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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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"

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