Review of Religious Research, Vol. 43, no. 3 (March, 2002):195-217
Fundamentalism in the
Contemporary U.S. Baha'i Community*
Juan R. I. Cole
ABSTRACT
This
article considers the ways in which the Baha’i faith in the United States has
become more fundamentalist in the past four decades. It looks at trends toward an increasing emphasis on doctrinal and behavioral conformity, resulting in
greater exclusivism and sectarianism in what on the surface appears to be a
liberal and universalistic tradition.
Building on the Marty and Appleby Fundamentalism Project, it shows a
trend in the community toward a strong reaction against the marginalization of
religion, selectivity about the tradition and about modernity, moral dualism,
absolutism and inerrancy, millennialism, an elect membership, sharp boundaries,
authoritarian organization, and strict behavioral requirements. It also demonstrates that Baha’i fundamentalists
see the civil state and academic scholarship on religion as their “negative
counterparts.” It considers the impact
on the community of the big wave of conversions of the 1970s and the influx of
immigrant Iranian Baha’is fleeing the Khomeinist regime. It further notes that fundamentalist Baha’is
have become powerful in some key sectors of the Baha’i administration and employ their
authority to exclude Baha’i liberals.
In some recent instances, Baha’i liberals have simply been dropped from
the membership rolls with no formal procedure.
Most researchers involved in the Fundamentalism
Project concluded that fundamentalist movements as they defined them can be
found in each of the contemporary Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam (Marty and Appleby 1991-1995).
A fourth, small, Abrahamic tradition that the project did not treat is
the Baha'i faith. Originating in Iran
and claiming to fulfill apocalyptic expectations in Islam, the Baha'i faith has
some ritual and doctrinal similarities to Islam. Its central tenets, however, are generally quite liberal. Baha’is believe that all the major religions
are one. They employ a figurative
approach to the interpretation of past scriptures. They believe in the need for a strong United Nations, in improving
the status of women, in the unity of science and religion, and in fighting
racial, ethnic and nationalist prejudices.
On the surface, these principles make them sound close ideologically to
the Unitarian-Universalists. But given
that they also have a global hierarchy headed up by an “infallible”
institution, the “Universal House of Justice,” (UHJ) it is more accurate to
compare the liberals among them to liberal Roman Catholics. Social scientists have published on
left-of-center Baha’i communities like that of Denmark, finding a “liberal and
international” outlook compatible with globalization (Warburg 1999).
I will argue here, however, that
there is also a significant fundamentalist tendency in the contemporary Baha'i
faith in the U.S. and at the Baha’i World Center in Haifa, Israel of which
social scientists have taken less account.
Scholars who have examined fundamentalisms have identified nine major
motifs in such movements, including a reaction against the marginalization of
religion, selectivity about the tradition and about modernity, moral dualism,
absolutism and inerrancy, millennialism, an elect membership, sharp boundaries,
authoritarian organization, and strict behavioral requirements (Almond, Sivan
and Appleby, 1995). Arjomand has also argued
that fundamentalists see their utopia as having “negative counterparts,” in the
form of the scientific worldview and the centralized, secular state (Arjomand
in Martin and Appleby 1995, 5:182-185).
All of these motifs are present in Baha'i fundamentalism, which falls
into two broad types, world-denying and world-affirming. World-denying Baha’i fundamentalists can
sometimes approach an Amish-like rejection of higher education and some forms
of technology. World-affirming Baha’i
fundamentalists are less extreme, and some are well-educated in the sciences or
engineering, but they oppose key aspects of academic scholarship as applied to
the Baha'i faith, as well as many democratic values.
Baha'i fundamentalists, who do not have a separate
organization but are increasingly prominent in the Baha'i administration, have
interpreted the liberal-sounding principles mentioned above in such a way as to
be compatible in their eyes with an emphasis on strict obedience to religious
authority, a literalist approach to the interpretation of scripture, and
patriarchal values. They would reject
the label of fundamentalism, claiming simply to be true Baha’is, and would deny
that sub-groups such as liberals and fundamentalists exist in the Baha'i
faith. Scholars within the movement,
such as Moojan Momen, have nevertheless admitted the tension that exists
between Baha’i liberals and fundamentalists (Momen 1992). Ex-Baha’i Denis
MacEoin has also pointed to fundamentalist themes in Baha’i historiography
(MacEoin 1986). Fundamentalists form a
plurality among U.S. National Spiritual Assembly members, who meet in Wilmette,
Ill., and among delegates to the annual National Convention. The Universal House of Justice, the nine-man
collective Baha'i “papacy” in Haifa, Israel, has been increasingly dominated in
the 1990s by fundamentalists, as indicated by the sentiments expressed in their
public talks and in the encyclicals issued by that body. That is, I am reporting a major shift in the
Baha'i faith similar to the take-over of the Southern Baptist convention by
fundamentalists in the 1980s and 1990s (Ammerman 1990). Many sources are available for the study of
Baha'i fundamentalism, including writings and audio tapes from prominent leaders,
letters and directives from Baha'i institutions, and email and usenet
discussion groups. For rank and file
views I depend heavily on Soc.Religion.Bahai (SRB), a mainstream Baha’i usenet
group. I have also used the more
liberal list, talisman@indiana.edu (which has had a number of subsequent
incarnations and is now talisman9@yahoogroups.com) and oral histories gathered
from Baha’is and ex-Baha’is. The
results of this study may therefore be skewed toward Baha’is who are internet
users, and toward official pronouncements.
These sources, despite their limitations, demonstrate the contours of a
Baha'i fundamentalism. I will suggest
some reasons for which this tendency, which has long been significant in the
religion, has become increasingly hegemonic in the past two decades. I will also argue that in the Baha’i faith,
fundamentalism as a set of motifs results in a more “sectarian” as opposed to
church-like community, and that fundamentalist leaders are attempting to take
the community in an exclusivist direction typical of the sect in its strict
sociological sense. Although the
treatment here is academic, I should alert readers that the author has been a
Baha’i since 1972, and is involved on the liberal side in the lively culture
wars now taking place in the community.
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)
(Cole 1998c; Smith 1987). He taught the
universalist principles mentioned above.
He ordered that eventually a Universal House of Justice should be
established to administer his religion.
He also appointed his son, `Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921) as the one his
community should turn to for the interpretation of scripture. `Abdu’l-Baha came to the U.S. in 1912 to
help spread the religion, and gave speeches that were quite liberal on social
and theological issues (Stockman 1985-1995; Smith 1987: 100-114). At that time, Baha’is living in republics
were allowed to be members of political parties, and Baha'i elections themselves
involved nominations and canvassing.
Among the 200,000 Baha’is in Iran, a few served in high government
office until the mid-1920s.
`Abdu’l-Baha appointed as his successor as official
interpreter his grandson, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, 1921-1957. He envisaged that the interpreter or
“Guardian” would serve ex-officio on the elected Universal House of Justice,
but Shoghi Effendi put off the establishment of that body. He did, however, arrange for the
establishment of National Spiritual Assemblies (NSAs), indirectly elected by
the believers. From the 1920s, the
relatively liberal early American Baha’i community began to be transformed by
the religion’s leaders into a much more regimented body (Smith 1987:115-156: Armstrong-Ingram
1987). Nominations and campaigning in
Baha'i elections were banned, and Baha’is were ordered to avoid membership in
political parties or other churches.
The vetting of all publications of Baha’is about their religion by the
Baha’i assemblies at the appropriate level was organized. Baha’is were gradually forbidden to utter
any public criticism of their religious bodies’ decisions. In the 1950s, Shoghi Effendi appointed the
Hands of the Cause, lay bishops whom he assigned the functions of “propagation”
(encouraging proselytizing) and “protection” (monitoring and curbing heresy or
disobedience).
Shoghi Effendi died childless and without a successor as
interpreter in 1957, throwing the community into consternation over who would
lead them, since most at that time felt that the integrity of the Baha’i
administration depended on there always being a living guardian. The Hands responded in 1963 by having the
national assemblies of the world elect the nine-man legislative body, the
Universal House of Justice, with its seat in Haifa, Israel. Its first incumbents were drawn from members
or former members of the NSAs of the U.S, the U.K, Uganda and India, and many
of them were moderates or relative liberals.
They presided over a great expansion of the religion in the third world
(Smith 1987: 157-199; Smith and Momen 1988:63-91). The House of Justice, having decided that there could be no
further Guardians or Hands, created the new post of “Continental Counselors,”
with the same duties of “propagation” and “protection.” In 1972 it created the “International
Teaching Center” in Haifa, with nine resident Counselors, to serve as
ideological watchdog for the community, among other duties.
The U.S. community had about 13,000 members in 1968. In the 1970s, it experienced a growth spurt,
having 48,000 sure members by 1979 (Cole 1998b:236). The newcomers derived from three main groups: white middle class youth (unhappy with war,
political corruption and racism); white evangelicals (who embraced Baha’u’llah
as the return of Christ); and African-Americans, whether middle class or poor
rural folk from South Carolina (who liked both the messianism and the
anti-racist message). In the 1980s and
1990s there was little or no growth through conversion in the U.S, but some
12,000-15,000 Iranian refugees from the Khomeini revolution immigrated, adding
a fourth element. The American
community probably now consists of about 60,000 adult believers whose mailing
address is known, though the authorities claim twice that number of
adherents.
In the classical sociology of Max Weber, a “church” was a
sober, broad religious organization into which one was born, whereas a “sect”
consisted of individuals who had made a choice to join it and was characterized
by greater fervor and personal charisma.
Weber’s categories consisted more of a descriptive catalogue of
attributes than of a concise definition, however, which led to much subsequent
confusion. Sociologist Peter L. Berger
wrote his dissertation on the Baha’i faith, arguing that it demonstrated a
shift from nineteenth-century Iranian sect (“the spirit is present”) to
mid-twentieth century American church in its increasingly “routinized” forms
(“the spirit is remote”) (Berger 1954,
Smith 1980). Neither the presence or
absence of the spirit nor degree of organization and institutionalization
(criteria Berger also rejected), however, have been seen by most subsequent
theorists to be key to the distinction between sect and church. Even Berger pointed out that the centralized
and elaborated Baha’i administration could be operated by officials and
believers in a personalistic and “sectarian” manner, especially in Iran. More recently, greater clarity has been
achieved, in large part owing to the work of Benton Johnson, Rodney Stark and
William Sims Bainbridge, who have suggested that church, sect and cult can be
plotted on a graph with only a few variables (Benton 1963, 1971; Stark and
Bainbridge, 1985). Benton argued that
the key variable is the degree of tension existing between the values of the
religious group and the values of the larger society. Churches broadly have a congruence of values with the society in
which they operate, whereas sects are in a high state of tension with their
society. Stark and Bainbridge made a
valuable contribution in recognizing the importance of Johnson's approach and
employing it. They unpacked the notion
of "tension" into three variables, difference, antagonism and
separation. They correctly pointed out that
some otherwise "church-like" groups such as the Southern Baptists,
with their biblical literalism and strict moral code, are in some tension with
the mean of American norms, even though they are not in so much tension as to
be properly thought of as a sect (Stark and Bainbridge 1985:19-24, 135). The “high-tension” model of the sect
predicts that it not only will attempt to draw firm boundaries around itself
with regard to the mainstream host society, but it also will strive to exclude
those adherents who are seen as too accommodating to mainstream norms. That is, high tension with the outside tends
also to imply exclusivism on the inside.
The old Weberian paradigm tended to see the change from sect to church
as a one-way street. Such a change
certainly can occur, with sectarians becoming less exclusivistic over
time. Finke and Stark showed that
liberals gradually came to power in nineteenth-century Methodism, taking it in
a more church-like direction (Finke and Stark 1992:145-169). Another example of this phenomenon is the
way in which significant numbers of Calvinist Congregationalists in New England
became liberal Unitarians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
(Robinson 1985). It is important to
note, however, that church-like organizations can also become more
sectarian. Fundamentalists were able to
take over the Southern Baptist convention in the past two decades, taking the
group in an increasingly sectarian direction (Ammerman 1990). In both the Baptist and the Baha’i case, the
growing prominence of fundamentalist beliefs has coincided with increased
organizational sectarianism.
The first major ideological
characteristic of fundamentalism, according to Almond, Sivan and Appleby, is a
reaction against the marginalization of religion in secular societies
(1995:405-408). Among Baha'i
fundamentalists, this reaction takes the form of a belief in a future
theocracy, in which they expect Baha'i ecclesiastical institutions to take over
the civil state. This conviction
differentiates them from Baha’i liberals and moderates. The prophet-founder of the Baha’i faith,
Baha’u’llah, wrote: “Most imagine that this Servant has the intention of
establishing a full-blown government (hukumat-i kulliyyih) on earth--even though, in all the Tablets, He
has forbidden the servants to accept such a rank [of rulership] . . . Kings are
the manifestations of divine power, and Our intent is only that they should be
just. If they keep their gaze upon
justice, they are reckoned as of God” (Baha’u’llah in Cole 1998c). That is, he rejected charges that his
religion implied the establishment of a Baha’i government. In his Treatise on Leadership of the
early 1890s `Abdu’l-Baha said that religious institutions, including Baha’i
ones, are never to intervene in affairs of state or political matters unbidden,
and that whenever in history they have done so it has resulted in a huge
disaster
(`Abdu’l-Baha in Cole 1998a). He envisaged the state and
religious institutions as complementary, “like milk and honey” (which do not
dissolve). In talks given in the West
1911-1913, `Abdu’l-Baha stressed repeatedly that “non-intervention in politics”
on the part of Baha’i (and other) religious institutions was an essential principle
of the faith.
The theocratic ideology developed by Western Baha’is
appears to be rooted in early twentieth century premillennialist motifs among
converts from Christianity and secondarily in oral traditions attributed to
Shoghi Effendi (cf. Robarts 1993) and letters written on his behalf by
secretaries. Shoghi Effendi does speak
of a future Baha'i commonwealth in his published works, but its character
remains vague and it does not seem identical to the civil world government he
also envisions. Some Baha’is believed
that he held that a melding of religion and state would not occur during the
thousand-year dispensation of Baha’u’llah himself, but at some later time
during the Baha'i “cycle,” of some 500,000 years (Hofman 1953). Others reported him as thinking it more
imminent. There are two problems for
Baha'i fundamentalists. The first,
already noted, is that Baha’u’llah’s own writings, and those of `Abdu’l-Baha
are frankly anti-theocratic. The second
is that in Baha'i law, oral traditions are supposed to be discounted in favor
of written texts. Fundamentalists thus tend to retreat into generalities when
explaining their belief, since they lack scriptural support.
The status of this belief in local
communities in the West has been unsettled.
One old-time Baha'i from the western part of the country writes,
As I recall, growing up [in the 1950s and
1960s], the idea that Local Spiritual Assemblies would be the governments of
the future was always in the air. But
it was always being debated. Frankly, Shoghi
Effendi's statements about this issue are contradictory and confusing, and I
remember as a teenager first having doubts about the matter precisely for that
reason. I remember [one person] going
around in the 1980s insisting that the Baha'i institutions would take over the
world by the end of the century. And I
remember thinking that [this was irrational] . . . Anyway, my memory is that
this matter of just what role the Baha'i institutions would play in a future
world was always rather fluid . . . and
that there was a range of opinion on the subject. (Pers. Comm. 22 May
2000).
Another liberal
Baha’i, this one from the Midwest, recalled,
in the Faith in the 70's and 80's there
was not much discussion about a theocracy, there was talk of the Baha'i Commonwealth
and a world superstate . . . but not
that the Baha'is would be in charge of the government. In fact it was quoted to me by older Baha'is
that if the government was offered to the Baha'is we were to refuse to accept
it--a quote from Abdu'l Baha . . . I had left the Faith for three years in the
'90's and came back in around '96 . . .only recently, within the past eighteen
months has there been a discussion about the Baha'i Theocratic State,
apparently a current member of the UHJ and the US NSA are proffering this to
the rank and file . . .(Pers. Comm., 23 May 2000).
This belief was
variously formulated, was highlighted in certain communities but not in others,
and went in and out of popularity over time.
In the 1970s, moderate Baha’is who acknowledged that Baha'i institutions
might play an important role in future governance often expressed the
conviction that non-Baha’is would be enfranchised, whereas fundamentalist
Baha’is felt they would be left without the vote but would be “very well taken care
of” by the Baha'i majority.
A strong belief in future theocracy
is especially associated in the second half of the twentieth century in the
West with David Hofman, a British publisher and U.K. Baha'i official who was
elected in 1963 to the Universal House of Justice. His thoughts on the subject are not distributed in the official
form of a book, but informally as audiotapes (Hofman, n.d.). His election to the House of Justice gave
him a powerful platform to promulgate the belief. By the 1970s at least, Hofman’s British colleague on the
Universal House of Justice, former actor Ian Semple, was also strongly
advocating the doctrine. A Baha'i
religious publisher reported, “I
recall being in Haifa in the '70s ('72 and '78) and hearing long talks about
this from Ian Semple, on how the world was destined to be ruled by houses of
justice and there will eventually be no distinction between church and state”
(Pers. Comm, 29 Feb. 2000). How many
members of the Universal House of Justice have held the strong form of this
thesis is unclear (Hofman is retired, but Semple is still on that body in
2001).
The belief also occurred among rank and
file Iranian Baha’is of the Pahlevi era. An Iranian-American Auxiliary Board
Member told the author in 1973 that Baha’is believed that their religious
institutions would one day rule the world, but “we do not speak of it to
outsiders.” Some Baha'i officials,
including members of the Continental Boards of Counselors, publicly advocated
future governance by Baha'i religious institutions, often to the dismay of
other, moderate or liberal U.S. Baha’is.
A former office assistant to Counselor Florence Mayberry, wrote,
I became a Baha'i in 1949 and remained one
through most of the 70's. When I
resigned, no one asked why! . . yet I had been active, known by "major
figures" in Wilmette and in Haifa . . .
I felt we were developing a theocracy; then someone gave a speech at a
national convention and plainly said that was our goal. There was not one outcry, not one smidgen of
discussion about that as far as I knew. I loved Baha'is; I loved the universal
qualities of the faith, but I, in no way, wanted to help build a theocracy
(Pers. Comm., 21 February 1999).
She added concerning the identity of that speaker in the late
1970s, “I don't remember the year, but it was [Counselor] Sarah Pereira” (Pers.
Comm., 23 Feb. 1999). This person, an
adherent for nearly thirty years, was shocked by the open endorsement of a
theocratic ideal at National Convention.
Baha’i elective institutions can
have both a “democratic” and an “authoritarian” aspect. Those who stress the latter over the former
often appeal to theocratic ideals. For
instance, in 1988 Firuz Kazemzadeh (then professor of Russian history at Yale
and a long-serving member of the U.S. NSA) told a Los Angeles gathering, “If somebody is dissatisfied with a local assembly, he
is not prevented from appealing to the NSA
. . . 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” (Kazemzadeh 1988).
When the Internet began in the 1990s and individual
Baha'i opinions began to be broadcast beyond local communities and private
conversations, theocratic views quickly surfaced. A liberal participant in the usenet group SRB worried, “One
problem a Bahai majority area may have is the prohibition of Bahais taking part
in politics. The minority may well have all the political offices!” A Wisconsin Baha’i replied, “But in the
Baha'i Commonwealth political authority will be transferred from the current
governments to Baha'i Institutions. The fact that Baha'is can't belong to the
old world order political systems isn't really relevant. True, there will be a period when the two
systems coexist side by side, for how long we don't know. In a majority Baha'i
society all politcal [sic] authority rests with the Local Houses of Justice and
their affiliated institutions” (SRB, Apr 4, 1994). A prominent Baha'i bibliographer took another tack, writing:
“Remember that as time goes on and Baha'i methods of political life - e.g.
electoral principles, plurality election, elimination of parties - are adopted,
the stigma of participation in political affairs would lift” (SRB, Apr 4,
1994). Note that fundamentalist Baha’is
often expect that in a Baha'i-ruled state political parties and campaigning for
election would be outlawed. Many hoped
for an organic society. There was,
however, always controversy around the edges of the subject. When the academic Baha'i listserv talisman@indiana.edu
was begun by a Baha’i professor at Indiana University, in 1994, debates broke
out for the succeeding two years among Baha’is about many issues, including
theocracy. These demonstrated a wide
range of opinion in the community, despite the favor with which theocratic
theories were viewed in Baha’i power centers (Talisman Archives
1994-1996). One liberal Baha’i
theologian based in the Netherlands has extensively argued that religious and
state institutions are distinct organs in the body politic according to the
Baha’i scriptures (McGlinn 1999).
Perhaps in part
out of frustration that the theocratic vision was still contested,
conservative members of the Universal
House of Justice crafted a letter in 1995 designed to bolster it:
As for the statement made by
Shoghi Effendi in his letter of 21 March 1932, the well-established principles
of the Faith concerning the relationship of the Baha'i institutions to those of
the country in which the Baha'is reside make it unthinkable that they would
ever purpose to violate a country's constitution or so to meddle in its
political machinery as to attempt to take over the powers of government. This
is an integral element of the Baha'i principle of abstention from involvement
in politics. However, this does not by any means imply that the country itself
may not, by constitutional means, decide to adopt Baha'i laws and practices and
modify its constitution or method of government accordingly (Universal House of
Justice 1995).
More
than one informant told me that Ian Semple was the lead author of this
letter. The Semple letter implies that
the scriptural principle of the non-involvement of Baha'is in politics is a
temporary expedient, until such time as they should succeed in converting a
majority of the population in any country, when they could employ electoral
politics to put their system in place of the democratic one. Baha'i fundamentalists share many ideals in
common with the Khomeinist interpretation of
Shi`ite Islam, their parent religion, which also seeks governmental
authority for the religious institution.
Because the Baha'i faith is almost everywhere so tiny in size, however,
and because Baha'i fundamentalists recognize a “temporary” principle of non-involvement
in politics, their dream of theocracy is projected into the future. As with Islamic fundamentalism, then, one
key trend is the insistence on divine governance and rejection of its negative
counterpart, the modern secular state (Arjomand in Marty and Appleby 1995,
5:184). Baha’i fundamentalism remains
apolitical, unlike Islamism in the Middle East, however, by agreeing to accept
the legitimacy of the secular state until a Baha’i majority is achieved that
could vote in a new, theocratic constitution.
(Semple’s impression that such a move would be “peaceful” and
“voluntary” is, however, belied by the experience of Algerian Islamists who
attempted the same strategy in the early 1990s, and provoked a civil war with
secularists there, even though Algeria has an overwhelmingly Muslim population).
The second feature of fundamentalism
is selectivity. Fundamentalists select
and reshape aspects of the tradition, all the while asserting that they have
recaptured its pristine essence. They
are also selective in their responses to modernity. They embrace some aspects of it (such as certain types of
technology), while vehemently rejecting others. Baha'i fundamentalists engage in all three types of selectivity
as well. They frequently make a claim
to be engaging in traditional practices that are in fact innovations, and can
do so with some success because the history and texts of the Baha'i faith are
relatively little studied and authorities have often actively suppressed
historical sources. We have already
mentioned the problem that theocratic beliefs are unscriptural. That is, the scriptural tradition in the
Baha'i faith strove for a separation of religion and state as a way of making
room for liberty of conscience for Baha’is in Shi`ite Iran (Cole
1998c:17-47).
Baha'i fundamentalists with
theocratic leanings have used several strategies to overcome this separationist
heritage in their scriptures. They have
suppressed Persian texts and ensured that such anti-theocratic passages are not
officially translated into English.
They attempt to bound this scriptural principle as pertaining to “a
particular stage” of the evolution of the faith, as in the Semple encyclical
cited above. The “stage theory” of
Baha'i fundamentalists allows all contradictions between scriptural principles
or earlier Baha'i practice and their own vision to be resolved through
relegating all contrary evidence to the status of “a past stage.” The stage theory relativizes even basic
Baha'i principles like the non-intervention of religion in politics, rendering
them amenable to future change and even reversal, and raising the question of
whether the religion permanently stands for any principle at all. Another strategy might be called an appeal
to the “disease of language.” Many
nineteenth-century Arabic and Persian technical terms found in the
nineteenth-century Baha'i scriptures have changed in their meaning profoundly
under the impact of modernity, and can now be read anachronistically to support
theocracy (Cole 1998c:95-96).
Baha'i fundamentalists often exalt
some temporary practice to the status of eternal principle. Thus, in the early twentieth century
`Abdu’l-Baha initiated the practice of official prepublication censorship
(“literature review”) of everything written by Baha’is about their religion for
publication. This was because at that
time a few seditious writers from a Baha'i background could potentially cause
pogroms in Qajar Iran. Shoghi Effendi
referred to this requirement as “temporary” in the 1920s. Liberal Baha'is have argued in the past decade
and a half that it has stifled intellectual life or is outmoded with the rise
of the Internet (Leith 1995; Dialogue Editors 1998). Yet contemporary Baha'i fundamentalists strongly resist the idea
that prepublication censorship should now be abolished (SRB 23 Oct. 1996, 26
Oct. 1996; UHJ 1988).
Baha’is, including Baha'i
fundamentalists, have for the most part embraced modernity. They have a vision of building a peaceful
global society and have a generally positive view of technological advances. Still, the selectivity of Baha'i
fundamentalists toward modernity can be witnessed in the severe misgivings that
some of them have expressed about the Internet. Some Baha'i officials have attempted to control Baha'i discourse
on it. The academic talisman@indiana.edu
listserv was closed down when its owner, a Baha'i professor at Indiana
University, was accused by the Counselors of “making statements contrary to the
Covenant” on it. Subsequently the
Universal House of Justice attempted to stigmatize liberal critiques of Baha'i
fundamentalism as “a campaign of internal opposition” mounted on the Internet
(UHJ 1999). One anonymous Baha'i wrote,
“Still, many friends have faced trouble for voicing their opinions
on the web - and a Continental Board Member gave me a real look when I
said I write on newsgroups. The point being that many are still terrified of
this bad tool like the Anti-Christ itself . . . and would not think of
subscribing to unmoderated groups” (Pers. Comm., 26 Feb 1999). Many moderate and liberal Baha’is value
their self-expression on email and view it as nobody else’s business, so that
the commitment to control of public discourse on the part of some Counselors
and Auxiliary Board members has created frictions between them and the community. By summer of 1999 the Counselors at the
International Teaching Center at the Baha'i World Center in Haifa, Israel, felt
constrained to write to the Continental Boards of Counselors reminding them
that “The opposition campaign on the Internet, it should be noted, is being
promoted by only ‘a small number of Baha'is’; many friends engaged in these
discussions are, in fact, devoted believers . . .” They urged a more forbearing approach, and warned, “as you are
well aware, to develop an adversarial relationship with any of the friends will
only create an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that will pose far greater
problems for the general community than the activities of a few misguided
individuals” (ITC 1999). The signs are,
then, that conservative Baha'i are beginning to back off from what some
adherents see as undue intervention in individual email correspondence.
Fundamentalist
Baha’is put special emphasis on moral Manichaeanism. Baha’i fundamentalists see the world as comprised of a small
cadre of those “firm in the Covenant.”
They then admit a larger number of Baha’is who are “infirm” but perhaps
not dangerously so. They worry about
smaller numbers of “dissident” Baha’is who attempt to “undermine” the
Covenant. In response to liberal
discussions on the talisman@indiana.edu listserv in 1996, an Iranian-American
member of the NSA of Alaska wrote, “I do believe that the Covenant is being
undermined and challenged continuously by a subgroup within Talisman. The
self-appointed 'loyal opposition' and 'dissident group' is determined to force
the Universal House of Justice to 'reform' itself and to be morally consistent
with their private agendas and interpretations. I am vehemently opposed to
this. Should I remain silent? You tell me.” (Talisman Archives, 7 April 1996).
Then there are
the “covenant-breakers” (mainly schismatic groups, all rather small), who are
considered spiritually diseased and who must be shunned completely. Indeed, it is important to fundamentalist
Baha’is to believe that these “covenant-breakers” are entirely insincere and
know very well the falsehood of their claims (Piff and Warburg 1998; Johnson
1974). They feel it is unwise even to
read something they have written, lest one become “infected.” Finally, for fundamentalists, there is a
vast sea of misguided and benighted non-Baha’is. It is a scriptural principle of the Baha'i faith that “all
religions are one,” and many Baha’is in my experience have a relatively
universalist outlook. Nevertheless,
fundamentalist Baha’is have developed ways of holding the principle in a
triumphalist manner, so as to position members of previous religions as
inferior. Speaking of Jews’ refusal to
recognize Christ, one Baha'i newsgroup poster wrote, “At
noon on a cloudless day, one can say that the sun is clearly up in the sky. But
if someone stubbornly stays indoors with all the curtains drawn, a heavy
blanket over his head, and his eyes closed, he might well argue that it is not
clear at all, or indeed that it is night.” (SRB, May 19, 1994).
Absolutism and Inerrancy of Scripture
As
with Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, Baha'i fundamentalism puts great
emphasis on the absolutism and inerrancy of scripture (cf. Ammerman
1990:80-87). According to Peter Khan (a
Pakistani-Australian engineer who was elected to the Universal House of Justice
in 1987), world-denying fundamentalists go to the extreme of discouraging young
Baha’is from seeking a college education because “the Revelation of
Baha’u’llah” contains “all knowledge.”
He adds that in this view
The physical
sciences are stigmatized as being incorrect because they take no account of the
spiritual dimension of creation.
Psychology is condemned because most theories appear not to take account
of the spiritual nature of man. Economics
is dismissed as appearing not to accommodate a spiritual solution to economic
problems. Evolution and the Darwinian
perspective are condemned as being contrary to the belief in God. (Khan 1999:46-47).
The presence of such views in the US
during the 1960s is confirmed by an old-time Baha’i, who said his parents were
“always warning me about those wacko Baha’is who thought that you only needed
to read the Writings and nothing else.
And there was a good deal of tension over whether one ought, as a Baha’i,
to go to university—wouldn’t it be better to go pioneering [move abroad to do
missionizing]?” (Pers. Comm., 17 June
2000). As Khan points out, scriptural
literalism is tested most fiercely with regard to issues such as
evolution. `Abdu’l-Baha maintained, in
Sufi and Neoplatonic fashion, that human beings have always been distinct from
animals, insofar as they are endowed with a soul. He also argued that the morphological similarities between humans
and apes might be merely functional (e.g, sharks and porpoises resemble one
another but are not immediately related), and maintained that “the missing
link” would never be found. These
assertions have foundered against the DNA revolution. During a discussion of his statements on evolution, a typical poster
to SRB wrote, “Dear all, On the topic of
evolution: Clearly we should understand as clearly as possible what
'Abdu'l-Baha says on this subject. Because we believe His statements on matters
pertaining to the Revelation of Baha'u'llah and all of creation are infallible,
we must be clear about what it is we believe, or are accepting” (SRB 6 July
1997). Other, moderate or liberal
Baha’is on the same list were frank about noting the apparent contradiction
between contemporary biology and `Abdu’l-Baha’s statements, but said they had
to file the problem away as irresolvable.
Fundamentalist Baha’is also see scriptural inerrancy to underlie the
infallibility of later authorities.
One wrote, “It is my understanding that when we see
people questioning the infallibility of the Guardian's interpretations or
translations, or the decisions of The Universal House of Justice, we need to
turn to the Baha'i writings and investigate what the Baha'i writings tell us
about this subject” (SRB 6 Sept. 1995).
Since the 1940s in Iran, Baha’i fundamentalism has
increasingly defined itself against those Baha’is who were seen to defect to an
academic point of view and who wrote of their religion within that
framework. Baha’i fundamentalists are
sometimes themselves engineers or scientists and do not altogether reject a
scientific world-view, but they often feel it is wrong for an adherent to speak
of the scripture or history of the Baha'i faith in academic terms. World-affirming fundamentalists accept much
of modern science, but they still wish to affirm the existence of ether and the
chemical transmutation of elements (Khan 1999:63). These unscientific ideas, present in the Baha’i scriptures, are
largely drawn from Greco-Islamic philosophy.
World-affirming fundamentalists draw the line at academic scholarship by
Baha’is on the Baha'i faith that incorporates the perspectives of the liberal
humanities and social sciences, the equivalent of “Higher Criticism” in
biblical studies. Scriptural
literalists, whether of the soft or hard variety, are often promoted within the
ranks of the Baha’i administration, especially to the offices of “Auxiliary
Board Member” and “Counselor,” and they then use their offices for the
promotion of anti-intellectualism.
Arab-American Soheil Bushrui, appointed to the endowed Baha’i chair at
the University of Maryland at the instance of the U.S. National Spiritual
Assembly, writes, “The fact that this field has of late been largely dominated
by Western scholars has placed a certain restriction and limitation on
understanding, preventing a more profound appreciation of the aims and purposes
of Baha’i scholarship” (Bushrui 1995:23).
An Iranian-American sociologist at Carleton College expressed outrage
that Bahau’llah’s ability to work miracles had been questioned on the H-Bahai
discussion list (Saiedi 1999).
Prominent speaker John Hatcher, professor of English literature at the
University of South Florida, attacks the value of the “historical-critical approach” to “the Revealed Works of
Baha’u’llah” (Hatcher 1997:27-25).
Ironically, his essay appears in a volume with several chapters
employing the “historical-critical approach” by liberal Baha’i academics.
The Universal House of Justice,
while encouraging “scholarship,” has made increasingly strong pronouncements
against “humanist” and “materialist” academics in the ranks of the
Baha’is. A crisis was provoked by the
plan in the 1980s and 1990s of some Baha'i academics to publish a Baha’i
Encyclopedia, for which they gained the backing of the U.S. NSA, which
spent some $800,000 on it. The articles
commissioned, however, were academic in style and substance, and the House of
Justice in response condemned the then editors and their authors as scholars
who “cast the Faith into a mould which is essentially foreign to its nature,
taking no account of the spiritual forces which Baha’is see as its foundation .
. . In other words, we are presented in such articles with the spectacle of
Baha’is trying to write as if they were non-Baha’is” (UHJ 1994 in Research
Department 1995:37). The editors
resigned, the encyclopedia was ordered rewritten in fundamentalist style, and
its Harvard-educated founder was driven out of the faith. Controversies over Baha'i historians
questioning the literal accuracy of some of `Abdu’l-Baha’s statements about
history roiled the talisman@indiana.edu list and were among the impetuses for
the Counselors at the ITC to launch formal heresy charges against them. “Problems will arise, rather, if an
attempt is made to impose on the Baha’i community’s own study of the
Revelation, materialistic methodologies and attitudes antithetical to its very
nature” (UHJ 1997). Note that for a Baha’i simply to write
about the religion using academic tools is seen as an act of aggression, an attempt
to “impose” methodologies and attitudes.
The insistence that the impersonal, non-theological norms of academic
scholarship make it an inappropriate vehicle for Baha'i self-expression has
been taken by some Baha'i authorities even to the extent of threatening to have
Baha'i academics shunned over it (Birkland 1996). UHJ member Peter Khan insists, “Any form of Baha’i scholarship
must necessarily be founded upon our concept of the Creative Word of our
Revelation . . .naturally we will accord the Creative Word a central position”
(Khan 1999:45). As with Muslim
fundamentalism, the “negative counterpart” of Baha’i fundamentalism is the
academic, scientific worldview when applied to the Baha'i faith itself by adherents
(Arjomand in Marty and Appleby 1995, 5:183).
What appeared to him to be the UHJ’s wholesale condemnation of Baha’i
scholars involved in the academic study of religion caused one auxiliary board
member for protection, then enrolled in a Religious Studies graduate program,
to resign noisily from the faith in June of 1999.
World-denying
Baha'i fundamentalists emphasize belief in an imminent catastrophe they refer
to as “the Calamity” (Smith 1982). One
of sociologist David Piff’s informants recalled, “In 1973 . . . Los Angeles, there
was incessant talk about the calamity.
It poisoned us.” Others admitted
that fear of an especially severe catastrophe in the materialist United States
impelled them to move abroad for missionary work. (Piff 2000:123, 498). In
the 1990s as the turn of the millennium approached, the impending calamity was
a subject of discussion on Bahai-Discuss, a Baha’i-only email list, where one
wrote, “I would like to open a discussion on a subject which many of us are
somewhat unwilling to address - namely, the impending (year 2,000) calamity
which is supposed to create grave upheaval (literally) not only here in
California, but also on the East Coast, and other parts of the world . . .”
(March 14, 1994). Nor was this sort of
belief confined to the rank and file.
Douglas Martin, a former secretary-general of the Canadian National
Assembly who was elected to the Universal House of Justice in 1993, gave an
interview with the BBC in which he asserted that that the proof of the truth or
falsity of the Baha’i faith would be that universal peace would arrive by the
year 2000 (Pers. Comm., 18 Feb. 1997).
His colleague, American physician David Ruhe, who retired from the House
of Justice in 1993, said in that year, “Abdu'l Baha talked about the coming of the Lesser Peace
before the end of the century, that is, before December 31, 2000. There will be
surprising events in the next 7 years, many to rival the collapse of communism
and the Soviet Union in the last few. I can suggest a few scenarios . . . My
own presumption is that there will be great crises we cannot anticipate” (Ruhe
1993).
Probably only a minority of Baha’is put very great emphasis on near-term
apocalypticism. There is a growing
tendency among world-affirming fundamentalists to reinterpret the Calamity as a
long-term process of, e.g., environmental degradation (Piff 2000:117-130). One member of the House of Justice suggested
that resistance to belief in the infallibility of the UHJ among Baha’i liberals
was itself the long-awaited Calamity (Khan 2000).
The question of
whether conservative Baha’is consider the Baha’is an “elect” is a complicated
one. On the one hand, Baha’is
do not have monks or a clergy, do not have convents or communes, and in the
West they do not practice spatial segregation (i.e. there are no Baha'i
quarters or neighborhoods). Yet,
exclusivist sentiments do exist in the community. Despite the universalist views expressed by Baha’u’llah and
`Abdu’l-Baha about the validity of all the great religions, some fundamentalist
Baha’is maintain that only Baha’is are spiritually “saved.” One of my informants said she heard this
idea of salvation only for Baha’is publicly stated by long-serving member of
the U.S. National Assembly Jack McCants in 1988. One conservative Baha’i on the talisman list referred to Buddhism
as a “fossil religion.” In a discussion
at the Baha’i Studies list at www.escribe.com, one member said he was told by a
Baha’i, “I think the texts are actually saying non-members do not have
salvation because they have not recognized Baha'u'llah." (March 17,
2001). Liberal intellectuals on this
list disputed this interpretation, arguing for salvation for at least some
non-Baha’is or even maintaining that the issue of salvation was irrelevant to
Baha’u’llah’s message of social and spiritual unity.
Some
fundamentalist groups develop what one liberal Baha’i referred to as “gurus,”
whom they treat with special reverence, and the followers of whom they see as
an elect. However widespread it might
be, this phenomenon is not normative. One faction of Iranian emigrants to the
U.K. in the 1980s and early 1990s led by a Cambridge-trained Iranian scholar
even developed a doctrine that Baha’u’llah was the Godhead who had sent the
other prophets. They engaged in heated
public debates with more liberal Western Baha’is who argued that all the
prophets were spiritually equal. In
part this was a conflict between Western converts from Christianity, who wanted
to assert the equality of the religions, and Iranian Baha'i refugees in the
West who were dislocated and often looked down upon, and wished to emphasize
the superiority of their tradition (Pers. Comm., 1994). The “guru” (i.e. “elect”) stature attributed
to the leader of the Iranian group was one of the objections raised against it.
Others view election
to high Baha’i office as a sign of divine selection of that individual for a
“high station,” though some Baha’is object to such differentiation. Some fundamentalist Baha’is speak of being a
Baha'i as a status that bestows special spiritual privileges. One wrote on SRB, “Donating to the Bahai
Cause is a privilege that only Bahais, who have not lost their voting rights,
are granted.” When challenged as to
why the Baha’is do not do more philanthropy than they do, they will often reply
that others can carry out such charity work, whereas only Baha’is can build the
foundation of the New World Order.
Attending the regular Baha'i worship and community business meeting, the
“nineteen-day feast,” is also often called a “privilege” pertaining to being a
Baha'i, from which non-Baha’is are excluded (SRB 15 Aug 1997). As for boundaries, as we have seen, in the
past decade fundamentalist Baha’is have begun drawing sharper boundaries
between themselves and “humanist” or “materialist” liberal Baha’is as well as
between their beliefs and mainstream U.S. values.
Authoritarian
Organization
Fundamentalist Baha’is have an
authoritarian view of how the Baha'i “administrative order” should
function. They insist on obedience, and
forbid criticizing Baha’i officials or institutions. The typical logic of Baha'i fundamentalists roots obedience in
the legitimacy of authority, disallowing a rational examination of the
substance of a command or an inquiry into whether the body giving the command
has the “constitutional” prerogative to give it. In this way, arbitrary commands by Baha'i bodies or officials are
made to be an either-or proposition. If
one accepts Baha’u’llah, one accepts his administrative order, and must obey whatever
it orders one to do, whether one agrees in conscience or no. Rejection of the command, ipso facto,
represents a rejection of Baha’u’llah (Semple 1991, McMullen 2000:66-71). Thus,
fundamentalist Baha’is secretly consider liberals and some moderates “not
Baha’is” at all because they do not demonstrate sufficient compliance in
immersing their wills in the authority of the Baha'i administration. Kazemzadeh expressed the fundamentalist
philosophy on obedience when he visited a Baha'i study class in Los Angeles in
1979 to caution its members about the tone of their discussions, which were
being published in a small-circulation newsletter. A class participant suggested that tone was not the real issue,
saying “Dissent seems more the issue . . . Every time a Baha'i criticizes or
disagrees with a policy of the NSA, is his commitment to the Covenant to be
questioned and his Baha'i status threatened?”
Kazemzadeh said that no one questioned the right of the Baha’is to
gather for discussions, “but the word dissent implies separating oneself from
the activities of the group and putting oneself outside the mainstream of the
community, and that is contrary to Baha'i practice” (Kazemzadeh in Los Angeles
Baha’i Study Class 1979:4). The
National Assembly subsequently demanded the right to censor the newsletter,
which had a circulation of about 120.
Although
conservatives and persons who hold many of the fundamentalist beliefs sketched
above have predominated on the NSA, occasionally liberals have been quite
popular in the community. Liberal
educator Daniel Jordan served on that body from 1963 until his death in
1982. Of three new NSA members elected
1998-2000, two were from the West Coast and known to be moderates. At the international and appointive level,
Baha’i governance has grown more centralized and authoritarian in recent
decades. The old custom in the 1960s
through early 1980s of seeing secretaries-general of the U.S. and U.K. and some
other key communities as the prime candidate pool for filling vacancies on the
Universal House of Justice led to the election of moderates and liberals who
could exercise a liberal influence on the entire religion once they became
members of the House of Justice. From
1987 forward, the members of the NSAs, who constitute the electoral college
that chooses members of the UHJ, for some reason began voting instead for
appointees of the House of Justice itself, preferably those resident in
Haifa. Chief among them are male
counselors at the International Teaching Center in Haifa, who have filled the
vast majority of empty slots on the House of Justice since 1987. Counselors elected to the House of Justice
have tended to be more fundamentalist in their outlook than is typical of
secretaries-general of national assemblies, since the latter must be acceptable
to the delegates of a national community and therefore sometimes have views
that are more moderate. Once on the
House of Justice, conservative former counselors are also in a position to
administer ideological litmus tests to the persons they in turn appoint as
counselors. Since the Continental
Counselors appoint regional Auxiliary Board Members, who appoint local
Assistants, the influence of what Baha’is call “the Institution of the Learned”
is now predominantly fundamentalist, according to dozens of messages I have
received from liberal Baha’is in local U.S. communities. In some instances ABMs have summoned liberal
Baha’is serving on local assemblies to weekend interrogation sessions, accusing
them of being “charismatic” or seeking to “gain a following,” apparently in
hopes of driving them out the community (talk.religion.bahai 1999/07/28). The number of ABMs and Assistants has been
much increased in the 1980s and 1990s, as has their aggressiveness in
confronting liberal Baha’is.
Fundamentalist Baha’is believe that
Baha'i institutions such as the local assembly or the NSA can be divinely
guided, and that the Universal House of Justice is infallible. The technical terminology in Persian is ambiguous,
and Baha’i texts make distinctions that this absolutist approach
disregards. Contemporary Baha'i
fundamentalists avoid thinking constitutionally about such issues, asserting
the infallibility of the House of Justice in an undifferentiated manner. One American Baha’i mystery writer who is
well known on email groups wrote, “The Guidance and infallibility of the
Universal House of Justice are assured
and promised. We are
specifically directed, as an act of faith, to offer instant, exact, and
complete obedience to Baha'u'llah's House of Justice.” (Talisman9 Archives, 23
May 2000). In response to a former
Baha'i who disagreed with a decision of the Universal House of Justice, one
Baha'i on SRB replied that if he were asked by an Auxiliary Board Member
whether he accepted the infallibility of the Universal House of Justice, “My
reply would have been that I accept unreservedly and without qualifications the
infallibility of the Universal House of Justice in the past, present and future
. . . If I were to receive a decision that appeared to me to be contrary to my
views and conscience I would automatically assume my own perceptions were
incorrect” (SRB 23 December 1997). In
his study of the Atlanta Baha’i community of the 1990s, McMullen found that 87
percent of his informants strongly agreed or agreed with the proposition that
“As a Baha’i, I submit to the authority of the Administrative Order, even if I
disagree with what it says” (McMullen 2000:66). UHJ member Peter Khan has condemned Baha’i intellectuals who
point out that the Arabic word “ma`sum” (officially translated as
“infallible”) actually refers in Islamic thought to moral immaculacy or
legitimacy rather than propositional inerrancy: “one of the forms of opposition at the moment that’s being spread
in a clandestine way, is to say: well, the word is mistranslated, it really
doesn’t mean “infallible”, it means “immaculate” in terms of integrity, or
sinlessness, or freedom from moral stain or anything like that . . .” (Khan
2000). Khan has also spoken of the way
in which he would “convert” Baha’is at conferences dedicated to scripture study
to belief in infallibility.
Saturday evening, we got into the covenant. And these were friends who had been brought into the Faith but hadn’t been taught as much as we want to teach people these days, so a lot of it was new. And somewhere around 8.30 or 9.00 pm on a Saturday evening, I’d break to them the news that we have at the centre of our Faith a body called the Universal House of Justice, which they would accept fairly readily, it didn’t particularly worry them what it was or what it was called. But then I laid on them the fact that it was, that we regard it as infallible, divinely guided and freed from error. And whenever I said this and read the passages from the Guardian’s writings on this subject, one could see alarm and distress in their eyes. They’d rather not know about it, generally, and also, you could see they were saying to themselves: I have joined this very modern, this avant garde, this 21st century religion, and now having penetrated to the core of it, I find it’s saddled with a medieval concept of infallibility. Where did that come from and what’s it doing in the middle of my religion? So they were prone to make all kinds of extreme statements, such as: I don’t believe this, this is wrong, it’s not right, and things like that. And what one had to do was to stay calm, and not get hot and bothered and upset, and just deal with it as it comes . . . You’d find by the next morning, they’d sorted it out in their minds. They would think: OK, I accept Baha’u’llah’s the Manifestation of God, he has clearly said this about this institution of the Faith . . . (Khan 2000).
Although
widespread, an absolutist approach to infallibility is not universal in the
community, as Khan, who calls such reluctance “extreme,” admits. Privately, some Baha’is express misgivings
about the demand for strict obedience or seek to limit the scope of
infallibility. Even one
neo-conservative Baha’i academic historian described herself as “distressed”
over Khan’s denunciation of philological investigations of the Persian word for
“infallibility” (2 June 2001, the Bahai Studies list at www.escribe.com). One Baha’i informant told me that even
. . . David Ruhe, a [former] member of the House of Justice,+ had said to him, “We’re not
really infallible, you know.” Once the
Internet developed in the 1990s, liberal Baha’is began publicly expressing less
absolutist understandings of infallibility, which drew the fundamentalists’
ire. In the late 90s and early 00s, Canadian
fantasy writer Michael McKenny and New Zealand communications consultant Alison
Marshall were summarily ordered removed from the membership rolls of their
respective national Baha'i communities by the Universal House of Justice. They were apparently sanctioned in this way
for repeatedly making statements on email lists that seemed to fundamentalist
Baha’is to bring into question the infallibility of the House of Justice and to
ask for women to be allowed to serve on that body (Documents 1999). Before 1997, believers could only get off
the rolls by renouncing belief in Baha’u’llah in writing, whereas McKenny and
Marshall saw themselves as believers.
Also, previous to 2000, the recalcitrant were extensively “counseled”
before being sanctioned, but Marshall was expelled without a single meeting
with any Baha’i official about her email traffic (which had never questioned
the legitimacy of the House of Justice).
Although Baha’is do not have a distinctive
dress, they do have special ritual forms of prayer, and they are required to
fast in the Muslim way. They are
monitored for behavior that might contravene Baha'i law. Baha’is who drink alcohol, gamble, have an
affair or live together out of wedlock, engage in homosexuality or politics, or
use drugs in such a way that it comes to the attention of their local community
have their “administrative rights” removed and can no longer attend the
Nineteen Day Feast--the main worship ceremony--nor can they vote or hold
elective office. Many Baha’is who lose
their administrative rights eventually leave the religion. Fundamentalist Baha’is often strive to be
hyper-correct. On SRB a dispute broke
out in 1997 over consuming non-alcoholic beer and wine, which the
fundamentalists on the list condemned.
A liberal Baha'i complained of a “witch hunt,” and an unscientific
attitude in his coreligionists. Some
fundamentalists argued that even using cooking wine (where the alcohol boils
off) is forbidden in Baha'i law (SRB Sept.-Oct. 1997). Fundamentalist Baha’is expect one another to
project an image of great propriety. A
discussion on SRB was provoked in February of 1995 by the question, “what do
Baha’is think of R-Rated movies?” A few
took a hard line, saying things like, “We don’t think about them,” or that they
avoided them as incompatible with a prayerful life. Most responses were honest and thoughtful, with posters admitting
that despite finding sex and violence distasteful they would sit through such
scenes for a good film.
Fundamentalist
Baha’is view “the member’s time, space and activity” as “a group resource, not
an individual one” (Almond et al. 408).
In some communities enormous pressure is put on individuals by
fundamentalists to “teach the faith” or proselytize others. Some more liberal (or just shy) Baha’is
report being extremely uncomfortable with this pressure and cite it as a reason
they became inactive or withdrew from membership (cf. McMullen 2000:144). Constant appeals are also made for Baha’is
to donate money, to “give till it hurts,” and most of these donations appear to
go to monumental building projects at the Baha'i world center in Haifa or to
bureaucratic purposes at the National Baha'i Center in Wilmette. In the mid- to late 1990s, typically about
one third of US Baha’i donations to the Baha’i National Center were forwarded
to Haifa for the building projects of the House of Justice (National Spiritual
Assembly 1998). The U.S. Baha'i
administration does very little charitable or development work (measured as a
percentage of its budget) unrelated to proselytizing, especially for
non-Baha’is.
CAUSES
OF BAHA’I FUNDAMENTALISM
In the 1960s and 1970s large numbers
of relatively liberal Americans came into the Baha'i faith, some converts from
Unitarianism or Quakerism, others veterans of the civil rights or anti-war
movement or the youth culture. In the
late 1960s the NSA had put out a slogan, “Human Rights are God-Given
Rights.” Relative liberals were elected
to the National Spiritual Assembly and the Universal House of Justice. Of course, a strong fundamentalist tendency
existed then, too. But what factors
account for its increasing hegemony in the U.S. Baha'i community in the 1990s? First, the end of the guardianship in 1957,
and the necessity to attempt to mount a House of Justice that lacks an official
interpreter (in contradiction to what was envisaged by `Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi
Effendi), was a crisis that some Baha’is dealt with by turning to
fundamentalist themes. Thus, reifying
the infallibility of the Universal House of Justice is one way of dealing with
the bewildering end of the guardianship.
Baha’i fundamentalists appear to have concentrated on gaining control of
the appointive and international institutions, and to have been less successful
in securing hegemony over the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly or the annual
national convention, which have a stronger democratic aspect. Their successes, in marginalizing or forcing
out Baha’i academics and in curbing the free expression in magazines or on email
lists of liberal Baha’i views, have had little or no impact on most local U.S.
Baha’i communities and so often are unknown or not a matter of concern (cf.
Ammerman 1990:259).
The strict moral codes and
ideological commitments of old-time Baha’is who tended to control Local
Spiritual Assemblies and to provide the cadre for Auxiliary Board Members and
their assistants may have been a powerful selecting mechanism. Liberals who joined may have been made
uncomfortable and encouraged to leave at much higher rates than those of a
conservative or fundamentalist mindset.
Several of my liberal informants who left the religion told stories of
having been publicly humiliated by such officials. (The Baha'i faith retains only
about 50 percent of converts, compared to 80 percent among mainstream Christian
denominations). Many of those who
joined in the 1970s brought with them fundamentalist outlooks, as well. Opinion
polls show that most African-Americans, despite their social liberalism, are
inerrantists when it comes to scripture, and African-Americans constituted at
least 10 percent, and perhaps more, of the community by the 1980s. White evangelicals attracted by books like
William Sears’ Thief in the Night, which explains to Christians how
Baha’u’llah is the return of Christ using Millerite arguments, may have
accounted for more of the converts than researchers earlier realized. Indeed, it was suggested to me by one
informant that Jack McCants, a former Methodist minister from the South, owes
his long-standing position on the NSA to the vote of the white evangelical
converts to the faith among delegates to the National Convention. It is also possible that converts from a
liberal or moderate background were gradually socialized to a more
fundamentalist outlook through the 1980s and 1990s. Ammerman found that among Baptists, income did not predict
theology, but that whether one grew up in a white collar or a blue
collar/farming family did correlate strongly with liberal or fundamentalist
commitments (Ammerman 1990:128-129). We
do not know enough about the home environments of Baha’i leaders to be sure if
family background plays a role.
Certainly, some prominent Baha’i fundamentalists, while professionals
themselves, were raised in working-class or rural homes. The increasing
influence of the Christian right in U.S. public discourse cannot be excluded as
an explanatory variable, either.
Another factor is the influx of
Iranian Baha’i refugees from Khomeinism. By 1987 an internal Baha'i poll found
that 15 percent of the U.S. community was “Persian,” and this was probably an
undercount. Although it cannot be
assumed that the majority of these Iranians are fundamentalists, large numbers
certainly do see the Universal House of Justice’s infallibility as absolute. Several Iranian Baha’i informants of a
liberal turn of mind have said they were ostracized by their extended families
because they do not accept the idea of infallibility. In turn, Iranian Baha’i absolutism may be a reaction to the
persecution of the Baha’is by the Islamic Republic. Many immigrants saw their
practice of the faith to be superior to that of local Western converts, which
caused tensions (Cole 2000). They sometimes replied to the insecurities of
immigrant status by turning to absolutism, as we saw in the Iranian-British
incarnationist group. Further, the
persecution gained the Baha’i organization great good will and sympathy on the
part of governments and the press, making them reluctant to criticize Baha’is. Opportunistic sectarian-minded officials may
have seen this press honeymoon as a time when they could act arbitrarily and
harshly against intellectuals and liberals, using summary expulsion and threats
of shunning, without fear of a backlash from mainstream society.
Baha’i fundamentalists are not
separatists and do not despise their religious establishment. Rather, there is evidence that they have
achieved increasing dominance on the Universal House of Justice and thence much
of the corps of Counselors and Auxiliary Board Members and their
assistants. There appears to be an
“elective affinity” between the themes of Baha'i fundamentalism and some sorts
of administrative service, since fundamentalism as an ideology gives Counselors
and the UHJ far more practical power than does liberalism, which is thus seen
as “undermining” that power. Given the
centrality and authority of these Baha’i institutions, the ability of
fundamentalists to capture them may be the most important explanation for the
increasing hegemony of this tendency in the movement.
These developments in the U.S.
Baha’i community have led the community to be more sectarian than was the case
in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when tens of thousands of converts, many of
them liberals, had joined. This
conclusion challenges the old Weberian expectation, that sectarianism was more
characteristic of first-generation converts whereas persons born into the
religion tended to create more church-like structures. While persons with a sectarian outlook
certainly came into the faith in the 1970s, so too did many religious liberals
from the youth culture. The latter for
a time created many local liberal communities and contributed to liberal Baha’i
publishing enterprises, but most eventually left the religion, out of
frustration with the conservative national and international
administration. At the turn of the
twenty-first century, the tendency of the movement is less open. Fundamentalists in the international center
and their appointees in the “institutions of the learned” dislike the
democratic system of governance, are committed to establishing an ultimate
Baha’i theocracy, and wish to prohibit academic modes of discourse about the
core areas of the religion. All of
these themes, if widely adopted, would bring the religion into greater tension
with the surrounding U.S. society. (The
U.S. is after all a democracy committed to the separation of religion and state
where nearly half of citizens go on to some form of higher education). Demands that liberal members avoid
discussing their personal views of the faith on public email lists, and threats
or sanctions launched at those who demur from the fundamentalist orthodoxy and
become “prominent,” all point to an increasing exclusivism more characteristic
of the sect than of the church. Whereas
`Abdu’l-Baha had forbidden in the tolerant Baha’i faith the Muslim custom of
issuing rulings that a believer had departed into disbelief, and whereas Shoghi
Effendi had insisted that believers be extensively counseled before being
punished, the current leadership has initiated a new practice of summary
expulsion from the rolls. The community
is becoming more ready to exclude, impelled by developments in the religion’s
world center, by the increasing influence of fundamentalism in American
religion generally, and perhaps also by the influx of immigrants, especially
some Iranians, from the Third World, as well as by the transparency and
consequent open conflict introduced into community discourse by the
internet. The community is small and
needs its resources, and so the purges have centered on a few vocal individuals
rather than being more general, apparently in hopes that the remaining liberals
will take the hint and keep their silence in public. In a church, a member born into it might be punished but there
would never be any question that he or she was a member. In a sectarian organization, membership is
dependent on strict doctrinal and behavioral criteria. In the contemporary Baha’i community, those
criteria increasingly consist of assent to, or at least avoiding public dissent
from, the fundamentalist tenets discussed above.
*Juan R. I. Cole,
Department of History, 1029 Tisch Hall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 48109-1003. Email:
jrcole@umich.edu.
+Text altered from published version, which contained an error of fact.
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