# Baha'i Religious History: Introduction

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Todd Lawson, Baha'i Religious History: Introduction, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Journal of Religious History
> Vol. 36, No. 4, December 2012
> doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9809.2012.01224.x
> 
> TODD LAWSON
> Special Issue Editor*
> 
> Baha’i Religious History
> 
> The Baha’i Faith is heir to the distinctive Abrahamic cluster of myths and
> religious grammars or styles of piety so familiar to scholars and students of
> religion. The inheritance has a pronounced islamicate tonality because of the
> time and place in which the Baha’i Faith arose as an identifiably Iranian version
> of the venerable Abrahamic religious elan. (This, of course, means that it also
> displays certain features suggestive of more purely Iranian religious pheno-
> mena such as Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism.) For example, the earliest
> extended doctrinal work by the founder of the Baha’i Faith, Baha’u’llah, is a
> commentary on the Qur’an and Hadith having to do with the end of time and
> the return of the Hidden Imam of Shi‘i Islam. Perhaps the single most striking
> and defining element of the Baha’i Faith, and its precursor, the Babi religion,
> is the conviction that God has spoken to the world again — and would continue
> to speak to the world as long as it lasts — through a specifically chosen
> individual of the same type he had spoken to the world through in the past:
> Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, to name only three. Such a prophetic history —
> what Baha’is term “progressive revelation” — is also Islamic in form; but, by
> going beyond the confines of usual Islamic belief which states that there will be
> no prophets after Muhammad, the Baha’i Faith casts itself in the unique and
> problematic position of being inherently Islamic in structure while being
> beyond the pale in actuality. So a question could arise: is the Baha’i Faith a
> legitimate or an illegitimate heir to islamicate Abrahamic ethical monotheism?
> 
> Todd Lawson is Associate Professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations,
> University of Toronto, Canada.
> * I am very grateful to the editors of the Journal of Religious History for this most interesting
> assignment, especially to Associate Professor Carole Cusack, general editor, and Anna Haunton,
> tireless chief of the editorial office at the journal. Both have been exceptionally kind, patient, and
> perspicacious during the process of putting this special issue together. I am also grateful to the
> authors of the articles included here who have with equal parts grace, diligence, and poise
> responded to my sometimes unreasonable and precipitate requests. I am especially grateful to
> Christopher Buck, Omid Ghaemmaghami, Graham Hassall, Anthony Lee, and Will C. van den
> Hoonaard for assistance and support above and beyond the role of author. I would also like to thank
> Rebekah Zwanzig for her kind editorial assistance at various stages along the way. Finally, for his
> suggestions and encouragement, I am most grateful to Franklin Lewis. This special issue has been
> made better by the generous input of numerous anonymous reviewers. We are all most grateful for
> their comments, criticisms, and suggestions. We are also grateful to the Spiritual Assembly of the
> Baha’is of Springfield, Illinois who kindly made available the negative for the frontispiece (p. iv).
> 
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> 464                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY
> 
> The record of history of prophets and their claims and communities is
> considered divine revelation. In the Baha’i instance, the most recent recipient
> of the revelation bears the title “Baha’u’llah,” an Arabic combination of two
> words: the first one, baha, means splendour or glory; the second is the usual
> word for God in Arabic, Allah, slightly transformed here, due to the laws of
> grammatical liaison, into the above ligature which then may be understood as
> “the splendour of God” or “the glory of God.” The semantic substrate need not
> detain us except to notice that in the extra-Qur’anic Arabic word baha we
> should also hear references to beauty, light, and precious treasure and under-
> stand thereby that through the linguistic algebra inherent in the poetics of the
> epithet it also connotes knowledge and wisdom of the highest value. The
> religious teachings, books, doctrines, and institutions identified with this name
> date from after 1853; however, the Baha’i era or cycle of history — an
> elemental feature of what may be thought of as a Baha’i philosophy of history
> or Heilsgeschichte — is held to have begun on 23 May 1844 when a young
> merchant laid claim to direct contact with the Hidden Imam of Ithna-‘ashari
> (Twelver) Shi‘ism. This figure, who is most widely known today as “the Bab”
> (Arabic for “gate, door”), was the founder of a short-lived religion whose chief
> purpose, Baha’is believe, was to prepare the way for the coming of
> Baha’u’llah; however, Baha’is also recognize that the religion of the Bab was
> a distinct, freestanding system of beliefs and values articulated in the specially
> charged atmosphere of Shi‘i messianic expectation. The twelfth or Hidden
> Imam of the Shi‘a had gone into hiding a thousand years earlier and a large part
> of Twelver Shi‘i piety, belief, and practice developed around the religious
> problem(s) connected with the identification and validation of true spiritual
> (and, as it happens, temporal) authority in the absence of the leader whose
> return is expected to inaugurate that glad day when injustice will be changed to
> justice throughout the world. During the first half of the nineteenth century,
> Shi‘i messianic expectation ran very high, especially in Iran. The success of the
> Bab’s claims to be simultaneously the representative of the Hidden Imam and
> the return of the Hidden Imam himself, was due in part to the intensity of this
> expectation and the way in which this expectation had acquired a unique
> technical and discursive language in the writings of a particular sect of Twelver
> Shi‘ism, known to history as the Shaykhiyya. All of the Bab’s earliest disciples
> and followers were either members or sympathetic to their philosophical and
> rationally based discussions of the otherwise supra-rational tenets of Twelver
> Shi‘ism, a chief one being, in this instance, the unnaturally prolonged life of
> the Hidden Imam from the year of his disappearance in 874 to the time of his
> reappearance or advent (zuhur) in 1844 (1260 AH).
> For Baha’is, history has both a horizontal and vertical dimension: it is both
> problem and sacrament. It is through what the uninitiated call “history” that the
> will of God becomes more accurately known and participated in by humanity.
> According to Baha’i teachings, 1844 marks the beginning of a new cycle or era
> in this history, one that is destined to be characterized by the spiritual matu-
> ration of the human race, perhaps a variation on the well-known Islamic
> mystical doctrine of the Perfect Man or Perfect Humanity (al-insan al-kamil).
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> INTRODUCTION                                               465
> This is frequently expressed in Baha’i literature in reference to the fact that the
> days of prophecy are finished and that we are now living the days of fulfillment.
> Muhammad can thus retain the title “seal of the prophets.” Whereas formerly,
> humankind was expected to wait for perfect guidance, Baha’is believe that this
> perfect guidance has now come. It remains only for this guidance to be
> properly followed, embodied, realized.
> In typical Baha’i discourse, Baha’u’llah is not called a prophet or a mes-
> senger or even an Imam, as one might expect given the Shi‘i Islamic context of
> his teachings and his claims. Rather the operative term used to describe his
> status and to indicate the nature of his religious authority is one taken from the
> mystico-philosophical lexicon of Islamic intellectual culture: manifestation of
> God, or, more accurately, “divine manifestation” or “manifestation of divinity”
> (in Arabic, mazhar ilahi). The most proximate source, apart from the Qur’an
> and the Hadith, for such terminology and the style its use would ultimately
> assume, is the characteristic, not to say poetic, Shi‘i mystical and philosophical
> theology developed over several centuries, to be bequeathed to the Baha’i
> tradition through the numerous dense and influential works produced by the
> first two masters of the above-mentioned Shaykhiyya, Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i
> (d. 1826) and his successor, Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1843). To a greater or
> lesser degree, this process was heir to the vast “ocean without shore” of one
> whom current scholarship has come to regard as possibly the greatest mystic of
> any tradition, Muhyiddin ibn al-‘Arabi “Ibn Arabi,” (d. 1240), whose prolific
> writings, including his seminal theorizing on the previously mentioned topic of
> the Perfect Man, would influence all later Islamic spiritual and philosophico-
> theological discourse. The manifestation in question is, in reality, the place
> where something appears, not the thing that appears. A mirror is the place of
> manifestation for the reflection we see in it. Because the relationship is so close
> — beyond contiguity, as it were — there is thus frequent confusion about who
> is who and what is what. This has been a fecund and generative trope in
> islamicate mystical poetry from the very beginning. Ibn Arabi’s achievement
> was to provide conceptual and terminological tools for a refinement of the
> discourse, a contribution of the first water to the ongoing and perhaps impos-
> sible task of making love reasonable.
> In the Baha’i writings, those who were formerly known as prophets and
> messengers (for instance all of the twenty-five figures explicitly named in the
> Qur’an, from Adam to Muhammad and presumably the 124,000 others theo-
> rized by the extra-Qur’anic learned tradition) are now best understood as
> having been divine manifestations, or places where the divine appeared most
> perfectly to the world. The number 124,000 may sound odd, both too precise
> and not precise enough. It should be remembered, however, that such doctrines
> were developed at the height of Islamic cosmopolitanism during which the
> religious sciences began consolidating and elaborating the basic religious spirit
> and identity indicated in the Qur’an, which insists that historically there has
> been no human community without a divine messenger;1 that each messenger
> 
> 1.   Qur’an 10:47.
> 
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> 466                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY
> 
> spoke or revealed the will of God in the language of their community2 and the
> racial, linguistic, and cultural differences which seem to separate the members
> of the human family are, in reality, designed so that all may share the mutually
> enriching experience of getting to know one another — not to despise each
> other.3
> The Baha’i Faith is interesting to historians of religion because it provides an
> example of how heresy becomes orthodoxy. It began in the middle of the
> nineteenth century in Iran — or Persia, if you prefer — emerging from within
> the bosom of its parent religion, Ithna-‘ashari (Twelver) Shi‘ism. Using terms
> such as “heresy” and “orthodoxy” in the study of Islam and its various inter-
> pretations is quite problematic and should usually be avoided. Nevertheless, in
> the case of the Baha’i Faith it is useful at least to think of its genesis and
> development within Islam as heretical or at least heterodox, even though from
> its very beginning, during the Babi phase of what is referred to in the literature
> as the Baha’i era, it is quite clear that such heresy or heterodoxy was not the
> function of a lack of piety and devotion to the central symbols and figures of
> Islam, especially Shi‘i Islam. What is clear, however, is that from the very
> beginning, the new religion espoused an uncompromising anti-clericalism (as
> distinct from being anti-Islamic) even as many of its strongest intellectuals and
> preachers had themselves been qualified at one degree or the other in the Shi‘i
> clerical hierarchy. The two most important figures were not, however, members
> of the priestly class. I am referring here to the actual founders, Sayyid ‘Ali
> Muhammad Shirazi (1819–1850), known to history as “the Bab,” founder of
> the Babi religion, and Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri (1817–1892), known chiefly as
> “Baha’u’llah,” founder of the Baha’i Faith proper.
> If the Baha’i Faith is anti-clerical, it is also fully committed to a notion of
> religious authority that encompasses both the spiritual and temporal realms.
> In the process of articulating the role and nature of such authority a number
> of central themes acquire absolute importance. Not least of these “sacra-
> ments,” history itself is understood as a shared experience through which the
> particular ethical monotheism of the Baha’i Faith acquires and produces
> meaning. Thus when we speak of “religious history” in connection with the
> Baha’i Faith we are engaged in pleonasm because, in a sense, all history is
> religious. As in the Qur’an and Islam, the experience of humanity on earth
> has been punctuated over time by the appearance of prophets and messengers,
> all of whom are implicated in the primordial divine covenant that the Qur’an
> describes as having occurred at a mysterious time and in a mysterious place
> before creation.4 In the case of Islam (and the Baha’i Faith) this myth of the
> covenant is also a myth of the birth of consciousness and history. The differ-
> ence between Islam and the Baha’i Faith here is quite simple: the latter
> teaches that two new, post-Muhammad, divinely guided messengers have
> appeared with new revelations and new religious laws, and that such
> 
> 2.   Qur’an 14:4.
> 3.   Qur’an 49:13.
> 4.   Qur’an 7:172.
> 
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> INTRODUCTION                                               467
> 
> messengers will continue to appear for the purpose of teaching humanity to
> carry on an “ever-advancing civilization.”
> The Islamic teaching that Muhammad was the seal of the prophets is well
> known. It is therefore important to point out that Baha’u’llah himself refers to
> Muhammad with devoted respect as the seal of the prophets and, as far as I
> know, never assumes for himself, the designation “Prophet” (nabi), though
> there are rare appearances of the word “Messenger” (rasul ) in his writings,
> just as there are very infrequent occurrences of these words in the writings of
> the Bab. These seem to exist to draw attention to the terminological refine-
> ment theorized and put forth in the use of “Divine Manifestation” the pre-
> ferred term, mentioned above, for the cognate role of one who receives divine
> revelation. The basic teachings of the Baha’i Faith are an insistence on the
> oneness of humanity, the oneness of God, and the oneness of religion through
> a universally applicable historical narrative. Such a preoccupation with unity
> is also obviously Islamic. But its centrality now seems to spring from two
> sources: the timeless and eternal metaphysical “Abrahamic” oneness familiar
> to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and explicated and theorized through neo-
> platonism, plus a kind of communal and existential exhaustion with the dis-
> unity and mutual animosity abroad in the greater Islamic world, especially
> during the age of European colonialism and adventure, when the Baha’i Faith
> was born.
> Other central teachings of the Baha’i Faith may have an islamicate genesis,
> such as the commitment to the harmony of “science and religion,” the
> primacy of education, the equality of men and women, the centrality of com-
> munity life and so on. For the interested reader, there are numerous sources
> available that outline the central tenets and history of the Baha’i Faith. While
> the articles included here may touch on some of these questions, none of
> them is devoted to the highly interesting and extremely important problem of
> the doctrinal and intellectual genesis of the Baha’i Faith “out of ” Islam. After
> all, each of its most important “theoreticians” was Muslim and its earliest
> literature was cast in the form of scriptural, viz Qur’anic, commentary. There
> is thus much to attract interested scholars with the necessary languages
> (Arabic, Persian, sometimes Turkish) and specific historical and cultural
> knowledge. The articles included here are occupied with more self-contained
> problems, that is to say problems and questions arising from within the
> “Baha’i ghetto,” whether in Iran, Australia, Canada, Cameroons, or the
> United States.
> For a number of reasons, the Baha’i Faith has not captured the attention of
> the academy to the extent one might have predicted when, at the beginning of
> the twentieth century, its ideas were embraced in the West as not only exotic
> and refreshing spiritual truth from the more spiritual and mysterious East, but
> also because they seemed to be remarkably in tune with the challenges and
> concerns of contemporary global society. When ‘Abdu’l-Baha (see photo-
> graph, p. iv), the son of Baha’u’llah, visited Europe and North America in
> 1911, 1912, and 1913 he was given a reception befitting a true holy man and
> sage with meetings and audiences in churches, synagogues, and universities all
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> 468                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY
> 
> along his highly publicized itinerary. His central concern, on the eve of World
> War I, was peace. And his central conviction was that peace is impossible
> without religious harmony. This became the mantra and desideratum of the
> small but growing Baha’i community: to privilege social and “political” peace
> as a religious value and to work for it with religious devotion. Here religious
> and social unity is an icon or reflection of the divine unity that serves as its
> central teaching and wellspring. This same Baha’i community was equipped
> with numerous teachings from the central figures, the Bab, Baha’u’llah, and
> ‘Abdu’l-Baha, his son and “Center of the Covenant.” These teachings included
> new prayers, new religious principles and laws, and what is considered a
> divinely ordained new system of organization whose purpose was, in the first
> place, to safeguard the unity of the Baha’i community itself so that it might, in
> the second place, reflect an image and example of such far flung and variegated
> unity to a world divided and at odds in every conceivable way. While Baha’i
> history and teachings have interested and existentially engaged individuals
> from all walks and strata of life, they still have not become a central concern
> in the academic world. The logical place for their scientific and systematic
> study and analysis is in university departments and faculties of religious
> studies. As perhaps the only “Islamic movement” of recent history to have
> “escaped the gravitational pull of Islam” and acquire a distinctive post-Islamic
> identity, it is clear that the Baha’i Faith offers an important cluster of questions
> to scholars of religion. Again, the articles collected in this issue are only
> tangentially or accidentally concerned with Baha’i doctrines and practices or
> institutions per se. No article takes a particular Baha’i belief or teaching and
> discusses it in terms of a broader and more inclusive or comparative religious
> history.
> The articles included in this issue, however, are written by many of the
> leading experts in Baha’i studies. They are arranged in rough chronological
> order according to the central problem or event discussed, beginning with
> Momen’s historical overview of the first years of the Baha’i Faith’s history in
> Qajar Iran. In the course of this investigation of the way in which the Baha’i
> community of Isfahan safeguarded and consolidated its own special identity
> against the adverse pressures of society, both political and religious, we are
> given insight into the subtle and complex workings of identity formation. In
> the next article, Ghaemmaghami focuses on a single topic, eschatology, to
> consider how the Baha’i insistence that the time for waiting had ended may
> have influenced the work of one of the more prominent and prolific Shi‘i
> scholars of the late nineteenth century. It will be remembered that in Twelver
> Shi’ism there is no more important doctrine than that of the Hidden Imam
> and the concomitant waiting for his return. This article illustrates perfectly
> just how acutely (and phobically) the new interpretation could be felt in
> some religious quarters. Vejdani has nuanced and explored the fascinating
> problem of Baha’i community identity and community formation through the
> optique of bibliographic history and, most importantly, print culture. In the
> process, he has also identified and privileged two important Baha’i religious
> “modalities” — communion with the divine word and universalism or
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> INTRODUCTION                                               469
> 
> transnationalism — and their problematization vis-à-vis technologically and
> deceptively “neutral” agencies such as printing.
> Baha’i teachings are quite specific: if a family can afford to educate only
> one child, it is the girl who must be educated because she stands to become
> the primary educator of the next generation through her maternal role.
> Zabihi-Moghaddam’s article regarding the pioneering attempts by an Iranian
> Baha’i community to provide schools for women and girls highlights the
> central Baha’i value of obedience to its religious teachings and its eventful
> and influential history in a specific case. Echevarria singles out the early
> Baha’i community of Canada to study the ways in which Baha’i women
> assumed roles of administrative agency, perhaps in advance of similar devel-
> opments in the wider Canadian society. The approach here is sociological
> and enriched with meticulous qualitative and quantitative research. Racial
> harmony has been a central Baha’i preoccupation from the very beginning.
> Buck tackles a somewhat vexed episode, or series of episodes, in the history
> of the American Baha’i community, specifically as it engaged with the
> African American population it was trying so hard to reach, during the Jim
> Crow era of legalized segregation. The intensity of Baha’i efforts to counter
> this pernicious, painful social disease may be thought to have been far in
> advance of that obtaining in the general public of the time. This is borne out
> by the initial attraction, (discussed here), to Baha’i teachings of “race amity”
> by the brilliant, eloquent, and influential W. E. B. Du Bois, among others
> within black intelligentsia. Hassall offers a rich and probing investigation of
> the character of the relatively small Australian Baha’i community during an
> obviously crucial phase in its growth. He raises many questions for further
> consideration, especially as one considers the relationship of the Baha’i com-
> munity to the “host” religious institutions of the time. Lee focuses on Africa
> and the spread of the Baha’i Faith in the Cameroons during the 1950s and
> early 1960s. In the early 1950s, the Baha’i Faith was introduced to West
> Africa and grew rapidly; but beyond growth, Lee attempts to investigate the
> social forces that contributed to early Baha’i conversions and allowed it to
> develop as a religious movement in the British Cameroons. He also demon-
> strates how this spread depended upon the way in which the new Baha’i
> principles and administrative order came into conversation with existing reli-
> gious forms and debates. Finally, Yazdani brings the discussion up to more
> recent date exploring in great detail the systematic othering of the Baha’i
> community in Iran through the writings of Ayatollah Khomeini, especially in
> the period leading up to what was once characterized as the most successful
> revolution in modern times. In this fascinating article, it is also shown that it
> was not only during the nineteenth century that Shi‘i messianism loomed as
> an influential social and religious mobilizer, but that it continued to play a
> crucial role in the Iran of 1979–80.
> It is hoped that these nine articles will be of interest to the professional
> historian of religion as well as to the more general reader. Unlike at the
> beginning of the twentieth century when the Baha’i Faith acquired notoriety for
> its ideas, its “social gospel,” today when it is encountered it is frequently in the
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
> 470                       J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY
> 
> deplorable context of its continued persecution in its motherland. These articles
> combine to demonstrate that the worldwide Baha’i community has continued
> to maintain its dedication to its challenging and lofty religious ideals even if it
> has from time to time been distracted from directly pursuing them in order to
> fight for its very survival, particularly in Iran.
> 
> © 2012 The Author
> Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association
>
> — *Baha'i Religious History: Introduction (Used by permission of the curator)*