# What is Baha'i Orientalism?

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Geoffrey Nash, What is Baha'i Orientalism?, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> humanities
> Article
> What Is Bahai Orientalism?
> Geoffrey Nash
> 
> Independent Scholar, Durham DH1 5LD, UK; geoff.nash6@outlook.com
> 
> Abstract: Scrutinizing the literature of a modern religious movement this article argues that post-
> colonial theory can effectively be brought to the analysis of religions and religious writing. The case
> study focuses on the way in which colonialism impacted the Bahai faith in a specific and formative
> way, causing its leadership to present aspects of the faith’s development by employing the codes
> of Western Orientalism. Drawing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century European orientalist
> texts composed either about their own faith, or the Islamic society out of which it grew, the article
> demonstrates how these led Bahais “themselves [to] . . . adopt [..] an essentially Orientalist vision of
> their own community and of Iranian society”. Edward Said’s Orientalism throws light on an enduring
> situation in which mutual othering has crossed from culture and religion into politics, however since
> the late 1990s critics have demonstrated that Orientalism can function in more varied ways than Said
> allowed. Finally, the possibility is discussed as to whether there can be such a thing as a postcolonial
> Bahai scholar.
> 
> Keywords: postcolonialism; Bab; Bahai faith; Orientalism; self-orientalizing; modernity; Shoghi Effendi
> 
> 1. Introduction
> The aim of this article is to demonstrate how postcolonial approaches, which since
> the beginning of the new millennium have been insightfully deployed in the study of
> Christianity, can be usefully applied to other world religions. However, in discussing the
> 



> 
                           impact Orientalism and postcolonialism have had or might have on religious studies in
> this article, I eschew disciplinary issues such as the subject’s discreteness, its place within
> Citation: Nash, Geoffrey. 2021. What
> Is Bahai Orientalism? Humanities 10:
> culture, the scientific study of religion and so on. I start out from the premise that Edward
> 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/
> Said’s Orientalism was a foundational text in the development of postcolonial approaches
> h10010002
> generally, owing to the impulse it brought to our awareness of the imperial production of
> knowledge and its processes, in which studying, analyzing, and reporting on non-Western
> Received: 19 November 2020                 cultures took the form it did, privileging Western norms and objectifying, essentializing,
> Accepted: 14 December 2020                 diminishing, and debasing the non-Western. A prevalent view of postcolonialists is that
> Published: 23 December 2020                Said re-oriented analysis of the humanities collectively (as followed up in the postcolonial
> turn) making them alive to cultural bias towards non-Western societies in the name of
> Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neu-          Western conceptions of modernity. One outcome of applying a postcolonial approach to
> tral with regard to jurisdictional clai-   religious studies devolves from the typically Saidian position of contesting the Academy’s
> ms in published maps and institutio-       separation of humanities into discrete subjects within disciplinary boundaries, leading to
> nal affiliations.                          the assumption that religion is separate from politics, and that there should be separate
> departments of religion, political science, economics et cetera. This is precisely the point
> made by Richard Horsley in his discussion of the “depoliticization of Jesus” in Jesus and
> Empire (Horsley 2003, p. 6). It is affirmed in Brett’s Decolonizing God (Brett 2008) and the
> Copyright: © 2020 by the author. Li-
> censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
> founding of the Postcolonial Theology Network. Richard King in Orientalism and Religion
> This article is an open access article
> (King 1999) focuses on Said’s theory as enabling understanding of the way in which “the
> distributed under the terms and con-       academic discipline of religious studies has contributed to the construction of the object
> ditions of the Creative Commons At-        of its analysis, creating a textualized, homogeneous and limited group of world religions
> tribution (CC BY) license (https://        largely constructed in its own (modern, Western) image.” Noting the word “Orientalism”
> creativecommons.org/licenses/by/           has in itself come to carry a pejorative meaning he also points out that Said, “acknowledges
> 4.0/).                                     elsewhere that there is an authentic ‘Orient’ out there that is actively being misrepresented”
> 
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010002                                              https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                             2 of 15
> 
> (King 1999, pp. 82–83). Drawing upon Talal Asad’s observations on colonial anthropology,
> Kiri Paramore in his recent collection of essays Religion and Orientalism in Asian Studies,
> affirms “essentialist religion-centred representations of culture have been used to project a
> vision of . . . colonized . . . cultures and countries, which is clearly defined to stand against
> a normative standard of modernity” (Paramore 2016, p. 129).
> In line with how the term has come to be understood after Foucault, throughout my
> article the words “writing” and “narrative” are taken as modes of discourse. Said produced
> a modification of Foucault in his conception of “Orientalist discourse”: in Orientalism an
> author, literature-oriented approach can be seen to operate across a wide range of writing
> by composers of texts such as poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists
> and imperial administrators (Said 2003; Nash 2019). To this I add the writing of religious
> leaders, thinkers and apologists. Said however had little to say about Orientalism’s relation
> to religion per se and although Islam and Islamic culture featured prominently in Orien-
> talism its subject was not Islam, “but rather the portrayal of Islam in the West, offering a
> critique of the foundations and the goals upon which the coverage is based” (Viswanathan
> 2001, p. 437). Patrick Williams confirms: “One of the foundational acts of postcolonial-
> ism, [Orientalism] is among other things an engagement with the West’s construction of,
> demonisation of, and subsequent assaults upon, Muslim identity and culture” (Williams
> 2014, p. 48). Western dominance is the starting point in Saidian Orientalism and this
> transfers to postcolonialism. The main focus of the article is the manner in which power
> and knowledge are linked in the production of Orientalist discourse, particularly in the
> way it “others” its objects who, in the case of Orientalism and in this article too, are mainly
> Muslims.
> 
> 2. Empire, Christianity, and the Babi and Bahai Movements
> In the topic I have chosen to write about postcolonial analysis alerts us to the impe-
> rial dimensions behind the birthing of a new eastern religion. The focus here is on the
> nineteenth-century Islamicate world and on a faith which traces its origin to an Iranian
> Mahdi. Ali Muhammad Shirazi, or the Bab as he is more generally known, was the founder
> of a movement whose followers staged a number of uprisings in Iran in the late 1840s.
> After the Bab was executed in 1850, the remaining Babi leaders were exiled to Ottoman do-
> mains where Babism was re-launched and came to be known as Bahaism, after its founder
> Bahaullah, a former Babi. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the movement spread
> to North America and Western Europe where it was further modified in the hands of
> Bahaullah’s eldest son and designated successor Abdul Baha also known as Abbas Effendi,
> after whom a street on Mount Carmel was posthumously named. He was an outstanding
> notable still embedded in the Islamic character of the Akka and Haifa areas of Palestine. In
> the local mosque and on the occasion coinciding with the opening of the Woking Mosque
> near London in 1912, Abdul Baha maintained the formalities of Islamic worship. However,
> liberal clergymen in Britain and colonial officials and leading military figures in Palestine
> tended not to associate him with the Islamicate world. (Interestingly, the Military Governor
> of Jerusalem Ronald Storrs described him dressed in white robes “noble as a Prophet of
> Michael Angelo” rather than, say, a Sufi shaykh) (Storrs 1939, p. 232). Bahais were inspired
> by Abdul Baha, who journeyed to Europe and North America between 1911 and 1912, to
> exchange Islamic terms of reference (though not the many Islamicate concepts Bahaism
> contains) for a cosmopolitan message of peace and world unity encoded within a discourse
> of religious modernity and addressed to a world stage. However, it was under the aegis
> of Shoghi Effendi, a grandson of Abdul Baha who appointed him to the Guardianship
> (wilaya) of the Bahai faith that it self-identified as a new religion. Todd Lawson conceives
> of this as “perhaps the only ‘Islamic movement’ of recent history to have ‘escaped the
> gravitational pull of Islam’ and acquired a distinctive post-Islamic identity” (Lawson 2012,
> p. 468). Bahais usually see this process as divinely ordained and proceeding in orderly
> managed stages—we shall see later whether this model can be gainfully viewed from a
> postcolonial perspective. The core situation of hostility and persecution that often faces
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                         3 of 15
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> movements of renovation in Islamicate domains can throw them on to the defensive, as
> might be considered the case with the Bahais. However, we shall see that the orientation
> their movement adopted in making colonial writers their allies raised a set of issues that
> are the main focus of this article.
> With respect to modern millenarian movements, Moshe Sharon argues “there is no
> underlying connection between the spiritual developments in the East and those in Europe
> and America”; but he makes the Bahai faith the exception: “in moving westwards [it]
> arguably became the only one to move outside of its hinterland and make the journey
> from East to West moving outside the scope of its religious origins” (Sharon 2004, p. 7).
> As followers of a new religion from the Middle East, Bahais entered the space already
> opened in the United States by nineteenth-century Christian millenarian movements. New
> religious sects—Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s witnesses—shared a common heritage
> with respect to the millennium and the expectancy it generated for the return of Christ.
> Though in Iran Babism might be said to have emerged out of a comparable environment
> of chiliastic Shiism, once within the orbit of Christianity, Bahaism quickly switched its
> millennial vocabulary and discourse register. When converts to the new religion started to
> show up in the United States and Western Europe in the early years of the twentieth century,
> a trickle of whom held positions in Christian organizations, they quickly assimilated Bahai
> norms to Christianity. Missionaries in Iran who had spent many, largely unfruitful decades
> attempting to convert Iranian Muslims found further frustration in their encounter with
> Bahais; transferring their antagonism to the West some became adversaries in print using
> material written by orientalists to undermine Bahai claims. However, Orientalist attempts
> to reduce Islam such as that performed by the missionary-academic in India, William Muir,
> would not work with Bahaism whose chief, Shoghi Effendi, ironically, would in the course
> of time direct similar texts against Islam. As Bahais moved under pressure of exile from
> Iran to the Ottoman Empire, and later to America, a universalizing Christian bent was
> developed. The encounter was intrinsic to the process of change from an Islamic to a
> post-Islamic movement. This began before Shoghi Effendi’s Guardianship, but it was his
> decision to combine Orientalism and Christianizing bringing these together in the Bahai
> narrative.
> 
> 3. Construction(s) of Bahai Orientalism
> The Bahai faith has adopted a universal, reformist stance that allows for alignment
> with formulations of Western modernity. Bahai leaders, however, have had very little to say
> about imperialism and the dominion of the West, and tended to endorse Western rule in the
> East under the rubric of “obedience to rulers”. Orientalism being the dominant apparatus
> for relaying notions about the East in the era of Empire, depictions of Islam as a backward,
> stagnant element in eastern societies certainly attracted Western Bahais. Idioms dilating on
> Persia’s “medieval” backwardness started to feature in Bahai writing in statements about
> Muslim opponents in Iran in the 1900s and the culture of Iranians in general. Although
> officially non-political, among many Iranian Bahais there also developed in the 1930s
> support for the Pahlavi form of dynastic nationalism with its strong connections to Western
> Orientalism (Nash forthcoming). The individual most influential in the process of the
> construction of a Bahai Orientalism was and continues to be Shoghi Effendi. It is from his
> writings that evidence for the argument will mainly be drawn.
> According to Denis MacEoin, the “influence of Shoghi Effendi’s orientalist vision
> “
> 
> “
> 
> of the Babi-Baha i movement on later Baha i writing in the West has been profound and
> enduring” (MacEoin 2009, p. 533). An ethnic Iranian born in Palestine in 1897 and brought
> up in a predominantly Persian speech-community, associating in his early adult years with
> British colonial administrators, high-ranking military officers, orientalists, and Western
> Bahai figures from wealthy and professional backgrounds, as a religious leader Shoghi
> Effendi occupied a niche and decidedly ambiguous position in the newly transplanted
> British colonial outpost in the Middle East. Marked out to play the role of interpreter of
> Bahai doctrine and becoming the architect of a far flung administration, he was educated
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                           4 of 15
> 
> at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut then sent to Oxford University in 1920. There
> he gained an exceptional proficiency in English, a language in which none of the three
> founder-figures of the faith had been able to communicate. Having mastered the codes of
> formality of the dominant world imperial power he brought this expertise to the newly
> centralized Bahai World Center situated on Mount Carmel. Performance of his role as
> Guardian of the faith coincided with the situation of “double colonialism” in which the
> British administered the native Arab and oriental populations while the Zionist movement
> took over the land of Palestine (Thompson 2019, p. 5). Called back to Haifa at the close of
> 1921 on the death of Abdul Baha, Shoghi Effendi largely detached himself from the oriental
> locale his grandfather had moved in. He discarded eastern dress (with the exception of a
> karakul hat) and cutting off intercourse with locals altogether received mainly British and
> Zionist VIPs (Khanum 1969).
> Beginning in Palestine in the 1920s, almost single-handedly a Bahai literature in
> English was scripted by the Guardian until his death in 1957. This took the form of
> translations from the Arabic and Persian writings of the founders, and lengthy letters
> addressed to the believers which were eventually collated into volumes, together with
> several histories. Collectively, these laid down the doctrine of, and established a canonical
> narrative for the Bahai faith. Behind Shoghi Effendi’s heavily derivative style of writing
> drawn from eighteenth-century and Victorian prosody with its syntactically complex
> sentences and Latinate vocabulary can be discerned a mindset to which the term “self-
> orientalizing” Westerner can most effectively be applied. Having had no direct personal
> contact with the land of his ancestors, an imaginative geography of Persia (the term he
> always used) came to him via the writings of the Bahai holy figures and his reading of
> Western writers, in the main historians, travelers and orientalists. Together these influences
> worked towards his construction of an image that was both negative and othering of the
> land and its people, its culture, and its religion, and by extension of other adjoining Middle
> Eastern spaces. While following the tenets of Bahaullah and Abdul Baha that upheld the
> prophethood of Muhammad and revelation of the Quran, Shoghi Effendi shaped a narrative
> condemning the Islamic world for rejecting the claims of Bahaullah. Although probably
> unavoidable given the continuing hostility to which the Bahais were subject in Iran and
> to a lesser extent elsewhere in the region, through being couched in Orientalist terms and
> inflected with Christian motifs this narrative oriented the Bahai faith in a new, pro-Western
> direction. From his reading of Western writers he borrowed and incorporated into his
> writings the classic Orientalist division of progressive civilization (implicitly recognized
> as embodied in the modernity authored by the West) regarding de haut en bas a backward,
> rigid and fanatical Orient. In particular, this negative view focused Persia’s decadence and
> the part played in it by “arrogant, fanatical, perfidious and retrograde clericals” and to a
> more muted degree its Qajar rulers (Shoghi Effendi 1961, p. 95). The late nineteenth-century
> writings on Persia of British author George Nathaniel Curzon were especially chosen to
> aid this project. Gesturing to the Aryan-Persianism explored earlier in the century by
> John Malcolm, Henry Rawlinson, Arthur Gobineau, Ernest Renan, and latterly Edward
> Granville Browne, Curzon suited Shoghi Effendi’s preference for authors who stressed the
> self-evident irreversibility of Persia and Islam’s decline. To this he added a component that
> operated as a binary opposite: the huge assertion of an exclusive agency of redemption in
> the form of a unitary Babi-Bahai revelation. These were the two pillars upon which Shoghi
> Effendi’s Bahai narratives were constructed, and vital to them both was the input Western
> orientalists provided, some of whom had mentioned Bahaism as possibly replacing Islam
> as Persia’s established religion. Probably because they were considered “modern” these
> writers also inflated the number of Bahais there (e.g., Curzon 1892, vol. 1, p. 499), perhaps
> on the assumption that if they took over the country, they would be friendly to Britain. Not
> potentially rebellious as the Muslims of the Empire were thought to be, as a small quietist
> group in Palestine, and like other heterodox Muslim sects scattered through the Empire
> such as the Ismailis and Ahmadiyya, they not only posed no threat, but positively exuded
> declarations of loyalty. In Britain, Bahai converts were never considered to be “the enemy
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                           5 of 15
> 
> within” as were a few high-profile British Muslim converts like Abdullah Quilliam and
> Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall who both supported Ottoman Turkey.
> Abdul Baha spent most of his life in the Ottoman Empire and wrote in Turkish, one
> of the three oriental languages in which Shoghi Efendi was also fluent. The nineteenth-
> century Bahai movement favored similar notions concerning modernization to the Ottoman
> Tanzimat. However, two of its ministers—Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha—were responsible
> for exiling Bahaullah and his family to Akka thus creating a gulf that was unassailable
> (Cole 1992). Later, the fin de siècle Ottoman elite developed an Ottoman form of Orientalism
> the main idea of which was to bring Western civilization to bear upon the backward
> peoples of their imperial domains. In order to strengthen these, in a kind of “borrowed
> colonialism” they created “a discourse of empire” applying Orientalist typology vis-à-vis
> populations living “in a state of nomadism and savagery” (Deringil 2003, pp. 312–13;
> Eldem 2015; Szurek 2015). Bahaullah, Denis MacEoin suggests, went as far as he could in
> creating a new sharia that threw out many of the outdated ordinances that also concerned
> 
> “
> Tanzimat reformers too. However, “[to] proceed too far with modification of the shari a is,
> 
> “
> for many conservatives, to run the risk of leaving Islam entirely, as the Baha is demonstrate”
> (MacEoin 2009, p. 655).
> However, Shoghi Effendi’s writings went even further: the major difference between
> the tenets of Ottoman reformers and the views he expressed is that in his, Islam features
> as the factor behind the East’s obscurantism and as a bar to progress, whereas in theirs,
> it had a role as a unifying factor capable of modernization and reform (Makdisi 2002).
> With the defeat of 1918, the fall of the Ottoman dynasty, and the accession to power of
> Kemal Atatürk, Orientalism in Turkey morphed into Kemalist Orientalism, a reversion to
> a hard-line Western form that branded “Oriental backwardness and Muslim civilization”
> as equivalents, manifesting between the wars as the “anti-clerical rage” of Kemalists who
> saw it as “imperative to destroy ‘tradition’“(Szurek 2015, p. 113; original italics). Shoghi
> Effendi’s employment of Orientalism to pronounce on the incorrigible character of Islamic
> institutions aligns much more clearly with the contemporary project of Kemalist Orien-
> talism with respect to the implacable opposition both raised against continuing Islamic
> entities. As Guardian he inspired the Bahai community, especially in North America, to
> express open support for the programs of anti-traditionalism and anti-clericalism promoted
> by both Atatürk and Reza Shah, in particular noting approvingly the forced Westernization
> of the apparel of Islamic scholars (pursued alongside the outlawing of Sufis in Turkey) and
> the banning of women’s Islamic attire (Shoghi Effendi 1961; Nash forthcoming). The follow-
> ing passage presents a Muslim mullah dispossessed of his religious attire with a satirical
> tone unusual for Shoghi Effendi, although it strikes an obviously Orientalist, anti-clerical
> pose:
> the once lofty turbaned, long-bearded, grave looking aqa . . . as he sits, hatless,
> clean-shaven, in the seclusion of his home, and perhaps listening to Western
> music, blared upon the ethers of his native land . . . Well might he muse upon
> the havoc which the rising tide of nationalism and scepticism has wrought in the
> adamantine traditions of his country. Well might he recollect the halcyon days
> . . . seated on a donkey, and parading through the bazaars and maydans of his
> native land . . . (Shoghi Effendi 1961, p. 68).
> 
> 4. Bringing Together East and West
> In contrast to hard-line binarism replete with negative nostrums and stereotypical
> tropes which fit the category set out by Edward Said, there were softer types of Orientalism
> to which Bahais in the first decades of the twentieth century became attached. Romantic or
> affirmative Orientalism valorized the spirituality and wisdom some Westerners descried in
> Indian philosophy and mysticism. This in turn helped stimulate a form of Occidentalism
> or “Orientalism in reverse” in which Indian anti-colonial activists such as Vivekananda
> and Mohandas Gandhi vaunted Indian spiritual superiority and condemned the West for
> its materialism (King 1999). Shoghi Effendi’s form of Bahai Orientalism replaced a softer
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                            6 of 15
> 
> Orientalism in operation from the time of Abdul Baha which had passed into the writings
> of some of his Western acolytes. According to this, the mission of Bahaism was to cement
> the integration of eastern spirituality and Western progressive social know-how in order to
> bring civilization to the East and spirituality to the West. A similar approach can be found
> in the assimilative Orientalism of Christian universalists at broadly the same time who,
> though they continued to ascribe superiority to Christianity, played a prominent role in the
> world faiths movement initiated by the 1893 Parliament of Religions meeting in Chicago.
> Liberal clergymen such as T.K. Cheyne and J. Estlin Carpenter who were partly responsible
> for Abdul Baha’s positive reception when he addressed Christian congregations in Oxford
> and London, were part of this tendency which valued essential spiritual values in oriental
> religions, although they could not find a place for Islam in their scheme (McNamara 2017).
> Another eastern group advocating East-West reciprocity which had a connection with
> Bahaism was the Mahjar, a movement of Christian Lebanese émigré writers who had
> established themselves in the Americas at the beginning of the twentieth century. Primarily
> settled on the East coast and writing in Arabic as well as English, they started out from an
> assimilative perspective, constructing a universalizing project that was aimed at bringing
> together East and West. Both the Mahjar and Bahais of the period accepted the East/West
> binary but with the aim of transcending it in a blend of eastern spirituality and Western
> economic and civilizing progress. Citing key literary figures Ameen Rihani and Kahlil
> Gibran, Waïl Hassan has confirmed their acceptance of “the basic premises” of Orientalism,
> the discrete concepts of “Orient” and “Occident”. Although partially resistant they also
> invested in them through creating characters in their fictions who advocated cosmopoli-
> tanism and who acted as “intermediary between two worlds”. However, according to
> Hassan while they tried to “negate Orientalist negation through Orientalist transcendence”,
> their writings failed to accomplish what he terms the process of “cultural translation”
> i.e., —overcoming cultural differentials by, in this instant, disclosing the superior spiritual
> values of the East. So strong was Western cultural hegemonism that in their mediatory
> stance the Mahjar writers were unable to create harmony and equality, but still “operate[d]
> within the orbit of the dominant discourse” (Hassan 2011, pp. 57–58, 77).
> A few avant-garde Bahai artists had links with both Mahjar figures, one of whom,
> Juliet Thompson arranged for Abdul Baha on his westward journeys to sit for a portrait by
> Gibran in his Boston studio. Ameen Rihani also incorporated Bahaism into his experimental
> emigrant novel, the Book of Khalid (1911). However, Hassan’s argument is applicable to both
> movements. The fact remains that in spite of their idealism, the conditions that made this
> soft Orientalism possible—partly enabled by New England Orientalism but also explicable
> in terms of a configuration of a number of strands making for an openness to eastern
> influences on the part of American culture—dissipated after the Great War, continuing only
> in a restricted, specialized form in the poetry of Pound and Eliot (Weir 2019). Negative
> American Orientalist attitudes toward the East ensured that the dream of East-West unity
> remained unfulfilled, and it would take several generations before Middle Eastern migrant
> literatures began to be studied and valued in the United States. It should also be added
> that just as Bahaism in the early decades of the twentieth century attracted converts who
> articulated the movement in “New Age” terms, the same either remained largely indifferent
> to Islam or, having imbibed Orientalist attitudes from their Christian background, when
> they represented the rejection and persecution of both the Babi and Bahai movements in
> their native Persia drew heavily on Orientalist vocabulary (Nash forthcoming).
> 
> 5. European Orientalists and the Babi and Bahai Faiths
> We need now to return to the exceptional circumstance that led to the new oriental
> religion being partially inscribed in Orientalist forms, first by Western scholars and later by
> Bahais. It is precisely because during the Napoleonic age the country became firmly fixed
> in the sights of the British and French, and territorial losses at the hands of imperial Russia
> were set in train, that the sudden appearance of Babism in Persia first came to intersect
> with Orientalism.
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                           7 of 15
> 
> Qajar Iran’s self-image as an empire at the center of its own universe . . . changed
> into one of a vulnerable nation in the throes of Christian powers. Yet despite
> its inherent disadvantages, Qajar Iran escaped domination by colonial powers
> in part because of the dictates of its geography but also because of a degree of
> resistance displayed by the Qajar state and its subjects. (Amanat 2017, p. 179)
> Abbas Amanat’s introductory sketch to the Qajar period in Iran (1789–1925) gestures
> toward the colonial background missing from Bahai narratives; it also inscribes the Babis
> into the “resistance” mode he believes Persians displayed against foreign control even if,
> paradoxically, that resistance was raised not against any foreigner but the Qajar state. In
> one of the earliest Western reports on the Babis published in 1856, Lady Sheil, wife of the
> British Minister in Tehran, argued that they had made “a serious attempt at revolution . . .
> under the disguise of a new revelation” and ascribed to them socialist, communist, and
> republican beliefs, asserting that in spite of the Bab’s execution and Babi martyrdoms there
> was “a spirit of change abroad among the Persians, which will preserve [the Bab’s] system
> from extinction” (Sheil 1856, pp. 176, 181). Nikkie Keddie outlined the similarities between
> the Babi and Chinese Taiping uprisings occurring at almost the same time against weak
> and corrupt dynasties, but there was not, as she suggests, a Christian infusion in Babism
> even if later on European orientalists tried to conjure one up (Keddie 1981, pp. 16–17).
> In a work published nine years after Sheil’s, French diplomat and traveler Arthur
> Gobineau presented the Bab and his movement to Europe on a larger scale than hitherto
> and was instrumental in encouraging scholars to study the Babi faith. Like Lady Sheil, he
> considered Persia in the 1840s to be restless for change:
> People are getting irritated with Islam, even against that strangely disfigured
> Islam presented by Shi‘ism, finding it too narrow and restrictive . . . People are
> looking for something else. What? (Gobineau 1957; 2009, p. 133)
> Displaying Gobineau’s personal predilections and idiosyncracies—including theories
> on the Aryan race which influenced his determination to separate the Bab from Shiism—in
> Religions et philosophies dans l’Asia centrale (Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia),
> the Bab emerges as a Christ-like figure. The outstanding components of his story—his
> execution and the martyrdoms of his followers—excited comparison with the beginnings
> of Christianity. Ernest Renan immediately picked up on his compatriot’s portrait of the
> Bab as an Aryan messiah battling against Islam. Wholly endorsing the Christian parallels it
> drew, he valorized Babi martyrdom as evidence of self-sacrifice in the name of religion still
> being alive in the nineteenth century (Renan 1890; Nash 2014). Realizing how important
> sacrifice was in proselytizing the faith in the Christian West, Shoghi Effendi would employ
> Gobineau and Renan’s encomiums on this quality (along with other European sources) in
> his narratives as irrefutable evidence of the kind only Western orientalists could provide.
> In adopting a Western face, the Bahai movement quickly set about distancing itself
> from its Islamic origins. Bahaullah had attached to his Ismaili-style theophanic claim to
> be the latest “Manifestation” of God an ecumenical message that stretched beyond Islam
> and made overtures to Christian messianic expectation. Christian converts figured his
> relationship to Ali Muhammad as comparable to that of Christ and John the Baptist with
> the Bab assigned the role of Bahaullah’s forerunner. It was also necessary to erase the
> Babis’ militancy and to ascribe to the movement retrospectively the pacific character of
> the teachings of Bahaullah, though in the work of orientalists the Bab remained the focus
> rather than his successor in the Bahai scheme. Dabashi believes after the death of the Bab
> and in exile from Iran “Baha’ullah could not gather any politically significant community
> of believers” and although Bahais did perform for a while a significant reforming and
> modernizing role in Iran and Transcaspia their “theologically benign” movement became
> in time “harmless, politically innocuous and irrelevant” (Dabashi 2011, p. 202).
> The strong tendency to align the Bahai faith with Christian messianic codes might well
> be related to Bahaullah’s disengagement of his followers from political involvement, a result
> of his “essentially mystic world view” (Amanat 1997, p. 412). Both Bahaullah and Abdul
> Baha prepared the way for parallels to be drawn, which in later Bahai narratives become
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                         8 of 15
> 
> striking, between the depoliticized Jesus of Roman Christians, and Bahais’ smoothing
> out of the political in their representations of the role and person of the Iranian Bab. The
> elision of the oppositional force of the Bab’s movement against the Shah-mujtahid state
> appears to share a similar rationale to Christian decoupling of Jesus from a Jewish national
> revolution. While Jewish resistance to Rome was raised against an occupying power, the
> Babi insurgency was simultaneously a rebellion against corrupt indigenous rule, and “a
> revolutionary movement [with] its social and economic roots in a messianic culture now
> moving through major institutional transformation in the face of European colonialism”
> (Dabashi 2011, p. 182). Both Christians and Bahais felt the need to placate imperial power,
> the former because their operations came increasingly to center on Rome, while after
> the departure of the Ottomans, the Bahai leaders were sheltering under British imperial
> rule in mandated Palestine. Both Christians and Bahais saw how important it was to
> disconnect from resistance to imperial power staged by majority populations—Jewish in
> the ancient Holy Land, Muslim in the modern Islamicate ones. Placed in a postcolonial
> context, this phenomenon is obviously more immediate and concretely evidenced in the
> twentieth century record of the Bahais than in the sources Richard Horsley is able to
> marshal in Jesus and Empire. At least in the case of the Babi movement, it is possible to
> see the importance of indigenous resistance as a factor that both reappears in the Iranian
> Constitutional Revolution and is dissolved into an apolitical cosmopolitanism by the absent
> Bahai leadership.
> Shoghi Effendi’s incorporation of a corpus of Western European orientalists into his
> presentation of the history of the Bahai faith should perhaps not be considered surprising.
> Reza Zia-Ebrahimi points out how Iranians had an inferiority complex with regard to the
> West and “the sacrosanct status in which European scholarship was, and still is, held”
> (Zia-Ibrahimi 2011, p. 465). So although we have argued Shoghi Effendi was out of touch
> with the broader currents in Iran, it is undoubtedly the case that the oriental culture he
> had lived and imbibed among Iranian émigrés in Palestine already inclined him towards
> deference to Western scholarship. That this was directed to the British in particular was by
> no means unusual among educated persons living under the shadow of British colonialism.
> Among the orientalists he selects are Gobineau, Renan, Curzon and Persianist and Babi
> expert Edward Granville Browne. Said includes all of them in Orientalism but mentions
> Browne only once and misunderstands Gobineau’s writings on the East because he prob-
> ably never read them. The first three certainly support Said’s argument that orientalists
> believed the Orient was aberrant and irrational, and all its glories situated in the past.
> Although Gobineau believed some of these aspects made “Asia” preferable to the West,
> Curzon’s statements assert them as evidence of Persia’s stagnation and as such they are
> conspicuously incorporated into the narrative of Bahai history. Persia and the Persian Ques-
> tion—in which Curzon projects his position of superiority as a British imperialist traveler
> to inscribe the reality of “the East” as splendid, decadent, and moribund—typifies Said’s
> connection of Orientalism with knowledge/power. Shoghi Effendi borrowed Curzon’s
> performance of this syndrome as a surrogate for his own narratives. Both Renan’s sym-
> pathy and Browne’s initial enthusiasm for Babism as an “Aryan” faith were inspired by
> the work of Gobineau. As a savant of Oriental culture Renan features in Said’s study as
> an epitome of how self-selecting individuals aspired to wield the expertise of Orientalism
> in Renan’s case in order to underwrite his ideas on race. He too joined knowledge to
> power in his narrative of a degraded Semitism contrasting a resurgent Aryanism, arguing
> that the culture produced by people of Semitic origin (pre-eminently Jews and Muslims)
> was now stagnant, whereas the Aryan races had created a civilization that was scientific,
> rational, protean, and dynamic. Edward Browne, however, complicates Said’s notion of
> Orientalism. He did this by opposing Western dominance over the East while at the same
> time contributing to the export of European ideas of race and nationalism in support of the
> Iranian Constitutional Revolution. These ideas were later inserted into the Iranian national
> idea, and recent thinking has emphasized the integral role Orientalism played in the rise of
> eastern nationalisms (Burke 1998).
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                              9 of 15
> 
> All the figures above-mentioned feature as authorities in Shoghi Effendi’s two Babi-
> Bahai narratives: Dawn-Breakers (Shoghi Effendi 1932), his “translation” or more properly
> his rewriting of the Bahai historian Nabil Zarandi’s story of the Bab, later joined by God
> Passes By, a history marking the first centenary of Babi-Bahaism (Shoghi Effendi 1944). Both
> reference and quote from a range of orientalist texts. Nearly seventy years after Religions
> and Philosophies, in the introduction to Dawn-Breakers, Shoghi Effendi sets events against
> the background of Qajar Persia. Aided by large chunks from Persia and the Persian Question
> to summarize the “condition of the land”, the backwardness and tyranny of the state, the
> chains of Islam fixing the people down, and the barbaric “Persian character”, a hard-line
> Orientalist picture emerges:
> Nothing is more shocking to the European reader, in pursuing his way through
> the crime-stained and bloody pages of Persian history during the last and, in
> a happily less degree, during the present century, than the record of savage
> punishments and abominable tortures, testifying alternately to the callousness
> of the brute and the ingenuity of the fiend. The Persian character has ever been
> fertile in device and indifferent to suffering; and in the field of judicial executions
> it has found ample scope for the exercise of both attainments. Up till quite a
> recent period, well within the borders of the present reign, condemned criminals
> have been crucified, blown from guns, buried alive, impaled, shod like horses,
> torn asunder by being bound to the heads of two trees bent together and then
> allowed to spring back to their natural position, converted into human torches,
> flayed while living. (Shoghi Effendi 1932, p. 20)
> The creed of Islam is dispatched in a similar way:
> Marvellously adapted alike to the climate, character, and occupations of those
> countries upon which it has laid its adamantine grip, Islam holds its votary in
> complete thrall from the cradle to the grave. To him, it is not only religion, it is
> government, philosophy, and science as well. The Muh.ammadan conception is
> not so much that of a state church as, if the phrase may be permitted, of a church
> state. The undergirders with which society itself is warped round are not of
> civil, but of ecclesiastical, fabrication; and, wrapped in this superb, if paralysing,
> creed, the Musulman lives in contented surrender of all volition, deems it his
> highest duty to worship God and to compel, or, where impossible, to despise
> those who do not worship Him in the spirit, and then dies in sure and certain
> hope of Paradise. (p. 30)
> Similar tropes are employed to denigrate Islam by the Christian missionaries to Iran,
> but why does Shoghi Effendi re-use such material? How can a new religion be dignified by
> describing the land into which it was born in this degrading manner? One answer is: the
> more decadent and retrograde the country of the Bab and Bahaullah could be shown to
> be, the greater would be the contrast of their revelations and the heroic sacrifice of their
> followers. However, binarism—in this case refusing to ascribe any virtue to the non-Babi,
> non-Bahai majority of the country, especially one’s religious opponents—is a message
> which, when repeated and ingested, is unlikely to leave open a space for reconciliation. (I
> found this presented no difficulty to students in Bahai institutes which I attended in the
> 1980s—on the contrary it confirmed everything they saw on their television screens during
> the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath).
> Renan, who is valorized as a great authority by Shoghi Effendi, is the figure who
> racializes Islam as the creed of motley undistinguished peoples, only in the case of the
> “Aryan” Persians allowing exceptionality for standing above the “Semitism” which forms
> the fundamental racial character of Islam:
> The Musulman East defeated the West . . . Henceforth the parts are changed.
> European genius rises with peerless grandeur; Islamism, on the contrary, is slowly
> decomposing—in our days is falling with a crash . . . [I]t is the appalling simplicity
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                           10 of 15
> 
> of the Semitic spirit cramping the human intellect, closing it against . . . delicate
> thought . . . feeling . . . every rational inquiry . . . (Renan 1864, pp. 164–65)
> Substitute ‘the Bahai faith’ for ‘European genius’ and the third sentence might be
> inserted directly into a Bahai text, but why are these Orientalist elements present in Bahai
> writing and what function do they perform? To formulate an answer we need to take
> into consideration matters of self-definition including: the importance of being seen to be
> modern, being in conformity with the New Age, showing cognizance of futures, et cetera.
> As well as constructing a Bahai consciousness, undoubtedly Shoghi Effendi’s intention
> was to inform powerful figures in British government circles, in the Mandate, and VIPs
> more broadly as well as upcoming Zionist leaders, of the uncontentious and acculturated,
> modern character of the Bahai faith, in contradistinction to the Islamicate world out of
> which it had grown. Undeniably, his narratives are purposed as a weapon in the struggle
> between the Bahais and their Muslim opponents. A paradox is created, however, by
> Shoghi Effendi’s decision to employ Orientalist and Westocentric modes of thought so
> unreflectively. While Orientalism and racism are closely allied, informing so much writing
> on the East and its peoples, the absence of racial thinking from his writing is notable, but
> paradigmatic, because Bahai doctrine is predicated on eradication of racism. Nonetheless,
> the excoriation projected in the orientalists’ quotations and reproduced elsewhere in his
> own statements, imparts associations that unavoidably get attached to Bahai Orientalist
> discourse where the presentation of the growth and decay of Islamic civilization is wholly
> aligned with mainstream Orientalism with its teleological deployment of “periodization
> and direction” with Muslims assigned to the place of “existing ‘local peoples’ left behind
> in the progressive evolution of modern (European) ‘civilization’” (Asad 1993, p. 13). In
> all these respects Bahai Orientalism aligns the Bahai faith with a Western modernity that
> was prevalent and hegemonic at the time but has increasingly come under fire in the
> postmodern world, in addition to leading Bahais to adopt “an essentially Orientalist vision
> of their own community and of Iranian society” (MacEoin 1988).
> 
> 6. Is There a Bahai Postcolonialist in the House?
> Western Orientalism can be said to have impacted the colonized East via the dual
> thrust of “missionary polemicists and academic Orientalists”, with the activities of the
> first “aimed at all groups, but especially at Muslims”. The latter, as “European scientific
> researchers also challenged Islam” (Lawrence 2006, pp. 144–45). In the face of that aggres-
> sion, unsurprisingly, Muslims were nearly unanimous in recognizing the need to defend
> Islam. Islamic responses were initially mixed with modernist and revivalist elements,
> but in the twentieth century increasingly took on anti-imperialist, anti-Western stances.
> Muslim thinkers have tended to embrace the argument that Orientalism was a factor in the
> West’s dominance over eastern countries and in the embattled situation of Islam. Bahai
> scholars have mainly eschewed involvement in the Orientalism debate, but it is clear that
> significant Orientalist elements are present in Bahai writing.
> In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the project of resistance was spear-
> headed by Jamal ud-Din “Afghani” and his disciple Muhammad Abdu, and then by his
> disciple Rashid Rida. Coterminously pro-British Indian modernists such as Sayyid Ahmad
> Khan, Sayyid Amir Ali, and Chiragh Ali, as well as Ahmadiyya missionaries in Europe,
> notably Maulana Muhammad Ali, undertook a defensive apologia against attacks on Is-
> lam by colonial missionaries and orientalists (Geaves 2018). Given that their millennial
> movement’s antecedent, Babism underwent a struggle involving the state and religious
> leadership during the early nineteenth century; in the twentieth century Bahais were unable
> to achieve an uncontested status in Iran. In their proselytizing activities in the West Bahais
> were more accommodating to Christians than another Mahdi movement, the Ahmadiyya
> (Addison 1929). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, over the matter of Orientalist attacks
> on Islam, Bahais were little disposed to join up to a defensive position. Bahai responses,
> limited and mainly low key, were conspicuous in two instances: the figure of Muhammad
> as a prophet and Islam as a divinely-revealed religion were publicly affirmed by Abdul
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                           11 of 15
> 
> Baha while in America, and for a period in Cairo in the late 1890s Bahai scholar Abul
> Fadl Gulpaygani conducted a defense of Islam “against tendentious missionaries and
> orientalists” (Cole 1981, p. xiii). All such efforts ended in the inter-war period with the
> new orientation set out by Shoghi Effendi which might be accounted as tantamount to the
> Bahai faith joining up with the missionaries and orientalists. From that time onward in
> that it takes up an Orientalist stance toward Islam in the modern world, it is logical that it
> should be situated within the larger scope of Orientalism.
> However, to the extent that Western Bahai writers were able to approach recent and
> more distant periods of the history of the Islamicate world without getting too exercised by
> the persecution of their faith (the rejection of the Bab, Bahaullah and their truth claims), or
> falling into the groove of Orientalist clichés about East and West, the positive aspects of
> Bahai teaching allowed direction of their observations into more fruitful and worthwhile
> areas. For example, American Bahai author Stanwood Cobb, perhaps on account of
> his educationalist’s mindset, in his Islamic Contributions to Civilization (1963) displayed a
> positive approach towards his subject that was not a universally approved one at that
> time in the non-Bahai world. To be fair, however, it was entirely consistent with the view
> expressed by Shoghi Effendi that Bahais should study the early growth and successes of
> Islam and indeed of other world religions. Later in the twentieth century, independent
> Bahai scholars operating on similar premises produced significant work on histories of
> the entire Islamic dispensation in which, like Cobb, they did not disclose their personal
> Bahai affiliations. Two outstanding examples are Hasan M. Balyuzi’s Muhammad and the
> Course of Islam (1970) and Moojan Momen’s An Introduction to Shi‘i Islam (1987). A writer
> of mixed American-Iranian extraction, Marzieh Gail generally adopted an unpartisan
> approach in dealing with Persian and Arabic topics in her English writings. Her Persia
> and the Victorians (1951) is a detailed, low-key literature-oriented study of a subject that is
> replete with Orientalist associations. Since it was published around ten years before Jalal-e
> Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi (Westoxification) it would be unfair to reprove its author for failing
> to show any cognizance of the connections mainstream Iranian and Arab intellectuals
> of the same period were starting to make on the subject of Orientalism and the Middle
> East (see Macfie 2000). She did however accuse E.G. Browne of behaving as a typically
> “authoritarian” orientalist in lamenting the lack of historical material on Babism. If Browne
> had only waited, she suggested, he would have been able to read the flow of books now
> appearing (in the late 40s and 50s)—all of them by Bahais!
> In the professional academic frame, Bahais might claim more than their fair share
> of illustrious practitioners of Iranian Studies; however, most have either rescinded their
> adherence to the faith or maintained only a nominal connection (e.g., Abbas Amanat, Juan
> Cole, Denis MacEoin, and John Walbridge). Nonetheless, with the exception of MacEoin,
> whose valuable and searching interventions have supported this article, Orientalism as a
> field of study let alone a collection of Western conceptions of the Orient in the way Said
> presents is almost entirely absent from the works of the above. Abbas Amanat’s chapter
> on the Christian missionary-orientalist Henry Martin (albeit containing only a passing
> reference to Babism) is however noteworthy and fascinating for the manner in which it
> places a noted Western missionary to Iran in the spotlight of his cross-cultural impact
> on mujtahids and Sufis against the background of an impending colonialism (Amanat
> 2005). In Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth-
> Century Middle East, expert on the history of the region Juan Cole aligns Bahaullah and
> Abdul Baha’s pronouncements on modernity with Jeffersonian politics in an attractive
> way. However, he is silent about the fact that his analysis is delimited so as to totally
> ignore how the Bahai faith was later radically re-orientated by Shoghi Effendi, who is
> entirely absent from the monograph. Cole therefore has no problem in writing of the need
> to “get beyond Orientalist essentialisms and dichotomies”, and of “the limitations of the
> Orientalist tradition” (Cole 1998, pp. 189–90).
> Bahais are almost ubiquitously silent about Orientalism. Although it is taken for
> granted that many of the prominent orientalists of the mid- to late- nineteenth and early-
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                            12 of 15
> 
> twentieth centuries had something to say about Babis and/or Bahais, in Bahai scholarship
> generally, orientalists, even allowing for their varied individual specificities, are not delim-
> ited as a group. The fact that such a collectivity might exist is either passed over or taken as
> read, without even so much as an outline assessment of the place of Babi-Bahai within the
> broader context of the orientalism of these periods. Moojan Momen’s highly informative
> collection of documents published in The Babi and Baha’i Religions: Some Contemporary
> Western Accounts (Momen 1981), many of which were written by orientalists, makes no
> reference to Said. Orientalism is absent from the index in Brookshaw and Fazel’s The Baha’is
> of Iran: Socio-historical Studies (2008). A valiant exception is however to be found in an
> important intervention in which Stephen Lambden deconstructs a symptomatic instant of
> orientalist distortion of Babism: Gobineau and Browne’s misattribution of Biblical learning
> to the Bab and Shoghi Effendi’s interpolation in Dawn-Breakers of a Christ–like speech
> purportedly delivered by the Bab to his followers (Lambden 2002).The topic of Russian
> Orientalism and its relation to the Babi and Bahai faiths, because it is discrete and requires
> a detailed outline, has been omitted from the present article (but it forms nearly half a
> chapter in my forthcoming monograph). However, recent works on this subject area also
> leave the term ”orientalism” unproblematized, and Russian military officers who came
> into close contact with Bahais on the borders of their empire are exonerated of all motives
> other than interest in their topic.
> Where and how, we might ask, could postcolonial or postmodern theories interpose
> and stretch current Bahai thinking? To start with a beginning: like most religious narratives
> Bahai, particularly as articulated by Shoghi Effendi, employs a foundationalist format,
> one that, as suggested above, is made to unfold logocentrically. In a frequently quoted
> statement Shoghi Effendi sums up the Bahai faith as a teleologically directed movement that
> is destined to develop out of (local) Ithn’ Ashariya (“Twelver”) Shiism into a world religion
> (Shoghi Effendi 1944, p. xxi). The speaker neglects to indicate that from a historiographical
> perspective, the narrative approach is highly selective. Development is predicated on a tree-
> like structure where the whole derives from a single trunk and is therefore hierarchically
> ordered. Postmodern analysis, however, challenges the idea that such a narrative must take
> on an organic development (it can, but it does not have to). In proposing their “rhizomic”,
> model Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri argue: “The rhizome is reducible neither to the
> One nor the multiple . . . it is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions
> in motion” (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987, p. 21; Chicago School of Media Theory n.d.). This
> obviates the need to produce a linear, temporal narrative that has a fixed beginning and
> ordered development, one which can be critiqued on the lines that (1) it is inconsistent
> with the flow of life and its multidimensional character, and (2) and spatially it provides a
> less than satisfactory explanation of phenomena. In the case of authorized Bahai accounts
> of Babism for example, vital conceptions such as “return” and “renewal” are tidied up
> (following Bahaullah’s lead in his Kitab-i Iqan) whereas scholars have considered these
> terms to be far more varied (and often extravagant) in their implications and associations, as
> is indicated in pre-Bahai Babi literature. Hasan Balyuzi did not deny the chaotic meanings
> and interpretations ascribed to such terms among Babis, he just wanted to see them tidied
> up! (Browne 1910; Balyuzi 1970, p. 73). Such is the homogenizing tendency in religious
> literature intent on fixing one body of truth. A reading of Babism by a postcolonial (or post
> postcolonial) scholar, which suggests multiple possibilities beyond Bahai or, for that matter,
> Shii scholasticism, is Dabashi’s section in Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest.
> As the present article has strongly implied, a Bahai postcolonial scholar would have
> to adopt a position probably even more radical than that suggested by Said’s contrapuntal
> method: they would need to begin by deconstructing the Orientalist image in Shoghi
> Effendi’s writings and situating the religion more firmly in its colonial contexts; but are
> Bahais capable of re-envisioning their tradition in this way? One factor making this difficult
> is the reverence with which Shoghi Effendi’s writings are viewed. Another is that intel-
> lectual inquiry within present-day Bahai communities is stifled and modern/postmodern
> movements of thought are viewed as godless and to be avoided. Crucially, nothing can be
> Humanities 2021, 10, 2                                                                                                            13 of 15
> 
> written about a Bahai topic that does not pass a Bahai system of review (MacEoin 2012).
> Notionally, scope lies within the faith (what could be called a Bahai form of ijtihad) leaving
> open avenues for new thinking outside the parameters already laid down in the revelation.
> However, this is the province of the world governing body (the Universal House of Justice)
> to decide on. Hitherto progressive ideas have been disabled by the system of regulation
> overseen by the faith’s institutions culminating in this “divinely guided” body. A similar
> tension obtains in the Bahai faith between conservative elders and liberal scholars as is
> to be found in other religious organizations, from Roman Catholic to Mormon. In the
> writer’s opinion a huge alteration in world conditions is required before Bahais can read
> their foundational texts in a more revolutionary way.
> 
> 7. Conclusions
> On the level of its propagation in the West in the twentieth century the foundational
> Bahai narrative operated within the orbit of the dominant Western discourse of its time,
> mimicking what many of the intelligentsia of Western countries had been saying for a
> long time with respect to the Islamic Middle East and other Muslim populations. Electing
> to write from a self-imposed self-orientalizing perspective not unusual among modern
> eastern intellectuals, Shoghi Effendi accessed Orientalist tropes to help him structure a
> binary religious narrative in which followers of the new revelation were opposed and
> persecuted by those entrenched in the previous, superseded one. In it, the Bahai faith
> incorporates modern socio-religious beliefs in a messianic program of reform, while Shiism
> remains in the grip of an inexorable decline presided over by an entrenched and reactionary
> “clergy”. Bahais acquired from the secular Christian-Enlightenment project a civilizing
> mission bringing progress and modernity to a Persia still coming out of its “medieval”
> backwardness, only instead of bringing Christianity they were re-releasing the power
> of the Bahai revelation in the benighted land into which it had been born. Its enemies,
> on the other hand, opportunely denied Bahais were followers of a religion, but branded
> them a political movement created by colonial powers to divide and weaken Muslims.
> Separating Bahaism from its Shii roots and activated in the context of its struggle with the
> Shii ulama and anti-Bahai Iranian intellectuals, the Bahai discourse is in reality constructed
> for and directed to a Western audience. In reporting the Bahai community as a movement
> from which a defunct Islam has been erased, but containing within this report a view of
> Islam that employs Orientalist tropes, such a narrative cannot be dissociated from but
> must be viewed as a functioning sub-discourse of Orientalism. As regards the situation
> of the Bahai faith’s self-presentation as a religious movement that campaigns against the
> human rights deprivation of its followers and advocates world peace while retaining at the
> same time a formative Orientalist element, the outcome is what postcolonialists call aporia
> (Greek: “irreconcilability”). This is dangerous for a religious community to be party to,
> especially in the twenty-first century with rising trends of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism
> across the world. Under this apprehension the article makes the argument that Bahais
> divest themselves of the Orientalism of their foundational narrative in the cause of better
> promoting their positive message of world unity
> 
> Funding: This research received no external funding.
> Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
> 
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> — *What is Baha'i Orientalism? (Used by permission of the curator)*