3 August 1999
From: Department of the Secretariat
Baha'i World Center
Dear Baha'i Friend,
Clearly, no one would dispute the right of Dr. Cole to write and publish
whatever work a publisher is prepared to handle. Nor has anyone questioned
the right of a Baha'i who is interested in such a book to purchase it. To
suggest that the House of Justice is saying otherwise would be to seriously
misconstrue the nature of its concern . . .
As a participant in various Internet discussion groups over the past five
years, and particularly in the last year or two, you cannot but be aware
from these exchanges that Dr. Cole has embarked on a deliberate assault
against the Baha'i Cause, in which he has not hesitated to attack its
institutions, to misrepresent its fundamental teachings, and to abuse the
trust of Baha'is who had been led to believe that they were engaged with him
in a detached and scholarly search for the truth. These same Internet
exchanges exposed you, like other participants, to a flood of calumny and
invective against a great many of your fellow believers, on the part of Dr.
Cole, that is scarcely credible in rational discourse.
Had such a book as Modernity and the Millennium been written by a
disinterested non-Baha'i scholar, its misconception of the nature of
Baha'u'llah's Mission and its other shortcomings would have represented no
more than understandable weaknesses of an honest attempt to explore a
religious phenomenon as yet little understood in the West. Indeed, in this
context, such an attempt to make the Baha'i Faith comprehensible to the
Western academic mind, however inadequate it might appear to knowledgeable
Baha'i scholars, would surely have earned its author a measure of genuine
Baha'i appreciation for the writing and research
skills deployed in devising it.
As you -- like other participants in certain Internet discussion groups --
are well aware, however, the book's author is not a disinterested scholar.
Rather, he is a deeply embittered individual who, as his book was in
preparation, had just denounced in the most intemperate language an apparent
twenty-year allegiance to Baha'u'llah, in the wake of a failed
attempt on his part to impose his private ideological agenda on the
Baha'i community's study of Baha'u'llah's Message. Modernity and
the Millennium represents an effort to provide the current stage of this
long-running scheme with the underpinnings of scholarly rationalization.
What is this rationalization? Although distorted by its evasion of Baha'i
Texts that contradict its main assertions, and blurred by reliance on
speculations peculiar to its author's purpose, the thesis appears to run
somewhat as follows: Baha'u'llah's work and Writings represent essentially
one of several efforts by Middle East thinkers to work out a
"response" to
the challenges posed by European modernity in the form of rationalism,
revolution, nationalism, economic upheaval, feminism and other contemporary
developments. Although Oriental in origin, this particular
"response", in
contrast to various others, was unusually "progressive",
"liberal",
"idealistic", even "radical". Because it "grew
up" in a congenial modernist
era, its Author was able gradually to adjust and revise the ideas with which
He had been "grappling", through benefiting (in a manner generally
insinuated rather than explicitly stated) from successive interactions with
other thinkers and movements. By 1862, apparently in order to deal with the
problem of religious exclusivity in the Muslim world, and in response to
some form of "private mystical experience", He "decided to make
a prophetic
claim of his own" . . .
The Covenant, the distinguishing feature of Baha'u'llah's Revelation, has
been made the central target of this effort (a maneuver that Dr. Cole's book
is at particular pains to shore up). Although forced to acknowledge the
appointments of `Abdul-Baha and the Guardian as Interpreters of
Baha'u'llah's Message, every effort has been made to call such authoritative
interpretation into question wherever it presents a problem for the notions
being promoted.
Similarly, although ostensibly acknowledging that the Universal House of
Justice is Head of the Baha'i Faith today, this opposition has tried by
every means possible to undermine the broad authority conferred in
Baha'u'llah's own words and emphasized in the Master's Will and Testament.
(In Dr. Cole's book, this agenda makes its appearance in the conclusion:
namely, that the Faith founded by Baha'u'llah has failed in its mission
because, like "the Khomeinist state in Iran", it has been somehow
captured
by "fundamentalists", by which term Dr. Cole has repeatedly
characterized
the members of the Universal House of Justice.) . . .
With loving Baha'i greetings,
Department of the Secretariat
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