# Beyond Pluralism

*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: Moojan Momen, Beyond Pluralism, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Beyond Pluralism
> 
> Moojan Momen
> 
> 1995-04
> 
> ... I believe that there is, for Bahá'ís, a world beyond pluralism. I have
> not fully worked out these ideas but I gave a preliminary account of them in
> an "Is the Bahá'í Faith a World Religion?" which I wrote for Sen McGlinn's
> magazine Soundings. I will try to summarize and develop these thoughts further
> here.
> 
> The Bahá'í Faith at present appears as yet another religion, a competitor in
> the world's religious market place. But I would argue that this is a
> distortion of its real nature, a result of the present stage in its historical
> development. This distortion is caused by the fact that up to now, all of the
> leaders and intellectuals of the Bahá'í community have come from a narrow
> cultural and intellectual basis (an Iranian-European-North American axis).
> They have interpreted the Bahá'í teachings in accordance with their cultural
> perspectives and the result is what we see today.
> 
> The Bahá'í Faith is, however, I would argue, in reality, a metareligion. It is
> not another religion that has come to take the place of the existing religions
> but rather a way of looking at the religious experience of the whole of
> humanity. Philip Smith presents an interesting diagramatic view of this in the
> first issue of the Bahá'í Studies Review, a diagram which, unfortunately, due
> to the limitations of the Internet, I am unable to reproduce here.
> 
> I cannot believe that several thousand years of human religious experience and
> knowledge are now all redundant because Bahá'u'lláh has come. Are the insights
> produced by the great philosophers and mystics of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism
> all going to put aside? No, rather I believe that, in the future, people from
> other cultures, Hindus, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists, Chinese
> religionists, and native peoples, will produce their own interpretations and
> developments of the Bahá'í Faith from their own cultural and religious
> viewpoints. These new views of the Bahá'í Faith will, I am sure, be scarcely
> recognizable to us who know only the Bahá'í Faith today. They may in fact
> possibly be much more recognizably Hindu, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist,
> Chinese, and native religionist than what we today call the Bahá'í Faith--in
> the same way that the Bahá'í Faith in Iran is recognizably close to Shi`i
> Islam in ethos, when compared with the Bahá'í Faith in America.
> 
> Every culture and religion sees the spiritual world in different ways and has
> its differing emphases on the path to spiritual progress. If, as I have argued
> in "Relativism: a basis for Bahá'í Metaphysics" (SBBR 5), these are all merely
> different viewpoints on "the Truth", then the Bahá'í Faith should embrace them
> all.
> 
> What I see the Bahá'í Faith doing is taking the religious traditions of the
> world and developing these along their own traditional paths of spirituality.
> What then is the role of the Bahá'í Faith? If each religious tradition is
> going to carry on its own path, is there any point in the advent of the Bahá'í
> Faith? The answer to these questions I would see as being three-fold.
> 
> There is the matter of eliminating religious conflict and prejuduices, and
> the unity of humanity under the umbrella of the Covenant. Also, although each
> tradition will in a sense be developing along its own lines, they will be
> bound in by ties of loyalty to the Centre of the Covenant, the Universal House
> of Justice.
> 
> The Bahá'í teaching will act as guidelines to keep the development of these
> different spiritual paths along the "correct" lines. What I mean by this is
> that there are certain principles in the Bahá'í teachings, such the abolition
> of priests and other religious professionals, the equal spiritual station of
> all humanity, the spiritual equality of men and women, etc. These Bahá'ís
> principles would act as constraints on the ways in which any particular group
> could develop. No group would be permitted (by its own members awareness of
> these Bahá'í principles, if nothing else) to develop in ways that contravened
> these principles.
> 
> The world-wide Bahá'í community would act as a medium in which these
> different spiritual pathways would become globally available. But much more
> than this, there would be a cross-fertilization of religious ideas and
> practices such that, for example, Bahá'í mystics from Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic
> and other backgrounds would meet and discuss their experiences and learn from
> each other. This cross-fertilization of religious experience will be the basis
> for the further spiritual evolution of humanity. Needless to say that we are
> at present completely unable even to hazard a guess as to what form this might
> take.
> 
> METADATA
> 
> Views12362 views since posted 1998; last edit 2012;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../momen_beyond_pluralism;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> Shortlink: bahai-library.com/512
> Citation: ris/512
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> — *Beyond Pluralism (Used by permission of the curator)*