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
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(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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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).
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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
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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)