Condemning the Islamic world

Behind Shoghi Effendi’s heavily derivative style of writing drawn from eighteenth-century and Victorian prosody with its syntactically complex sentences and Latinate vocabulary can be discerned a mindset to which the term “self-orientalizing” Westerner can most effectively be applied. Having had no direct personal contact with the land of his ancestors, an imaginative geography of Persia (the term he always used) came to him via the writings of the Bahai holy figures and his reading of Western writers, in the main historians, travelers and orientalists. Together these influences worked towards his construction of an image that was both negative and othering of the land and its people, its culture, and its religion, and by extension of other adjoining Middle Eastern spaces. While following the tenets of Bahaullah and Abdul Baha that upheld the prophethood of Muhammad and revelation of the Quran, Shoghi Effendi shaped a narrative condemning the Islamic world for rejecting the claims of Bahaullah.

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2

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Shoghi Effendi discarded eastern dress (with the exception of a karakul hat) and cutting off intercourse with locals altogether received mainly British and Zionist VIPs

An ethnic Iranian born in Palestine in 1897 and brought up in a predominantly Persian speech-community, associating in his early adult years with British colonial administrators, high-ranking military officers, orientalists, and Western Bahai figures from wealthy and professional backgrounds, as a religious leader Shoghi Effendi occupied a niche and decidedly ambiguous position in the newly transplanted British colonial outpost in the Middle East. Marked out to play the role of interpreter of Bahai doctrine and becoming the architect of a far flung administration, he was educated at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut then sent to Oxford University in 1920. There he gained an exceptional proficiency in English, a language in which none of the three founder-figures of the faith had been able to communicate. Having mastered the codes of formality of the dominant world imperial power he brought this expertise to the newly centralized Bahai World Center situated on Mount Carmel. Performance of his role as Guardian of the faith coincided with the situation of “double colonialism” in which the British administered the native Arab and oriental populations while the Zionist movement took over the land of Palestine (Thompson 2019, p. 5). Called back to Haifa at the close of 1921 on the death of Abdul Baha, Shoghi Effendi largely detached himself from the oriental locale his grandfather had moved in. He discarded eastern dress (with the exception of a karakul hat) and cutting off intercourse with locals altogether received mainly British and Zionist VIPs (Khanum 1969).

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2

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Endorsing Western rule in the East under the rubric of "obedience to rulers"

Bahai leaders, however, have had very little to say about imperialism and the dominion of the West, and tended to endorse Western rule in the East under the rubric of “obedience to rulers”. Orientalism being the dominant apparatus for relaying notions about the East in the era of Empire, depictions of Islam as a backward, stagnant element in eastern societies certainly attracted Western Bahais.

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2

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New religion from the Middle East entered the Christian world

As followers of a new religion from the Middle East, Bahais entered the space already opened in the United States by nineteenth-century Christian millenarian movements. New religious sects—Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s witnesses—shared a common heritage with respect to the millennium and the expectancy it generated for the return of Christ.

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2

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Short introduction of the Baha'i Faith by Geoffrey Nash

In the topic I have chosen to write about postcolonial analysis alerts us to the imperial dimensions behind the birthing of a new eastern religion. The focus here is on the nineteenth-century Islamicate world and on a faith which traces its origin to an Iranian Mahdi. Ali Muhammad Shirazi, or the Bab as he is more generally known, was the founder of a movement whose followers staged a number of uprisings in Iran in the late 1840s. After the Bab was executed in 1850, the remaining Babi leaders were exiled to Ottoman domains where Babism was re-launched and came to be known as Bahaism, after its founder Bahaullah, a former Babi. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the movement spread to North America and Western Europe where it was further modified in the hands of Bahaullah’s eldest son and designated successor Abdul Baha also known as Abbas Effendi, after whom a street on Mount Carmel was posthumously named. He was an outstanding notable still embedded in the Islamic character of the Akka and Haifa areas of Palestine. In the local mosque and on the occasion coinciding with the opening of the Woking Mosque near London in 1912, Abdul Baha maintained the formalities of Islamic worship. However, liberal clergymen in Britain and colonial officials and leading military figures in Palestine tended not to associate him with the Islamicate world. (Interestingly, the Military Governor of Jerusalem Ronald Storrs described him dressed in white robes “noble as a Prophet of Michael Angelo” rather than, say, a Sufi shaykh) (Storrs 1939, p. 232). Bahais were inspired by Abdul Baha, who journeyed to Europe and North America between 1911 and 1912, to exchange Islamic terms of reference (though not the many Islamicate concepts Bahaism contains) for a cosmopolitan message of peace and world unity encoded within a discourse of religious modernity and addressed to a world stage. However, it was under the aegis of Shoghi Effendi, a grandson of Abdul Baha who appointed him to the Guardianship (wilaya) of the Bahai faith that it self-identified as a new religion.

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2

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Official Baha'i translations

One non-Baha'i scholar states:

I have read most of the books by the central figures and Shoghi Effendi I could find. I just think that there is a clear difference in vision between all of them. On top of that I have read many writings of the Bab and Baha'u'llah in Arabic, which are infinitely better for understanding their teachings than translations.

For example, I translated this passage:

قُلْ تَاللّهِ الحَقِّ مَا ظَهَرَ شِبْهُهُ فِي الإِبْدَاعِ وَ‌مَنْ أَقَرَّ بِغَيْرِ ذَلِكَ شَهِدَ بِغَيْرِ مَا شَهِدَ اللّهُ وَيَكُونُ مِنَ المُشْرِكِينَ فِي أَلْوَاحِ عِزٍّ مَحْفُوظٍ (سورة القلم)

"Say: I swear by the one true God that there is no equal to him (Baha'u'llah) in all of creation. Anyone who claims something other than that, testifies to something other than what God testifies, and will be counted among the polytheists (mushrikun) in the mighty preserved tablets." (Surah al-Qalam)

The official translation says:

"Say: I swear by the one true God that there hath never appeared in all creation another like unto Him. Whoso asserteth otherwise hath gainsaid the testimony of God and is accounted among the faithless in His mighty and well-guarded Tablet."

The original text clearly states mushrikun, i.e. people who ascribe partners to God, which traditionally meant the polytheists in Mecca, and the official translation says faithless, which is something completely different and not what was meant. Also tablets is in plural form but this may be the case if a different manuscript was used.

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How do you explain this Baha'is?

The Bab instituted a law that you should not hurt children as one of these children could be He whom God shall make manifest. He also declared semen to be clean, in contrast with the Quran, because each sperm cell could be the one He whom God shall make manifest. Baha'u'llah was older than the Bab. How then do you explain this?

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Let deeds, not words, be your adorning! - Woe to you, O swine!

From Suratu’l Nus’h,

قل أفّ لك يا خنزير وبما اكتسبت أيداك بحيث جرّبت سيف نفسك على وجه الله واستكبرت على الله المهيمن العزيز القدّوس.

Provisional Translation

Say: Woe to you, O swine! For what your hands have wrought to the extent that you have drawn the sword from its sheath towards the Countenance of God, and waxed arrogantly against God, the Help in Peril, the Mighty and Most Holy.

https://bahai-library.com/bahaullah_stevens_surih_nush

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Baha'u'llah's law does not consider semen unclean, Pork is allowed and the concept of "uncleanness" is abolished.

One of the major reforms in the Bahá’í teachings involves the laws of cleanliness, which were instituted in various faiths, including Hinduism and Judaism. In The Most Holy Book, Bahá’u’lláh revokes the notion of the uncleanness of various objects and people, specifically “of semen [and] of certain objects for purposes of prostration”. This serves as a perfect illustration of what I call a prescriptive religious reform.

In the Law of Moses, the discharge of semen was considered unclean: “If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening… If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening” (Lev. 15.16, 18). Bahá’u’lláh’s law, in contrast, does not consider semen unclean despite the fact that in the last several thousand years the nature of semen obviously has not changed. As you can see, we are dealing not with natural but with ritualistic purity, which the Biblical text explicitly confirms: “when any man has a discharge from its member, his discharge makes him ceremonially unclean” (Lev. 15.2).

https://brill.com/view/book/9789004301078/B9789004301078-s004.xml

"The eating of pork is not forbidden in the Baha'i Teachings."

(From a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual believer, March 27, 1938; quoted in Lights of Guidance, no. 1012)


“God hath, likewise, as a bounty from His presence, abolished the concept of "uncleanness", whereby divers things and peoples have been held to be impure. He, of a certainty, is the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Generous. Verily, all created things were immersed in the sea of purification when, on that first day of Ridvan, We shed upon the whole of creation the splendours of Our most excellent Names and Our most exalted Attributes.

(Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Aqdas, p. 47”)

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Baha'u'llah's attitude

I noticed in doing a critical analysis of the Kitab-i-Aqdas in the fall of 2017 how incredibly entitled he seemed to be. At one point, he scolded the Emperor of the Austria-Hungary Empire for not seeing him when the Emperor visited Palestine. Uh, he wasn't a Baha'i, he was most likely a Christian going to visit holy sites associated with his own religion... why the hell would he bother to visit some prisoner and exile that was founding a different religion? Seeing what Baha'u'llah wrote in that case was a massive turn off for me.

-Dale Husband

https://www.reddit.com/r/exbahai/comments/rebp45/bahai_faith_and_swearing/

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Treasury Tells Baha'is to Hire More Israelis if Status Pact Is to Be Renewed.

The Finance Ministry is threatening to torpedo a status agreement between the Bahai World Center and the Israeli government unless the Bahai agree to hire Israelis at their centers in the Haifa region in place of current workers who are mainly Bahai volunteers from around the world, sources told Anglo File.

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5286432

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Shoghi Effendi's love for Switzerland

Shoghi Effendi loved nature. Whenever he felt the need for a rest it was not to the big cities that he went but to the mountains of Switzerland where he bicycled and climbed... His travels to Africa were for the love of nature and the simple life. (Lowell Johnson, Our Beloved Guardian, p. 41)

His one single personal hobby was photography; he took superlatively artistic pictures of the scenery in Switzerland and other places during those early years... (Rúhíyyih Rabbaní, The Priceless Pearl, p. 88)

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"liberation of Palestine" by the British forces

No need to dwell on the energetic steps which the English believers as soon as they had been apprized of the dire peril threatening the life of `Abdu'l-Bahá undertook to insure His security; on the measures independently taken whereby Lord Curzon and others in the British Cabinet were advised as to the critical situation at Haifa; on the prompt intervention of Lord Lamington, who immediately wrote to the Foreign Office to "explain the importance of `Abdu'l-Bahá's position;" on the despatch which the Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, on the day of the receipt of this letter, sent to General Allenby, instructing him to "extend every protection and consideration to `Abdu'l-Bahá, His family and His friends;" on the cablegram subsequently sent by the General, after the capture of Haifa, to London, requesting the authorities to "notify the world that `Abdu'l-Bahá is safe;" on the orders which that same General issued to the General Commanding Officer in command of the Haifa operations to insure `Abdu'l-Bahá's safety, thus frustrating the express intention of the Turkish Commander-in-Chief (according to information which had reached the British Intelligence Service) to "crucify `Abdu'l-Bahá and His family on Mt. Carmel" in the event of the Turkish army being compelled to evacuate Haifa and retreat northwards.

The three years which elapsed between the liberation of Palestine by the British forces and the passing of `Abdu'l-Bahá were marked by a further enhancement of the prestige which the Faith, despite the persecutions to which it had been subjected, had acquired at its world center, and by a still greater extension in the range of its teaching activities in various parts of the world. The danger which, for no less than three score years and five, had threatened the lives of the Founders of the Faith and of the Center of His Covenant, was now at long last through the instrumentality of that war completely and definitely lifted. The Head of the Faith, and its twin holy Shrines, in the plain of Akká and on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, were henceforth to enjoy for the first time, through the substitution of a new and liberal regime for the corrupt administration of the past, a freedom from restrictions which was later expanded into a clearer recognition of the institutions of the Cause. Nor were the British authorities slow to express their appreciation of the role which `Abdu'l-Bahá had played in allaying the burden of suffering that had oppressed the inhabitants of the Holy Land during the dark days of that distressing conflict. The conferment of a knighthood upon Him at a ceremony specially held for His sake in Haifa, at the residence of the British Governor, at which notables of various communities had assembled; the visit paid Him by General and Lady Allenby, who were His guests at luncheon in Bahjí, and whom He conducted to the Tomb of Bahá'u'lláh; the interview at His Haifa residence between Him and King Feisal who shortly after became the ruler of Iraq; the several calls paid Him by Sir Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel of Carmel) both before and after his appointment as High Commissioner for Palestine; His meeting with Lord Lamington who, likewise, called upon Him in Haifa, as well as with the then Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs; the multiplying evidences of the recognition of His high and unique position by all religious communities...

(God Passes By, by Shoghi Effendi - Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1971)

https://bahai-library.com/writings/shoghieffendi/gpb/306-310.html

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Weigh not the Book of God with... sciences

Weigh not the Book of God with such standards and sciences as are current amongst you, for the Book itself is the unerring Balance established amongst men. In this most perfect Balance whatsoever the peoples and kindreds of the earth possess must be weighed, while the measure of its weight should be tested according to its own standard, did ye but know it.

(Kitab-i-Aqdas, 99)

(Loyalty to the Covenant and Critical Thought by Udo Schaefer)

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Fanaticism - growing tendency in the Baha'i community

We must beware of thinking that fanaticism is something which is only practiced by others. On the contrary, it is a universal human frailty, namely the high virtue of steadfastness taken to an extreme, an evil from which even we, who call ourselves Baha'is, are not immune.

There is a growing tendency in the Baha'i community to allude to "covenantal implications" (Takfir), when issues are raised, which have not yet been openly discussed, or if an opinion is voiced that deviates from the common understanding in the community.

(Loyalty to the Covenant and Critical Thought by Udo Schaefer)

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