Baha’i Rants

Dr. Ali Nakhjavani, a former member of the Universal House of Justice, talks on the Covenant:

Biography
After he received his Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction from the American University of Beirut in 1939, in the early 1940s Mr. Nakhjavani returned to Iran. He was a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran from 1950 to 1951.

In 1951, Mr. Nakhjavani and his family moved to Uganda, where he worked as a teacher and lecturer. He was a member of the Auxiliary Board for the Propagation in Africa from 1954 to 1961 and chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of Central and East Africa from 1956 to 1961.

In 1961, Mr. Nakhjavani was elected to the International Bahá’í Council and served as its president. He was elected to the Universal House of Justice in 1963 and served continuously as a member of the institution until his retirement in 2003.

Mr. Nakhjavani is tied with Mr. H. Fatheazam for the second longest term as a member of the Universal House of Justice. The record holder for the longest continuous membership belongs to Mr. Ian Semple (1963-2004).

The Covenant
I’ve already touched on the subject of the Covenant and for now I’ll simply present this video. Perhaps a commentary will be upcoming shortly.

Google, being the most widely used search engine, collects an unbelievably large amount of data about how we use the internet and what we search for. Since their motto is “Don’t be evil” they are rather transparent and open up a lot of this data, offering an intriguing view into what people around the world are curious about.

According to Google, a lot of folks are interested to learn more about the Baha’i Faith on the internet. The keyword “bahai” ranks at around 80, which is relatively high (out of 100). The trend over the past 4 years is moderately decreasing however.

Google also breaks down the search volume for keywords by geography. Perhaps you would be surprised to learn that, by far, the most curious, are Iranians:

According to Google, Iran’s search volume for the keyword Baha’ is 100 (the highest). I’m amazed to see such unbridled curiosity from the cradle of the Faith. Not just because I tend to read from most parts that people there are generally apathetic but also because of the technological limitations imposed by a nationwide firewall which rivals China’s.

If you drill down into the Iranian data, you discover that there has been a dramatic drop off in search volume for Baha’i in the past 4 years. It has gone from 100 to low double digits. Maybe that’s when the firewall went into effect. Or perhaps it was ratcheted up.

Understandably, the second spot goes to Israel, at a respectable 67. I don’t know about you, but I would be a tiny bit interested to learn more about this “Baha’i” thing if I had scores of Baha’is in my backyard every year.

Unfortunately for the proclamation efforts of the NSA of the United States, Americans are apathetic at an index reading of just 39. However, the people in the state of Illinois, for some strange reason, show the highest interest. Followed very closely by Alaska.

Another country scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of interest is Chile. Hopefully once the Santiago Temple is finished, that will change things.

If you want to tinker with the data, here is the link for the Google Insight worldwide, and Iran specific search data.