Baha'i Studies Review - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2012

This study demonstrates how the Baha’i ‘Race Amity’ efforts effectively reached the black intelligentsia during the Jim Crow era, attracting the interest and involvement of two influential giants of the period – Alain Leroy Locke, PhD (1885–1954) and Robert S. Abbott, LLB (1870–1940). Locke affiliated with the Baha’i Faith in 1918, and Abbott formally joined the Baha’i religion in 1934. Another towering figure in the black intelligentsia, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) – whose first wife, Nina Du Bois (d. 1950), was a member of the New York Baha’i community – had sustained, for a period of time, consider¬able interest in the Baha’i movement, as documented in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Religious History, guest edited by Todd Lawson. These illustrious figures – W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain L. Locke and Robert S. Abbott – are ranked as the 4th, 36th and 41st most influential African Americans in American history. It is not so much the intrinsic message of the Baha’i religion that attracted the interest of the black intelligentsia, but rather the Baha’i emphasis on ‘race amity’ – representing what, by Jim Crow standards, may be regarded as a socially audacious – even radical – application of the Baha’i ethic of world unity, from family relations to international relations, to the prevailing American social crisis.

A short review of Shoghi Effendi’s published letters to the Baha’is of India and Burma during the 1930s. The article includes a survey of the main statistical, administrative, and teaching developments of the Burmese and Indian Baha’i communities during the period.

This article examines the corpus of anti-Baha’i polemics produced since the mid-19th century as historiographical works, exploring the ways in which they have been exploited in the service of writing the dominant history. It categorizes these polemics, identifies their major themes, and traces the shift in their overtone from religious/moral to political. Suggesting that historiography became an integral part of anti-Baha’i polemics from early on, it focuses on Tahirih, Dolgoruki, and Hoveyda as epitomes of the three main accusations levelled against Baha’is: moral/ethical decadence, clandestine foreign dependency, and political corruption. The article concludes by advancing a short analysis of the role these accusations have played in anti-Baha’i polemics and why they have been blindly accepted by large numbers of Iranians.

Many religious movements have at one time or another had to acknowledge the effect of historical developments and social changes on the applicability of their sacred laws. This has been especially true for Shi’a Islam, whose history was, for long, one of disappointment and defeat. Throughout the centuries, Shi’a jurists gradually developed a rather distinct set of conceptual tools, and a unique religious structure, to deal with these changes. The implication of these developments for one’s understanding of the nature and meaning of religious truth, though, remained largely uninvestigated by these jurists.

In the early part of the 19th century, Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i (1753–1826) and Siyyid Kazim al-Rashti (1793–1843) embarked on an enterprise to revise popular Shi’a understanding of religious truth. Together, they tried to show that religious truth was neither static nor could it be reduced to the outward meanings of Qur’anic verses and Islamic traditions. Instead, they portrayed truth as that which would have to unfold through an unceasing dialectic between the worlds of creation and revealed text (naql), and within the enlightened hearts of illumined souls who have rid themselves of preconceptions and become imbued with spiritual virtues. Shaykh Ahmad and Siyyid Kazim referred to their proposed method of encounter with and search for religious truth as dalil-i-hikmat (lit. the proof of wisdom).

This paper attempts to portray ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s interpretive style as proof of wisdom par excellence. It begins with a study of the term ‘hikmat’, as commonly used in the Baha’i writings and parlance, to refer to the effect of situational factors on the shaping and application of Baha’i laws and teachings. It proceeds to show how this particular usage is linked to, and informed by, the Shaykhi approach to truth, and to demonstrate how this approach is endorsed in the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha and finds expression in his encounter with questions regarding the applicability of Baha’i laws. The paper aims to suggest that the Baha’i community’s collective decision-making needs to become better informed by ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s hermeneutical approach to the understanding of the teachings of the Baha’i Faith.

As the Baha’i religion has become better known, it has been the target of numerous attacks as well as rational criticisms by non-Baha’is, former Baha’is and by Baha’is who remain in the community but feel that their religion is becoming more authoritarian or even totalitarian. These criticisms need to be addressed as they are quite valid to those who accept the ideas and institutions of the European Enlightenment. The disparagement tends to fall into three general categories: personal, political and academic.

This paper presents a discussion of the meaning of the terms ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ from the point of view of political theory, then lays out arguments that the Baha’i Faith does not fit either of those classifications but rather that the Baha’i Faith in every way conforms to the Weberian concept of voluntarism. Further, the relation of the individual Baha’i with his community is a form of social contract predicated on freedom of choice with the responsibility to abide by the conditions of that contract as they are expressed by the institutions of that Faith. Only those who have freely chosen to enter that community by way of the contract are subject to the laws and ordinances of that community; there is no intention of imposing them on humanity at large.

A wealth of literature has attested to the recrudescence of state- and clerical- sponsored religious intolerance and persecution of the Iranian Baha’i religious minority since the more than three decades of the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979. Persecution during the Pahlavi regime is more sparsely documented. The following is an annotated translation of an article by Nasser Mohajer of the grim circumstances surrounding the brutal killing of Baha’i physician Sulayman Berjis (1897–1950) by a gang of religious fanatics and the uncivil indifference and abortive trial of justice that followed.

It was recently discovered that the Dutch national newspaper “Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant” in 1921 published an anonymous interview with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá taken at his home in Haifa as well as in Tiberias. The correspondent turned out to be Ms Jo Goudsmit, a Dutch Zionist who emigrated to Palestine in 1919.

This article brings to light a number of hitherto unknown passages from the writings of the Bāb about Hajji Mubārak, the Bāb’s Ethiopian servant.

Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), (2009) Berkeley: University of California Press, ix + 338 pp., ill., 23 cm., ISBN 9780520257429 (pbk), $24.95; ISBN 9780520257412 (hbk), $60.00

Commonalities: A Positive Look at Latter-day Saints from a Bahá’í Perspective, Serge van Neck, (2009) Oxford: George Ronald, xvii + 445 pp., 24 cm., ISBN 9780853985372 (pbk), £19.95/$38.95

Lines that Connect: Rethinking Pattern and Mind in the Pacific, Graeme Were, (2010) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, x + 204 pp., 44 ill., 24 cm., ISBN 9780824833848 (hbk), $38.00

Religious Myths and Visions of America: How Minority Faiths Redefined America’s World Role, Christopher Buck, (2009) Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, xii + 324 pp., 25 cm., ISBN 9780313359590 (hbk), $49.95

Revelation & Social Reality: Learning to Translate What is Written into Reality, Paul Lample (2009) West Palm Beach, FL: Palabra, vii + 293 pp., 23 cm., ISBN 9781890101701 (pbk) $10.00. Digital download www.palabrapublications.com