# 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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> Views8477 views since posted 2003-10-19; last edit 2022-02-17 17:00 UTC;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../swartz_cole_modernity_millennium;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> Citation: ris/1089
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> — *Modernity and the Millennium, by Juan Cole: Review (Used by permission of the curator)*