Modernity and the Millennium, by Juan Cole: Review
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Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Merlin Swartz, Modernity and the Millennium, by Juan Cole: Review, bahai-library.com.
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Modernity and the Millennium, by Juan Cole:

Review

Merlin Swartz

published in American Historical Review105:3

2000-06

Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Bahá'í Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East

Author: Juan R. I. Cole

Published by: Columbia University Press, New York, 1998. Pp. xi, 254.

Review by Merlin Swartz, Boston University

review published in American Historical Review Vol. 105 No. 3 (June 2000)

In this carefully researched and perceptive work, Juan R. I. Cole
proposes to look at the Western, Enlightenment idea of modernity
through "new eyes": that is, through the eyes of Bahá'ísm,
particularly those of the leadership of the movement during the
formative period of its history. The basis for Cole's selection of
Bahá'ísm as the lens through which to view the idea of modernity is
nowhere spelled out explicitly, perhaps because his reasons are
largely implicit in his analysis of the encounter between the two.
Bahá'ísm arose in the Middle East and remained socially and, to some
extent, spiritually close to its historical roots; at the same time,
its religious character, and especially its millenarian stance,
enabled it to distance itself from its religious past and to view
that past — indeed, the whole of the past — in a critical light.
Bahá'ísm saw itself as the culmination of the earlier monotheistic
traditions, both as fulfillment and as corrective. At least in terms
of its own self-understanding, early Bahá'ísm represents an
orientation that is neither Eastern nor Western. In the analysis and
critical assessment of modernity, Bahá'ísm does indeed offer
interesting possibilities and perspectives.

Cole's examination of the Western notion of modernity focuses on a number of
key issues, among them: religious freedom and the relationship of religion
to the state; political absolutism and democracy; nationalism and the state;
and patriarchy and gender relations. Cole devotes an entire chapter to a
discussion of each of these complex issues. He insists on viewing Bahá'ísm,
especially during its formative period, as a tradition in flux or, one might
say, as a set of general principles and values that had to be fleshed out,
refined, and adjusted in response both to changing conditions and to the
perspectives of other intellectual and spiritual traditions. This seems
clearly to have been the view of the early leaders of the movement,
including Baha'ullah himself. Within the context of these qualifications,
Bahá'ísm did come to define its position vis-á-vis the critical
issues posed by Enlightenment modernity. On a number of the principles to
which Enlightenment modernity was committed, Bahá'ísm declared itself in
essential agreement: for example, on the question of the separation of
"church" and state, the primacy of the individual conscience, gender
equality, and the rule of law.

But if Bahá'ísm did come to endorse many of the characteristic ideas and
values of modernity, Bahá'ísm did find some aspects of modernity, especially
some of the larger historical consequences that followed, or that seemed to
follow, from its implementation profoundly troubling. The idea of an
autonomous reason, and what Bahá'ísm saw as the repressive potential of a
reason freed from the constraints of a transcendental frame of reference,
raised serious questions at both the theoretical and practical levels. The
industrialization of war and the enlarged destructive capacity of the modern
army, all developed within the framework of modernity, had led to violence
and death on a scale without precedent in the history of humankind. These
and other reservations, articulated repeatedly in the early literature of
the movement, led Bahá'ís increasingly to reject modernism's emphasis on the
primacy of reason and its secularism — its Jacobin tendencies —
and to call for the integration of religious dimension into the framework of
Enlightenment modernism. Bahá'ísm insisted that only a religious dimension
is capable of providing the kind of constraints that the secularist and
rationalist aspects of modernist doctrines need to protect them against
excess — a concern dramatically underscored by the events of the modern
period. To the degree that Cole endorses this Bahá'í emphasis on the
importance of a religious dimension, some readers will undoubtedly see the
present work as in part an apologia for religion. Whether one agrees with
the position articulated in this work or not, one must concede that Cole has
raised a set of issues that demand careful, critical attention.

This reflective and insightful work is based on an impressive array of
primary (in some cases unpublished) sources, not to mention a very large
body of secondary, interpretative studies, as will be seen from the notes
and the bibliography at the end of the work. It is an important study that
will commend itself especially to those who are concerned with modernist
doctrine, Bahá'í responses to that doctrine, and the implications of both
for a fuller understanding of important facets of Middle Eastern history,
especially during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

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-- Modernity and the Millennium, by Juan Cole: Review (Used by permission of the curator)