A personal Baha’i blog.
Bill Davis at the US National Convention asking the delegates to bury the NSA’s own letter and instead focus the attention of Baha’is on the UHJ’s letter:
What is this all about?
US NSA Annual Report - Ridvan 2007
House of Justice Letter April 19 2007 - Response To NSA US
Counsellor Rebequa Murphy’s Comment At Convention
Mr. William E. Davis
Former Chairperson
National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States of America
A few weeks ago, fellow Baha’i blogger J. A. McLean wrote an article titled “Dissidents and the Baha’i Faith”. It attracted a lot of attention, especially from quite of few of those naughty, naughty “dissidents”.
So much so that Jack seems to have changed his mind about the whole thing and decided to call it all off… by erasing his post from his blog.
Before the self-censorship, the blog post was featured on Baha’is Online. And Allison also wrote a commentary on her own blog. As for this humble blogger, for now I’m withholding any comments.
However, the internet and the technologies it contains allows us to punch a few buttons and take a ride in our own time machine (also known as, Google Cache) to retrieve Jack’s original post.
In all its effulgent glory (minus the holy numbered comments), behold:
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Thursday, August 23, 2007
DISSIDENTS AND THE BAHA’I FAITH
On the Internet today one may find webpages, websites and member lists that contain disgruntled views and/or bitter attacks, usually against the Bahá’í Administrative Order, from a relatively small number of so-called dissident and ex-Bahá’ís. A dissident is not, of course, an ex-Bahá’í, but someone who still claims to be a follower who has serious grievances against the Bahá’í Faith and who continues to militate for their acceptance. A dissident must be distinguished from the individual, who for personal reasons, chooses not to associate with the community, and from the person who, for one reason or another, drifts away from the Faith. Surprisingly, some of these attacks are made even by “Bahá’ís in good standing.”
In the early 1990’s, I gained first-hand experience of this phenomenon when I was a temporary member of the original Talisman list, hosted by ex-Bahá’í, Dr. Juan Ricardo Cole. I subsequently resigned from Talisman I when Dr. Cole, in his grand design to be the “gadfly” reformer of the Bahá’í Faith, made direct, frontal attacks on the Universal House of Justice. What is perhaps not so well-known was that by that time Dr. Cole had been remonstrating with the Universal House of Justice more or less steadily for about 20 years.
It is not the purpose of this message to reanimate the specifics of Cole’s case which are well-known to those who once belonged to Talisman I and who are familiar with his articles that attempted to blacken the reputation of the Bahá’í Administrative Order. He has since found new enemies: his blog is largely devoted to attacking the foreign policy of the United States government. However, I would like to make some general comments about dissidents and ex-Bahá’ís, whether it be Juan Cole, Francesco Ficicchia in German-speaking Europe in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, and/or the like-minded Internet club of present or past hostile critics.
The behaviour of these individuals, if one wants to step back and observe it, reveals a negative dynamic or pattern of behaviour that continues to be dismally instructive. I am submitting the following observations, consequently, not to revive some old grudges, nor to perpetuate present ones, but because I seriously doubt that the Bahá’í community has seen the end of the complaints of the constantly disgruntled, the doctrinally innovative and the permanently embittered. While space is lacking here to set out fully the entire dynamic of this pattern, I would like to comment briefly on the climate of sympathy that seems to be created, at least momentarily, for the grievances of these individuals.
Allow me to preface these observations with this comment: I do not doubt for a moment that these persons have been hurt or that some have been betrayed by a fellow believer or that some decision by an administrative body has not gone their way. Most Bahá’ís, if they live long enough, will experience betrayal, or be subject to an administrative decision that has not been in their favour. The latter phrase applies sometimes to members of these very same institutions. These experiences contribute to our awakening to the stark realities of the human condition.
One of the keys to the sympathetic ear temporarily lent to the disgruntled has to do with the way that organized religion is generally perceived in contemporary society. In modernity, religion and spirituality have gone their separate ways. Individuals may willingly affirm their theism or spirituality but many disavow being official members of an “organized religion.” Of course, the whole notion of being against organized religion per se is a strange one, when one thinks about it. People, generally, do not object to organized government, to an organized judiciary, to organized political parties, to organized education, to organized medicine, clubs, associations and societies. But except for official members, the religious “organization” in a secular age has become definitely suspect.
And for good reason. This climate of suspicion has been created by a long history of the violent repression of doctrinal minorities, and other past or present moral travesties. Uninformed observers, consequently, tend to be predisposed to accept the viewpoint of the dissident without further reflection or investigation. If she has dissented from a religious institution, ergo, the charges must be true and she must be a victim: at least, that is the hasty conclusion. This predisposition was clearly at work for a time in Juan Cole’s case, just as it was for another ex-Bahá’í, Francesco Ficicchia.
What the dissidents fail to realize, and do not accept, is that the Bahá’í Faith, while it allows for a fair and reasonable largesse of individual interpretation, has nonetheless its own doctrinal boundaries and ethical norms. But in the final analysis, these doctrinal boundaries and ethical norms are simply not accepted by these individuals who, driven by frustration at the non-acceptance of the perceived moral rightness of their cause, ego-mania, hyper-individualism and the principles of “liberal democracy,” engage in corrosive attacks which by definition are beyond the ethical norms and the principles of consultation which Bahá’u’lláh has mandated to replace acrimonious and divisive debate.
The founders of the Bahá’í Faith have repeatedly warned their followers—some individuals even balk at the very notion of a warning–of the grave moral and spiritual consequences that accompany such hostile, confrontational approaches. But these individuals, unless they disaffiliate themselves from the religion to which they belong, and although they have knowingly accepted these doctrinal boundaries and ethical norms, imagine that these standards do not apply to them. They clearly view themselves as belonging to a different category. Dissidents believe somehow that they are fully within their rights to violate these norms with impunity.
Yet, just like the perpetrators who claim to be victims, they act shocked and surprised, and charge betrayal and harassment, when the government of their religion finally asks them to withdraw or takes measures to remove them permanently from the membership list. This removal, I should add, usually takes place after a lengthy and patient hearing and exchange of views, counselling and, final warnings. This careful process, however, has sometimes resulted in charges of fascism and religious fundamentalism being levelled against the institutions of the Bahá’í Faith. Of course, neither Bahá’í doctrine nor covenants gives any one a licence to radically alter Bahá’í belief or ethical practice to the point of making it unrecognizable to the community itself and to the institutions of the Bahá’í Faith. But for these individuals, this seems to be quite beside the point.
As sequitur to this last sentence: the point of this message is not, as might be supposed, simple justification, the basic preoccupation of theology, of administrative sanctions taken against these individuals. Methodologically, the confrontational, heavy-handed approach is also unsound. It is both strange and ironic when this defective, ineffective tool originates with the learned. Phenomenologist of religion, William Brede Kristensen, the Norwegian-Dutch scholar (1867-1953), in his instructive essay “What is Phenomenology?” was perhaps the first to make the point that serious students and scholars of religion must identify with the faith of others to the extent that they “must therefore be able to forget themselves, to be able to surrender themselves to others” (p. 49). The respected comparative religionists, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Huston Smith have since made the same point both in their writings and in their lives by profound study and congenial practice with followers of faiths outside the Christian tradition.
Kristensen is promoting here, not some objective and detached study of a particular religion—let alone an inflammatory one–but rather a process of initiation into the sympathetic understanding of “the faith of other men,” as the title of Cantwell Smith’s 1962 comparative study of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Chinese philosophy, Christians and Jews put it. Smith’s innovative little book aimed to elucidate, not only the beliefs of these world religions, but also and especially, how these religions formed the personal values of the men and women who practiced them, and how their personal beliefs motivated their lives. In other words, Cantwell Smith recommended that the observer be willing to be taught by the participants of the tradition he or she was investigating, and to assume their point of view, without necessarily adopting their faith. In the academic study of religion, then, the testimony of believers is consequently the starting point and the meeting place of authentic understanding and must necessarily carry great weight.
Some may think that this argument is irrelevant and has no bearing on the present case; these individuals are, after all, already Bahá’ís, and are no longer studying the faith to which they belong. But Kristensen’s views are pertinent to this discussion. The point is that with Cole, Ficicchia, and present-day dissenters, the testimony, sacred writings, history and ethical norms of believers were either ignored or distorted to the extent that members of the Bahá’í Faith were no longer able to recognize their own religion in the distorted or hostile depictions by these critics. So much for the elementary protocol advocated by Brede Kristensen, Cantwell Smith and Huston Smith and other respected scholars of religion.
What one sometimes reads from these poisoned pens is even more surprising since some of them claimed, or still claim, to be Bahá’ís. It is no wonder that the appointed and elected institutions of the Bahá’í Faith ultimately came to the intellectually defensible conclusion that they were not. Neither is it a wonder that the Universal House of Justice has written that character, that is, active spirituality, ethics, values and norms, and methodology cannot, and should not, be separated. In this, as in all things Bahá’í, character and methodology are one.
***
Posted by J.A. McLean at 11:45 AM 9 comments
[END DOCUMENT]
I was unable to retrieve the nine comments, if anyone has them, please forward them for inclusion.
Spending time with Persian Baha’i ladies has some consequences. You eat delicious Persian food (rather, you’re forcefed it), you learn to hide your enthusiasm for said food (the Persian practice of “tarof”) and you hear a lot about God’s Will and “tests”.
I have nothing against Persian food but I’m beginning to develop allergies against the superstitious practice of calling everything “God’s Will” or “a test”.
For one, how are we to know what is God’s Will? Sure, the general broad strokes are obvious. They are in every religious dispensation. Don’t kill, be nice, don’t lie, etc. Those are God’s Will for us. That’s what He wants us to do. I have no qualms about those. They are clear.
But what about the mundane, everyday things. Was it God’s “will” that I be late for an interview? Was it God’s “will” that I forgot to call ahead and make reservations? That I burn the toast by forgetting to adjust the setting on the toaster?
I’m not so sure. Maybe it was the Big Guy’s will that those things happen. But then again, maybe they were a result of less than devine motives.
But many of the Baha’is that I spend time with have no doubts whatsoever. They know. And they want to tell you. Usually I just play along and don’t upset their perception of things. But sometimes I do venture to ask meekly, how exactly it is that they know. In those times, they blink and recover with: why… what else can it be? of course it is God’s will.
And then they smile at me as if I’m a total idiot incapable of telling the difference between yogourt and glue.
I keep thinking though that unless you have some sort of direct phone line to God, or are a Prophet you can have no conviction on the matter. But then again, saying “It may or may not be God’s will” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, now does it?
The other one is when they call difficult situations “tests from God”. This one gets me even more. I mean, how the heck do you know? Oh, we already covered that: what else can it be? Yes, ironclad logic. How did I ever miss that one?
Seriously though, I’ve heard this explanation when people are confronted by challenges in their life and slap the name “tests” on them. Going through a divorce? It is a “test”. Children misbehaving? yup, another “test”. And you guessed it, it was specifically tailor made by the Big Guy for you.
Again, not once do these people stop to ask how exactly they know or can prove that this is a “test from God”.
This insidious practice is seeping into Baha’i culture and I hate it. For one, it is supersition and we are to guard against superstition. When religion doesn’t agree with simple reason, something is wrong.
Also, using these superstitious labels, like “God’s will” or “test” causes one to become separated from cause and effect. To not feel personally responsible for our actions, our lives and the results that we cause. I don’t believe that God wants us to live that way. Some things may very well be God’s will or tests, but there is no way for us to know.
What’s more, living our lives as if most or almost everything is a test or His will, can cause one to feel disempowered. I’d rather live my life believing that some things are under my power and some things under His. Since I will never truly know which is which, I will simply live my life by giving it all I’ve got. By living my life to the fullest, by trying my darndest, by never ceding an inch. And letting Him sort it all out in the end.
Where someone else might simply sigh and say, “Well, it is God’s will…” and sit back, I will redouble my efforts or reflect on what else I can do, what other options I have and how I can learn from this for the future. I attempt to be proactive, a protagonist in my own life, rather than a puppet whose strings are pulled by divine decree.
Where someone else might call a situation a “test from God”, and feel vindicated or absolved from responsability, I attempt to reflect on how I contributed to the outcome, how I may react or act differently in the future and what I may do now to improve things. It may be a test, or it may not. That sort of thing is irrelevant to the matter.
Finally, another reason I strongly dislike this practice is that it can be a useful tool in the hand of a bully. Let’s say that a situation arises and you disagree with things or how it came to be. If you contact the institutions and let them know, like a good Baha’i is supposed to, you may get the short and sweet response that “it is God’s will” and that agitating for change would mean that you are making the situation “a test” for yourself.
Farfetched? Impossible? Not at all. This has actually happened.
I found this recent article on Iran from the Times Online website rather interesting. Especially in the last few paragraphs were it describes the approach of the Islamic government of Iran towards censorship:
The way censorship works in Iran is that the rules are deliberately kept vague. Something that sneaks through one week is then used later as a catalyst for a crack-down. What is acceptable and what not changes constantly: the blurry red lines foster a climate of self-censorship more powerful than any rules.
Sadly, this is also a succint description of the way Baha’i pre-publication “review” works. There are no clearly defined lines. In fact, they would bristle at the word ‘censorship’ being applied to what they do. But the outcome of the process is the same as that in the Islamic Repulic of Iran: within the Baha’i community there is no academic freedom, nor is there freedom of the press.
And by keeping the mechanism and process as vague as possible, the result is that a state of fear is produced. Academics, authors and all creatives begin to self-censor themselves much more readily and to a deeper extent simply because they don’t quite know where the lines are. If one day a Baha’i of many years can be thrown out of the community for calling himself a ‘Baha’i theologian’, then who knows what’s next?
Here is an excellent article by Barney Leith on pre-publication review.
In case the link to the Times article kicks the bucket, here is the complete article:
This is Iran, but not as you know it
Young Iranians are doing more to transform their country than any outside agency could do, writes Rageh Omaar
It might have been hot, but it was going to take much more than the familiar Tehran cocktail of unrelenting heat and choking smog to deter the 20 or so young Iranian women gathered outside the record shop. Beethoven’s isn’t exactly the sort of name you would expect of a hip music store. But this is Tehran, and as with most things involving young Iranians today, even a seemingly boring name hides something far more subversive.
All the young women are in manteaus, the figure-hugging three-quarter length jacket worn as a substitute for the chador. But underneath they sport tight white jeans, Versace print head-scarves, designer sunglasses and delicate sandals, the thin straps of which wrap around perfectly painted toenails.
A brand new silver Mercedes glides up and an androgynous young man clad in trendy black gets out. Behind him walks a confident man in his late thirties who shepherds the younger man past the adoring female fans. A ripple of excitement goes through the crowd as the girls recognise the young man while some hold up their mobile phones to take pictures and video clips of him in the crush.
Were it not for the head-scarves and manteaus, it could easily have been Robbie Williams outside HMV. Welcome to the vibrant and almost completely unnoticed world of Iranian pop music.
Tehran is one of the most talked about cities in the world; many people believe it could well be the next target for the Bush administration’s third invasion in its so-called “war on terror”. The majority of the limited reports and images to have emerged from the Iranian capital in the past year have been about alleged nuclear weapons programmes, senior members of Iran’s theocratic state and, of course, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Very little has been said that accurately describes this nation of 70m, which is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse countries in the Middle East. Despite a recorded history of more than 5,000 years, making it one of the oldest civilisations on earth, Iran remains shackled to a small number of clichés; turbaned mullahs, women wearing the black chador and antiwestern rhetoric.
As a news correspondent this Iran was familiar to me. I’d seen many angry rallies postFriday prayers and done interviews with politicians and military figures. But I longed to show the unseen and hugely varied life of ordinary people in Tehran; one of the least understood cities on earth.
I had a personal reason for doing this, too. There have been many times over the past year or so where the accelerating crisis over Iran has reminded me of the relentless build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. The similarities are chilling; accusations of the development of WMDs, allegations of sponsoring terrorism, and military reinforcements being sent to the region while leading Bush administration officials consistently speak of the need for the world to be prepared for preemptive action.
I reported from inside Iraq for several years before the invasion and I regret enormously that while I did endless stories about Saddam, his regime, weapons inspectors and suchlike I spoke very little about ordinary Iraqis; what role religious and sectarian beliefs played in their identity, what they made of the exiled politicians groomed by Washington as their leaders in waiting.
I wanted to make sure that mistake was not repeated. It took a year of wrangling with the authorities to be able to follow the lives of ordinary Iranians without restrictions or minders, but I was given an extraordinary opportunity.
Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world; around 70% of its citizens are under the age of 30. That means 70% of Iranians have no memory of life under the Shah, and have grown up under the rules of the Islamic republic. For them there is the profound sense that nearly 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini led the world’s first Islamic revolution the rebellion has to renew itself to become relevant to their generation.
So in Iran at the moment there is a unique situation where an Islamic theocracy is being challenged, scrutinised and publicly questioned in a way that very few other regimes in the Middle East are. This is not just happening in Iran’s parliament and the active media; it is being done in the streets, in people’s homes, and even by what citizens wear and how they express themselves.
The pop star I met at Beet-hoven’s record shop was called Benyamin and the analogy with Robbie Williams is pretty accurate. Benyamin is currently the hot young thing in Iranian pop music. Mohsen Rajabpour, his manager, is Tehran’s Simon Cowell — and is a match for his English counterpart in every way. The last person I expected to hang out with in Tehran was a pop svengali cum entrepreneur.
“The difference between me and this Englishman [Cowell] is that he is not restricted in making his pop stars,” said Rajabpour as we glided around in his Mercedes. “Mine must be created within the restrictions of Iran.”
But this hasn’t stopped him producing a number of highly successful pop acts. The restrictions are ones you’d expect. “I can’t do songs that are about hot sexy topics,” but despite this his acts find ways of pushing back the boundaries with each record.
The key to Rajabpour’s success and why he is an unlikely modern revolutionary is that he succeeds as a pop entrepreneur by having a very good grasp of the laws and jurisprudence of the Islamic republic. He’s now working on what he thinks is the perfect rock band for Iran.
“It has the usual things: drums, bass, guitars . . . but with girls!” They’re going to be Iran’s answer to the Spice Girls, but with a very different kind of girl power. The law says that the lead vocalist in a publicly approved rock band cannot be a girl. His trick is that all members of the band are vocalists, so it can’t be said that the lead vocalist is a girl. It is in thousands of such small tests of change that Iranians from all walks of life are transforming their country.
Bozorgmehr Sharafeddin is the editor of Chelcheragh, one of Tehran’s best known weekly youth magazines. Still in his twenties, he leads a constantly changing group of 40 or so young Iranian men and women journalists. The topics range from politics and culture to music and comedy. In the midst of Benyamin’s appearance at Beethoven’s, the editor quizzed me about my documentary and I explained that I wanted to follow the lives of ordinary Iranians.
“So,” he said with a wicked grin, “you are on mission impossible.” He paused briefly then said: “Why don’t you write an article for our magazine as a guest reporter? It’s the best way for you to get as deep into Iranian society as possible.”
I duly attended the magazine’s editorial meeting where I was quizzed by staff and given a stark insight into the constant battle they face with the censors and the threat of the magazine being suspended or shut down.
Iranian journalists call them “red lines”, the opaque and constantly shifting guidelines by which the state clamps down on publications. My article was going to be edited by Sharafeddin and any sensitive or risky comments would be cut.
I said I wanted to write a feature profiling three prominent young women: Nazila Noe-bashari (who runs a transportation company employing many men), Newsha Tavakolian (a renowned photojournalist I met in Iraq) and Ghazal Chegini (who works in Iran’s huge nongovernmental organisations network for a charity caring for children with cancer).
The three of them allowed us into their lives and homes in Tehran and took us around their city. I discovered a mass of contradictions. Tehran has one of the highest rates of cosmetic surgery among young people and terrible poverty. One day I went to a pro-Hezbollah protest in the morning and a recording studio with Benyamin in the afternoon. Women cannot ride motorcycles, but in the glitzy shopping malls of the affluent northern suburbs young men with earrings openly court girls.
I went back to Sharafeddin to go through my article. Various lines and paragraphs had been crossed out and the changes revealed a lot about the republic. For example, my comment about women not being allowed to ride motorcycles in Tehran was changed to “in Tehran there are no women motorcyclists”.
The reason? My original sentence laid too much emphasis on the government’s restrictive rule. Another comment, on how Iranian women wear what they want in their homes but outside wear a headscarf (which, it seemed to me, meant they were hiding their identities behind a mask), was rejected and changed to “women felt they were having to take on different identities”.
The way censorship works in Iran is that the rules are deliberately kept vague. Something that sneaks through one week is then used later as a catalyst for a crack-down. What is acceptable and what not changes constantly: the blurry red lines foster a climate of self-censorship more powerful than any rules.
And yet it is the millions of largely young Iranians who are forcing through a slow but surely unstoppable transformation in the country. Sometimes at a terrible cost to imprisoned journalists and human rights activists, the restrictions are being rolled back. But the quickest way to reverse this progress is for the West to attack.
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