Misleading loyal Baha'i scholars

Twentieth century Baha'i attempts to survey Baha'u'llah's writings are for the most part highly selective, often digressive and unreliable. Such is to some extent the case with Abd al-Hamid Ishraq Khavari's (d. 1972) Persian 'Ganj-i shaygan' (The Befitting Treasury,1968) and Adib Taherzadeh's (d. 1998) often disappointing four-volume English language 'The Revelation of Baha'u'llah' (first edition, 1974-83). Little solid academically and philologically informed writing on this subject has appeared until now aside from Juan Cole's 'Modernity and Millennium' (1998), several of the findings of which are contested in the uneven, often polemically oriented and convoluted volume under review.

'Logos and Civilization', written by a professor of sociology at Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota, USA), does not exactly carry matters forward. Saiedi's book is divided into three major parts: (1) "The Dynamics of Spiritual Journey" (15-110); (2) "The Critique of Spiritual and Historical Reason" (113-210) and (3) "The New World Order" (211-370) spanning ten chapters. These sections contain distasteful and distracting polemic against a few Baha'i academic scholars whose opinions are often misrepresented or overstated. Throughout the book there are numerous overly categorical statements about Baha'u'llah's writings and contemporary academic scholarship which say more about the author's own apologetical concerns than anything especially illuminating. Saiedi bemoans allegedly "reductionist" methodologies utilized by largely unnamed Baha'i and other scholars working within modem Islamic and Middle East studies and out of line with conservative, traditionalist currents in the Baha'i world.

Not an easy work to digest, 'Logos and Civilization' mixes up the author's polemic with attempts to survey some of Baha'u'llah's major writings as if they dropped down from heaven uninfluenced by Islamic categories or a progressive unfolding over a forty-year period. Islamic dimensions of Baha'u'llah's works (e.g. the use of 'dhikr', "recollection of God") are played down, implying that a proper understanding of his doctrines does not require a knowledge of their Islamic roots and the nineteenth-century Sufi-Shi'i milieu. Saiedi has it that the use of 'dhikr' by the Bab in his 'Qayyum al-asma' is "a subtle but unmistakable declaration of His station as a Manifestation of God" (106) though this messianic term is often a cipher representative of the Hidden Imam. Although chapter 1 very loosely sketches "the background, in Islamic Sufism of Baha'u'llah's early writings," the diverse, multi-faceted phenomenon of Sufism and the opinions of some of its major figures, are several times portrayed in generalized, misleading ways.

-Stephen N. Lambden

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iranian-studies/article/abs/logos-and-civilization-spirit-history-and-order-in-the-writings-of-bahaullah-nader-saiedi-bethesda-university-press-of-maryland-2000-404-pp-isbn-1883053609-cloth-isbn-1883053633-pb/201B0B0C99E02697C8D785E3ACFB4D0E