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

Denis MacEoin

Times Literary Supplement, 1999

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

Author: Juan R.I. Cole

Publisher: New York, Columbia University Press, 1998, also distributed by Kalimat Press as Volume Nine of the series Studies in the Bábí and Bahá'í Religions)

xi + 264 pages, notes and index. ISBN 0-231-11080-4 and 0-231-11081-1 (pbk).

Review by: Denis MacEoin.

New prophet, new law

Our perception of the Middle East and Islam being what it is, it's not very
surprising that most Westerners think of the region as hopelessly
unreformed, as, perhaps, beyond reform, in a way that is not thought true
of, say, non-Muslim Africa or Latin America. Faced with Saudi conservatism,
or the Taliban at work in Afghanistan, the average onlooker may well be
forgiven the judgment, however sweeping.

There is no question but that, in recent years, Islamic revivalism has
embraced a "back to basics" ethic that manifests itself most notoriously in
public floggings, the enforced veiling of women, or calls (as in Pakistan)
for the universal implementation of shar'ia law. Yet, go back a century or
so, to Turkey or Iran or Palestine and an equally astonishing picture
presents itself: one of both religious and secular reformism on a
breathtaking scale.

In country after country during the second half of the last century and the
first decades of this, Muslims demanded and achieved reforms, that, in the
nature of things, encompassed both religion and State. Everything had to be
modelled on the expanding, successful West, of course, and very little was
considered sacrosanct. Reform affected law, education women's rights,
minority rights, and even the character of the Islamic State itself (as in
the agitation that led to the new Iranian constitution of 1906).

Juan R. I. Cole's elegantly presented study brings the period and its
reformers bark on to centre stage, while doing so through an unfamiliar
medium: the reformism of a new, post-Islamic religion, the Bahai faith,
which exists today as a widespread and rapidly growing new religious
movement. This is not as perverse as it may seem. Bahá'ísm ranks very high
indeed in the hate list of modern Muslims, sandwiched somewhere between
Salman Rushdie and Zionism. The reason is simple: despite the smallness of
its numbers, Bahá'ísm represents the ultimate threat to Islam; it is a
movement that abrogates Islamic law and puts a new prophet and a new law in
its place.

This has all sorts of resonances today, but in the last century (Bahá'ísm
developed through the 1860s, 70s and 80s) it was heady stuff. Secular
reformers had already seen the inevitability of abolishing Islamic law,
while their clerical opponents perceived a future devoted to rearguard
actions in defence of the faith.

The Bahá'í prophet, Baha' Allah (1817-92), stands out as a moderate figure
in this debate, abrogating Islam while insisting on the primacy of religion
within the State. Cole presents the prophet's teachings in an original and
accurate manner, demonstrating for the first time in many years the
liberalism and even radicalism that exemplified the new creed, and tracing
connections with reforms in Istanbul, Tehran and elsewhere. Modern Bahá'ís
have tarnished that picture by a heavy-handed conservative interpretation of
Baha' Allah and his ideas, and it is refreshing to see someone of Cole's
stature rescue both from their smothering embrace.

It is a pity, however, that Professor Cole didn't spend a little more time
discussing the Azali Babis. The Babis were a militant sect that preceded the
Bahá'ís, and the Azalis were and are its only surviving splinter group, and
great rivals of the Bahá'ís at one time. Although their numbers were tiny,
many Azalis played an important part in the Iranian constitutional
revolution. The Bahá'ís, on the other hand, were conspicuous by their
absence. Yet Babism is backward-looking, mystical, conservative and crippled
by some of the most impractical laws in religious history whereas Bahá'ísm
is in principle liberal, forward-looking, delighted by modernity and eager
for social improvement. There is an anomaly here that the present work only
goes part of the way to explaining.

But even a partial explanation is much more than we have had before. Above
all, Cole is to be congratulated for his forthrightness in treating Baha
Allah, the main focus of his research, not as a god, but as a man and an
articulate exponent of human rights and reformist principles. If, in future,
we are to see a realistic biography of the Bahá'í leader, it will be along
these lines, rather than those of the hagiographies which have, until now,
dominated the field.

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