Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Juan Cole, From Iran East and West, Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1984, bahai-library.com.
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STUDIES IN BABi AND BAHA'i HISTORY
VOLUME TWO

FROM IRAN EAST AND WEST
EDITED BY
JUAN R. COLE , PH.D. , AND
MOO/AN MOMEN , M.A. , M.B.

KAuMAT PRESS
Los ANGELES

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•

Copyright © 1984 by Kalimat Press
All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
(Revised for volume 2)
Main entry under title:

Studies in Babi and Baha'i history.

Includes bibliograph ies and indexes.
1. Bahai Faith- History-Addresses, essays. lectures.
2. Babism-History- Addresses, essays, lectures .
1. Momen, Moojan . 11 . Cole, Juan R.
BP330.S78 1982 297 .89 83-227
ISBN (}'93377(}'16-2 (v . 1)
ISBN (}'93377(}'4(}'S (v. 2)
CONTENTS
•
Preface by Juan R. Cole IX

Baha'u'llah and the Naq~bandi Sufis in Iraq,
1854-1856
Juan R. Cole, Ph .D ., Assistant Professor of History,
University of Michigan , Ann Arbor 1

Baha'i Influences on Mirza 'Abdu'lh'h, Qajar Court
Musician and Master of the Radif
Margaret L. Caton , Ph.D., University of California,
Los Angeles 31

Early Zoroastrian Conversions to the Baha'i Faith
in Yazd, Iran
Susan Stiles, M.A " University of Arizona 62

Ibrahim George Kheiralla and the Baha'i Faith In
America
Richard Hollinger, M,A. , University of California,
Los Angeles .25

Reality Magazine: Editorship and Ownership of an
American Baha'f Periodical
Peter Smith , Ph ,D" University of Lancaster, England

Baha'i Conversions in Malwa, Central India
William Garlington, Ph,D, ]57

I Bibliographies

Index ]99

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V II

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PREFACE

The Babi movement, begun in Shiraz in 1844 by Sayyid /\Ii
Muhammad,
•
the Bab, was greeted by many Iranian Muslims as
the answer to their hopes for the coming of the messianic Promised One (Mahdi) and the advent of Christ. Partly because of
the repression of the movement (1848-1853) by the Iranian
government and the uiama, and partly because of the militancy
of some Babis, the original spread of the religion was accompanied by social upheaval and, in several instances, military engagements . A second phase began in the 1860s when Mirza
l:Iusayn-'A1i. Baha'u'lIah, successfully pressed claims to being
the spiritual return of the Bab, the one whom the latter had
foretold God would make manifest. Almost all Bab,s SWiftly
became Baha'is, and new believers from other religious backgrounds were attracted by Baha'u'lIah's charisma as well.
Baha'u'Uah, from his places of exile in Turkey and Palestine,
preached a new social doctrine centered on the unity of all mankind, the unity of the great world religions, and peaceful approaches to the resolution of social conflict. In the autocratic
Middle East he advocated constitutionalism and parliamentary
government, and in a society no t far from feudalism he proposed a more equal distribution of wealth . These social ideas
were nevertheless proclaimed as part of a specifically religious
message . Baha'u'lIah's successor and eldest son, :Abdu'I-Baha
:Abbas, developed the universalist and liberal aspects of his
father's message even further, preaching peace, universal love,
and world government on his trips to Europe and North America
(1910-1913).
•
lX

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x by Juan R. Cole

The early phases both of the Babi movement and its successor,
the Baha'i Faith, provoked exciting and prodigious scholarship
in nineteenth-century Europe, engaging the brilliant talents of
Gobineau , Browne, Goldziher, Huart , von Rosen, and others
in the forefront of Orientalist studies. Admittedly, they were
sometimes shackled by the drawbacks of the Orientalist tradition , with its assumption of European superiority and its preoccupation with ideas and texts, almost to the exclusion of social
reality. Nevertheless, they produced a solid corpus of scholarship on the Babis and early Baha'is that is only now beginning
to be superseded.
Ironically, the early scholarly interest in the religion died out
by the 1920s, and for nearly fifty years virtually no European
or North American academic scholar published any significant
work on it. Yet from 1920 to the present, the Baha'i Faith has
undergone important changes and expanded greatly-becoming, if anything, more important than it was when Browne
devoted so much study to it. In Iran the faith grew more organized and its intellectual culture began to take on greater sophistication . [t remained the largest non-Muslim religious minority,
outnumbering the mostly Armenian Christians, the Jews, and
the Zoroastrians. The American Baha'i community, founded in
the 1890s, continued to show vigor, involving itself with activities aimed at bringing blacks and whites together as equals in a
racist America . Baha'i communities were founded throughout
the world, and in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the movement
suddenly encompassed masses in Uganda , India, and elsewhere .
Since 1970 academic writing on the Bab, and Baha', religions
has begun once more to see print. The rapid expansion of Middle East Studies as an academic discipline in Europe and North
America in the 1960s and 1970s was one factor. Anthropologists
and others who went to [ran encountered Baha',s and wrote
about them . The surge of growth the religion experienced in the
United States and Great Britain (1968-1975) also provoked the
interest of many young Westerners. some of them converts . Immigrant Iranian scholars, whether they were themselves Baha',s
or were simply interested in the history of the movement. have
also been important in the revival of European-language
•
Preface XI

scholarship on it. Since 1979, the persecution of the Baha'is by
Iran's government has further aroused interest in the imperiled
minority.
Within the Baha', community, Great Britain has been the
center and vanguard of the new Bab,-Baha', history. Hasan
Balyuzi , a distinguished Iranian Baha', originally trained at the
American University in Beirut, later at the London School of
Economics, and long resident in England, produced full-length
treatments of the lives of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha
in the seventies. Younger Baha'i scholars in Europe participated
in the groundbreaking Lancaster seminars organized by British
sociologist Peter Smith. Important dissertations have recently
been produced on the Bab, or Baha', religions by Smith at Lancaster, Denis MacEoin at Cambridge, and Abbas Amanat at
Oxford.
Moojan Momen, trained at Cambridge, not only began this
series of volumes on Bab, and Baha', history but published a
compilation of European archival documents bearing on Bab,
and Baha'i history. It was only natural that the first volume of
this series featured contributions from the Lancaster group.
Although academic studies on the Baha', Faith in North
America still lag behind those in Europe, new energy is apparent on the Western side of the Atlantic, as well. The first Baha',
History Conference held in America took place in Los Angeles
in August 1983. It is the intention of the present volume to
draw together some of those academics working on the subject
in America (or, in the case of Peter Smith, working on the
American Baha', community). No attempt has been made at being exhaustive, and a great deal of talent exists that is not
represented here . All the contributors to the present volume
were present at the Los Angeles conference. Although efforts
were made to attract contributions from outside that circle,
they have met with no success at this point-though it is the
hope of the editors that this series will increaSingly publish articles from authors of many backgrounds.
If this volume has a theme, it might be the historical impact
of the Baha', Faith outside the circle of Persian-speaking Iranian
~i'is within which the Bab, movement originated . In my piece
xii by Juan R. Cole

on Baha'u11ah and the Kurdish Sufis of Iraq, I discuss the interplay of Babi themes of messianic advent and the Sufi mystical emphasis on internal spiritual renewal. The piece analyzes
for the first time an important but heretofore little-known early
mystical poem written in Arabic by Baha'u'Uah, which contains
strong hints that even in the 1850s he felt he had a private
mission of reform to carry out in the Babi community. Margaret
Caton of U.C.L.A. treats BaM'i influences on the Iranian court
musician, Mirza I\bdu'llah . The mystical milieu of the traditional musicians and the BaM'i Faith's approval of music (in
contradistinction to the legalist Islam of the ayatu 'llahs, which
forbids it) made the religion appealing to one of the great
compilers of the Persian repertoire . The BaM'i Faith touched
another out-group in ~i'i Iran in a Significant way- the Zoroastrians, an ancient Iranian religious community. Susan Stiles
of the University of Arizona makes interesting use of heretofore
unstudied biographical materials to delineate the gradual process of conversion among some Zoroastrians to the Baha'i
Faith .
Richard Hollinger of U.C.L.A. gives us a study of Ibrahim
Kheiralla, the Lebanese Baha'i who first spread the religion to
the United States but later renounced his allegiance to Baha'-
u'llah's appointed successor, I\bdu'l-Baha. Hollinger makes use
of a mass of primary source materials he has unearthed in
public and private archives. Peter Smith of Lancaster University
traces the fate of a BaM'i periodical published in New York in
the 1920s, illuminating important facets of the intellectual and
social history of the American Baha'i community in that formative period. William Garlington, late of Australian National
University, discusses in comparative perspective the issue of
recent conversion to the Baha'i Faith by Hindu villagers in Central India, concluding that the universalist themes in the movement allowed it to act as a cultural bridge in expressing the spiritual aspirations of those who embraced it.
The contributions in this volume span the entire history of
the Baha'i Faith, from its early inception in Iran and Iraq through
its spread to non-Muslim communities and to other lands and

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Preface XIU

cultures in North America and India. The rich source materials
to which the contributors have drawn attention, and the exciting conclusions they have been able to draw from them, should
encourage greater academic interest in the history of the Baha'i
Faith. It is hoped that this series will serve all those wishing to
gain a better appreciation of the sweep of Baha'i history.

JUAN R. COLE
27 JUNE 1984
STERLING , VIRGINIA

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