The Prisoner of Akka,
Baha’u’llah, lived much of His life deprived of liberty, harassed
and suppressed by the tyranny of one despot or another, yet He
envisions a world of global freedom and universal brotherhood. From
His experience of the liberty of His own Mind, from His mystical
experience of the oneness of God, He teaches the oneness of all
religions and the oneness of humankind. His immortal and challenging
proclamation is "The earth is but one country and mankind its
citizens." His love of liberty resonates with the noblest
reflections on liberty that run throughout human history, East or
West. Like Edmund Burke, Lord Acton, and the signers of the
Declaration of Independence, Baha’u’llah upheld a responsible
liberty seasoned with a sense of duty to God and society, while
preserving and protecting the sanctity of the individual from
tyranny and debasement.
What the Baha’i Faith has
become today contrasts sharply with His enlightened Writings: a
prison house of oppression, coercion, deception, manipulation,
employing all manner of "slanderous vilification" against its own
members for the slightest ideological divergence from its
interpretation of His Teachings, calculated to deprive the
individual of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, demanding
nothing less than complete, absolute, and servile obedience. From a
secular perspective, the Baha’i Faith has become the antitheses of
the liberty discussed by John Stuart Mill in his classic work and
the antitheses of the virtues extolled by Baha’u’llah and his son in
the societies of England and the United States of America.
To those who are unfamiliar
with the complicated history of the Baha’i Faith during the last one
hundred years, these claims may well seem extreme and unwarranted,
if one only knows the version propagated by self-serving Baha’i
sources; To those who have suffered at the hands of Baha’i
administrative inquisitors and oppressors, these claims will ring
all too true, evoking bitter and painful memories. For the past ten
to thirty years, the Baha’i Faith has imposed one inquisition after
another upon its members. It has been widely assumed by many Baha’is
that these incidents marked a temporary aberration from Baha’i
administrative conduct, which would soon be corrected once the
Universal House of Justice became sufficiently apprised of the
issues involved, and that it would reprimand the particular
counselor or auxiliary board member involved. Time has gone by, and
incident after incident has accumulated, bringing home to many that
far from a temporary aberration, a prison house of tyranny has
indeed supplanted the liberty of the individual mind and soul that
Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha had guaranteed their followers.
It is the sheer number of
these incidents that convey, more than any one of them, the truest
picture of what has become of Baha’u’llah’s Faith. In the mid 1970s,
a group of young students and scholars in Los Angeles loosely formed
a study class for the sharing and encouragement of their research of
Baha’i history and theology. They were harangued, harassed, and
attacked, some leaving the Baha’i Faith in confusion and disbelief.
Later in that decade, Bahai scholars at the University of Michigan
and elsewhere who were commissioned, by the National Spiritual
Assembly of the United States of America, to write a Bahai
encyclopedia, met with a similar experience, many ending up having
to resign from working on it, believing they could not do so in good
conscience, given the interference of Baha’i authorities regarding
historical fact and detail; some were driven out into the
self-censorship of silence. The 1980s witnessed an increasing number
of incidents. In 1987 "A Modest Proposal," intended for, but never
published, in Dialogue Magazine, attempted to suggest
improvements in procedure and operation of the national community,
only to be publicly denounced at the national convention the
following year, while its writers were handled in a most
reprehensible fashion, some threatened with excommunication. Another
group of scholars and writers in 1998 contributed to a paper known
as "The Service of Women" which again met with a vehement crackdown
all out of proportion to the issues and intentions of its authors.
No brief highlighting of the shockingly dictatorial abuse of power
by the Baha’i administration would be complete without mention of an
open letter in 1996 by Steven Scholl, one of the Dialogue
editors, which attempted to bring attention to the frequency and
severity of these incidents and urged moderation and a more open and
tolerant community. Many of the young editors and writers of
Dialogue Magazine, as well as others, have been harassed and
hounded into silence or driven out the door.
With the wide availability
and development of the Internet during the 1990s, Baha’is all around
the world, enjoying the liberty given them by God Himself and lauded
by both Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha, entered into free and open
discussion in a number of online venues. One of the first was
Talisman, an email list sponsored through one scholar’s affiliation
with Indiana University. Baha’i interrogators of conscience were
quick to quibble and denounce members for their views and opinions
expressed in emails to group members, ultimately denouncing, as had
happened in previous incidents, individuals as "covenant breakers"
or possibly holding opinions which were tending toward covenant
breaking. Through such methods, the abuse of individuals was carried
out "in the best interest of the Faith," driving more young,
intelligent, inquisitive, vigorous minds and souls away in shock and
horror over what the Baha’i Faith had become, not was.
Another major incident,
publicly documented in the newsgroup databases of Google and other
search engines, was the proposal of an open and unmoderated
newsgroup, talk.religion.bahai. Given the pervasive censorship and
manipulation of thought and discussion on the previously existing
newsgroup, soc.religion.bahai, praised in The American Baha’i,
many Baha’is and non-Baha’i observers believed such a newsgroup
was essential for unfettered discussion about Baha’i matters of
concern. The overwhelming opposition of Baha’is to its formation
shocked many inside and outside of the Baha’i Faith, as many
fundamentalists called upon Baha’is "in good standing" and "firm in
the covenant" to vote NO against it, garnering more than 600 votes
through such rabble-rousing techniques on private Baha’i-only email
lists. It took three years and as many rounds of voting to create
what is still, as of 2004, the only forum on the Internet that
cannot technically prevent the expression of any opinion or point of
view.
No survey of incidents
should fail to mention the lawsuit of Deborah Buchhorn against the
National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States and
the Assembly of Albuquerque, New Mexico for fraud and libel in 2001.
The court’s dismissal of the lawsuit proved only that the government
of the United States was wisely not about to adjudicate on issues of
religion and conscience and in no way exonerated the Baha’i
administration of the charges.
Throughout all these
incidents and others, most Baha’is thought only in terms of an
aberration, surely something had gone wrong, a miscarriage of Baha’i
justice that the ultimate defender of justice, the Universal House
of Justice, would rectify, restoring order and sanity to
Baha’u’llah’s Cause. Yet the tactics used were virtually identical
in each case, and have become widely known, through
talk.religion.bahai, as The Baha’i Technique, essentially,
"slanderous vilification," imputations of covenant breaking or
incipient covenant breaking, frightening people involved into
silence, fear, and self-censorship. To assist in this program of
ideological terrorization of the Baha’i community, the uhj has on a
number of occasions apparently, or purportedly, autocratically
thrown people out of the Baha’i Faith, despite such a practice not
existing anywhere in the Baha’i Writings, despite Shoghi Effendi
explicitly stating that only the Guardian could pronounce someone a
covenant breaker. This indefensible, desperate tactic,
non-doctrinal, has been wielded a number of times since 1997. All
these incidents and more are documented on the Internet and
elsewhere for those unfamiliar with them or for those who wish to
independently investigate them further:
https://fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/
How often in religious
history have the teachings and vision of the Founder become debased
by the organization that rears itself upon His Sacrifice. No
impartial, fair-minded observer who conscientiously explores, to
whatever degree, these incidents, thus far recounted, can fail to
perceive that the Baha’i Faith and what it calls its "administrative
order" has become, in the most apropos words of Martin Luther, a
"terrible tyranny." Its wolves in sheep’s clothing have turned far
aside from the Middle Path, envisioned by Baha’u’llah and
Abdu’l-Baha, universally condoned by the reason of all persuasions.
On all sides Baha’i administrators see only heretics and apostates,
point the finger, denounce people as breakers of Baha’u’llah’s
covenant, or Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and Testament, or Shoghi Effendi’s
non-existent will, which, in disobedience to Abdu’l-Baha, he never
wrote.
In 2004, H-Net, a scholarly
website supported by Michigan State University and Humanities &
Social Sciences Online, reprinted in digital format the works of
Mirza Ahmad Sohrab, who for over eight years served Abdu’l-Baha as a
secretary and translator in the Middle East and on his American and
European journeys. In Sohrab’s several books, especially in
Broken Silence: The Story of Today’s Struggle for Religious Freedom
(1942) and The Will and Testament of Abdu’l-Baha: An Analysis
(1944), Sohrab presents his opinion that the Baha’i Faith was
already well on the road to becoming an oppressive organization in
the 1920s and ‘30s, exploitative of the individual, and departing
further, with every year, from the moderation and predominately
democratic liberalism of Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha. Sohrab located
the source of the emerging problems of conscience and religious
freedom in the desire of some early American Baha’is for absolute
control, modeled on the Roman Catholic Church and other forms of
autocratic religious organization, leading to and encouraging Shoghi
Effendi’s increasingly fanatical interpretation of Abdu’l-Baha’s
Will and Testament:
To interpret
this section of the Will in such a literal sense,
is, to say the least, utterly short-sighted and a
complete subversion of all the glorious teachings of
the Bahai Cause (53).
The young and impressionable
Shoghi Effendi, a little dreamy and not entirely ready for it all,
unsure of himself and what direction to chart after Abdu’l-Baha’s
passing, increasingly came under the influence of people in both the
East and West who wanted a rigidly controlled bureaucratic system,
until his own hand became the dominating force shaping the now
trademarked, incorporated, and copyrighted organization. H-Net’s
digital reprinting brought home for insightful observers of the
victimization of fellow Baha’is, during the purges and pogroms of
the 1970s and after, the inescapable realization that, far from an
aberration, the same pervasive fanaticism and censorship had indeed
been experienced by Sohrab and earlier Baha’is in virtually the same
form and manner. No amount of distorting and slandering the
intentions and beliefs of Sohrab and Mrs. Chanler could deny the
validity and eloquent truth of their own testimony, repeated and
confirmed by the experience of subsequent generations of Baha’is.
Dying without leaving a will
in 1957, Shoghi Effendi left the Baha’i Faith with no infallible
successor, no appointed Guardian, and no infallible interpreter of
Baha’u’llah’s Writings. Shoghi Effendi’s own words state
emphatically that without a Guardian the Baha’i Faith would be
mutilated and completely deprived of the "unerring guidance of God."
Subsequent to his death, Baha’i experience only corroborates his
judgment. No matter to what extent the Hands of the Cause assumed,
or presumed, an authority that neither Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and
Testament nor any of the writings of Shoghi Effendi bestowed, their
innovations and attempts to lay a credible foundation for the uhj
failed, and time has proven it, made it open and blatant as the
noonday sun.
The end of the Guardianship
and the innovations and attempts to fill in the gaps and unfulfilled
portions of Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and Testament have continued unabated
since the earliest schism between the Hands of the Cause, their
unilateral and unauthorized attempt to fill the interpretive void
left by Shoghi Effendi’s failure to foresee his untimely end and the
commotions it would unleash upon Baha’u’llah’s Faith. Neither the
custodians nor the Orthodox Baha’is had, or have, a credible claim
to assumption of the mantle of authority. Nothing in Abdu’l-Baha’s
Will and Testament nor Shoghi Effendi’s writings anticipated or
justified what they did after the Guardian’s death. Similarly, the
International Baha’i Council that the Hands put aside was not in the
Will and Testament nor an instrument of the Master for the
appointment of a new Guardian. That the Hands were nominated and
appointed by Shoghi Effendi gave them no legitimate authority to
assume, or usurp, the "rights and powers in succession to the
Guardian," which they claimed, nor to change the method of creating
a universal house of justice from what was stipulated by the Master
in His Will and was already anticipated by the Guardian through the
unfolding of the International Baha’i Council. Any pretense to
"infallibility" ended with Shoghi Effendi, and subsequent Baha’i
experience has proven it in the ruined and destroyed lives of many
thousands of individuals, married couples, families, and Baha’i
communities.
The eventual creation by the
uhj of the continental board of counselors, a type of Baha’i college
of cardinals, and the auxiliary boards, notorious for operating like
the Jesuits at their worst, has only exacerbated the situation and
deepened the rift between Baha’is in all walks of life and the
barely concealed clergy that now exists and demands at every turn
"obedience" to the covenant, as the "infallible" universal house of
justice interprets it, ignoring that Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi
both explicitly stated that only the Guardian has interpretive
guidance and that the uhj has only legislative authority.
For decades the fanatical
interpretation of Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and Testament has demonstrated
that not the slightest reform, or suggestion of reform, will be
tolerated, let alone considered or acted upon. The uhj and its
clergy have demonstrated beyond a doubt that they do not possess
infallible powers or interpretive authority worthy of respect, let
alone obedience.
Reform Bahais have watched
or participated in all this. Many have been victims of intolerance
and witch hunts; of coercion of conscience and denunciation,
ostracism and shunning, and all the other tactics and techniques of
The Baha’i Technique, suffered under the ferocious attacks of their
fellow Baha’is who never hesitate to violate the Words of Abdu’l-Baha:
"According to the direct and sacred command of God we are forbidden
to utter slander."
Far from censuring such
slander, a corrupted organization has encouraged among its cadre an
ever more vicious campaign of slander, by what Mirza Ahmad Sohrab
rightly recognized and scathingly called in the 1940s, "fawning,
cringing, sniveling, mealy-mouthed sycophants, flatterers and
flunkies."
Lessoned by time and
history, by experience that cannot be taken but as a revelation of
the Will of God, an unveiling of what lies behind the marble facade,
acknowledging that the loss of the dream of unity and infallibility
happened long ago, Reform Bahais seek to recover, restore, and
return to Baha’u’llah’s central and pristine Teachings–the oneness
of God, the oneness of religion, the oneness of humankind–to His
vision of responsible individual liberty in service to humanity, to
the Example of the Master’s Love, Wisdom, Kindness, Compassion, and
Self-Sacrifice.
Reform Bahais choose to
leave those who choose hatred, denunciation, shunning, endless and
unproductive argument and recrimination over Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and
Testament, seeking justification for fanaticism, over the Will of
Shoghi Effendi, which he never wrote or implied, or over the
successors he never intended or appointed, or over the oppressive
organization Baha’u’llah Himself never envisioned nor proclaimed.
Reform Bahais invite all
Bahais, all humanity, to a Convocation of celebration, peace, love,
and brotherhood, to seek humbly His Will, during Ridvan 2006.
FG
The Reform Bahai Faith
www.ReformBahai.org
October 4, 2004