Respecting the Conscience
of Man.... June 27, 2000 - FG
In his conclusion, which would never have passed the system of censorship,
"Bahai review," that the UHJ imposes on all publications brought out
under its tight control, Professor Cole, of the Department of History at the
University of Michigan, quite accurately identifies the distortions that have
been wreaked upon Baha'u'llah's Teachings:
"Some contemporary leaders of the Baha'i Faith have given answers
increasingly similar to those of fundamentalists, stressing scriptural
literalism, patriarchy, theocracy, censorship, intellectual intolerance, and
denying key democratic values. While the values of the nineteenth-century Baha'i
movement, which was far more tolerant, continue to exist as a minority view, by
the late 1990s a different set of emphases prevailed." (196)
Cole himself and many others have suffered at the hands of the
fundamentalists who have taken control of the religion:
"The rise of academic Baha'i scholarship has caused tension in the
community, whose present-day leadership tends to be fundamentalist and
antiliberal in orientation, and this has led to pressure on a number of
prominent academics to resign or dissociate themselves from the movement."
(201)
These same forces of fundamentalist orthodoxy are evident on
talk.religion.bahai and alt.religion.bahai on Usenet for impartial viewers to
witness. They will be evident to all perceptive observers of whatever forum
Bahais may be trying to control and influence. Both my and Cole's websites
provide essential documentation along these lines. It should be noted that the
Universal House of Justice has actively worked through the BCCA (Bahai Computer
and Communications Association) to suppress all links to websites with other
than its own "comprehensive" point of view on such major portals as
Yahoo.com, Excite.com, and other search engines. The UHJ has gone even further
by advising Bahais to remove any link whatsoever to Professor Cole's website.
As a Bahai since 1976, I myself have always found especially repulsive the
manner in which Bahai fundamentalists attempt to manipulate the institutions and
leaders of government, the United Nations, and public opinion, while pretending
to values they deride in private or at Bahai-only meetings.
Ultimately, it is the Bahai Universal House of Justice that is responsible
for the perversion and corruption of such clear and elevating teachings of
Baha'u'llah and Abdul-Baha as the following:
"These are effectual and sufficient proofs that the conscience of man
is sacred and to be respected; and that liberty thereof produces widening of
ideas, amendment of morals, improvement of conduct, disclosure of the secrets of
the contingent world." Abdul-Baha, A Traveler's Narrative, 91.
The UHJ is also in the end responsible for inciting Bahai fanatics and
fundamentalists to attack other Bahais and non-Bahais merely for their views
expressed on and off line in free forums of public discussion.
Professor Cole's Modernity and the Millennium will remain, for many years to
come, the most important book available on the Baha'i Faith. His discussion of
its historical development within the intellectual milieu of progressive 19th
Century thought is particularly brilliant and insightful.
Juan R.I. Cole. Modernity and the Millennium, Reviewed by Sen McGlinn, Otago University, New Zealand.
Published by H-Bahai (July, 1998)
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=17941900618943
Review by Denis MacEoin, published in Times Literary Supplement, 1999:
Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the
Nineteenth-Century Middle East
Author: Juan R. I. Cole
Published by: Columbia University Press, New York, 1998. 264 pp.
New prophet, new law
Our perception of the Middle East and Islam being what it is, it's not very
surprising that most Westerners think of the region as hopelessly unreformed,
as, perhaps, beyond reform, in a way that is not thought true of, say,
non-Muslim Africa or Latin America. Faced with Saudi conservatism, or the
Taliban at work in Afghanistan, the average onlooker may well be forgiven the
judgment, however sweeping.
There is no question but that, in recent years, Islamic revivalism has embraced
a "back to basics" ethic that manifests itself most notoriously in public
floggings, the enforced veiling of women, or calls (as in Pakistan) for the
universal implementation of shar'ia law. Yet, go back a century or so, to Turkey
or Iran or Palestine and an equally astonishing picture presents itself: one of
both religious and secular reformism on a breathtaking scale.
In country after country during the second half of the last century and the
first decades of this, Muslims demanded and achieved reforms, that, in the
nature of things, encompassed both religion and State. Everything had to be
modelled on the expanding, successful West, of course, and very little was
considered sacrosanct. Reform affected law, education women's rights, minority
rights, and even the character of the Islamic State itself (as in the agitation
that led to the new Iranian constitution of 1906).
Juan R. I. Cole's elegantly presented study brings the period and its reformers
bark on to centre stage, while doing so through an unfamiliar medium: the
reformism of a new, post-Islamic religion, the Bahai faith, which exists today
as a widespread and rapidly growing new religious movement. This is not as
perverse as it may seem. Baha'ism ranks very high indeed in the hate list of
modern Muslims, sandwiched somewhere between Salman Rushdie and Zionism. The
reason is simple: despite the smallness of its numbers, Baha'ism represents the
ultimate threat to Islam; it is a movement that abrogates Islamic law and puts a
new prophet and a new law in its place.
This has all sorts of resonances today, but in the last century (Baha'ism
developed through the 1860s, 70s and 80s) it was heady stuff. Secular reformers
had already seen the inevitability of abolishing Islamic law, while their
clerical opponents perceived a future devoted to rearguard actions in defence of
the faith.
The Baha'i prophet, Baha' Allah (1817-92), stands out as a moderate figure in
this debate, abrogating Islam while insisting on the primacy of religion within
the State. Cole presents the prophet's teachings in an original and accurate
manner, demonstrating for the first time in many years the liberalism and even
radicalism that exemplified the new creed, and tracing connections with reforms
in Istanbul, Tehran and elsewhere. Modern Baha'is have tarnished that picture by
a heavy-handed conservative interpretation of Baha' Allah and his ideas, and it
is refreshing to see someone of Cole's stature rescue both from their smothering
embrace.
It is a pity, however, that Professor Cole didn't spend a little more time
discussing the Azali Babis. The Babis were a militant sect that preceded the
Baha'is, and the Azalis were and are its only surviving splinter group, and
great rivals of the Baha'is at one time. Although their numbers were tiny, many
Azalis played an important part in the Iranian constitutional revolution. The
Baha'is, on the other hand, were conspicuous by their absence. Yet Babism is
backward-looking, mystical, conservative and crippled by some of the most
impractical laws in religious history whereas Baha'ism is in principle liberal,
forward-looking, delighted by modernity and eager for social improvement. There
is an anomaly here that the present work only goes part of the way to
explaining.
But even a partial explanation is much more than we have had before. Above all,
Cole is to be congratulated for his forthrightness in treating Baha Allah, the
main focus of his research, not as a god, but as a man and an articulate
exponent of human rights and reformist principles. If, in future, we are to see
a realistic biography of the Baha'i leader, it will be along these lines, rather
than those of the hagiographies which have, until now, dominated the field.
Modernity and Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the
Nineteenth-Century Middle East
by Juan R.I. Cole
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1997) 264 pp. $47.50 cloth $19.50
paper
review by Barbara D. Metcalf
review published in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30:3 (2000),
pages 566-568
https://bahai-library.org/reviews/cole.modernity.html
Cole's book illuminates significant aspects of modernity in the Middle East, as
well as the early history of the Baha'i millenarian movement led by Baha'u'llah,
the nineteenth-century Iranian prophet. Cole's careful work as an archival
historian is informed by the theoretical work of historical sociology. But its
high quality depends on yet another discipline, namely, "area
studies," which has given him excellent command of the languages and the
cultural traditions of the area.
Cole's research design places a definition of modernity at the center of his
project. Drawing on theorists that include Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens,
Eric Hobsbawm, Michel Foucault, Alain Touraine, Max Weber, and Victor Turner, he
identifies five critical themes that are central to modernity and that,
surprisingly, elucidate his case study: the relationship of religion to the
state; the move from political absolutism to some form of democratic or
representative government; the rise of an international system of nation-states
characterized by internal and external violence; the phenomenon of nationalism,
with its illusion of homogeneity and relatedness; and, finally, the challenge to
patriarchy through women's movements and feminism. The sources for the study
[End Page 566] include such Arabic, Turkish, and Persian texts as histories,
letters, reports, and the writings of both founders and followers. Cole also
draws on a vast background literature in such fields as history, literature, and
religious studies.
Mirza Husayn 'Ali Nuri (1817-1892), the founder of the Baha'i faith, built on
the protests of Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad Shirazi (1819-1850), his predecessor, who
had attacked aristocratic oppression in Qajar Iran and supported interest on
loans, more freedom of movement for women, and restrictions on both European
merchants and on the official clergy. Known as "the Bab," he was
executed and his followers suppressed. Nuri, scion of a magnate family, joined
the Babi religion, taking the name by which he was later known, Baha'u'llah
("glory of God"). Exiled to Baghdad in 1853, and subsequently to
Edirne and Akka, he built his own following, adding to the earlier Babi themes
those of Sufi ethics and ecstatic worship, as well as the claim of being the
successor promised by the Bab.
Ironically, Baha'u'llah's evolving political ideas were close to those of
Ottoman reformers in accepting a fundamental separation between religion and
state. In due course, he was to create democratic governing institutions for his
followers, the "houses of justice," at every level of his community.
He fully supported religious freedom while simultaneously criticizing
Enlightenment deism, opposition to organized religion, and unfettered science. 'Abdu'
l-Baha, his eldest son, further articulated these political teachings. His tens
of thousands of followers in Iran clearly played a role in the ferment for
constitutional reform during the first decade of the century--a role hitherto
undocumented. Baha'u'llah favored the creation of a union of nations as a way of
eliminating war, as well as the establishment of a single world language. Cole
situates Baha'u'llah's teachings in the context of French "peace
thought" and notes the similarity in social milieu of the early Baha'i
followers--largely merchants, skilled urban workers, less influential clergy,
and many activist women--and the followers of Saint-Simon (137). Baha'i have
differed in their interpretations of the founder's teachings in relation to
women, but at the least he articulated a position that gave higher status and
privileges to women than was common in the Islamic law and custom of his day.
One contribution of Cole's work is his exploration of the issues of religious
transformation and modernity in the context of predominantly Muslim societies,
given Euro-American assumptions that virtually equate Islam with anti-modernism.
Cole, in contrast, reviews the ambiguities and variations that make it
impossible to accept that simplistic view. He also shows the simultaneity of
many material developments in the Middle East and in Europe, as well as the
patterns of intellectual responses common to modernity throughout both areas.
Following Giddens' discussion of European movements against the "dark
side" of modernity, Cole places Baha'u'llah among the "utopian
realists" whose critiques of the power of industrialized warfare,
xenophobic nationalism, [End Page 567] colonialism, materialism, and
exploitative capitalism seem ever more prescient.1 To explore an interpretation
of movements like the Baha'i as utopian, rather than reactionary and antimodern,
is in itself an important contribution of this study. It is surprising that Cole
makes no reference to the broadly similar Ahmadiyya movement, which originated
in colonial India. The Ahmadis have been denied status as Muslims, which they
have sought; the Baha'i, by contrast, have insisted on identity as a separate
religion. Neither strategy has helped: In Iran, about 200 Baha'i have been
executed since the revolution (144).
In his conclusion, Cole notes that the Baha'i community in recent years has come
to emphasize literalism, patriarchy, theocracy, and censorship--far less
tolerant values than those of their founder. This "radical
reorientation" (194), which resonates with the positions of
"fundamentalist" movements elsewhere, further counters easy
assumptions of essentialism in relation to Middle Eastern religious
movements--an argument effectively made in the study as a whole.
Barbara D. Metcalf
University of California, Davis
Note
1. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990). https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_interdisciplinary_history/v030/30.3m
etcalf_b.html
American Historical Review
VOLUME 105 NUMBER 3 June 2000
Review by Merlin Schwartz, p. 1049
Juan R. I. Cole. Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i
Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East. New York: Columbia University
Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 254. Cloth $47.50, paper $19.50.
In this carefully researched and perceptive work, Juan R. I. Cole proposes
to look at the Western, Enlightenment idea of modernity through "new
eyes":
that is, through the eyes of Baha'ism, particularly those of the leadership
of the movement during the formative period of its history. The basis for
Cole's selection of Baha'ism as the lens through which to view the idea of
modernity is nowhere spelled out explicitly, perhaps because his reasons
are largely implicit in his analysis of the encounter between the two.
Baha'ism arose in the Middle East and remained socially and, to some
extent, spiritually close to its historical roots; at the same time, its
religious character, and especially its millenarian stance, enabled it to
distance itself from its religious past and to view that past indeed, the
whole of the past in a critical light. Baha'ism saw itself as the
culmination of the earlier monotheistic traditions, both as fulfillment and
as corrective. At least in terms of its own self-understanding, early
Baha'ism represents an orientation that is neither Eastern nor Western. In
the analysis and critical assessment of modernity, Baha'ism does indeed
offer interesting possibilities and perspectives.
Cole's examination of the Western notion of modernity
focuses on a
number of key issues, among them: religious freedom and the relationship of
religion to the state; political absolutism and democracy; nationalism and
the state; and patriarchy and gender relations. Cole devotes an entire
chapter to a discussion of each of these complex issues. He insists on
viewing Baha'ism, especially during its formative period, as a tradition in
flux or, one might say, as a set of general principles and values that had
to be fleshed out, refined, and adjusted in response both to changing
conditions and to the perspectives of other intellectual and spiritual
traditions. This seems clearly to have been the view of the early leaders
of the movement, including Baha'ullah himself. Within the context of these
qualifications, Baha'ism did come to define its position vis-a-vis the
critical issues posed by Enlightenment modernity. On a number of the
principles to which Enlightenment modernity was committed, Baha'ism
declared itself in essential agreement: for example, on the question of the
separation of "church" and state, the primacy of the individual
conscience,
gender equality, and the rule of law.
But if Baha'ism did come to endorse many of the
characteristic ideas
and values of modernity, Baha'ism did find some aspects of modernity,
especially some of the larger historical consequences that followed, or
that seemed to follow, from its implementation profoundly troubling. The
idea of an autonomous reason, and what Baha'ism saw as the repressive
potential of a reason freed from the constraints of a transcendental frame
of reference, raised serious questions at both the theoretical and
practical levels. The industrialization of war and the enlarged destructive
capacity of the modern army, all developed within the framework of
modernity, had led to violence and death on a scale without precedent in
the history of humankind. These and other reservations, articulated
repeatedly in the early literature of the movement, led Baha'is
increasingly to reject modernism's emphasis on the primacy of reason and
its secularism its Jacobin tendencies and to call for the integration of a
religious dimension into the framework of Enlightenment modernism. Baha'ism
insisted that only a religious dimension is capable of providing the kind
of constraints that the secularist and rationalist aspects of modernist
doctrines need to protect them against excess a concern dramatically
underscored by the events of the modern period. To the degree that Cole
endorses this Baha'i emphasis on the importance of a religious dimension,
some readers will undoubtedly see the present work as in part an apologia
for religion. Whether one agrees with the position articulated in this work
or not, one must concede that Cole has raised a set of issues that demand
careful, critical attention.
This reflective and insightful work is based on an
impressive array of
primary (in some cases unpublished) sources, not to mention a very large
body of secondary, interpretative studies, as will be seen from the notes
and the bibliography at the end of the work. It is an important study that
will commend itself especially to those who are concerned with modernist
doctrine, Baha'i responses to that doctrine, and the implications of both
for a fuller understanding of important facets of Middle Eastern history,
especially during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Merlin Swartz
Boston University
The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in Middle Eastern Modernity by Juan Cole
Middle Eastern religion is seldom mentioned in the same breath with
modernism, at least in the West. However, the Baha'i faith, which originated
in nineteenth-century Iran, poses key conundrums to our understanding of the
relationship between modernity and religion in the global South.
Modernity was conceived in binary oppositions, between superstition and
reason, absolutism and liberty, nation and Other, civilized and barbarian,
and male and female. Proponents of modernity, as Edward Said demonstrated in
his masterful Orientalism,1 managed to range a number of such oppositions
together, coding reason, liberty, nation, civilization and maleness as
European, whereas both Europe's medieval ('immature') past and Europe's
Oriental Others, especially Islam, were painted as possessing the opposite
and inferior characteristics. European modernity tended to hide from itself
its own darker traits, including chauvinist hatreds, industrialized warfare,
racism, colonialism and male chauvinism, and the degree to which the modern
form of these phenomena was inextricably intertwined with the entire
modernist project.
From a postmodern point of view, modernity has lacked a sense of ambiguity
and irony, and suffers from limiting its typologies to mere binary
oppositions, when in fact social phenomena come in three's, four's, and even
higher ordinals, not just in two's. North Atlantic modernists have also
privileged the European experience of modernity in ways that seem peculiar
to anyone who knows something about world history. Anthony Giddens in The
Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990), argues that modernity is not a
static matter of binary oppositions, but is rather dialectical. Movements
against absolutism give rise not only to parliamentary regimes, but also to
national security states that appear to many citizens to deprive them of
liberties instead of bestowing them, thus generating oppositional grassroots
movements campaigning for democracy (as opposed to elitist Liberalism) and
for workers' rights. That is, he challenges modernists' insistence that the
contenders in political battles can be neatly divided into 'reactionaries'
and 'progressives'. Giddens gives the name 'utopian realist' to the
movements, such as those of workers, women, peace groups and others, that
challenge the industrial, militant nation-states of bourgeois modernity.
Islam's encounter with nineteenth-century modernity produced not only
reactionary, revivalist, millenarian, liberal and fundamentalist responses,
as some have argued, but in the form of the Baha'i faith it produced a
mixture of millenarianism, liberalism and utopian realism that later turned
sharply toward a sort of fundamentalism. The latter turn has tended to
obscure the original emphases of the religion's founder, which can only be
recovered through reading his voluminous letters in their nineteenth-century
political and cultural context.
The Baha'i faith developed out of the esoteric, kabbalistic Shaykhi movement
of Shicite Islam, founded by Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i (1753-1826), and out of
the apocalyptic and messianic Babi movement, founded by cAli Muhammad
Shirazi, the 'Bab' or door to the divine, in 1844, which racked Iran with
religious ferment and turmoil, leading to the Bab's execution in 1850 and a
retaliatory attempt on the life of Nasiru'd-Din Shah by radical Babis in
1852, and thence to a nation-wide pogrom against the new religion.2 Out of
this maelstrom emerged an entirely different sort of messianic movement, the
Baha'i faith, founded in Baghdad in 1863 by Mirza Husayn cAli Nuri,
Baha'u'llah (1817-1892).
Baha'u'llah, a high notable born in Tehran whose father had been a
provincial governor married into the royal family, had emerged after the
Bab's execution as a prominent Babi leader, though his more radical younger
half-brother, Mirza Yahya Subh-i Azal, was more widely recognized as the
vicar of the Bab in the 1850s and early 1860s. Baha'u'llah was exiled first
to Ottoman Baghdad (1853), then to Istanbul (1863), Edirne (1863-1868) and
finally in 1868 to Akka on the coast of Ottoman Syria, where he lived until
his death. In 1867 he had broken decisively with Azal, proclaiming himself
the messianic successor of the Bab and founding a new religion, the Baha'i
faith. Partly due to his exiles to the Ottoman Empire, which was more
directly imbricated in European modernity than Qajar Iran, Baha'u'llah
turned Babism from a millenarian protest movement into one that mixed
modernist and utopian realist themes. He expressed approval of some aspects
of modernity, whereby he critiqued the absolutist Ottoman and Qajar states,
including a call for parliamentary democracy, some separation of religion
and state, a guarantee of freedom of conscience and expression, greater
rights for women, and an end to arbitrary decrees, which should be replaced
by tribunals. At the same time, however, he critiqued nineteenth-century
modernity itself, condemning chauvinist nationalism (whether religious,
linguistic or ethnic in character), European colonialism, industrialized
warfare paid for by high taxes on the poor, the anarchy of international
relations based upon the absolute sovereignty of nation-states (which he
wished to curb through international peace conferences), and what he thought
of as over-developed civilization, by which he appears to have meant
materialism, pollution and massively destructive weaponry.
Baha'u'llah's mixture of rationalization (e.g. parliamentary institutions
and due process), appeal to human rights, and yet his communitarian emphasis
on the creation of a new, revealed missionary religion, prefigured some of
the convergences between the old Right and Left that French sociologist
Alain Touraine perceives as characteristic of the turn of the twentieth
century. In a fascinating about-face, the later Baha'i faith's leaders
turned increasingly to the Right, condemning multi-party democracy as
factious and plutocratic, advocating theocracy, and curbing individual
freedom of conscience and expression within the community. This right wing
shell has preserved the utopian realist core of Baha'u'llah's own emphases,
however, creating a unique sectarian community that has remained tiny in the
literate world, in part because of its strict controls on discourse, but
which has had some success missionizing in India and elsewhere in the global
South. The Babi-Bahai movements underwent an odyssey from militancy in the
1840s to pacifist, liberal globalism under Baha'u'llah and thence in the
twentieth century to two contending emphases: a liberal stream that
maintains a universalist and tolerant outlook and a conservative one that
dreams of theocratic domination and insistence on scriptural literalism. The
movement thus defies any easy teleology of modernity, and in many ways
parallels the major reformist intellectual currents of modern Iran's Shicite
majority.
Juan R. I. Cole is Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian History at
the University of Michigan, USA. He is author of Modernity and the
Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle
East. New York: Columbia University Press.
Notes
1. New York: Vintage, 1978.
2. Abbas Amanat (1989), Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi
Movement in Iran, 1844-1850. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
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