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Race, Immorality and Money in the American Baha’i
Community:
Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly
Juan R. I. Cole
Abstract
This article analyzes the dissolution of the Baha’i local assembly of Los Angeles in 1986-1988 by the National Assembly. Official explanations for this move focused on lapses in morality and administrative discipline. But local interviewees, as well as some official pronouncements, suggest that the conflict had two roots: The globalization of the community and resultant ethnic conflict among whites, African-Americans and newly immigrant Iranians; and national/local conflicts over power and money. The article concludes that low-information elections, the unaccountability of elected officials, censorship, and difficulties in acknowledging social conflict, make for such episodes in the Baha’i religion.
Where could Iranian-Americans,
African-Americans and whites meet regularly for worship, negotiating each
other’s very different value system in the globalized world of diasporas and
New Religious Movements? The answer
is, in the Baha’i community of Los Angeles.
An analysis of a crisis in that community will tell us a great deal not
only about the Baha’i faith but about how an immigrant faith that has attracted
many converts deals with the resultant communal tensions. On July 19, 1986, the National Spiritual
Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States formally dissolved the Local
Spiritual Assembly (LSA) of the Baha’is of Los Angeles, then a community of
some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha’i communities. The
national authorities replaced the disbanded local assembly with a six-person
administrative committee that was to report directly to the national Baha’i
headquarters in Wilmette, Illinois, so that in effect the national body took
direct control of the affairs of the Baha’is of Los Angeles. This action was
thought by local Baha’is at the time “unprecedented.” [1] Although local assemblies are routinely
dissolved, it is usually because their members have flagrantly broken Baha’i
law, which, with perhaps one exception, was not the case here. Why, then, did the NSA act in such a direct
and forceful fashion? What goals did
the national body wish to accomplish through this intervention? What problems had the local spiritual
assembly faced that the national body felt it simply could not deal with? Three admitted major areas of concern later
emerged, having to do with finances, race relations, and immorality. Other sources suggest that concern for the power
and primacy of the national assembly played a part. Which, if any, of these
causes was determinative?
The Baha’i faith came to the U.S. in
the 1890s from the Middle East, where it had been founded in 1863 by an Iranian
notable and prophet, Baha’u’llah (1817-1892).[2] He taught the eventual advent of world
peace, the need for collective security, the unity of humankind, the unity of
the religions, and the need to replace absolute monarchy with parliamentary,
constitutional government. His son,
`Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921), came to the U.S. in 1912-1913 to help spread the
religion, and he was succeeded by his grandson, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani,
1921-1957.[3] From the 1920s, the relatively liberal,
freewheeling early American Baha’i community, which had no clergy, began to be
transformed by the religion’s leaders into a much more disciplined, organic
sort of body. It was demanded that all
publications of Baha’is about their religion must be vetted by the Baha’i
assemblies at the appropriate level.
Baha’is were gradually forbidden to utter any public criticism of their
religious bodies’ policies or decisions.
The collective, nine-man international head of the religion from 1963,
the Universal House of Justice came to be considered infallible in all its
doings by most American Baha’is. The American community probably now consists
of about 60,000 adult believers, though the authorities claim twice that number
of adherents. The Los Angeles community
dates from the early twentieth century, and is the burial site of Thornton
Chase, widely regarded as the first American Baha’i.
As Mike Davis has contended, Los
Angeles is a city of contradictions and contrasts, above all between the poor
and the rich, but also ethnically and occupationally.[4] Nowhere is this axiom more true than in the
sphere of religion. Most of the world
religions are active in the city, and ethnic religions abound. Its population now over nine million,
swollen by a century of astonishing immigration rates, Los Angeles county is a
place where 106 languages are spoken and persons of Western European descent
are a minority. The reality of immigration presents enormous difficulties for
religious communities. In the words of
John Gregory Dunne, “Everyone was an alien, the newcomer never an exile. In such an environment, the idea of
community did not naturally flourish, since community by definition built on
deposits of shared experience.”[5] Conflicts abound between members of distinct
waves of immigration, and between social groups whose relative importance had
shifted in the New World. The Sri
Lankan Buddhists of Los Angeles
experienced a bitter schism in the 1970s over lay versus monastic control of
the community.[6] Shi`ite and Sunni Muslims uneasily coexist
in some Los Angeles mosque congregations.[7] It is therefore no surprise that the Los
Angeles Baha’i community should experience difficulties that arose in part from
the immigration of an ethnically distinct group of believers.
This study is based in part on
unpublished interviews and drafts done by anonymous reporters for the
short-lived Baha’i magazine, dialogue, which was forbidden to publish
these materials by the NSA, as well as upon follow-up interviewing with members
of the Los Angeles Baha’i community (I was myself a member of the Southern
California Baha’i community during the period 1979-81 and 1983-1984). [8] To understand
the following events it is necessary to have some notion of Baha’i power
structures, which are lay and either elected or appointed by elected bodies.
The nine-member local spiritual assemblies are elected directly, without
nominations or campaigning, by secret ballot and universal adult suffrage among
all the registered believers in a particular municipality or other civil
unit. Local communities meet every
nineteen days at “feast,” actually a combination worship service and church
business meeting that is closed to non-believers. The National Spiritual
Assembly (NSA) is indirectly elected, insofar as individual Baha’is vote every
fall for a delegate to the annual April National Convention, where the
delegates elect the nine-member national body.
Every five years since 1963, the national spiritual assemblies of the
world have elected an international or “universal” house of justice, with its
seat in Haifa, Israel, which is the religion’s highest executive and
legislative body. Baha’i governance is
characterized by an episcopal ecclesiastical structure and by demands for
conformity and obedience to “the Covenant.”[9] The authoritarianism characteristic of the
upper levels of the organization, however, is in contradiction with the
relative freedom believers usually exercise at the local level in creating
Baha’i subcultures and electing local officers. The NSA intervenes occasionally
to dissolve any local spiritual assemblies, the members of which it deems
morally corrupt (or, it is alleged, which are thought insufficiently loyal to
the national). The Los Angeles assembly
faced many unique problems, given the unusual and vast geography of the city,
the relatively large size of the community (in U.S. Baha’i terms), and the need
for feasts to be held in thirteen area locations. These area feasts perpetuated ethnic and economic divisions of
long standing.
The announcement of the dissolution
of the Los Angeles local assembly was made to a large convocation of believers
at the recently-completed Baha’i Center, by then NSA member James Nelson, a
Reagan-appointed Los Angeles municipal court judge. The initial reasons given for this step had to do with what was
felt to be widespread immorality in the community and the local body’s refusal
or inability to deal with it. Nelson
announced,
The Local Spiritual Assembly . . . has found itself
disabled from performing the functions of guiding the community in taking care
of its administrative affairs. Over too
long a period, instances of bad behavior in the community have gone
unrecognized or, if recognized, uncorrected . . . This runs the gamut from
fraud and corruption to gambling, to sexual deviations, to---well, all of the
things that can possibly go wrong, including drug abuse—things which every
urban society has in ample measure and to which our community is not immune.[10]
In
fact, immorality was only one of a number of concerns that drove the
dissolution, and it, like the entire event, was deeply entwined with ethnic
conflict in the community. That is,
Nelson’s casting of the issue as one of simple morality and local capitulation
to it had the effect of universalizing the conflicts and stripping them of
their rootedness in financial difficulties and in identity politics among
Baha’is in the city.
The immediate reaction of the old
local spiritual assembly members was shock and disbelief. Lois Willows, who had been the corresponding
secretary, observed, “I’m sure we didn’t do as good a job as we should have,
but we did as good a job as we could have . . . My feeling is our problems were
no grater than those encountered in other large communities in the United
States.”[11] Most former LSA members, including all four
Iranians, declined to speak for the record.
Manila Lee, a long-time member of the local assembly and a respected
elderly African-American school teacher, had resigned from the assembly in
mid-April, 1986, but because that body was slow to announce her departure she
was reelected on the twenty-first of that month anyway. Lee thought the dissolution “should have
been done a year ago.” She recalled a
closed ninety-minute meeting of seven members of the NSA with the Los Angeles
local assembly held to discuss the decision to dissolve the local body, chaired
by James Nelson. “One assembly member
asked, ‘What about our prestige?’” she reported. “Nelson replied, ‘Your prestige is way down.’” She criticized some members for “looking for
prestige,” but this reaction seems too unsympathetic.[12] It was perfectly understandable for the
elected members of the Local Spiritual Assembly to be concerned about what the
dissolution would mean for their reputations in the local Baha’i community.
Nelson’s oral declaration of the
dissolution was followed up by a letter to the Baha’is of Los Angeles from
Robert H. Henderson, the full-time secretary-general of the NSA. Henderson, an African-American former
businessman elected to the national body in 1984, was from a Baha’i family and
was brought up in Los Angeles. These
events therefore had special meaning for him, though he had left the city some
time previously. Henderson wrote that
“after prolonged and agonizing consultation” the NSA had “concluded that the
situation” required “remedial action.”[13] The first step was the July 19 dissolution
of the local assembly. He added, “the
major reason for this regrettable but necessary action was the inability of the
Spiritual Assembly to cope with the demands of the administration of the
community’s spiritual and operational affairs . . ." He explained that in order to revitalize the
community, the NSA had appointed an “administrative committee,” to which local
believers were to give their “wholehearted support and cooperation.” He concluded by quoting a letter of Baha’i
holy figure `Abdu’l-Baha to the early Los Angeles Baha’i community, in which he
urges them to promulgate the religion, and to remain firm in “the Covenant”
(most Baha’is interpret the covenant as unswerving obedience and submission to the
Baha’i ecclesiastical authorities).
The members of the six-person
“administrative committee” that the NSA put in charge of the Los Angeles
community were hand-picked from neighboring communities. But one problem in addressing the issue
entirely through outsiders, with local elections in abeyance, was that there
would be no obvious way to train potential new Local Spiritual Assembly members
from within Los Angeles. In order to aid in the creation of a new cohort of
potential leaders, the NSA in August of 1986 appointed a “Council of Nineteen”
local Baha’is to “oversee the day-to-day teaching, administration, finance,
consolidation and proclamation activities of the Los Angeles Baha’i Community.”[14] At the Feast of Asma’ on 19 August,
long-time NSA member Firuz Kazemzadeh (and then professor of Russian history at
Yale University) was asked when fresh elections for an LSA would be held and
replied that it “perhaps will be determined through a process of consultation
between the Council of 19, the administrative committee, the community at large
and the NSA. It cannot be decided
locally. It will be decided jointly.”[15] Dialogue interviewed Mark Sisson, who
had served on the Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles from 1983 till 1984,
when he had resigned in frustration, and who was the only former LSA member to
be appointed to the Council of Nineteen.
He explained that “The Council of 19 are trainees, as it were, in
preparation for assembly members.”[16] It was expected that local Baha’is with
leadership potential would be rotated onto the Council of Nineteen to create a
wider base of administrative experience.
Sisson expressed concern, however, about the publication of the pictures
of the Council of Nineteen on the cover of the September issue of the Los
Angeles Baha’i Journal. In Baha’i
elections, campaigning and canvassing are supposed to be strictly forbidden,
and this photograph appeared to many to function as a subtle campaign
poster. Sisson admitted,
This is a concern of many of the council members themselves. And this has been voiced by myself and
others. I’ve been really concerned
about this issue . . . I was very uncomfortable with the fact that our pictures
were plastered all over the journal. I
am concerned with the fact that we are constantly referred to as council
members before the community at large.
However, it is premature to say whether or not the outcome will be . .
another crude form of electioneering.
It will result in that if the Baha’i community at large does not pursue
their individual and independent responsibility as active members of the
community.[17]
In
fact, the techniques of subtle campaigning had long been mastered by several
members of the NSA, who had become perpetual incumbents, so the spread of these
tactics to a large urban community is not surprising.
Around the same time as the Local
Spiritual Assembly was dissolved, one of its members, an Iranian refugee and
ex-academic, faced possible Baha’i administrative sanctions over alleged
financial irregularities in his business.
This simultaneity of charges raised the question of whether the
businessman’s actions had helped precipitate the NSA’s intervention. A dialogue correspondent wrote to
Anna Lee Strasburg, head of community affairs at the national Baha’i center in
Wilmette, Ill., asking, among other things,
whether it were true that: 1)
the NSA discussed the possibility of dissolving the LSA of Los Angeles as early
as 1983; 2) the Universal House of Justice advised the National Assembly not to
postpone the dissolution; 3) the timing
of the sanctions against the Iranian businessman and the dissolution of the LSA
was coincidental.[18] That these questions were being widely posed
in the community at the time demonstrates that local Baha’is were seeking to
establish some timeline and chain of authority for the dissolution.
Only months later, on March 14,
1987, did the general community receive a more extended explanation of what had
happened, during a talk given at the local Baha’i center by NSA Secretary
Robert Henderson.[19]
He expressed regret that the NSA had
felt forced to intervene, acknowledging that Baha’i values favored emphasizing
the good points in an individual or body.
(Most Baha’is have a strong commitment to internal peace and quietism,
and condemn backbiting or internal conflict, which might lead them to be
uncomfortable with the hardline NSA actions.)
He went on to give three categories of serious problem with local
administrative functioning that had precipitated the crisis. The first was administrative and
financial. The Local Spiritual Assembly
had become disorganized, even though the NSA had around 1983 appointed an
executive committee to work with it.
For several months prior to the July 1986 dissolution, the local
assembly of Los Angeles had neglected to keep minutes, leaving no permanent
record of decisions. Beginning in the
late 1970s, the NSA had required all local assemblies to submit copies of its
minutes for spot-checking at the national headquarters in Wilmette, Illinois,
as a means of national oversight over local affairs. Henderson complained that
the lack of minutes allowed individual LSA members to voice opinions not
necessarily consistent with the majority, and allowed informal decision-making
“outside the chambers of the assembly.”[20]
The Local Spiritual Assembly’s
financial situation had, Henderson explained, become perilous. The Baha’i bookstore had incurred a $35,000
debt to the Baha’i Publishing Trust (an organ of the NSA), with poor bookkeeping
and no effective plan to pay it off. He
alleged that evidence of pilferage had been ignored, and that the bookstore
continued to operate at a loss of $1,000 per month. The debts to the Baha’i Publishing Trust were sufficiently large
that steps had had to be taken to avoid allowing them to push it into financial
instability. He added, “The financial
affairs of the community were in complete disarray. The community would have gone into bankruptcy had not certain dramatic
actions ultimately been taken by the NSA through the agency of the administrative
committee . . .”[21] The NSA had appointed an executive committee
of hand-picked experts to advise the Los Angeles assembly on how to reorganize
its affairs, but the latter had proven “contentious” declined to take
direction, even though public disagreement with higher authority is greatly
disparaged among Baha’is. A member of
the LSA confirmed the financial problems, saying that by spring of 1986 less
than 125 members out of the 1200 adults were contributing to the national fund
because they had lost faith in the local leadership.[22] The great expenses incurred in the building
and opening of the new Baha’i center in 1983 appear also to have discouraged
local congregants, insofar as they were continually dunned for increased
sacrifices, with no end in sight.
Henderson did not mention the fall-off in contributions. As we shall see below, another major
money-maker for the Los Angeles community was the rental of space to a medical
clinic, the collection of which the disorganization of the local assembly
ultimately made impossible. What should
have been a major profit center for the national assembly had ceased
contributing to Wilmette and, indeed, threatened to require investment from the
center to cover local shortfalls.
The second general area of problems,
Henderson said, had to do with the deterioration of the “social and spiritual
life of the community.” He used these
words as a code for race relations and immorality. The Los Angeles Baha’i community consisted of about 300
African-American adults and 500 Iranians, with most of the remaining members
being white (there were only two or three Latino families and no East Asian
ones). Henderson alleged that the
Iranian Baha’i immigrants had not been greeted with sufficient warmth into the
Los Angeles community, giving the example of the enthusiastic and
self-sacrificing manner refugees from Karachi had been accepted by an Oregon
community. Another of his concerns in
the area of social and spiritual dysfunction had been violations of Baha’i laws
against gambling, drinking, drug use, extramarital sex, shady financial
dealings, and tax evasion. Henderson
complained that most in the community had been unwilling to report such
violations, where they knew of them, to the Local Spiritual Assembly. And the assembly, even where it did learn of
such behavior, had refused to take any action.
Here, two central traditionalist Baha’i norms had been violated. There is a strong sense among conservative
Baha’is that one should “report” to the authorities any behavior or speech of
another Baha’i that seems out of the ordinary, that every believer should serve
as a spy on all the others. The second
is that public immorality as defined by Baha’i law should be investigated by
the local assembly, that the perpetrators should be cautioned, and, if they
continue in the activity, they should be disfellowshipped (in Baha’i
terminology, their “administrative rights” should be removed). Those so disfellowshipped cannot attend the
“Feast”--held every nineteen days, cannot vote, stand for election, give money
to the religion, or even give a public talk on the Baha’i faith. Henderson’s second complaint, about race
relations, had to do with the African-American Baha’is. He reminisced that in his childhood he
attended the old Baha’i center on New Hampshire Avenue and that “this community
was a model of interracial fellowship and unity that went way beyond anything
being done anywhere, I am convinced.”[23] He complained that this achievement had been
lost, and that “gradually, the non-white members of our community began to feel
estranged.” Black Baha’i attendance at
community affairs and worship meetings had somewhat declined in the 1980s. Others at the time questioned Henderson’s
idyllic portrayal of race relations among Los Angeles Baha’is in the 1950s and
1960s.
The final category of problem
according to Henderson was a persistent set of conflicts among the members of
the Los Angeles local assembly.
“Individual members of the assembly were engaged in gossip about the
assembly’s affairs and engaged in public backbiting about the unwisdom of this
decision and that decision.” He
stressed that the Baha’i norms called for unswerving and silent obedience even
to decisions of the assembly with which one disagrees. He further alleged that electioneering had
occurred, in addition to the problem of “informal decision-making” and
“backbiting.” Criticism of a Baha’i
institution by a Baha’i is considered a serious offense, and even if private
can sometimes result in the loss of administrative rights. For it to emanate from a member of an
institution was even more threatening.
Henderson concluded by blaming the
problems not only on the nine members of the local assembly, but on the entire
community, in part for not following the LSA.
He said that there would be no election in Ridvan (April) of 1997 for a
new Local Spiritual Assembly. When
asked by an audience member what needed to be done, Henderson replied that
during his four years on the national assembly he had seen other local spiritual
assemblies dissolved, and had seen other local communities “restored.” He said that the ethnic problems had to be
resolved, and that the blacks, Iranians and Hispanics had to be brought back
together as parts of the family, and that the community members had to engage
in “putting the faith first,” devoting themselves to proselytizing (“teaching”
the faith), and “build bridges of understanding, connections from one heart to
another.”[24]
Henderson’s account of why the local
assembly had been dissolved was challenged at the time and by my Angeleno
interviewees years later. The first gap
in the explanations given has to do with the issues of power, control, and
conflicts between local assemblies and the NSA. The Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles had had a
long-standing reputation as insufficiently obedient to the national body, as
too willing to take the initiative and to strike out on its own. In the 1970s and until the early 1980s its
members had been relatively youthful and probably affected by the youth culture
of the 1960s, which was despised by conservatives in Wilmette. Under this group the decision had been taken
to build a new Baha’i center on the edge of a middle class black neighborhood,
a project guaranteed to divert substantial resources to local needs, which was
therefore disliked by some NSA members.
Although this group of young people was perceived as somewhat maverick
by Wilmette, they were also acknowledged to be relatively efficient and intelligent
about avoiding a complete breakdown in relations with the national body. In the 1980s an older group of leaders was
elected, including several Iranian-American expatriates. These leaders maintained the tradition of
relative local autonomy, but were less adept politically. They inherited all the problems of finances
and staffing related to the opening of the new local Baha’i center in 1983, and
appear to have been unequal to the challenge.
In 1984, Robert Henderson was mysteriously elected to the NSA (in a way
filling a slot vacated by his mother, Wilma Ellis), and he became its paid,
full-time secretary-general. He was
concerned, in tandem with authoritarian older members of the national assembly
such as Firuz Kazemzadeh (who later married Ellis) and James Nelson, to assert
the authority of the NSA over local bodies.
To that end, the NSA ordered the dissolution of a number of local
spiritual assemblies, and threatened others, such as San Francisco, with this
step. They imposed national control by
means of appointed “Administrative Committees,” and took advantage of their
moment of local power subtly to promote candidates for local office who were
acceptable to them. The failure of a
local spiritual assembly to contribute any substantial sums to the national
fund may well have helped determine which local bodies were dissolved. Certainly, Los Angeles was by 1986 sending
on only risible contributions to Wilmette.
With regard to the finances of the
Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles, Henderson’s account appears to have
put unusual emphasis on some factors but to have ignored others entirely. His assertion that the Los Angeles Baha’i
bookstore was $35,000 in debt was challenged by Manila Lee, the manager, as
being an old figure much larger than the actual debt in 1986. It was also alleged that this “debt” in fact
included large amounts of book stock, which should rather have been counted as
capital. In addition, Lee complained
that the Baha’i Publishing Trust had refused to give her the sort of discounts
routinely offered to other Baha’i communities, which exacerbated her difficulty
in running the bookstore profitably.
Although outside observers do agree that the bookstore was not run in
good capitalist fashion, with Lee too willing to give away materials to those
who pled inability to buy them, it appears that Henderson greatly exaggerated
the bookstore’s straits. On the other
hand, he did not mention on this occasion the rent from the medical clinic,
which had its offices in a building at the new Baha’i center complex and paid on
the order of $5,000 per month. The
local assembly very badly mismanaged this office complex, leading the physician
renter to refuse to pay, and ultimately provoking a lawsuit that he won. Since the rent from the clinic was required
to cover the costs of staffing the new Baha’i center, inability to collect it
threatened in the most dire manner the finances of the local assembly. This issue, which Henderson elided, was far
more important than the bookstore.
Finally, the local assembly had decided to lend one of its members, an
Iranian businessman with very shaky finances, $40,000, a step that had led one
alarmed member of the assembly to contact Wilmette, which in turn led to the
dissolution. Henderson did not mention
this incident. One interviewee, responding
to Henderson’s charges of incompetence against the LSA, said that he was
confused when the secretary then insisted that among the problems had been the
failure of the local community to follow its local assembly. Why, he asked, should the community have
followed a body so maladroit as to require dismissal?
With regard to race relations,
Henderson’s account oversimplified an extremely complex dynamic. The legal framework that permitted
significant Iranian immigration was the 1965 change in immigration laws
abolishing unequal country quotas, but the actual motivation for most Iranian
immigrants to Los Angeles before the 1978-79 Revolution was largely
economic. Because of turbulence and
then revolution in Iran in the 1970s, impelling emigration, the Iranian
population of Los Angeles increased six-fold in that decade, and although it
grew at a smaller rate in the 1980s, its rate of growth was still far higher
than for other Middle Eastern groups. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of
Iranians in Los Angeles grew from only a few thousand to 76,000 (29 percent of
all the Iranians in the country).
Indeed, of 285,000 Iranians in the U.S., 100,000 or over one-third lived
in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
Jewish and Baha’i Iranians were most likely to be political refugees,
whereas Muslims (for the most part actually secularists) tended to be economic
immigrants.[25]
There had for some time been a few
Iranian Baha’is in Los Angeles, mainly as a result of chain migration
(following family and friends), though some were drawn by UCLA or business
interests. The arrival of several
hundred Iranian Baha’is who fled from persecution at the hands of the
Khomeinists from 1979 forward, however, changed the community enormously. Some twenty percent of the new arrivals did
not speak English well enough to conduct committee business in it, and wanted
everything that occurred at meetings to be translated into Persian, which
alienated the English speakers.
American Baha’is sometimes found the Iranian Baha’is cliquish (many of
them were members of extended clans and so interrelated), and complained that
the many wealthy among them tended to over-dress and to introduce class
distinctions into Baha’i social relations.
Iranian Baha’is were instructed to follow American Baha’i practices,
such as not rising to their feet for certain kinds of prayer. For their part, many Iranian Baha’is felt a
certain superiority to American converts, convinced that they knew better what
the Baha’i faith was, though in fact many of them confused their folk customs
with the high scriptural tradition.
“Persian Baha’is, in turn, take joy in pointing out, in an equally
patronizing way, the faults of Western Baha’i practices, such as the
inconsistencies in the observance of the Baha’i calendar and the omissions in
Baha’i laws of marriage and burial.”[26] All these things were a bit off-putting to
both sides. The overwhelming
predominance in the 1980s of Iranian Baha’is in many Southern California Baha’i
communities such as Santa Monica led to a drastic fall-off in the participation
of American Baha’is in community events and a slowing of conversions to the
religion. (Santa Monica had had perhaps
15 Baha’is in the 1970s, many of them white converts from the youth culture
with a New Age orientation; by 1981 it had some 100 Baha’is, almost all
Iranians, and many of the converts had ceased participating in community
events). Contrary to what Henderson
implied, the Los Angeles community, in part because of its sheer size, did much
better at integrating the Iranians.[27]
Manila Lee observed, “We had started
(assimilation) programs around 1980-1981, and the assembly was very careful to
appoint mixed committees, mixed as far as Persians and Americans.” This effort, she said, had fallen into
neglect in 1983, at a time when the local assembly was putting all its energies
into the move to the new Baha’i center, preoccupied by the minutiae of
financing and construction. Lee added,
that by that time,
there was no systematic plan to assimilate anything .
. . we didn’t devise any means. We lost
white Americans who felt that the Persians were aggressive and encroaching and
felt they heard too much translation (at feast) and all the petty excuses. They felt that the Persians were clannish
and then the objection came that the Persians were class conscious . . . I just think we missed the mark entirely on
assimilation. We had very little
development of any ethnic programs.[28]
Not
only did the local Baha’i community not always work hard enough at
assimilation, one contemporary Iranian-American observer suggested that Iranian
Baha’is had substantial reasons not to assimilate. (The question of whether assimilation was even a good goal does
not seem to have arisen in official Baha’i discourse). The large Iranian immigrant community of
Southern California, tens of thousands strong, offered social and cultural
services not available elsewhere, including cultural functions,
Persian-language media, and commercial and economic services and opportunities. These networks with non-Baha’i Iranian
immigrants helped overcome feelings of homesickness and of alienation in the
new, surreal setting of the city of angels, as well as helping these
businessmen, shopkeepers and service workers deal with the temporary downward
mobility that is the lot of most immigrants.
He felt that “historically, immigrant groups with more extensive ethnic
networks, such as the Chinese and Koreans of Los Angeles, have had a greater
chance for economic success in the United States.”[29] These observations are corroborated by
social scientists who have found that Middle Eastern immigrants to Los Angeles
are unusually likely to be entrepreneurs, self-employed, or professionals
(especially the Iranians among them) and that they proved especially resistant
to assimilation, tending to congregate in their own areas within white
neighborhoods. Iranian Jews and
Armenians also retained a distinct Iranian identity rather than melding in with
local Jews and Armenians. [30] Unlike the Iranian Jews of Los Angeles, who
began constructing their own synagogues, Iranian Baha’is were forced by Baha’i
law to attend the feast designated for their part of the city, and were
forbidden to hold separate meetings or build separate buildings, on pain of
being shunned.
The exclusion of a fair number of
Iranian Baha’is, moreover, was the fault of the international and national
Baha’i authorities, who adopted policies signaling that the Iranian refugees
were not supposed to be in Los Angeles.
Around 1981, Ruhiyyih Khanum (née Mary Maxwell) Rabbani, a Hand of the
Cause or lay bishop, spoke to the community harshly, upbraiding them for
settling in a such a decadent urban center, implying they should never have
left Iran, and that if they had insisted on doing so should at least have had the
decency to settle as missionaries in some remote village of the global
South. Many traditionalist Baha’is
believe that cities are in imminent danger of evaporation. When someone from the audience asked where
they should have settled instead, she replied in Persian that it was
self-evident: “Khar kih nistid” (“you are not asses”). Many Iranian Baha’is came away from the
meeting angry. One Iranian-American
observer pointed out that most Iranian Baha’is who settled in Los Angeles did
so “to be close to family members,” or for “economic opportunities.” Nevertheless, he noted, “repeated
admonitions from Baha’i leaders and institutions about the dire consequences of
living in Los Angeles has led to considerable confusion, thus making
assimilation seem even less desirable to them,” and added that “their choice of domicile has become a religious
question” which led to a “strong sense of guilt associated with their settling
in Los Angeles.”[31]
The Baha’i authorities also adopted
from 1983 a punitive approach to any Baha’is who escaped from Iran through the
Tehran airport, since it was known that they could only have gotten visas to
fly out by claiming to be Muslims.
These were disfellowshipped for at least a year upon their arrival in
the U.S. in 1983-1986 (the term was even longer in the late 1980s), and many so
punished for preserving their lives became disaffected and fell away from the
religion. The Universal House of
Justice in Haifa felt that allowing such paper apostasies as a means of fleeing
Iran might lead to a fatal weakening of Baha’i identity, and had to be strictly
sanctioned. (Escapees across the
Baluchi desert into Pakistan were more acceptable, even though they had broken
the law to cross the border without a visa).
Henderson and the U.S. NSA had zealously pursued punitive measures
toward those who flew out of the airport, rather as if the Jewish rabbis in the
early 1940s should have rigidly excommunicated any Jew who eluded Hitler by
pretending to be a Catholic. The Los
Angeles LSA was notorious for overlooking these apostasies under duress and
recognizing escapees as Baha’is in good standing (provided two other Baha’is
could vouch for their membership in the community), so that it was ironic that
it should be berated by Henderson for mistreating the Iranian Baha’is.
Finally, the Baha’i national
electoral system, with no formal campaigning or nominations wherein the top
nine vote-getters win, is extremely vulnerable to bloc voting by a distinct
group. The U.S. NSA appears to have
been worried that the large influx of Iranian Baha’is would create a new voting
bloc and throw up candidates for national election, displacing current
members. In response, the NSA acted
behind the scenes to close down regular scripture study sessions hosted by popular
Iranian immigrant lay preachers, who were becoming prominent and therefore had
a chance of being elected to the NSA.
One contemporary writer observed,
Unlike their Jewish and Armenian compatriots, who have
at times been encouraged by their leaders to preserve their traditions by means
of separate meetings from their host communities, Persian Baha’is have come
under considerable pressure to quickly integrate and adapt to the ways and
practices of American Baha’is. In the
past five years, Persian meetings have been discouraged or banned (with the
exception of memorial gatherings and fund raisers) while local Persian affairs
committees have been dissolved on more than one occasion.[32]
These actions were so successful that from
1978 when the influx of some 12,000 Iranian Baha’is began, till the eve of the
twenty-first century, no Iranian Baha’i immigrant from the wave of the 1970s
and 1980s was ever elected to the NSA.
That many Iranian Baha’is felt unwelcome was therefore not only the
result of local Los Angeles actions.
With regard to the issue of
immorality, what Henderson did not say was that many of those implicated in
immorality were wealthy Iranian businessmen who brought with them the norms of
behavior of the Pahlavi elite in Tehran under the shah. The Tehrani Baha’i community had been
thousands strong and some of them had been tightly connected to the shah and
his business class. As members of what
had become an ethnic religion in Iran, they were defined in their original
society by what families they came from, not by “Baha’i” behavior. In a setting such as the United States,
however, where most believers are converts, behavior becomes a crucial marker
of identity. The concern about drinking and drugs was corroborated in an
interview with dialogue given by former member of the Local Spiritual
Assembly, Manila Lee: “There were
instances of violations of Baha’i laws
that were reported to the assembly, but the assembly failed to act . . . And
then, there were some out and out cases of drunkenness that, for some reason,
would die if they came to the assembly.”[33] Of course, Americans may also have been
among the transgressors of conservative Baha’i norms, but most of the talk in
the early 1980s, often in Persian so as to keep it secret, was about Iranian
lapses.
The African-American population of
Los Angeles was also undergoing enormous changes 1970-1990, during which the
black population grew from about 744,000 to 927,000. The city witnessed among the greatest rates of residential
desegregation in the country during this period, with the dissimilarity index
dropping from .90 in 1970 to .73 in 1990.
African-Americans became substantially more educated, and even though
their earnings continued to trail those of whites and Latinos, they made the
most economic improvement in this period.
Mayor Tom Bradley (in office 1973-1991) served as a symbol for this
advance. Even more than among most
ethnic groups, however, African-Americans witnessed a severe bifurcation
between an increasingly educated and well-off middle class and an increasingly
poverty-stricken underclass.[34] The black Baha’is tended to belong to the
upwardly mobile middle class that was making such strides in this period. Although there were problems with
African-American Baha’i participation, it is not clear that these were greater
than the fall-off in white attendance and giving. The new Baha’i center was a refurbished bowling alley on the edge
of a middle class African-American neighborhood, after all. In her dialogue interview, Manila Lee
traced the alienation of some African-American Baha’is to early 1984, when the
new Baha’i center opened, a new staff was hired to run it, and committees were
reshuffled. The new staff was
“all-white,” and African-Americans felt they had been excluded from responsible
positions, especially from the financial management committee, and it had been
alleged to Lee by one African-American that the whites had said blacks “don’t
know anything about financing.” She
said that “blacks . . . where they’re a minority in the United States . . . are
very sensitive to people’s leadership if they feel there is any basic racism,”
and that the number of African-Americans who attended feast began dwindling,
and those who had been active members gradually became inactive.[35] Other African-Americans living in Los
Angeles at that time also remarked that they perceived the Iranian immigrants
to have brought with them prejudices against blacks, and that some of the
alienation stemmed from the new mix of ethnicities in the community.[36] Interestingly, this dynamic among non-whites
was not mentioned by Henderson as a problem.
In addition, some of the 300 black Baha’i Angelenos allege that
Henderson exaggerated their disaffection at that point, saying that they
participated faithfully in the Gospel choir, the Sunday services at the Baha'i
center, and as members on the local assembly.
The attempt of the NSA to intervene
in local Los Angeles affairs ultimately failed. At the Southern California district convention in October, 1986,
the attendees passed a resolution with overwhelming support asking the NSA to
dissolve the Administrative Committee and permit new elections for a Local
Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles.
Members of the committee who were present at the convention asked that
the convention’s request be sent to the Administrative Committee itself rather
than to the national assembly, but this suggestion was voted down. One interviewee recalls, “A lot of people
there felt that something was wrong about having an appointed committee running
the community, regardless of the fact that the NSA has appointed it and the UHJ
had approved it.” Another interviewee
said of the Administrative Committee that they were “administrative types who
all lived outside of Los Angeles,” and were “held in contempt” by the local
community. Even when Universal House of
Justice Member Glenford Mitchell visited Los Angeles in this period, he was
testily asked when the community would get its assembly back. The interviewee remembered, “He was kind of
flustered by the question and followed the party line that it was up to the
local community, that if they met some (unstated) standard, the Assembly would
be restored.” Baha’i scriptures
recommend parliamentary governance, and U.S. Baha’is see power exercised by
unelected individuals as illegitimate.
By March 19, 1988, the NSA had
become convinced of the failure of their highly interventionist experiment, and
seven members of its members were flown to Los Angeles for a meeting at the
Baha’i center to announce that annual elections for the Local Spiritual
Assembly would be resumed that April.
Only about 200 of the community’s some 1200 adult members attended the
meeting, which seems likely to have been meant as a sign of local
disgruntlement.[37] Henderson said that many of the “mechanical”
administrative problems had been corrected.
He was referring at least in part to the financial situation, both of
the local treasury and of the Baha’i bookstore: “I remember meeting with the auditors of the NSA. They wanted us to write off the debt of the
Los Angeles bookstore as a bad debt.
And, we said, in Baha’i terms, there’s no such thing as a bad debt. Even if I don’t have the ability to pay now,
I’m spiritually obligated to pay.”[38] He noted that the bookstore debt of “nearly $40,000” was “repaid in full” and
it was now operating in the black. He
also said that the bills of the Los Angeles Baha’i community had been paid off,
even though this effort had been impeded by the previous poor record keeping
and financial disarray. Even the permit to hold meetings at the Baha’i center
had lapsed, and until renewed the gatherings there had been technically
illegal. He continued to have financial
concerns, since although the community broke even, it did so in large part
because of the rent it received from the medical clinic. He said that without the rental income, the
Los Angeles community would run an annual deficit of between $70,000 and
$100,000. “That is, if we were solely
relying on contributions from the members, we would not be able to meet our
financial responsibilities.” He
complained that only about 200 Baha’is regularly contributed to the local
fund. “That is just not enough.”[39] He also had concerns about attendance at the
nineteen-day feast, which had jumped to 700 or about fifty percent soon after
the assembly dissolution, but “now averages 450” with some feasts as low as
350. He noted that there had been 50
conversions (“declarations”), and that a “black teaching task force” (for
proselytizing among African-Americans) was operating, and that work still
needed to be done on “assimilating” the Iranians.
Pressed on what had gone wrong,
Henderson admitted, “Part of the (problem) is that we don’t know how to do
this. We don’t know about the process
of building a Baha’i community in a metropolitan environment.”[40] As an urban businessman, Henderson was well
aware of the general Baha’i bias against cities, which had ill fitted the
religion for a place like Los Angeles.
James Nelson, the municipal court judge, promised that an advisory
council appointed by the NSA would work with the newly elected Local Spiritual
Assembly. He emphasized the spiritual
and moral challenges.
It is clear that Kazemzadeh had a
rather different reading of the problems than did Nelson or Henderson. Though
he did not use these terms, he saw them as rooted in a lack of what Marxists
would call party discipline. His
remarks at the March, 1988 meeting are worth quoting in full:
Friends, in our anxiety to improve the functioning of our
institutions, we must not forget certain essential principles on which these
institutions are built. Accountability
can mean many things but if the question of accountability is put in the
context of current practices of democratic nations, of the United States, for
instance, that accountability does not exist in the Baha’i community. Shoghi Effendi has said very clearly that
the Baha’i system combines the elements of various systems. The election is our democratic process, but
the assemblies function as aristocracies.
They are not accountable to the electorate. The consultation of the assembly is not open to the public unless
the assembly wishes to consult with someone or some group of people on some
specific subject. Otherwise, they
consult in privacy, so that they would not be inhibited, so that they would not
curry favor. Because if you are going
to have a meeting of the assembly here on stage, the temptation of the members
of the assembly to play to the gallery will turn the assembly into the Congress
of the United States. That is not the
Baha’i way of conducting the business of the institutions. Shoghi Effendi did not permit the NSA to
have a stenographer present at its deliberations . . . It also must be stated that, within the
Baha’i community, there are individuals, and sometimes they even become groups,
who do question the activities of the Baha’i institution. They are welcome to raise those questions in
Nineteen Day Feasts. They are welcome
to take those questions, objections, wishes, to higher institutions. If somebody is dissatisfied with a local
assembly, he is not prevented from appealing to the NSA and actions of the NSA
can be appealed to the Universal House of Justice. It is something else when whispering campaigns or petitions are
sent around for signatures objecting to the activities of the
institutions. That also may be
something which is countenanced by American democracy but has nothing to do
with the Baha’i Faith. We must always
remember that our institutions are an unusual and unique combination of
theocracy in the best sense of the term with democracy. The institutions of the Baha’i Faith have
not been created by us, the institutions have been created by God. The membership is filled by us. We have the privilege of assigning who is
going to be on the institutions, but the institutions themselves are the
expression of God’s will, communicated to the world through a divine
manifestation.[41]
Kazemzadeh
clearly has a firm vision of the Baha’i institutions as a sort of elective
dictatorship, unchallengeable, beyond public criticism, and to be
unhesitatingly obeyed. Nor is it to be
responsive to community concerns, which would be a capitulation to public
opinion. More worrisome, he wanted to
see this system become the civil government.
Again, there were dissenters from
the image painted by Henderson and the other members of the NSA. Some alleged that not only had the bookstore
had never actually been in as much debt as he said, but that it was only shown
to have been put in the black by now counting book stock as assets rather than
as debt (and, of course, some of the stock had sold during the two years of
hiatus). The Baha’i Publishing Trust
retroactively extended to the Administrative Committee the sort of discounts
they had denied to the old assembly, making paying off the debt much
easier. It was also alleged that income
from sources other than contributions was not reported at feast 1986-1988,
making the financial situation look much more dire than it was. Henderson was silent about the problems that
underlay the lawsuit over the clinic (which was eventually settled for
$100,000), and most Baha’is never learned of it. The number of conversions Henderson cited as evidence of a recovery
actually was unimpressive. Conversions
had fallen to 80 in 1983, to 50 in 1984, and to 39 in 1985, numbers that, in
the wake of the large conversions of the 1970s, had seemed to Manila Lee
“terrible.” She would not have been
impressed with the 50 conversions garnered in 1987.[42] Although many Angeleno Baha’is agreed that
the old assembly had become directionless, the real question for them was
whether the NSA’s intervention had had good results or bad. One of my interviewees, felt that under the Administrative
Committee local morale was actually further undermined in ways that caused long-term damage to the
community. When elections were held in
April, 1988, three or four of the former members of the local assembly,
including Lois Willows, were returned to office, which some saw as a vindication
of the body that had been dissolved.
Although Henderson and other members
of the NSA fore-grounded, in their explanations for why the local assembly was
dissolved, issues in immorality and race relations, I believe that these
considerations were subsidiary to power and money. Although immoral behavior is considered very serious in the
Baha’i community, it would not normally impel the dissolution of a local
assembly unless the assembly members themselves were persistently guilty of it,
something not charged in Los Angeles.
As for race relations, there is no reason to think these were
substantially worse in Los Angeles than in other big urban Baha’i communities
of that period, and there are enough inconsistencies in Henderson’s story of
Iranian refugees rebuffed and a vastly diminished African-American presence to
raise serious questions as to whether these alleged situations even existed,
much less forming causes for dissolving a local spiritual assembly. Other eyewitnesses appear to have perceived
the situation very differently, with the Los Angeles local assembly exceedingly
accommodating of Iranian escapees (perhaps too much so for Wilmette’s taste),
welcoming them into the community and refusing to punish their peccadilloes,
with continued substantial black presence despite some hurt feelings provoked
by both white and Iranian insensitivity, and with the major change being
dramatically decreased white participation in many community affairs as a
result of frustration over issues such as culture shock at the influx of
Iranians. But other communities, such
as Santa Monica, suffered from much worse declines in non-Iranian participation
than did Los Angeles.
The issue of disunity on the local
assembly was more serious, insofar as it threatened to undermine what Baha’i
administrators often privately refer to as “party discipline.” Kazemzadeh appears to have been particularly
concerned that constituencies may have developed in the community, to which
some members of the local assembly were consciously playing, a major sin in
Baha’i governance. The local assembly’s disunity was more likely an enabling
factor in the dissolution than a causative one. That the local leaders were not getting along guaranteed that
there would be no united opposition to the NSA plan of taking control of the
local administration.
Henderson’s own ambitions must be
taken into account, as well. He had
become secretary general of the national assembly 1984, after his company went
under in Atlanta. The position of
secretary has tended to be held for life or until election to the Universal
House of Justice. In the hard-line
Baha’i political culture of the top administrators, success required him to
demonstrate an ability to impose his will on the national community. The dissolution of a number of local
assemblies early in his administration, and the threats made to others,
functioned as a means for him to assert and consolidate national control. In Los Angeles, the opportunity presented
itself to displace a cohort of local leaders who had proved overly independent,
and to replace them with hand-picked loyalists of the sort appointed to the
Administrative Committee and the Council of Nineteen.
Money was probably even more
important than power. Henderson’s
various remarks on the economic situation contain strong clues as to the NSA’s
most pressing motivation in seeking to resolve the community’s leadership
problems. Local contributors to the Baha’i fund had slipped to only 125 out of
1200 adults as a result of lack of trust in the local assembly’s leadership,
which reduced the NSA’s receipts from the Los Angeles community to almost
nothing. The poor management of the
clinic’s office space, resulting in missed rent payments worth several
thousands of dollars a month, and ultimately a lawsuit that had to be settled
by the NSA for $100,000, was even more serious than the decline in giving. It threatened the ability of the local
community to continue to staff the new Baha’i center and perhaps even raised
the specter of requiring substantial contributions from the NSA to keep it
open. The mismanagement of the local
assembly by spring of 1986 seemed very possibly poised to cost the NSA tens of
thousands of dollars if it were allowed to continue. Henderson draws a full-time salary and perquisites, including
free rent and upkeep at the nine-bedroom mansion that also serves as the
secretary’s administrative headquarters, and some have estimated his package,
in cash, kind and perquisites, as worth over $150,000 a year (such information
is carefully withheld from the Baha’is).
Four others among the nine NSA members drew stipends for their services
on that body. The NSA was perpetually
in need of money, and was usually in debt, often avoiding substantial
indebtedness only because of bequests.
Individual members of the National Assembly depended on the national
fund. To have a major urban Baha’i
community like Los Angeles, full of wealthy business people and professionals,
become a substantial drain on national finances rather than a major profit
center, threatening national finances, clearly could not be allowed. It is not clear what resources were sent to
Wilmette from the Los Angeles community by the appointed Administrative
Committee in 1986-1988, but Henderson said that the alleged bookstore debt of
$35,000 was completely paid down, and this figure may indicate the scale of
such transfers.
Nor could the problem have been
solved locally. Current rules make it
impossible for a local community to exercise effective oversight over its
assembly, which members are not allowed to criticize publicly, and to which
unswerving obedience is inculcated. One
particularly active feast was aware of the problems in LA, and even drew up a
plan to resolve them, but the local assembly declined to implement it, and
there was nothing those 200 more informed believers could do about it. The major obstacle to dealing with these
sorts of problems by a large, urban Baha’i community such as Los Angeles, is
the electoral system. The extremely
low-information elections, the manner in which nine persons each with only a
handful of votes can be elected if their tallies are higher than all the
others, the tendency of the system to perpetuate incumbency in larger
communities, the lack of reporting requirements on the precise use of funds in
the budget or other means of judging the performance of the incumbents—all of
these features of the system militate against local electorates finding
solutions for dysfunctional local assemblies.
The alternative, of having the NSA intervene from above to fire LSA
members at will, has the severe disadvantage of lacking in legitimacy in the
eyes of rank and file Baha’is. These
problems, however, cannot be addressed in a thoroughgoing manner in the terms
of contemporary Baha’i discourse, which is why the planned dialogue
magazine article on the dissolution was never allowed to appear. No trace of the events I have discussed
remains outside the memories of the participants, and that there might be
systemic problems was disallowed by all the officials involved, who chose
instead to speak of lapses in personal morality. Norman Klein called his book on Los Angeles The History of
Forgetting. If he is right, Baha’is
are perfect Angelenos.
Notes
[1] Bob Ballenger/Steve Scholl, 21 July 1986, Dialogue Magazine Archives (hereafter DMA).
[2] Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Peter Smith, The Babi and Baha'i Religions: From Messianic Shi`ism to a World Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
[3] Robert H. Stockman, The Baha'i Faith in America , 2 vols. (Wilmette, Ill. and Oxford: Baha'i Publishing Trust and George Ronald, 1985-1995); R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram, Music, Devotions and Mashriqu’l-Adhkar: Studies in Babi and Baha'i History Volume 4 (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1987).
[4] Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); see especially chapter one, “Sunshine or Noir,” and chapter six, “New Confessions;” and Norman M. Klein, The history of forgetting : Los Angeles and the erasure of memory (London and New York : Verso, 1997).
[5] John Gregory Dunne, “Angels of L.A.,” New York Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 9 (May, 1998), p. 17; this article is also the source for the statistics cited.
[6] Paul Numrich, “Schism in the Sinhalese Buddhist Community of Los Angeles,” forthcoming.
[7] Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).
[8] For the story of dialogue Magazine see Juan R. I. Cole, “Press Censorship in the Baha’i Faith and the dialogue Affair.” forthcoming.
[9] Juan R. I. Cole, “The Baha’i Faith in America as Panopticon, 1963-1997,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 37, no. 2 (June, 1998), pp. 234-248.
[10] Transcript of tape of James Nelson speech, 19 July 1986, DMA.
[11] “L.A. LSA Reaction,” typescript, summer, 1986.
[12] Manila Lee in Ibid.
[13] Robert C. Henderson/Baha’is of Los Angeles, California, 21 July 1986, DMA.
[14] “Aftermath,” anon. typescript, circa August, 1986, DMA.
[15] Kazemzadeh quoted in ibid.
[16] Sisson quoted in ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Richard Hollinger/Anna Lee Strasburg, 23 September 1986, DMA.
[19] “Robert Henderson Talk,” Los Angeles Baha’i Center, 14 March 1987, partial transcript. DMA.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22]Manila Lee quoted in “The Decline and Fall of the Los Angeles Local Spiritual Assembly,” typescript, 1987, DMA.
[23] “Robert Henderson Talk,”
[24] “Robert Henderson Talk,”
[25] Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Claudia Der-Martirosian, and Georges Sabbagh, “Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant,” in Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), pp. 350-352; Mehdi Bozorgmehr, “Iranians,” in David W. Haines, ed., Case Studies in Diversity: Refugees in America in the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996), pp. 85-103; for this point see pp. 92-93; idem, “Internal ethnicity: Iranians in Los Angeles,” Sociological Perspectives 40, no. 3 (1997):387-408; and for a textured overview see Ron Kelley, Jonathan Friedlander, and Anita Colby, eds., Irangeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993)
[26] “The Persian Baha’is of Los Angeles,” typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.
[27] Kelley, et al., Irangeles, pp. 125-131.
[28] Lee in “L.A. LSA Reaction,” summer, 1986.
[29] “The Persian Baha’is of Los Angeles,” typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.
[30] Bozorgmehr et al., “Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant,” pp. 359-373; Bozorgmehr, “Iranians,” pp. 98-101.
[31] “The Persian Baha’is of Los Angeles,” typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.
[32] “The Persian Baha’is of Los Angeles,” typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.
[33] Manila Lee quoted in “Decline and Fall.”
[34] David M. Grant, Melvin L. Oliver, and Angela D. James, “African-Americans: Social and Economic Bifurcation,” in Bozorgmehr and Waldinger, Ethnic Los Angeles, pp. 379-411.
[35] Lee in “Decline.”
[36] Personal communication from an African-American Baha’i of Los Angeles, Dec. 3, 1997.
[37] “LA/LSA Restored: NSA Meeting in L.A. 19 March ’88,” typescript transcript, DMA.
[38] Henderson in Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Henderson in “LA/LSA Restored: NSA Meeting in L.A. 19 March ’88.”
[41] Kazemzadeh in “LA/LSA Restored: NSA Meeting in L.A. 19 March ’88,” typescript transcript, DMA.
[42] Lee in “Decline.”
Stockman Response
(That of Dr. Mike McMullen is not yet online).
Response
JUAN R. I. COLE
My thanks to Mike McMullen for his comments on the article, and for his kind words on some of its strengths. I have found his own work on the Atlanta Baha’i community very useful. However, the purpose of this exchange is surely the somewhat un-Baha’i-like task of addressing our differences. First of all, I should signal to academic readers why I think my article might be problematic for conservative Baha’is. The Baha’i culture is utopian, and Baha’is often wish to present the inner workings of their community life as perfect. They see their administrative order as an alternative to the politics of the corrupt ‘old world order’, which is under the control of powerful individuals and marred by individualist selfishness. That some of these same forces are at work within their own administration is therefore a proposition they find difficult to entertain.
Moreover, a great deal of work goes into preserving the utopian point of view. In my experience, Baha’i governance structures are deliberately kept opaque. Conservative Baha’is are very skeptical that anything serious can even be known about their governance processes outside official pronouncements. Baha’is are discouraged from speaking of community governance issues except in carefully controlled venues. Baha’i authorities, who surround themselves with an aura of divine guidance, keep believers in line by appealing to the welfare and unity of the community, and if these appeals fail then implicit or explicit threats of disfellowshipping and even shunning are invoked. Non-Baha’is are not allowed to attend the nineteen day feast, the main ‘business meeting’ of the local community, or the national convention held in April each year in Wilmette. (Among religious bodies of any size in the U.S., the annual Baha’i national convention is the only one from which journalists are systematically excluded). Such a closed ‘political culture’ makes the gathering of quantitative information extremely difficult, if not impossible. Two friends of mine in the Los Angeles community who did attempt to conduct a poll some years ago were instructed to desist by the local spiritual assembly (LSA), and I frankly do not believe such research would be allowed. That is, the Baha’is would be ordered by their authorities not to cooperate with it. The lack of quantitative evidence is, in short, hardly my fault, but would bedevil anyone who took up this sort of subject. Indeed, as I made clear, the very publication of articles about the incident was also forbidden by Robert Henderson, so asking for quantitative data in addition seems unrealistic. On the other hand, historians very seldom have the sort of complete set of quantitative information available to contem- porary, synchronic disciplines like sociology, and we have developed techniques to compensate for this. I do not think it terribly controversial, for instance, to suggest that when only two hundred out of 1200 local Baha’is showed up to see the national spiritual assembly (NSA) members in 1988, this poor attendance was a sign of disgruntlement with that body, given much higher attendance rates at other events.
Given the deliberate opaqueness of Baha’i culture and contemporary history, what is remarkable is that I gained access to dozens of documents on this issue from various key players, which survived in the Dialogue magazine archives. I therefore have what is, from a historian’s point of view, a very solid documentary base. It includes interviews with local assembly members and verbatim transcripts of in-house speeches by Baha’i officials; a sort of evidence that is almost never available for writing about the contemporary
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Baha’i community. It should also be remembered that I was myself a Persian speaking Baha’i in the Los Angeles area periodically between 1979–1984, attended feast there and had a large network of friends from all the major ethnic groups. So although I was not living there at the time of the dissolution, I knew a great deal from first-hand experience about the conditions that precipitated the crisis. I also had telephone conversations and correspondence at the time with Baha’is present.
McMullen’s conclusion that my documentary base for the article is inadequate to the task thus seems to me overdrawn. The unpublished articles prepared for Dialogue magazine on the dissolution involved interviews with dozens of key participants. Since the Dialogue staff consisted of professional journalists and young academics, the interviews were conducted professionally (a conclusion bolstered by the obvious quality of information and clarity of writing in the reports). I used many letters from and to Scholl and others, including letters generated by the NSA, and also speeches by its members. This amounts to an extensive set of documentation, not ‘a few anonymous reports’. As McMullen knows, I had to keep some of my informants anonymous because they might otherwise be disfellowshipped for speaking to me about the incident. For that reason I cannot identify the ‘outside observers’, or the other persons for whom he demands names. Indeed, I am afraid that some friends of mine who did not cooperate might nevertheless be punished for this article because of guilt by association. My informants were friends made when I was a member of the Southern Californian Baha’i community in the early 1980s, but they are not well known in the Baha’i community. Any anthropologist who worked in a village would be in the same position if he thought his ethnographic field report might in any way harm the villagers, and preserving respondents’ anonymity simply does not invalidate social science findings. All that said, I would be the first to admit that it is desirable that contemporary historians mine a greater quantity and diversity of sources in coming to further conclusions about the history of the Los Angeles Baha’i community since 1980. My point of view on the matter is only one of several possible views, and it derives from the particular cache of information and social networks to which I had access, as well as my own experiences in southern California. I think these sources sufficiently solid and broad to allow us to come to some conclusions about what happened and why, but the narrative will surely be nuanced by further information. I am the first social historian to attempt a focused journal article on the inner politics of the contemporary American Baha’i community, and the endeavour has all the drawbacks of a pioneering attempt. It also has the virtue, in my view, of laying issues and a data set on the table for social scientists to argue about; issues and data that had been wholly absent from the scholarly record (and, indeed, from virtually any sort of record). The lack of academic literature on the contemporary Baha’is is astonishing if one considers that we claim a U.S. membership size similar to that of the Quakers and Unitarians, and have been established in the country since the 1890s! I would welcome it if McMullen, Stockman and others would conduct further research on these events and offer alternative interpretations of the data. That is a very different matter, however, from simply accepting official explanations and relying on an idealised portrait of Baha’i community functioning.
As I said in my article, the Los Angeles community did better in integrating the Iranians into the pre-existing community than did many others. Often in California the previous small American community was simply swamped by the newcomers, and as a result, many of the Americans left the faith. Where there were only a handful of Iranians in a fair-sized U.S. community, they often felt somewhat alienated. I have seen these
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phenomena with my own eyes and they regularly crop up in the e-mail interviews I have been conducting with dozens of Baha’is and ex-Baha’is. Los Angeles was special in having whites, African–Americans and Iranians in roughly similar proportions and in retaining all three groups. I do not understand why McMullen thinks that I glossed over Baha’is being governed by values that stress unity, since I say that explicitly. There are different models for unity in the Baha’i community, however. Some Baha’is stress unity in diversity, others stress conformism. Iranian Baha’is at times were not allowed by the Baha’i authorities even to have all-Persian meetings. That is, the kind of unity stressed by the Baha’i authorities in this case appears to me to be a demand for uniformity and regimentation rather than a unity in diversity.
In the sociology of religion, an episcopal ecclesiastical structure refers not necessarily to the presence of bishops but rather to the presence of hierarchy as opposed to go-it-alone local religious bodies. I disagree entirely about the absence of the lay equivalent of ‘bishops’ or the claim that they have no authority. The individuals appointed Hands of the Cause of God expelled adherents judged to be schismatics from the Baha’i faith in the 1960s and caused them to be shunned, which seems to me the exercise of quite central authority. Nowadays the members of the Continental Boards of Counsellors, especially including those at the International Teaching Centre in Haifa, claim the authority to interpret the Baha’i covenant and to threaten individual Baha’is with excommunication for publicly expressing the views at variance with their conception of ‘orthodoxy’. Since they advise the house of justice on such shunning, these claims are credible. Shunning is the central control mechanism in the Baha’i system, and the advisers on its use are the counsellors and their subordinates. It simply is not true that they exercise no authority and, indeed, liberal Baha’is often live in terror of them.
While it is true that conservative Baha’is object to categorising Baha’is as liberals or conservatives, as gentle or hard-line, for a sociologist to suggest that such divisions do not exist in the community is frankly bizarre. Conservative Baha’is believe it is wrong to criticise the Baha’i institutions publicly. They support the NSA’s right to act as it pleases, even arbitrarily. They firmly support the demand that everything written by Baha’is about their religion be subject to in-house censorship (‘literature review’). They believe the House of Justice is infallible in all its doings. They believe that women should not be allowed to serve on the Universal House of Justice. They are convinced that civil governments will eventually be supplanted by the Baha’i institutions, which will rule as a theocracy. Shunning heterodox Baha’is or ‘covenant breakers’ is central to their religious identity. They are fiercely anti-intellectual and often consider indepen-dent th