# From Iran East and West

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Juan Cole, From Iran East and West, Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1984, bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> STUDIES IN BABi AND BAHA'i HISTORY
> VOLUME TWO
> 
> FROM IRAN EAST AND WEST
> EDITED BY
> JUAN R. COLE , PH.D. , AND
> MOO/AN MOMEN , M.A. , M.B.
> 
> KAuMAT PRESS
> Los ANGELES
> 
> ("   htoo
> •
> 
> Copyright © 1984 by Kalimat Press
> All Rights Reserved
> 
> Manufactured in the United States of America
> 
> Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
> (Revised for volume 2)
> Main entry under title:
> 
> Studies in Babi and Baha'i history.
> 
> Includes bibliograph ies and indexes.
> 1. Bahai Faith- History-Addresses, essays. lectures.
> 2. Babism-History- Addresses, essays, lectures .
> 1. Momen, Moojan .       11 . Cole, Juan R.
> BP330.S78 1982        297 .89        83-227
> ISBN (}'93377(}'16-2 (v . 1)
> ISBN (}'93377(}'4(}'S (v. 2)
> CONTENTS
> •
> Preface by Juan R. Cole                                   IX
> 
> Baha'u'llah and the Naq~bandi Sufis in Iraq,
> 1854-1856
> Juan R. Cole, Ph .D ., Assistant Professor of History,
> University of Michigan , Ann Arbor                          1
> 
> Baha'i Influences on Mirza 'Abdu'lh'h, Qajar Court
> Musician and Master of the Radif
> Margaret L. Caton , Ph.D., University of California,
> Los Angeles                                             31
> 
> Early Zoroastrian Conversions to the Baha'i Faith
> in Yazd, Iran
> Susan Stiles, M.A " University of Arizona                 62
> 
> Ibrahim George Kheiralla and the Baha'i Faith In
> America
> Richard Hollinger, M,A. , University of California,
> Los Angeles                                            .25
> 
> Reality Magazine: Editorship and Ownership of an
> American Baha'f Periodical
> Peter Smith , Ph ,D" University of Lancaster, England
> 
> Baha'i Conversions in Malwa, Central India
> William Garlington, Ph,D,                                ]57
> 
> I   Bibliographies
> 
> Index                                                    ]99
> 
> "
> V II
> 
> C DV    hted
> PREFACE
> 
> The Babi movement, begun in Shiraz in 1844 by Sayyid /\Ii
> Muhammad,
> •
> the Bab, was greeted by many Iranian Muslims as
> the answer to their hopes for the coming of the messianic Promised One (Mahdi) and the advent of Christ. Partly because of
> the repression of the movement (1848-1853) by the Iranian
> government and the uiama, and partly because of the militancy
> of some Babis, the original spread of the religion was accompanied by social upheaval and, in several instances, military engagements . A second phase began in the 1860s when Mirza
> l:Iusayn-'A1i. Baha'u'lIah, successfully pressed claims to being
> the spiritual return of the Bab, the one whom the latter had
> foretold God would make manifest. Almost all Bab,s SWiftly
> became Baha'is, and new believers from other religious backgrounds were attracted by Baha'u'lIah's charisma as well.
> Baha'u'Uah, from his places of exile in Turkey and Palestine,
> preached a new social doctrine centered on the unity of all mankind, the unity of the great world religions, and peaceful approaches to the resolution of social conflict. In the autocratic
> Middle East he advocated constitutionalism and parliamentary
> government, and in a society no t far from feudalism he proposed a more equal distribution of wealth . These social ideas
> were nevertheless proclaimed as part of a specifically religious
> message . Baha'u'lIah's successor and eldest son, :Abdu'I-Baha
> :Abbas, developed the universalist and liberal aspects of his
> father's message even further, preaching peace, universal love,
> and world government on his trips to Europe and North America
> (1910-1913).
> •
> lX
> 
> C JDV   hted
> x      by Juan R. Cole
> 
> The early phases both of the Babi movement and its successor,
> the Baha'i Faith, provoked exciting and prodigious scholarship
> in nineteenth-century Europe, engaging the brilliant talents of
> Gobineau , Browne, Goldziher, Huart , von Rosen, and others
> in the forefront of Orientalist studies. Admittedly, they were
> sometimes shackled by the drawbacks of the Orientalist tradition , with its assumption of European superiority and its preoccupation with ideas and texts, almost to the exclusion of social
> reality. Nevertheless, they produced a solid corpus of scholarship on the Babis and early Baha'is that is only now beginning
> to be superseded.
> Ironically, the early scholarly interest in the religion died out
> by the 1920s, and for nearly fifty years virtually no European
> or North American academic scholar published any significant
> work on it. Yet from 1920 to the present, the Baha'i Faith has
> undergone important changes and expanded greatly-becoming, if anything, more important than it was when Browne
> devoted so much study to it. In Iran the faith grew more organized and its intellectual culture began to take on greater sophistication . [t remained the largest non-Muslim religious minority,
> outnumbering the mostly Armenian Christians, the Jews, and
> the Zoroastrians. The American Baha'i community, founded in
> the 1890s, continued to show vigor, involving itself with activities aimed at bringing blacks and whites together as equals in a
> racist America . Baha'i communities were founded throughout
> the world, and in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the movement
> suddenly encompassed masses in Uganda , India, and elsewhere .
> Since 1970 academic writing on the Bab, and Baha', religions
> has begun once more to see print. The rapid expansion of Middle East Studies as an academic discipline in Europe and North
> America in the 1960s and 1970s was one factor. Anthropologists
> and others who went to [ran encountered Baha',s and wrote
> about them . The surge of growth the religion experienced in the
> United States and Great Britain (1968-1975) also provoked the
> interest of many young Westerners. some of them converts . Immigrant Iranian scholars, whether they were themselves Baha',s
> or were simply interested in the history of the movement. have
> also been important in the revival of European-language
> •
> Preface      XI
> 
> scholarship on it. Since 1979, the persecution of the Baha'is by
> Iran's government has further aroused interest in the imperiled
> minority.
> Within the Baha', community, Great Britain has been the
> center and vanguard of the new Bab,-Baha', history. Hasan
> Balyuzi , a distinguished Iranian Baha', originally trained at the
> American University in Beirut, later at the London School of
> Economics, and long resident in England, produced full-length
> treatments of the lives of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha
> in the seventies. Younger Baha'i scholars in Europe participated
> in the groundbreaking Lancaster seminars organized by British
> sociologist Peter Smith. Important dissertations have recently
> been produced on the Bab, or Baha', religions by Smith at Lancaster, Denis MacEoin at Cambridge, and Abbas Amanat at
> Oxford.
> Moojan Momen, trained at Cambridge, not only began this
> series of volumes on Bab, and Baha', history but published a
> compilation of European archival documents bearing on Bab,
> and Baha'i history. It was only natural that the first volume of
> this series featured contributions from the Lancaster group.
> Although academic studies on the Baha', Faith in North
> America still lag behind those in Europe, new energy is apparent on the Western side of the Atlantic, as well. The first Baha',
> History Conference held in America took place in Los Angeles
> in August 1983. It is the intention of the present volume to
> draw together some of those academics working on the subject
> in America (or, in the case of Peter Smith, working on the
> American Baha', community). No attempt has been made at being exhaustive, and a great deal of talent exists that is not
> represented here . All the contributors to the present volume
> were present at the Los Angeles conference. Although efforts
> were made to attract contributions from outside that circle,
> they have met with no success at this point-though it is the
> hope of the editors that this series will increaSingly publish articles from authors of many backgrounds.
> If this volume has a theme, it might be the historical impact
> of the Baha', Faith outside the circle of Persian-speaking Iranian
> ~i'is within which the Bab, movement originated . In my piece
> xii     by Juan R. Cole
> 
> on Baha'u11ah and the Kurdish Sufis of Iraq, I discuss the interplay of Babi themes of messianic advent and the Sufi mystical emphasis on internal spiritual renewal. The piece analyzes
> for the first time an important but heretofore little-known early
> mystical poem written in Arabic by Baha'u'Uah, which contains
> strong hints that even in the 1850s he felt he had a private
> mission of reform to carry out in the Babi community. Margaret
> Caton of U.C.L.A. treats BaM'i influences on the Iranian court
> musician, Mirza I\bdu'llah . The mystical milieu of the traditional musicians and the BaM'i Faith's approval of music (in
> contradistinction to the legalist Islam of the ayatu 'llahs, which
> forbids it) made the religion appealing to one of the great
> compilers of the Persian repertoire . The BaM'i Faith touched
> another out-group in ~i'i Iran in a Significant way- the Zoroastrians, an ancient Iranian religious community. Susan Stiles
> of the University of Arizona makes interesting use of heretofore
> unstudied biographical materials to delineate the gradual process of conversion among some Zoroastrians to the Baha'i
> Faith .
> Richard Hollinger of U.C.L.A. gives us a study of Ibrahim
> Kheiralla, the Lebanese Baha'i who first spread the religion to
> the United States but later renounced his allegiance to Baha'-
> u'llah's appointed successor, I\bdu'l-Baha. Hollinger makes use
> of a mass of primary source materials he has unearthed in
> public and private archives. Peter Smith of Lancaster University
> traces the fate of a BaM'i periodical published in New York in
> the 1920s, illuminating important facets of the intellectual and
> social history of the American Baha'i community in that formative period. William Garlington, late of Australian National
> University, discusses in comparative perspective the issue of
> recent conversion to the Baha'i Faith by Hindu villagers in Central India, concluding that the universalist themes in the movement allowed it to act as a cultural bridge in expressing the spiritual aspirations of those who embraced it.
> The contributions in this volume span the entire history of
> the Baha'i Faith, from its early inception in Iran and Iraq through
> its spread to non-Muslim communities and to other lands and
> 
> C JDV   hted
> •••
> Preface      XIU
> 
> cultures in North America and India. The rich source materials
> to which the contributors have drawn attention, and the exciting conclusions they have been able to draw from them, should
> encourage greater academic interest in the history of the Baha'i
> Faith. It is hoped that this series will serve all those wishing to
> gain a better appreciation of the sweep of Baha'i history.
> 
> JUAN R. COLE
> 27 JUNE 1984
> STERLING , VIRGINIA
> 
> C JDV   hted
>
> — *From Iran East and West (Used by permission of the curator)*