barbs of hostility. Clearly, Shoghi Effendi wrote in Advent of Divine Justice that no one can claim to be free from prejudice, and that is a battle we must all wage within our souls. The implication is that prejudice is also a constant in our interaction with fellow human beings. What there are is degrees and nuances, and some expressions of prejudice are more apparent and more hurtful than others.

The Bahá'í Faith traces the goal of unity, furnishes the impulse and energy required to face and gradually overcome its obstacles, not in a linear, but in an organic way, paved not just with advances but reverses also, and gives us an array of potent tools to transform millenia upon millenia of disunity. But it does not save us from walking the distance with our own feet. In the course of that journey, we discover we are but poorly shod, the road is thorny, and, sometimes, our feet bleed.

Nowhere is this more palpable to me than among indigenous populations the world over, who have been historically marginalized in their own countries, frequently in a brutal and violent manner, for hundreds of years. When these precious souls join the Bahá'í community, they bring, like all of us, very high expectations of the maturity and freedom from prejudice of a community committed, like no other, to the unity of humanity in all its diversity. It can be very hard to discover that the Bahá'í community is not, as in the Christian ideal, a "community of the elect". Rather, it is a community of humanity, warts and all. In it coexist the good, the bad and the ugly, except Clint Eastwood has yet to convert.

What brings us together is not a level of spiritual achievement, but a level of aspiration, that makes sense of a remark attributed to 'Abdu'l-Bahá, when asked how one particularly obnoxious individual could be a Bahá'í: "Imagine what he would be like if he weren't!". What brings us together is not that we are all morally, spiritually and socially excellent. It is that we all, whatever our starting point, want to become better, and our direction and our path and our strength is found, for all of us, in Bahá'u'lláh.

Be that as it may, it is hardbreaking when, expecting to find a refuge from prejudice, one has the misfortune of encountering it within our own community. Whether among Gypsy Bahá'ís in Spain, American Indian Bahá'ís in the United States, or Maori Bahá'ís in New Zealand, many are the anguished voices that tell painful stories of ignorance, prejudice and intolerance from their brothers and sisters in the Faith. From one perspective it is distressing, since it negates the very aims that sustain our aspirations, albeit generally unconsciously. From another perspective it is truly encouraging. It means that we are encountering one another beyond the surface, and are confronting, not avoiding, the very real and deep seated factors that have so bitterly and intractably divided our societies. As events, they are discouraging, but seen within a process of reconciliation on a global scale, they are in fact important milestones in our painstaking advance toward unity. If conflict were not in place, reconciliation would be irrelevant. But, our writings state, the purpose of this Faith is the reconciliation of the contending peoples of the world. If there was no pain in this encounter, chances are that the encounter, in an authentic way, was not taking place. Without friction, there is no movement possible. But excess of friction stops all movement.

The question is how to face prejudice and constructively transform it. In this we might most profitably look at 'Abdu'l-Baha's example of dealing with a lifetime of vicious prejudice against as well as within the Baha'i community. I see four key elements in His response:

1) Uncompromising in His upholding of the principle of the unity of humanity and the equality of the races. Without respect for the occasion He took every opportunity to demonstrate in His own actions the principle of the oneness of humanity, whether by encouraging Baha'is to inter-marry, giving honour to minorities within the very environment that excluded them, instructing the Baha'is to hold integrated meetings when the community was split down the middle on the wisdom of doing this, etc.

2) Unconfrontational in His engagement with the issues. Not once in His talks or the accounts of pilgrims or in His writings does 'Abdu'l-Baha directly condemn an individual or a specific segment of the population as racist, even as His actions quietly but unmistakably challenge the very foundations of prejudice. This is in sharp contrast to the strategies of the anti-racism movement, which often concentrate on exposure, controversy, and at times violent protest.

3) Long-term in His strategy. When they arrived in Akka, Baha'u'llah and His companions were ostracised, jeered, deprived of food, and mistreated. 'Abdu'l-Baha set out to undermine the very root of prejudice by establishing bonds of friendship and respect with the very source of the attacks; resulting by the end of Baha'u'llah's imprisonment in the passive disobedience of jailors, of their orders to maintain the stringent confinement and incommunication of Baha'u'llah and His followers, indeed allowing Him to move into house imprisonment. Prejudices had, it must be admitted, severely eroded - over a period of decades of consistent and systematic cultivation of genuine bonds of love. With the American Baha'is, rather than condemn those who opposed interracial marriages flouting His explicit and widely circulated guidance; or those who persisted in holding segregated meetings when He called for integrated ones, He focused on reinforcing the progressive tendencies and proscribing, without aggressively condemning, the regressive tendencies in the community. The Baha'i community, with all its imperfections, was well in advance of any other community of a similar size and make-up in their journey to overcome the legacy of centuries of prejudice, resentment, oppression and hostility between the races.

4) Reliant on the power and divine impulse in the Faith, which transforms copper into gold. Not for an instant, in the gloomiest moments, was His hope and confidence shaken, His certitude in the regenerating power of His Cause and its capacity to heal the prejudices of mankind. Consequently, His response was grounded in a peacefulness and a joy and an abundance that stands in sharp contrast with the (legitimate) anger, hopelessness, and alienation that characterises much of today's noble efforts to heal racism.

And so, when attitudes like those of the woman who posted such a hurtful, unkind message concerning a long-oppressed, noble people, surface in the Cause, they are part of the process of healing. They are part of what we bring into the crucible of the Baha'i community to be transformed by our mutual love for the Cause of Baha'u'llah, which takes our prejudices, our frailties, our blinkers and blindspots, and turns them into light, little by little, day by day. Prejudices act as a veil between the soul and its beloved, and so, if one is sincere in love, love itself will teach us, painfully, to let go of prejudice, and if not, love itself will marginalise our views, render us powerless and isolate us, for love feeds on love, and makes no room for bitterness or for resentment.

Rejoice, therefore, your struggles are in the path of love. They are noble, and ennobling. "Not for a moment are ye alone. Not for a moment are ye left to yourselves. The Beauty of Abha is with you. The Glorious God is with you. The King of Kings is with you." And we, your friends in His love, broken winged birds that we are, we too, are with you.

Ismael

A Reconciliatory Approach to Homosexuality

2007-05-27T07:55:00.001Z

This is a message I addressed to a bulletin board of homosexuals who were or had been Bahá'ís, in the context of the great polarisation that the discussion of homosexuality in a religious context tends to engender. Following the logic of reconciliation that I understand to be one of the animating principles of Bahá'í hermeneutics, and inspired by the model of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's approach and interactions with those whose views were at times directly challenging to the teachings, I offer these thoughts as a possible path toward, not removing the inevitable tensions that the position of homosexuality in the Bahá'í Faith generates, but framing their discussion in a more unifying, more potentially constructive perspective.

Dear all,

I have been moved by all your comments to participate in this heart-deep exchange. I should clarify that I am a Baha'i, and I am not gay. Many of my friends are gay, and I lived for many months in a gay household when Iwas 15. From my perspective, there is no denying that being gay in today's world may prove a painful experience (although not only painful...). There is stigma and prejudice resulting at times in violence, physical or psychological. In a Baha'i community that remains small, widely scattered and, according to its own testimony, embryonic, the challenge of relating effectively to homosexuality is even greater, both for homosexual and heterosexual Baha'is.

A number of parameters are clear. The bottom line in terms of homosexual practice and the Baha'i community, is that it is not allowed in the Baha'i Faith. As has already been said, there is no room for compromise on this principle, as it is based on the scriptures themselves and backed up by the authorised interpretations thereof. The UHJ simply does not have the powers to change such a law. This means that a Baha'i with homosexual tendencies or a homosexual identity will find reconciling their Baha'i and sexual identities an area of unavoidable tension in the Faith. I'll come back to this in a minute.

Equally crucial, is the unequivocal and primary principle of the oneness of humanity, trancending sexual, racial, religious and even moral divides. There is no exception, no leaf that does not belong to the tree of humanity. There is, it is evident from even a cursory reading of 'Abdu'l-Baha's writings, no warrant whatsoever for Baha'i attitudes toward homosexuals that involve hostility, shunning, or any form of aggression. If such attitudes are sometimes found among Baha'is, it is because this is a very young Faith, still learning to walk, and even struggling to grasp the transforming vision of Baha'u'llah. In such circumstances, we often fall back on inherited patterns of behaviour. The difference is that those patterns are not sanctioned in the writings, and that we are committed to gradually but permanently replacing them with new standards of interaction based on the oneness of humanity. Similar challenges face us as Baha'is in dealing with all the forces that currently tear humanity apart. After all, as theUniversal House of Justice states,"As you know, the Baha'is are distinguished not by their perfection or their immunity from the negative influences of the wider society in which they live, but by their acceptance of Baha'u'llah's vision and willingness to work toward it. Each of us must strike a balance between realistically facing our community's shortcomings, and focusing on Baha'u'llah's Teachings rather than our fellow believers as a standard of faith. This comment is not intended to belittle your concerns, but rather place them in perspective so that you may not become discouraged as you strive toward the ideal."

Thus I believe that as the years go by, while the tension between homosexuality and faith in the Baha'i community will not go away (only one of the many possible tensions confronting a Baha'i), the climate in which such tensions are resolved will become much more refined, more spiritually informed, less conditioned by the past, and more unifying and transformative. This does not promise a "final answer" that satisfies everyone, but a nurturing and positive process, that increasingly liberates our human potential and ability to communicate with one another above our differences and blindspots and frailties. Another dimension of this, is that gay identity itself is in flux, and embryonic too. The powerful poem in this site attests to nuances and layers of identity that are yet to fully find their voice in gay discourse. All of humanity will have much to learn, as will the Baha'is, from the spiritual insights gained by homosexuals around the world who have suffered from the venomous hostility of many in their society. And I suspect the gay world will likewise discover that there are voices within its ranks that remain silent or excluded, and which, as they are heard, will transform the meaning of homosexual identities. Again, this will not resolve the tension between Baha'i identities and gay sexuality, but it may well open new and more constructive spaces and arenas in which to address such tensions.

As to the laws of the Aqdas specifying punishments and sanctions against extramarital sexuality, it is evident that laws and society define one another. The reason why such laws are not in force anywhere in the Baha'iworld today, is, according to the Universal House of Justice, not on account of limited numbers (we have areas with entire Baha'i villages in which such laws could well be applied), but because the society does not exist yet with the refinement required to furnish an appropriate context to such laws. Ag reat deal of complementary legislation remains for the Universal House of Justice to formulate (and change later if necessary) that may qualify, clarify and even deeply challenge the common-sense meaning which we might attribute to a law which is unlikely to apply for decades or centuries tocome. So it would be misleading, both for Baha'is and others, to derive a code of behaviour from laws which, as long as society remains in its current state of development, are neither applicable, nor fully comprehensible.

Another theme discussed are administrative sanctions. These are explicitly not to be applied in relation to individual lifestyles, except when those lifestyles affect in a serious way the wider perception of the Baha'icommunity. To give you a real life example, I once visited a Baha'i community near the Gulf of Mexico. It so happened, that the most receptive population to the Baha'i message in that city was the large local gay community. The Local Spiritual Assembly which administers the faith in that city adopted a welcoming and tolerant approach, making clear the Baha'i teachings on homosexuality, but leaving individuals to work on their own relationship to the Faith in accordance with the dictates of their conscience and the passing of time. The enrolements grew among gays in the city, to the point that when I invited someone to visit the Baha'i centre, he told me that he thought that was a gay club! In this context, a local Baha'i community was placed in a dilemma, whereby the public built a picture of the Baha'i community which, rightly or wrongly, is not the community envisioned byBaha'u'llah. For the sake of honesty, both towards the public and towards itself, the Baha'i community must prevent this sort of scenario from emerging. This does not mean that a wave of administrative sanctions followed against gay Baha'is. It didn't. It is merely to point out the delicate juggling act between preserving individual rights and freedoms, and acting as custodians of the community and institutions designed explicitly by Baha'u'llah.

There are no easy answers to such dilemmas within a faith perspective. Knee-jerk responses of condemnation, of either the Baha'i community or individuals struggling to reconcile their faith and sexuality, are in myview inappropriate. Slowly, I have no doubt, we will develop processes and discourses that allow these dilemmas to be faced in a life-affirming, soul-ennobling fashion. I say slowly, because we are struggling against the inertial of millenial instincts to conflict and power struggles. I say I have no doubt about the positive outcome, because no unprejudiced observer would question the depth of Baha'i commitment to (however embryonic the understanding of) the oneness of humanity. Baha'is daily sacrifice careers and security to place themselves in situations of painful diversity, only to struggle, day in and day out, to reconcile their differences. We have been doing this for one hundred and fifty years, and we will, God willing, continue to work on this for another thousand more. Already, against all odds, a sociologist who is not a Baha'i described the Baha'i community as the single most unified, most diverse body of people in the planet. It sounds good, but it's not easy, and the heroism of the Baha'i community lies in not running away from the inevitable pain that must precede understanding. After all, it is, Baha'u'llah tells us, patience that leads from search to love; and pain that leads from love to knowledge. And so, in this early stage of dealing with the issue of homosexuality within the Baha'i community, patience is required, as is pain; but also the spirit of search and love and the thirst for knowledge. Every time we create a breakthrough of understanding, we are pioneering into a new country, in which the proscription of extramarital sex does not translate into virulent hostility and aggression, and in which the preservation of a homosexual identity does not require the vilification of a Faith community. A new country in which what matters is increasing mutual understanding, sacrificing our lives for one another, and building a peaceful and united world.

At the basis of such processes, lies the Baha'i principle of the independent investigation of truth. No one is forced to become a Baha'i. Someone who decides not to be a Baha'i is not considered damned or evil. So becoming a Baha'i is a matter of choice and recognition; a decision to embrace Baha'u'llah's authority to teach and legislate, affirming but transcending (stretching) our deep spiritual insights, based on a recognition of the spiritual integrity and beauty of His voice and of His life and of His message.

Such recognition cannot be manufactured or imposed, but if it is there, it requires that we abide by its principles. When a homosexual person finds his heart captivated by the Slayer of Lovers; when his or her soul discovers in Baha'u'llah the Ancient Beauty; and when Baha'u'llah's global vision encompasses the horizon of his or her heart, then he or she will enter a world of wonder, of struggle, of joy and disappointment; of loss and reunion; of plenitude and powerlessness. When a heterosexual responds in the same way, the very same experience will follow, nor will the trials be less, merely different. And if a homosexual finds that he is tested by attitudes within the infant Baha'i community he or she has joined; so will a heterosexual be tested, and in equal measure. If our sense of vision and rapture and recognition is greater and more compelling than the trials and sorrows that accompany all spiritual journeys, we will remain, homosexual and heterosexual alike, humble lovers of Baha'u'llah; and with infinite longing offer up our lives in the path of love. Otherwise, our search will continue along different routes, and God willing, the Baha'i Faith will prove to have been a valuable milestone in our path to God.

"For whoso maketh efforts for Us, in Our ways shall Weguide them".

With deep love and humble admiration for the honesty and yearning ardour of the voices in this space,

Your broken winged brother,

Ismael

Direct Teaching Methods and the Institute Process

2007-05-27T07:51:00.000Z

I was once unexpectedly invited to join a list made up principally of Bahá'ís who had been deeply involved decades ago in the mass teaching projects that saw a significant expansion of the Bahá'í community in the United States. It was inspiring to see the passion for teaching, and the commitment to learn and audaciously experiment. A point of dialogue was how the earlier approaches to "teaching the masses" fit in with the new processes associated with the last 5 Year Plan. The following is my introductory letter to the group, that articulates my thoughts on the subject. It is followed by a response to a two friends, elsewhere, to their reservations regarding the validity or wisdom of mass teaching methods.

Honoured friends,

With great humility I join your list, as our beloved Master wrote, "with no good deeds to tell of, only hopes". I am fascinated to hear of your initiative, and touched by the San Antonio project's goal of "Growth without creating conflict in the community", which combines like the projects described in the newsletter audacious, systematic and intense individual initiative with a deep engagement with and humility before the institutions of the Cause.

I admire the vitality of commitment evinced, together with the "learning mode" which our beloved said was the greatest legacy of the Four Year Plan and the first intimation of the change of culture that ushered in the Fifth Epoch of the Formative age of our Faith. It calls to mind the vision and methods championed by Hand of the Cause Dr. Muhajir, and appears already to be yielding significant results.

I would be very grateful to hear, in this light, the current progressis in the Army of Light initiative in connection with "the goal to welcome into the Cause of God at least 2001 new souls in this One Year Plan, byRidvan 2001, and then 5000 in each year of the Five Year Plan". How many souls did enter the Faith in the One Year Plan by Ridvan 2001? Where are we now?

For my part, I have had experience of such direct teaching methods across the UK, in Mexico, former Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Ireland. Almost without exception, such initiatives have in my experience proven successful in attracting new souls into the Faith, sometimes in substantial numbers. What has proven hardest has been, on the one hand, successfully integrating such souls into existing communities in a lasting and fulfilling manner, and on the other, in UK at least, making direct teaching methods culturally acceptable to the Baha'icommunity.

Generally, such mass teaching initiatives are built around individuals with confidence and skill in the process, who act as catalysts for involving other Baha'is in the campaign and enrolling new believers. In UK, most Baha'is are deeply, intensely uncomfortable about approaching people in the street about the teachings, associating such behaviour with either aggressive proselytisation or marginal religious behaviour. It is the sort of approach that they would personally cross the street to try to avoid if it was coming from someone else. Individuals who see the promise of such an approach generally manage such reluctance and diminish it in at least a proportion of the community, who supports and joins them in teaching. The problem is that when such an individual or group leaves, the momentum is lost and the community returns to more culturally comfortable ways of expressing their faith.

In relation to the new believers that invariably emerge when direct teaching is done skillfully and with sincerity, the problem of consolidation tends to arise either because the individuals who have been instrumental in the declaration and enrolment of the new believer have moved on, and the remaining Baha'is are unable to replicate the spiritual connection built with the original teacher; or because the new believer approaches his new faith from an entirely different cultural standpoint to that prevailing in his new Baha'i community. In Britain, where the culture of the Baha'i community has tended to be professional, literate, and ethnically predominantly white British and Persian, episodes of substantial growth among working class and unemployed families, and among ethnic minorities, have generally petered out after a few years, not only in terms of new enrolements, but in terms of retention of new believers too.

I recall, in this connection, the passages in Century of Light which the Universal House of Justice mentions in their remarkable letter to me which I believe Rich shared earlier with this list:

"Determined efforts were made to respond to the guidance of the World Centre that expansion and consolidation are twin processes that must go hand inhand. Where hoped for results did not readily materialize, however, a measure of discouragement frequently set in. The initial rapid rise in enrolment rates slowed markedly in many countries, tempting some Baha'iinstitutions and communities to turn back to more familiar activities and more accessible publics.
"The principal effect of the setbacks, however, was that they brought home to communities that the high expectations of the early years were in some respects quite unrealistic. Although the easy successes of the initial teaching activities were encouraging, they did not, by themselves, build a Baha'i community life that could meet the needs of its new members and be self-generating. Rather, pioneers and new believers alike faced questions for which Baha'i experience in Western lands - or even Iran - offered few answers." (Century of Light, pp.101-102)

It seems to me that what we have achieved in the past are "successes" in "teaching activities", but a crucial element was missing without which such activities were inherently fragile, and the accompanying expectations "quite unrealistic". That element without which the process of entry by troops is hamstrung is, as I understand it, "a Baha'i community life that could meet the needs of its new members and be self-generating" (ibid). What followed was a process of learning and experimentation described in such letters from the beloved as those of the 26 Dec 1995 to the Conference of the Continental Board of Counsellors; April 1998 on Training Institutes, February 2000 on Training Institutes and Systematic Growth, and 9 January 2001 to the Counsellors. The distilled insight of the last decade has resulted, across the world, in the emergence of the three core activities of study circles, devotional gatherings, and children's classes, as the key instrument for achieving "a Baha'i community life that could meet the needs of its new members and be self-generating". As we invest ourselves heart and soul in the process of establishing these critical elements of Baha'i community development over the next twenty years, and as we integrate our non-Baha'ifriends into these activities, we will move our clusters through successive stages of development till we achieve the "culture of growth" which, the Universal House of Justice points to in their letter to me as the ultimate goal of the Four, One and Five Year Plans.

The key difference then, in my mind, in relation to prevous patterns of large-scale expansion, is that whereas in the past the fundamental motor of such enrolements was the enthusiastic and skilled efforts of a small number of Baha'i teachers, in future I anticipate the key motor of large-scale growth will be the achievement of a critical mass of growth-focused and effective "category A" clusters, consisting of:

"a high level of enthusiasm among a sizable group of devoted and capable believers who understand the prerequisites for sustainable growth and can take the ownership of the program; some basic experience on the part of a few communities in the cluster in holding classes for spiritual education of children, devotional meetings, and the Nineteen Day Feast; the existence ofa reasonable degree of administrative capacity in at least a few Local Spiritual Assemblies; the active involvement of several assistants to Auxiliary Board members in promoting community life; a pronounced spirit of collaboration among the various institutions working in the area; and above all, the strong presence of the training institutes with a scheme of coordination that supports the systematic multiplication of study circles."(UHJ January 9, 2001)

How do these faltering and obfuscated thoughts resonate across the ocean among such valiant and exemplary souls and true eagles in the firmament of servitude and consecration to the Blessed Beauty and His precious, sacred Universal House of Justice?

Your affectionate and humbled pupil,

Ismael

* * * * *^
Dear both,
Thank you for your kind and encouraging responses. If there was no note of contrariness, beloved ones, it is because I do believe that mass teaching approaches do retain immense potential even now, when combined with the patterns of community life fostered by the House of Justice in their Jan 9 letter; when embedded in the attitudes of openess and lack of exclusivism called for in the message to the religious leaders; and when built on the foundation of clusters that evince the characteristics called for by the beloved, and focused on growth. I do not see personal teaching, the development of study circles, devotional meetings and children's classes truly "open to all" on the one hand, and large scale, well-planned, direct teaching campaigns on the other, as mutually incompatible, although the latter, unlike the former, need not be universal.
I recall our House of Justice's explanation that: "At this stage in the development of the Faith there are many new experiments taking place in the teaching field and also in the work of consolidation. It is obvious that not all these experiments will meet with success. Many have great merit while others may have little or none. However, in the present period of transition and rapid growth of the Cause we must seek diligently for the merit of every method devised to teach and deepen the masses." The Universal House of Justice, DDBC, 7.2 Each time I have overcome my inherited (and I must say substantial) discomfort to sally forth to gather souls in His Name with a direct method, on the streets of Britain for instance, each time I have encountered truly precious souls, ready souls, looking for the Faith, yet with no one to share with them the message, and felt deeply moved and grateful at having been part of such a sacred and soul enriching process which beyond the joys of service resulted in some deeply precious friendships with souls I would never otherwise have encountered, nor, it is likely, any other local Baha'is. This condition of yearning after new truth and not knowing where to turn for it Baha'u'llah describes in the Iqan as "the great oppression" of the latter days prophecied in the great Gospels. The bulk of the global Baha'i community owes the gift of the faith, it seems to me, to precisely such audacious and for many in the West counter-intuitive approaches, however discomforting they may, still, initially be in certain corners of my mindset.
Their effectiveness had nothing to do with the illiteracy or material ignorance of the target audience, as was demonstrated by the response of tens of thousands of cultured and educated individuals in Eastern Europe, and had already been shown among hundreds of like souls in Western countries. I recognise that such approaches are not suitable to all, and hold inherent spiritual pitfalls, but I cannot think of a single approach that does not. I therefore truly respect and admire those souls who feel called to advance this particular approach with sincerity, thoroughness, and in a learning mode and spirit of unity and submissiveness to the institutions, and look on with interest and prayerfulness for their progress.
For one thing I do not think has changed in Baha'i culture, is our focus on expansion. Rather, I would suggest the contrary to be the case, and that the culture the House of Justice is specifically and explicitly seeking to move us towards is what they designate as "a culture of growth". The key innovations are not, it seems to me, in deviating from a focus on expansion, but rather in our overall approach, which has become systematic, focused on learning from trial and error, and centred around a universal core of community activities which are not exclusive to Baha'is and which build a nurturing and self-generating community life. This does imply, as you reminds us, a much more open outlook towards the Other than may have been the case before, a much more dynamic and fluid boundary between the Baha'i community and its environment. At the same time it appears to me that, ultimately, it also calls for a more universal, more mature, and more consecrated focus on expansion on the part of each and every one of us.
As our beloved source of guidance wrote to an individual believer on April 1 1996, at the very begining of the House of Justice's efforts to evolve to a new stage our prevalent Baha'i culture: "In the future the Cause of God will spread throughout America; millions will be enlisted under its banner and race prejudice will finally be exorcised from the body politic. Of this have no doubt. It is inexorable,because it is the Will of Almighty God. However, as the House of Justice hasbeen trying to get the friends to understand for some time, the necessary precondition to translation of our community's social vision into reality is a massive expansion in the number of committed, deepened believers who are well grounded in the essentials of the Cause. Those who fail to comprehend the urgency assigned to the objective of achieving a large expansion have obviously failed to appreciate the moral imperative behind this aim."(quoted in "Raising the Call: The Individual and Effective Teaching", p.12)
It seems from this quote that we seem "for some time" to have had difficulty grasping "the urgency assigned to the objective of achieving a large expansion", on account of not understanding clearly enough "the moral imperative behind this aim". I certainly feel that such an analysis reflects my own frailties, and that the intellectual and more crucially spiritual connection between "our community's social vision" and the need for "a massive expansion in the number of committed, deepened believers who are well grounded in the essentials of the Cause.", with the clear emphasis on "massive expansion" and on "urgency", is one that has not always been clearly present in my heart, or animated in an authentic and personal way my labours and priorities in the Cause. The work of the souls in San Antonio; in Bryan/College station where 50 souls (mostly hispanics and African-Americans) have embraced the faith; in Northeast Oklahoma where 90 new believers have entered the Cause including a new LSA composed entirely of Cherokee Nation believers; etc., are all personally inspiring responses to both the moral imperative and the urgency of expansion, that have challenged me to reflect on my own response, and seek His signs in the regions and in my self.
With humble love,
Your friend,
Ismael

Meditation on the Martyrdom of the Báb: And a Provisional Translation

2007-05-27T07:44:00.000Z

This was a meditation I wrote many years ago on this tender subject. It contains a provisional translation of one of the most tender passages in any prayer I have read, written by the Báb .

Dear friends of my heart, we had a beautiful commemoration today, adorned, at the end of a tearful recitation of the Tablet of Visitation by a dear Baha'i friend, with an improvised and deeply touching Negro Spiritual a capella lamenting the Bab's martyrdom. It will stay with me.In the spirit of this holy occasion commemorating His Remembrance, I remember you all dear brothers and sisters who are mirrors turning unto Him, and share with you some faltering meditations which came to me last year on the subject of this tragic yet triumphant day. I also enclose a translated extract of a deeply moving prayer by the Bab, without any academic pretentions or considerations. May the spirit of the Exalted of the Most Exalted kindle in your hearts the fire of His Remembrance, that we may all return to the Point whence our spirits were created and re-created.

In a tablet to Ibn-i Asdaq, Apostle of Bahá'u'lláh and Hand of His Cause,who had begged for the gift of martyrdom in His path, the Abha Pen declared:"God willing, he shall be seen in utmost purity and saintliness, as befitteth the Day of God, and attain the station of the most great martyrdom. This martyrdom is not confined to the destruction of the body and the shedding of blood. A person enjoying the bounty of life may yet be recorded a martyr in the Book of the Sovereign Lord." (Cited in the noble Hasan Balyuzi's Eminent Baha'is in the Time of Baha'u'llah)

It was the Bab Himself who first disclosed this glorious station in this Dispensation. Long before the fatal evening which sealed His fate and that of His faithful Anis, the Bab bore witness to His living martyrdom in the impassioned pages of the Risalih Dhahabbiyyih, where He likened His sacrifice in the course of the public humiliation He was made to endure before the assembled people of Shiraz, to the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn on the plains of Karbila. It was not, therefore, in the muskets of an ill-fated regiment that the bullets that felled Him first started their flight, but in the faithless response that welcomed His call from the very dawn of His ministry. That last hail of bullets that tore through His heart on the 9th of July 1850 was thus but one dot, one final black mark in the book of His sorrows.

A full stop concluding, not the life of the spirit, but the long martyrdom of a young Shirazi Merchant, called to bear witness, before all in heaven and earth, to the manifestation of His own Self, the Exalted, the Most High.

Below, in His remembrance on this sacred day, I enclose a small token, a brief excerpt from a heart rending commune of the Bab found in the preface to the first volume of ALM Nicolas' French translation of the Persian Bayan (p.xvii-xviii). It is an example of worshiping God without the desire for paradise or the fear of hellfire as enjoined by the Bab in that same Holy Book. It is provisionally translated from the French for personal and not academic purposes, and without reference to the original manuscripts.

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O my God! Dost Thou wish for my blood? Wouldst Thou withdraw from me as I strive to draw nigh unto Thee? Yet should I seek to flee Thy might, Thou wouldst assuredly punish me. I know not the road that leads to Thy habitation, that I might seek Thee there, nor do I know in what tongue to call on Thee. Nay, I swear by Thy might, I do not flee Thy nearness, even shouldst Thou condemn me to remoteness from Thee! Nay, by Thy blessed threshold, I fear not Thy wrath even shouldst Thou cast me to the flames! Nay, I swear by Thy greatness, I place my hope in none other except Thee. Wert Thou to abandon me, I would yield praise for God's decree. None is there to be seen more patient than me, and no sovereign is more exalted than He whose dominion ruleth over my heart, chasing away the love of all else but Him. If like a child I seek to flee from Him, He impedes my flight. He places sugar between my lips to stop me from crying; then brings His breast to my mouth and suckles me to sleep.

Secular vs. Religious Historiography

2007-05-27T07:40:00.001Z

The message below combines a post to a Wilmette Institute course on Bahá'í history for which I was serving as faculty, with a dialogue I held with a Bahá'í that found academic readings of history troubling, and felt that to exclude spiritual, or more precisely theological readings of history, was to distort it with potentially immensely damaging results. This is a more general faultline which I attempt to address and to tentatively bridge in the discussion that follows.

Dear all,

Reading the messages and replies in this thread, brought to mind the potential tensions, and the yearning for integration, between two approaches to Bahá'í history. The first may be easily designated academic history. The second approach is what I would describe as providential history.

This is not an either/or polarity, but rather a spectrum, with, for instance, Will McCants and Kavian Milani's seminal Nuqtat’u’l-Kaf article, Mr Balyuzi's biographies, and Mr. Taherzadeh's books, occupying different places in that spectrum. Moreover, the same author in writing for different audiences may opt to position him or herself further or nearer to one or the other polarity. Moojan Momen's prolific and varied work is an example. Much of the conflict in Bahá'í studies has in my view emerged either from misunderstandings of the respective goals, methodologies and stylistic conventions of each approach, or else from competing efforts to make one or the other approach hegemonic in a given discursive context.

It is indeed most stimulating, most challenging, and most important to meditate on the similarities and differences between the complementary perspectives furnished, on the one hand, by the tools of academic history, expounded in Sholeh Quinn's excellent article (“Historical research and Bahá'í scholarship”, Bahá'í Studies Review, Vol.9, 1999-2000), and what may be called providential or dispensational history, the meta-historical, theologically guided, and in this case, divinely inspired interpretation by Shoghi Effendi of the facts furnished by primary sources and the ongoing labours of professional historians.

These two dimensions each have distinct, even if interrelated approaches and limitations, which, as in all matters of the harmony between science and religion, have at once the potential to be dazzlingly illuminating, or explosively polarising.

As a starting point, one of the fundamental methodological bases of modern academic history, is that an academic historian, such as Quinn describes, cannot read back later theological concepts into ealier history and periods. Thus, unless he finds distinct evidence in credible written documents, he or she cannot say that the Báb communed with, announced and gave His blessed life for Bahá'u'lláh, much less suggest that when He wrote in the Bayán "well is it with him who fixeth His gaze on the Order of Bahá'u'lláh", He meant, as Shoghi Effendi proclaimed, the institutions of the Administrative Order, institutions moreover that will, we believe in faith, eventually evolve into a World Order which will in turn culminate in the emergence of a world civilization. An academic historian, as historian, cannot go beyond contemporary sources, and, moreover, must give preference to the earliest accounts in understanding a given period or figure, accounts which cannot be expected to have been aware of interpretations which would emerge only much, much later. To do that is to fall into the academic historian's dreaded pitfall: anachronism, which literally means "out of time", that is inserting in historical narratives elements that belong to an earlier or a later period.

A believer, on the contrary, as believer (be he a professional historian, biologist, woodcutter or painter), and still more a divinely appointed interpreter, can, and Shoghi Effendi tells us, should, understand historical events in the light of Revelation, not only contemporary, but also preceding and subsequent to the events described. Thus, in order to grasp not only the facts of history, but their life transforming, society-building meaning, the historical events that make up the life of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh are to be placed in the context of thousands of years of past prophetic expectation, announcement and disclosure, on the one hand, and on the other, of the glorious promises, the new community, the Covenant of succession and interpretation, and the allusions, fulfilment and expositions of subsequent outpourings of divine revelation and authorized interpretation. This is what Shoghi Effendi does in God Passes By, and, in a wholly different category, authors such as Adib Taherzadeh also emulate.

These are two complementary spheres of historical consciousness, for without the competent research of trained historians, the facts that form the raw fabric whence divine meanings emerge would remain obscure and even unknown, while without the providential context, their spiritual significance, their existential meaning, and, above all, their sacred dimension, would become elusive at best, at worst (and almost inevitably), altogether lost.

To capture this delicate issue most forcefully we can take the following statement from God Passes By:

"The century under our review [1844-1944] may therefore be considered as falling into four distinct periods, of unequal duration, each of specific import and of tremendous and indeed unappraisable significance. These four periods are closely interrelated, and constitute successive acts of one, indivisible, stupendous and sublime drama, whose mystery no intellect can fathom, whose climax no eye can even dimly perceive, whose conclusion no mind can adequately foreshadow....To isolate any one of them from the others, to dissociate the later manifestations of one universal, all-embracing Revelation from the pristine purpose that animated it in its earliest days, would be tantamount to a mutilation of the structure on which it rests, and to a lamentable perversion of its truth and of its history." (God Passes By, Foreword, p.xiv)

Here we can see what intensity of emphasis Shoghi Effendi places on the need to read the early periods of Bahá'í history in the light of "the later manifestations of one universal, all-embracing Revelation ", and viceversa. And yet, the methodology of academic history relies precisely on an effort "to dissociate the later manifestations" from "the pristine purpose that animated it in its earliest days" and try to understand each period in its own terms, as revealed by the contemporary sources at our disposal.

In order to harmonize these two perspectives, we need to understand that they obey complementary yet distinct goals: on the one hand, trying to understand "what happened" at a given period or moment in time, and what it most likely meant to the people of that time (academic history); and on the other hand, seeking to comprehend what those events mean in the light of faith to believers today, and, beyond the confines of contemporary context, what it means in eternity in the sacred light of what the Guardian describes as the "Grand Redemptive Scheme of God" for humanity (God Passes By, p.139), where, the Bible tells us, "one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (II-Peter 3:8)

Shoghi Effendi, in God Passes By, makes room for both approaches. As an example, his discussion of the declaration of Ridvan is framed in the spiritual context of former prophecy and future divine promise, and it is in this light that he identifies and interprets the facts at his disposal: as providential history. The task of expanding and enriching the facts available, that raw material from which to expand and enrich in turn the sacred narrative of providential history, he does not himself attempt, but, as in "the exact circumstances" attending that Declaration, that is "the words Bahá'u'lláh actually uttered on that occasion, the manner of His Declaration, the reaction it produced, its impact on Mírzá Yahyá, the identity of those who were privileged to hear Him" he leaves, rather, to the labours of "future historians" (GPB p.153). This is where Sholeh Quinn's "professional historian" comes in. In some cases, both aspects can to some degree be combined (as in Mr Balyuzi's histories, and most of Persian Bahá'í historical writing). In the majority of cases, however, particularly where university audiences and non-bahá'í periodicals and conferences are involved, academic history and providential history remain separate, albeit frequently, and ideally, complementary endeavours.

This is specially so for believers who approach history from a Faith perspective. It is to be expected that those who do not share the premises of Faith, apply a reading that takes no account of faith based premises, such as the claim that in writing about the Order (nazm) of Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb had in mind, not the arrangement of future compilations of the Bayán, but the institutions the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, a use of the term “order of Bahá’u’lláh” which was only formulated explicitly for the first time by Shoghi Effendi in the 1930’s. The believer, on the contrary, faces three potential pitfalls, as I understand it. I am speaking here about hermeneutical risks, risks in understanding, not about the expression of that understanding in print. In print, or in conversation even, one will express one’s historical understanding in accordance to the conventions and constraints of the audience one is addressing. Whether one has a theologically informed perspective on history or not, if writing in an academic journal geared at a non-believing audience, one will not go beyond the interpretive resources of the period under study. However, it is suggested, as a believer, one’s own understanding, regardless of how fully or partially it finds its way to print, should be informed, animated, and guided by the light of faith in the supernatural, supra-historical dimension of history as the vehicle for the purposeful unfolding of the will of God for humanity.

The first interpretive risk for a Bahá’í historian from this perspective, then, is to strip religious history of its religious meaning, an endeavour which, while legitimate for non-believers, is at best incongruent for such as consider themselves believers in the divine realities of the Faith of God. It is to make revelation irrelevant to a believer’s understanding of history, and reduce in his own mind the causes and effects of events and happening purely to material means and processes, and limit the meaning of the facts at hand to the range of possibilities available to contemporaries, discarding the extended meanings that a supra-historical, scripturally informed understanding of their significance makes possible.

I say extended meanings, because the second pitfall into which a believer can fall is, beginning from scripture or belief, to discard, disavow or distort the factual investigations that are necessary as underpinnings of any theological meta-narrative of history, if it is not to become a pious fiction, history as, from a given theological perspective, it ought to have been. In medieval literature, the hagiographical genre is one example where frequent historical narrations derived from belief but entirely unsupported by research, in fact, pure works of edifying fiction, abound as examples. There are matters which it is, specifically, the province of academic historical and linguistic research to establish, above and beyond the premises of faith, although these may influence the dynamic and emphasis of the research. When, taking as the starting point a 21st century theological formulation of a Bahá’í meaning of the term “revelation, one states that there is no documented evidence whatsoever to declare that Quddus claimed divine revelation for himself, this is not something for Providential or Divine history, in other words for theology as such, to establish, but really for normal historical investigation.

This, as was pointed out earlier in the thread, is to be established by referring to the writings of Quddus, and to a lesser degree to contemporary secondary sources. When, from the point of view of divine or providential history, one asserts that Quddus never declared such a thing, without first checking in his writings whether that is the case or not, that is in fact not divine history, but divination. The Guardian, himself, as my quote regarding Ridvan suggests, always built his theological formulations on the basis of solid evidence, and refused to speculate, let alone categorically assert matters of fact, such as the exact circumstances and even the content of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration, where the necessary research was lacking. Now, if a perusal of the writings of Quddus showed that he wrote "I have received wahy", whatever our theological or doctrinal starting point, we would be compelled to declare: Quddus did claim to have received wahy or divine revelation. It would then be the task of the theologian of Providential history, not to deny, against the evidence, that such claims were made, but to harmonise and reconcile them, and explore how Quddus's claims to revelation might fit with the concept of revelation in Bahá'í belief. This - establishing what it might mean for Bahá'ís the fact that Quddus claimed revelation (if he did) - would not be something to be established by historians as historians, but by believers as believers.

I would whole-heartedly agree that for a sincere believer in Bahá'u'lláh's claims, questions about the meaning of history must indeed be interpreted in the light of revelation. But questions of fact must, the Guardian himself suggests, be understood primarily on the basis of careful assessment of the sources. We must also be able to go beyond the kingdom of names, and not read in the same terminology necessarily the same meaning for different periods, and judge accordingly. Here, providential history even as it is built around the factual researches of academic history, can benefit from the complementary tool of linguistic or semantic analysis. As an example, the question has arisen whether Quddus ever claimed, or was assigned, the station of a mazhar or Manifestation of God. From a modern Bahá’í perspective, the instinctive response would be that he could not have claimed such a thing, as it is clear that only the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh could have claimed such a station in this dispensation. Once more, this is an issue for historical research, not doctrinal presupposition to establish. But supposing an instance was indeed found where Quddus refers to himself, or is referred to by the Báb, as a mazhar, we need not immediately assume there is a theological contradiction at work. By turning to the ancillary tool of linguistic research, whereas in Bahá'í theology the term "mazhar" has become linked to a very specific concept, namely, that unique and peerless Intermediary between man and God, the same term "mazhar" has a long tradition with a much wider and more inclusive set of concepts attached to it in Shi'i theosopy (see Corbin's work, passim) and in Bábism also, and thus, if we find that someone is decribed as "mazhar" in a Bábí text, we should not jump to the conclusion that they are claiming to be Manifestatons of God in the Bahá'í sense, nor, on the other hand, because of the modern Bahá'í concept of "mazhar", rule out that the term may have been used for earlier, non-prophetic figures, although not necessarily with the same connotations.

Similarly, for Quddus to say that he “revealed” things, need not entail an equivalence to the use of the term “reveal” in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings as expounded by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi. The concept of revelation, even in Bahá’í terms, is demonstrably not static or monolithic, but rather flexible or plural. Thus, the term "reveal" has been authoritatively used by the Guardian both for the Master and for Bahá'u'lláh, but surely with different connotations. Those different connotations are clearly not purely matters of historical or linguistic research, but also, for believers, matters of theological reflection in the light of the writings of the Guardian on the respective stations of each of these Holy Figures. These are matters in which providential history and normal historical and linguistic research must, for a believer, and when communicating with an audience that shares the premises of faith, complement each other. Naturally, when writing for audiences that do not share our faith, our convictions arising from divine or providential history might be possibly (not necessarily wisely) communicated by us, but we cannot expect others to share them with us or even be receptive to them. It is, as I understand it, the task of providential history to harmonise, interpret and make sense of the facts as solid historical and linguistic research presents us, and not the other way around: such was always the way of Shoghi Effendi.

Beside the twin pitfalls of either reducing the meaning of history to exclusively material causes and effects and to strictly contemporary possibilities of meaning; and of ignoring or rejecting the processes and findings of the factual investigations carried out through academic history, the third potential pitfall for a believer approaching historical discourse from the standpoint of faith is, on the basis of a personal faith perspective, to presume his or her conclusion definitive, universal, or self-evident. Providential history, concerned, as has been suggested, not so much with "what happened" as to "what does it all mean in the light of the Faith", is not in any way cut and dried, any more than academic history. If anything, I would think that "what it means" is even less cut and dried, even more multilayered and nuanced and ambiguous, generally, than "what happened". One individual's perception of what is "the right interpretation" of a historical figure or event, is no more authoritative than that of a fellow believer working from the same starting point, and may frequently differ, which means that these are in fact, ever and anon, matters to be established, ever tentatively and for the duration of this dispensation, by consultation and dialogue, for which we need to develop, the House of Justice states, a culture of tolerance for diverse views representing individuals' different perceptions.

In sum, my understanding is that we must distinguish, when judging the communications of historians, believing or not, whether in their writings or messages they are trying to establish "what happened", or "what does it mean". If the former, that is the province of academic history, into which matters of faith enter but tangentially. If the latter, that is, in the light of faith, a question for believers qua believers, for which the bare facts are but raw matter, and not reductive final points of meaning. Here too, there must be room for a diversity of opinions, and a humble acknowledgement that one's own conviction of where the truth lies, however strong and personally compelling, remains an individual, human, and ultimately fragile and fallible perception, in the company of many more, not all in accordance with our own, but not therefore necessarily or inherently "wrong".

With love, as ever,

Ismael