MacEoin's opinion about Baha'u'llah's sufi-style writings

I enjoyed the first part of Dr Cole's essay, in which he discusses the development of the Mujaddidi and Khalidi branches of the Naqshbandi tariqa as 'neo-orthodox Sufi movements' as a prelude to discussing Baha' Allah's involvement with the Khalidis of Sulaymaniyya. I was less happy with the following section dealing with the contents of a Sufi poem entitled al-qasida al-warqa'iyya, penned by Baha' Allah in imitation of Ibn al-Farid's Nazm al-suluk while residing in the Khalidi khanqah there. Cole's interpretation of this somewhat obscure poem, in which he claims to find evidence that 'conclusively demonstrates' an early date for Baha' Allah's belief in his own mission as a prophet seems to me rather tendentious, as does his reading of a shorter and earlier poem entitled Rashh-i 'ama'. These interpretations seem to me to owe as much to a knowledge of later developments as to a direct reading of the texts. The author reads much into the poems about Baha' Allah's messianic awareness that may not really be there at all, except to the eye of faith. I wonder if his interpretation would have been the same had he not known the poems were the work of Baha' Allah and written at the period in question, thinking them instead that of an anonymous Sufi. I suspect he would have seen very little in them out of the ordinary. The Sufis in Sulaymaniyya to whom the Qasida al-warqa'iyya was first read are not recorded as having found anything unusual in the poem, and Baha' Allah himself states in a commentary on the work that various Ottoman 'ulama' to whom it was shown found nothing remarkable or objectionable in it. Most or all of the extreme language in the poem can be paralleled in other Sufi writings, and when Dr Cole sees foreshadowings in it of Baha' Allah's later claims, I rather feel he is simply reading those claims back into an earlier text. I am not convinced, on the plain evidence of the text itself, that these foreshadowings are there at all and suspect that knowledge of later developments seriously distorts the reading of it. If such foreshadowings are present, that must be demonstrated by providing sharper contrasts with traditional Sufi writing on the one hand and with contemporary Babi usage on the other.

-Denis MacEoin

Source: Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 13, No. 1 (1986), pp. 85- 91

Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/194982