Authoritarian Organization

Fundamentalist Baha’is have an authoritarian view of how the Baha'i “administrative order” should function. They insist on obedience, and forbid criticizing Baha’i officials or institutions. The typical logic of Baha'i fundamentalists roots obedience in the legitimacy of authority, disallowing a rational examination of the substance of a command or an inquiry into whether the body giving the command has the “constitutional” prerogative to give it. In this way, arbitrary commands by Baha'i bodies or officials are made to be an either-or proposition. If one accepts Baha’u’llah, one accepts his administrative order, and must obey whatever it orders one to do, whether one agrees in conscience or no. Rejection of the command, ipso facto, represents a rejection of Baha’u’llah (Semple 1991, McMullen 2000:66-71). Thus, fundamentalist Baha’is secretly consider liberals and some moderates “not Baha’is” at all because they do not demonstrate sufficient compliance in immersing their wills in the authority of the Baha'i administration. Kazemzadeh expressed the fundamentalist philosophy on obedience when he visited a Baha'i study class in Los Angeles in 1979 to caution its members about the tone of their discussions, which were being published in a small-circulation newsletter. A class participant suggested that tone was not the real issue, saying “Dissent seems more the issue... Every time a Baha'i criticizes or disagrees with a policy of the NSA, is his commitment to the Covenant to be questioned and his Baha'i status threatened?” Kazemzadeh said that no one questioned the right of the Baha’is to gather for discussions, “but the word dissent implies separating oneself from the activities of the group and putting oneself outside the mainstream of the community, and that is contrary to Baha'i practice” (Kazemzadeh in Los Angeles Baha’i Study Class 1979:4). The National Assembly subsequently demanded the right to censor the newsletter, which had a circulation of about 120.

Juan Cole, Review of Religious Research, Vol. 43, no. 3 (March, 2002)