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World Order

ARE WE DOOMED?

Editorial

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COUNTERCULTURE?

Wendy M. Heller

MAROON IDENTITY IN JAMAICA: 1655-1738

Rhett S. Jones

THE CHALLENGE OF THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH

V. Elvin Johnson

THE MISSIONARY AS HISTORIAN: WILLIAM MILLER AND THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH

Douglas Martin

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 10, NUMBER 3 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Editorial Assistant

MARTHA PATRICK

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence and changes of address should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copies $1.60.

Copyright © 1976, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Are We Doomed?

Editorial

6 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

11 What Happened to the Counterculture?

by Wendy M. Heller

18 Maroon Identity in Jamaica: 1655-1738

by Rhett S. Jones

31 The Challenge of the Bahá’í Faith

by V. Elvin Johnson

43 The Missionary as Historian: William Miller and the Bahá’í Faith

a book review by Douglas Martin

64 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Are We Doomed?

A CRESCENDO of cynicism, of desperation, of madness and perversion rises from daily papers, weekly news magazines, and television news programs and seems to wrench from the weakening grasp of Everyman his personal hopes, his faith in social institutions, his trust in his leaders and guardians, in his spiritual counselors, in his neighbor, and in himself. He perceives government as confused and corrupt; the very food he eats is said to cause disease. His children are growing up in what by a euphemism we call a jungle—for no real jungle was ever half so inimical to life and humanity.

In the present nightmare of world events, the individual is alienated from the social groupings which he once found so comforting and secure. Inherited values, patriotism. religious faith, moral certainties for many seem to have lost their basis. The revolutionary stratagems which have offered themselves as replacements of traditional modes are heading toward the same emptiness, the same disillusionment. Revolutionary movements; wars of “liberation”; authoritarian regressions from right and left—so smothered in rhetoric that right and left have lost their meaning; patchwork reforms of present systems; pathetic attempts to revert to a happier past, are losing their power to persuade the individual that his salvation and the world’s may be found in any of these. Is there then no hope? Are we doomed? Is there any room, any excuse for optimism?

We need not be surprised at these developments. Bahá’u’lláh has written of the travail that awaited the world:

The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divides and afflicts the human race is daily increasing. The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective.

During World War II, Shoghi Effendi foretold our present plight in terms which could then scarcely be believed, even after the horror of Hiroshima:

A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. . . . Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.

[Page 3] Superweapons do not alone suffice to bring about the spiritual, ideological, moral, metaphysical, economic, and social disorder into which we are descending. Bahá’ís have known—or have been told, though who until now could fully comprehend!—that the old order was truly passing and that its disappearance would be marked by profound upheavals. Now that the disintegration of that order is accelerating at an explosive rate, Bahá’ís remind themselves that they, of all people, must not succumb to despair. The values taught by the principal Figures of the Bahá’í Faith are of two kinds: the moral values, which enable people and nations to live together in harmony, values which will be universal in a world become totally interdependent; and social and esthetic patterns, tied to language and culture, to regional and national differences, and to the uniqueness of individuals, which bring charm and diversity to life and assure that loving unity will not entail deadly uniformity. Our economic and material condition is ineluctably tied to an acceptance of valid moral principles, revealed by the Divine Agent for our present epoch, an epoch whose beginning remains largely unnoticed in a spectacularly crumbling world. Politics, economics, social institutions cannot be controlled by technocrats if there is no agreement on goals and values. Shoghi Effendi paints the new order in these unforgettable words:

The unity of the human race, as envisaged by Bahá’u’lláh, implies the establishment of a world commonwealth in which all nations, races, creeds and classes are closely and permanently united, and in which the autonomy of its state members and the personal freedom and initiative of the individuals that compose them are definitely and completely safeguarded.

After a detailed exposition of the structure of international institutions, Shoghi Effendi describes the world that will be:

National rivalries, hatreds and intrigue will cease, and racial animosity and prejudice will be replaced by racial amity, understanding and cooperation. The causes of religious strife will be permanently removed, economic barriers and restrictions will be completely abolished, and the inordinate distinction between classes will be obliterated.

He goes on to speak of economic justice, the conversion of energy formerly dissipated on war to peaceful technological achievements, the extermination of disease, and “the furtherance of any . . . agency that can stimulate the intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.”

The amazing thing is that it is in our power as individuals to contribute to these goals. Without our efforts they cannot be realized. Our personal efforts, outside the framework of this divine plan, would be equally unavailing. But within this scheme each of us can be totally involved in the achievement of a new state of affairs. It is not enough consciously [Page 4] to direct one’s efforts to the realization of specific political, economic, or social goals. One must begin to develop the qualities enumerated by Shoghi Effendi:

. . . a rectitude of conduct which . . . offers a striking contrast to the deceitfulness and corruption that characterize the political life of the nation . . . ; a holiness and chastity that are diametrically opposed to the moral laxity and licentiousness which defile the character of a not inconsiderable number of its citizens; an inter-racial fellowship completely purged from the curse of racial prejudice which stigmatizes the vast majority of its people . . .

Individuals thus purifying their lives and working together for common goals will prepare themselves “for the time when the Hand of Destiny will have directed them to assist in creating . . . that World Order which is now incubating within . . . their Faith.”

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

SOCIETY is held together not only by such needs as providing food and assuring survival. It is held together also by elements too numerous to list or even to understand. Yet no group of people can create a society unless they develop a sense of belonging together—of sharing ideals and values.

In this issue we are happy to present two articles which discuss the attempts of two very different kinds of people to create a community. One article—Rhett S. Jones’ “Maroon Identity in Jamaica, 1655-1738” —discusses a group of Jamaican slaves, who, wanting freedom, refused to accept slavery and built a community because of shared ideals and a willingness to work together for common goals. The other article—Wendy M. Heller’s “What Happened to the Counterculture?”—discusses how radical students at universities turned out to be an accidental crowd which has made no contributions to anyone. The Maroons, though ultimately overcome by their more numerous opponents, succeeded through their discipline, loyalty, trust, love of freedom, and resourcefulness, in holding “out to the last”—in words of a seventeenth-century observer—and in making “terms not inglorious to themselves.” One might also say that to this day their determination to maintain a community against all odds has had an effect on the Jamaican character. The counterculturists of the sixties, on the contrary, for all their rhetoric and uproar, proved to have no genuinely shared ideals around which to build a community: hence the noise, the inevitable collapse, and the dispersion to the winds. One is reminded of the observation that “The tendency in modern times is to sacrifice the community for the individual, not realizing that if the community,” with its shared ideals, “is destroyed, all individuals will be sacrificed. . . .”

* * *

The Editors have recently become aware of three corrections which James Moorhead had hoped to make in his essay which appeared in our Bicentennial issue (Winter 1975-76). Dr. Moorhead writes that the title of his article should have been changed to “Religion and American Identity: 1607-1776,” in order to avoid confusion. He originally chose “1609-1776,” as his earliest quotation was from the year 1609. However, he feels the date should be “1607” to coincide with the settlement at Jamestown. The second correction concerns John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments Most Special and Memorable cited on p. 30 as having been published in 1641. The earliest English edition under the present title appeared in 1554. The final correction involves the date of the Hampton Court Conference, incorrectly given, on p. 32, as 1694. The Conference took place in 1604. The Editors admire Dr. Moorhead’s striving for accuracy even in the smallest details and very much regret that, in the press of preparing the Bicentennial issue, they have missed the author’s desire to make these corrections.

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To the Editor

NONSENSE

I very much appreciate the long end thoughtful review you gave The New Nonsense in the Fall ’75 issue of WORLD ORDER. Except for yourself and Professor Neusner of Brown (in The Chronicle of Higher Learning 11/18/74) no reviewer seems to have noticed that the book is serious. . . .

Since starting the work which led to this book and its predecessor The Dying Self (Wesleyan, 1969), I have been increasingly amazed at how authoritarian and un-openminded we are in this supposedly free-wheeling Republic. In The Dying Self, for example, I gave some of the fundamentals from brain anatomy and physiology on which I felt one could base a reasonable hypothesis as to how the waking “I” arises in man. I conceived of it as a functional system arising chiefly in neocortex, and very much dependent upon individual nurture (which in turn, of course, relies heavily upon tradition). The basic notion here was that the “I” or “consciousness” is a variable in man, and involves a critical degree of development, short of which man remains inwardly enslaved, as animals are, to his instincts and his training. Conversely, when the “I” is developed beyond the critical point mentioned, man attains a freedom to think and act which sets him apart from the animals or from most other men. I said this was analogous to the state of grace; the “I” or rational-imaginative self no longer subservient to lust, primitive egotism, etc., but free to seek its own objections, was the modern equivalent of the soul delivered from the darkness of sin, from Maya.

This seemed to me clear enough, but several scientific acquaintances, and one scientific reviewer, balked at my use of the word soul. The reviewer accused me of trying to revive the medieval concept of soul in toto. Even though I most carefully qualified what I said—was at some pains to point out that I was merely demonstrating that ancient notions such as the soul and grace had perhaps a clear basis in physiological psychology—these people almost deliberately misread me. They had been conditioned to react so negatively to the word soul that their emotions overwhelmed their reason and imagination, and they became literally unable to see the point I was making.

Most scientists and intellectuals nowadays are so hidebound on the question of religion that they cannot bear to back off and admit that anything good may have come of it. This (and not his real defects as a thinker) is the reason Toynbee has been so déclassé. It’s also the reason so few people, at present, read my books. (I have had, however, a brisk response from the lunatic fringe—people who write to me babbling about the Second Coming, about how Leviticus 1:17 applies to Watergate, etc., etc.)

In The New Nonsense, I compounded my mistake by dwelling on the fear of death as a major (and quite unChristian) source of Christian fervor, and by attacking the ideas and character of Father Freud, our seedy substitute for The Word. But just because he is that—because he sounds and partly is, scientific, while really catering to our longing for some kind of deliverance—Freud is “in.” Susan Sontag and the College of Irvings, and The Times and of course Psychology Today all believe, and the psychiatric Establishment, which has milked this sort of orthodoxy for millions, often gets into print itself, on the same theory, apparently, as motivated the medieval Scholastics, namely that endless discussion of dubious truths may, through sheer familiarity, make them seem truer. If enough Qualified Persons repeat the same axion, no matter how idiotic, it becomes a staple of the Age, and fifty years may have to go by before people see how absurd it is. Even then, they may miss the main point, which is why they recognize one [Page 8] set of beliefs as nonsensical only after they have replaced it with another, possibly more so.

What’s sad about all this is that the modern age held a promise of something better. The enormous power of the scientific approach to nature had an implication we failed to pick up. Open-mindedness as an ideal adhered to in everyday life could revolutionize it, but there’s no chance, it seems, of that happening, and so perhaps, no solution to such terrifying practical problems as now confront us.

You say that in The New Nonsense I give no hint of my own religious position. The reason is I don’t really have one. I was raised as an atheist, was drawn early to the sciences, found determinism and Freud unsatisfactory, went through a violent sea-change in my twenties—something like the “passage into nothing” described in James’s Varieties of Religious Experience—and then years afterward, from a study of the central nervous system, I arrived at the ideas of the psyche described in Dying Self. Although I have had what could be called mystical experiences, I am in no sense a mystic; and although I have spent many years debating what modern man could believe, I have arrived at only two tentative conclusions and a reserve clause. The first is that there is no evidence to suggest our survival after death, so we had best find some stable grownup way of handling our fear of dying. The second is that if God exists, He is either laissez-faire or so incredibly intricately mysterious in His workings that we can form no sensible notion of them. The reserve clause is that the notion of God, in itself, may be too much for us; it’s like the problem of what lies outside space-time; or the problem of who was I before I was? (and why am I me?). So I beg these questions, and stick to what I think I can handle.

CHARLES M. FAIR Cambridge, Massachusetts

P.S.

I forgot to mention the point on which you quite rightly picked me up in your review— namely, the contradiction implicit in my statement that man alone “is self-made; to aspire is not his option but his fate.”

What I meant, of course, was that man undelivered —in whom the “I” or soul (no implication of immortal soul) is too feebly developed to have much freedom or momentum of its own —is nevertheless enough of a thinking being to sense that something is wrong. This is the sense of sin—of one’s debasement by the animal and the tribal in one’s own nature. It has a better side, the sense that one has the potential for a kind of transcendence. This mixture of gloom and wild hope is quite characteristic of religious eras and totally misunderstood today (when we see the era of Hieronymus Bosch as “morbid,” The Spirituals, after St. Francis, as probably neurotic, etc.).

Because man, undelivered, has this mixture of self-dislike and hope, he gradually absorbs and to some small degree acts on, the moral principles taught him, however skimpily, by his priests. Even the obvious corruption of the church need not deter him, and doesn’t, until the religious impulse itself has passed. Hence most churches are reformed too late and for the wrong reasons.

In any case, man is “self-made” to the extent that his awareness of his own incompleteness and his sense that something can be done about it, take shape as ideals, which are in turn elaborated and handed on in the form we call tradition. It is their tradition which gives the men of a high civilization the chance, at least, to pass that critical point of inner development I mentioned —the point beyond which each is free, not to do as he likes but to be what he feels he should—“a human, no longer ruled by the Skinnerian beast inside him” (the sentence of mine you quoted).

We are not self-made exactly, but in a certain sense, self-grown. Something tells us we should tend our inner garden. The same something should tell us to help others do the same. But the modern mania for education isn’t quite that impulse. It is intended as much for the social promotion of our kids, as for their deliverance. And as skepticism has reduced the repertoire of principles or thinking devices which we pass on to our children, the education they get becomes more and more difficult for them to absorb. Like the world, it seems to them a chaos of facts. The demi-penalized retreat into specialism; the more severely stunted drop out; given enough of the latter type, a high civilization collapses via revolution into a lower one. The state organizes the violence and primitivism of this new citizenry the way a magnetic field aligns the dipoles in an iron bar. Hence such states must go to war. Hence our outlook is very poor.

CMF

THE TENTH VOLUME

Now that WORLD ORDER is in its tenth volume [Page 9] since its reintroduction may I offer my congratulations to the editoxial staff and the contributors for maintaining throughout an exceptionally high standard in this . . . most stimulating intellectual magazine.

Many articles appearing in WORLD ORDER have become classics in their own right and have proved a rich source of reference material for social science students preparing papers and theses. Even the disastrous article by . . . served the aim of WORLD ORDER to “stimulate” by providing a mind-boggling example of all the faults a social scientist is trained to avoid. As an example of judgmental, ethnocentric, short-sighted, prejudiced, time-obsessed, intolerant, nervous and tense, egocentric, etc., rubbish it couldn’t be beaten!

GRAEME C. ROUHANI

Mount Hawthorne

Western Australia

BICENTENNIAL

My sincerest appreciation is extended for the WORLD ORDER magazine sent to my office today.

You are to be commended for the fine work you are doing in connection with the 200th birthday of our nation. I look forward to reading this most interesting quarterly.

RAY BLANTON

Governor

State of Tennessee

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What Happened To the Counterculture?

BY WENDY M. HELLER

IN THIS BEWILDERING AGE it is sometimes unsettling how quickly things change. Nothing seems sure any more, nothing stable. Ideas, ideologies, movements—whole eras, each with its own symbols and shibboleths— appear like meteors which streak across the sky and then, just as suddenly and inexplicably as they have appeared, disappear from sight.

The student movement of the 1960s was just such an era. Looking back, those years now seem to belong to a remote, almost mythical epoch. Not that it is not clear in mind, for we who were there will always remember those days: the confetti colors of handbills and posters, the sharp tang of crisis and tear gas in the air, bomb threats in the student union, rallies and speeches and pretzels with mustard. Just as other generations look back on the distinctive relics and memories of their own college years, the college generation of the sixties will remember all those things with a stab of nostalgia, for those days are gone.

The rebellion on college campuses during the sixties was the most visible expression of what came to be known as the “counterculture.” Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture, defined “counter culture” as “a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion.” The counterculture of the alienated young of the sixties was an attempt to struggle against the materialistic and dehumanizing civilization of the twentieth century. The enemy of the counterculture was, according to Roszak, the “technocracy”—a society run by inaccessible “technical experts,” a society whose prime concern is the protection of an ever-expanding technology rather than the welfare of its citizens.

Adherents of the counterculture recoiled from this “civilization.” They were disillusioned not only with the political-economic system and its concomitant materialism, but with science itself, the backbone of technology; for science, although it had been touted for a hundred years as the force which would liberate mankind from the shackles of superstition, had proved, when given free rein, to be only another kind of even more dangerous superstition. Dissatisfaction with all traditional forms of thought—religion, philosophy, psychology, and so on—led the counterculturists into (sometimes strange) paths of exploration of the psychic and spiritual side of life. Interest in exotic forms of religion, in magic and the occult, and the fascination with psychedelic drugs which characterized the counterculture were all, according to apologists such as Roszak, an attempt to find a way to understand and experience the reality of life.

The core of the counterculture was in and around the university. Places such as the University of California at Berkeley were lodestones which attracted young, concerned, alienated, and disturbed people from all over the country. Some of them were never actually enrolled. These “nonstudents” hovered [Page 12] about the university because it was the center of activity. Even those who dropped out and left the college towns stayed in touch with these “underground” centers of counterculture. It should be mentioned, to keep the subject in perspective, that at no time did the student movement represent all, or even a majority, of the students, even at Berkeley. At the zenith of the movement there were thousands of students who were unsympathetic to it, ignored it, or even loathed it. Among those who followed it, however, there arose a tremendous feeling—a fever of imminence—it was to be the beginning of a new world. Great words rang in the ears: justice, peace, freedom, equality, relevance, meaning. With an exhilarating sense of solidarity and purpose, thousands gathered to march through the plazas and streets of Berkeley. Gentle old ladies along the route of march passed out flowers from their gardens . . .

Now, once again, the streets of college towns like Berkeley are quiet. Changing the world has proved to be a task complex beyond the methods and tactics of the movement. The university, like an old fortress which has withstood wave after wave of invading armies, was not so easily breached. And while the students looked upon themselves as crusaders of a sort, outside the protective moats and walls of the ivory tower was a country that considered them barbarians.

Searching for historical parallels to establish the validity of the movement, Roszak and others compared the counterculture of the sixties to the community of third-century Christians whose nascent culture appeared such an anomaly to Greco-Roman tradition but which proved itself to be in fact the most vital and important religious and cultural phenomenon of its time. This rather ironic analogy falls apart in one crucial aspect, one fundamental distinction in which we may discern the flaw which was the undoing of the counterculture. The community of Christians in the third century had a single, unifying force which brought together all the disparate

elements of which it was composed: the figure and teachings of its Founder-Prophet, Jesus Christ. The counterculture had no such unifying force, no universally accepted set of beliefs or pattern of behavior, and certainly no founder of such exalted stature.

THE COUNTERCULTURE took its ideas from any number of sources and was eclectic to the extent that it contained gross contradictions. While it purported to draw together different groups under its banner, actually it was very much a middle-class movement. Because there was no one organization or even leader to whom all owed allegiance, maintaining a united front of activity was a problem. Activity was induced by “the Berkeley invention,” or mountain-out-of-a-mole-hill process, whereby an incident was fanned into a confrontation. When there was no specific conflict or threat to keep the process going, the movement collapsed like a deflated balloon. Activity was further qualified by the inexorable cycles of life and weather: there were few confrontations on rainy days at Berkeley; summer vacation brought utter paralysis. At times, especially after some ground had been won, the movement disintegrated into a colony of small warring factions who competed for the spoils: office space in newly created departments, funding, appointments, and so on.

Among those groups under the aegis of the movement, there was something to offend everyone, even within the ranks. Male radical activists were, in those days, not happy to see energy siphoned off for such ephemeral causes as the embryonic women’s movement. For their part, the women grew dissatisfied with the role assigned to them: manning the mimeograph machines and making the coffee. Those who wanted to be left alone to meditate or explore uncharted wildernesses of the mind or plant organic carrots were not always responsive to the urgency of the revolutionaries. The third-world movement on campus became divided within itself, a situation which acutely embarrassed and disillusioned [Page 13] some of the architects of that movement who realized bitterly, “If we can’t even get together ourselves, how can we change the rest of society?”

The decade of the sixties presented a favorable climate for the growth of the student movement. To a generation that had grown up in peacetime and relative prosperity, the new movement was a heady experience, a great focal point of energy and enthusiasm. It created an aura of brotherhood and dedication which was intoxicating to a city of young strangers. Sometimes this energy was channeled into psychologically suspicious activities. The movement provided release from tensions which sometimes had nothing to do with war or academic freedom or whatever was the cause at hand. On the Berkeley campus it looked at times very much like a slave revolt. Hatred for figures of authority erupted in acts against the administration. During the “Reconstitution” in Spring 1970 many classes were forcibly taken over by student radicals who were absurdly pleased with their own power. Some activist professors, however, did not wait for Spartacus of Berkeley to come bursting into the classroom with a fistful of leaflets but “reconstituted” their classes to make them “relevant” to the business at hand (in this case, the war) and, like medieval priests, granted “indulgences” in the form of passing grades to students who “took the cross” by going out and doing some “relevant” (political) work among the “infidels” and the misguided.

As soon as the police or the national guard were called onto the campus, a new dimension was added to the general upheaval. Here were the armed troops of the enemy! Hypocritically, the “peaceful” counterculturists reveled in this caricature of war. Clashes were marked on both sides by a mixture of backyard hostility and humor. For the students the order of the day was “pockets full of rocks in Sproul Plaza at noon” (except when it rained). The police riot squad’s response to the demonstrators’ derisive cries of “Pig!” was to appear at the next engagement wearing pig lapel pins, and it was said that one outfit went into “combat” with a battle flag, pink pig rampant on a field of green. These militant periods on campus were characterized by the same distortions of perception which go with wars: paranoia, the intoxication of camaraderie, righteous hatred, promiscuity, and a lack of ability to see beyond the next hundred yards of turf.

It was spring 1970. A famous, elderly professor, soon to retire, was giving his legendary [Page 14] course on Don Quixote. Looking outside the window, we could see that there was something going on. A mob of chanting students moved across our line of view and then, suddenly, came running back in disorder. A tear gas canister exploded somewhere. The police could not be far behind. The class was squirming with excitement, but still the professor continued to lecture, apparently oblivious to the fact that the building would soon be unsafe. After some minutes he looked sadly at the students out of his one good eye (the other was covered by a black patch) and said, “I see no one is able to listen,” and dismissed the class. This incident was retold with snickers by students—there he was trying to talk about mad Don Quixote, who thought himself a knight-errant, charging full speed into imaginary giants! While all this was going on!

They still had a lot to learn about relevance.

But things had begun to change. While the activities of spring 1970 seemed at the time to signal a new surge of life, “Reconstitution” was really the last gasp of the movement. It was such an ambitious undertaking that many felt it would be their last chance; if the movement lost momentum as it always did following a period of concentrated activity, it would be doomed. Disillusion began to set in as the pace slowed once again, and by the arrival of summer it was obvious that there had been no real change. The next autumn was eerily quiet, and there has been no significant disruption since.

SEVERAL FACTORS contributed to the general disillusionment of the last few years. The economic deterioration of the seventies, for example, has had a profound effect on the counterculture which had thrived in the rarefied air of the sixties. In the sixties the future had seemed assured. All our lives we had been told that the world was at the feet of those who could claim the letters Ph.D. after their names. This might create an individual crisis over whether one would become a member of The System, high up in the ranks of the technocracy, but many were willing to brave this moral horror, if only (they rationalized) temporarily. For those who wanted to drop out altogether, there was always the “alternative life style”—a return to a more basic, less wasteful life away from the city, although communes flourished both in the country and the city. However, this route often proved more difficult than it had first appeared, and the communal life sometimes even more disillusioning than the old system had been. Many city-bred intellectuals who headed for the hills found that they were not really happy isolated—away from the stimuli, the pace, and the raw edges of the urban environment. And when those who were willing to “work within the system” found that the revolution was not imminent and that in the meantime it would be necessary to get a job, the economic situation suddenly got worse. Suddenly it meant nothing to be a Ph.D.: the woods and the unemployment lines were full of them. The system was collapsing where they had least expected it— on top of themselves.

Worst of all, perhaps, the counterculture itself actually began to become assimilated into mainstream culture, even into the technocracy itself, which, in the new departments of minority studies, had developed its own experts to interpret the needs of the neglected subcultures. Many of the radicals of the sixties now work for the universities and in the federal programs which were established in response to their demands. Some have even gone into conventional politics, still searching for some way to make some kind of changes, now that the sluggish protest movement has ceased to offer an avenue of action.

The wide media coverage which the student movement received eased the way for the assimilation and the merchandising of the counterculture. Entrepreneurs made a killing off the movement in all the paraphernalia and trappings and entertainment which attended it. When the counterculture became advertised enough, and diluted enough, it lost its [Page 15] threatening mask. It became fashionable. Long hair, for some time the symbol par excellence of protest, evolved into a symbol of conformity to the vogue. As an oyster reacts to an irritating foreign particle inside its shell by coating it with layers of nacre, the technocracy made a pearl out of the irritating counterculture and then sold it—at a profit.

The university has also changed in an unexpected way. Now that the “baby-boom” generation has graduated, the era of expansion in the American university is over. The new generation of students (who could hardly agitate for the same demands now that many of them have been conceded—the draft and the war over, the university pried open to minorities) finds itself faced with a different situation from that of the halcyon sixties. With individual survival in mind, they are no longer as interested in those subjects of social concern which aroused the impassioned rhetoric of their predecessors but want to secure their future with a career in a field which is not going to become obsolete or overcrowded or underfunded. The widespread feeling during the sixties that education and social science research would neatly and quickly solve the problems of the world has given way to disillusionment with fields that were once popular.

Indeed, there had been a general attitude that once the “revolution” started rolling, it would all be downhill from there: in a sudden, sincere hail of rocks, all the problems of the world would be solved. But what would happen after? It was not necessary to worry about what would replace the old civilization once it had been razed. The answer would come in good time, they were confident. Somehow it would just bubble up out of the rubble. But the truth was that the counterculture really offered nothing new. There was no commitment to continued effort, because the counterculture was too insubstantial to be worthy of such commitment.

Without an integrated system of beliefs and values and a structural coherence which can bring diverse groups together in sustained unity of purpose and action, lasting achievement is impossible. The counterculture lacked such a system. In fact, the very idea of structure was anathema, recalling as it did the rigidity of the despised Establishment. To call it a counterculture implies that it had (to use an anthropological definition of culture) functioning, interrelated institutions, but institution was a dirty word to the counterculture, one of the antiquated relics on its condemned list.

As for a system of moral values and a code of ethical behavior, horror of structure dictated an extreme individualism, in the words of an inarticulate slogan of the time, “do your own thing,” the net result of which was that few people were doing the same thing at the same time. Without a universal code of behavior, participants left to forge their own standards inevitably fell back, in the vacuum, on the only thing they knew—their experience.

This experience was of course rooted in the old system; thus the malignancies of the old society were passed on to the counterculture: prejudice, hatred, greed, concern with [Page 16] form rather than substance, with power, with appearance, with show, with conformity to one’s peer group. The counterculture, in essence, proved unable to make changes in people on a structural level. However, it may have “raised their political consciousness” or “turned them on,” it did not change their responses or behavior. And because of this, the counterculture expired from the same diseases which afflict the society it condemned, for the counterculture was inextricably bound up with the old system, much as it believed the contrary. It was dependent upon the existence of the established order for its own existence. It proved to be utterly contingent upon the fluctuations of the main current of which it was only a curious, wayward eddy.

The failure of the counterculture to effect any real change in society only underlines the necessity for change, more drastic and far-reaching than the wildest dreams of any counterculturist. One must not view the demise of the counterculture with pessimism, however; for the fact that it could not initiate such change does not mean that change will be impossible. The failure of the counterculture only confirms the fact that whatever will effect these basic changes in civilization must be totally independent of the present order in all its aspects. It must be able to provide not just a small core of middle-class intellectuals but an entire world with an ideology and a coherent pattern of behavior models which will elicit the kinds of attitudes and behavior necessary to realize the goals of justice, equality, and peace, a spiritual force to ensure real solidarity among all nations, races, and classes, and a base for the foundation of those functioning, interrelated institutions of which a viable culture is made. The struggle against the technocracy will be won by those who are able to put science into its proper perspective and who are able to understand that, in reality, the scientific and spiritual world views do not have to be at opposite poles.

The true place of the counterculture in history will become clearer in time. Only time will show definitely whether the counterculture can be considered alongside the community of third-century Christians or whether in fact the counterculture was more like one of the cults such as Manichaeism which spring up at apocalyptic times, caught up in the spirit of change, caught halfway between the old order and the new.

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Maroon Identity in Jamaica: 1655-1738

BY RHETT S. JONES

“In certain uncivilized regions of the globe, there are immense numbers of wretched black men existing slaves to barbarians of their own colour, plunged in ignorance, and subject to all the wanton cruelties and miseries of savage tyranny. . . . the colonists rescue these unfortunate blacks from a state of horrid and savage slavery, to place them in a mild and civilized state of servitude; they snatch them from the most degrading idolatry, and lead them to the benevolent system of the gospel of Christ. In doing this, care is taken to part no happy families, to break no kindred ties. . . .”

THIS ACCOUNT of the slave trade is untrue. It is given the lie by those who had been enslaved and who left behind records of their thoughts and experiences. But for many other aspects of the black past historians lack such detailed information and are forced to speculate, often with no better guidelines than the canons of rational thought and some sensitivity to the recurrent ideas and actions of mankind. This essay is concerned with a people—the Jamaican Maroons—who left no written records and who, therefore, would be considered by many traditional scholars to have no history. Such is clearly not the case, as the Maroons were important in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica. If their past cannot be recovered utilizing the methodology of the conventional historian, it is obviously necessary to develop other approaches. However, I shall attempt more than simply recounting the activities of the Maroons. Rather, utilizing what is here termed “sociological history” I shall attempt to get at Maroon conceptions of themselves. Or, stated in a slightly different way, I shall attempt to recover the conscious beliefs which Maroons, in particular Maroon warriors, had of themselves.

Maroon societies existed in many of the colonial Americas—in Brazil, in Mexico, in Peru, in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, in Panama, in Surinam, and on the islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and many of the lesser Antilles. But the Maroon identity which emerges is clearly tied to the realities of Jamaican life before 1738 and, therefore, any attempts to generalize about rebel black conceptions of self should be cautious and conservative. The term “identity” (or “character”—the two words are used interchangeably) is used in the sense of a consciously held and deliberately adopted set of values and beliefs. It would appear possible for the historian to get at such an identity, because it usually reflects the values of the society with which he is concerned. In the case [Page 19] of a social system such as that of the Maroons it is not always possible to discover these basic values. Yet the historian may gain some insight into identity by examining the social lives of the people, and he may make some not unreasonable guesses as to the values they must have held by studying the way in which they behaved. However, it is not possible in this manner for the historian to recreate personality in the way in which some historical psychologists work to understand the unconscious motives, drives, and desires of major historical figures, because no detailed outlines of the lives of individual Maroons have been uncovered.

Sociological history has been for some time an important way of attempting to recover the past, even though it has not always been viewed favorably by historians. As early as 1938 a president of the American Historical Association advocated cooperation between the disciplines of sociology and history, and a growing number of historians have gradually become aware of ways in which sociology might be used to their advantage. Unfortunately, sociologists have not always behaved in ways which would encourage cross-disciplinary cooperation. Many among them have regarded historians as junior partners whose function in any cooperative effort is to supply the crude facts necessary for the evaluation of their theories. Not surprisingly, large numbers of historians have rejected any such role and have, therefore, become much opposed to all varieties of sociological history. I define sociological history in this essay as that variety of history which applies sociological paradigms to the understanding of the past. I have applied such paradigms (or frameworks, or theories, or schemata) where their application seemed to lend additional insight into the nature of Maroon identity. I have not attempted to work within one framework and, therefore, to interpret all facts in its terms, nor to use one or more sociological schemata to get at each aspect of Maroon life and identity. Where common sense explanation or analysis seemed sufficient, I have allowed it to stand [Page 20] on its own; where sociological theories appeared to add insight I have deliberately introduced them for that purpose.

The Maroons, as a separate, distinct people emerged at the time of the successful English invasion of Spanish Jamaica in 1655. The English conquest of the island was the result of a failure to seize Hispaniola from the Spaniards earlier that year. The commanders of the expedition, fearing to return home to Oliver Cromwell with the news they had been thoroughly routed, hit upon the idea of offering him Jamaica instead. With nearly seven thousand men distributed among some thirty ships, they landed on an island populated by some fifteen hundred Spaniards and a similar number of blacks. Hopelessly outnumbered, blacks and Spaniards retreated to the hinterland and engaged in guerilla warfare. English attempts to separate the slaves from the Spaniards failed, and both sides were much impressed by the military prowess of blacks. Julianus de Castilla, a Spanish officer in the resistance, said of one of them:

This slave, a creole named Diego Pimienta, in these combats showed how greatly does virtue adorn the individual, and how diversity of color is no obstacle to nobility of blood, and worth. He was a fine marksman, and did not waste a shot; whenever he fired he indicated his mark, saying to his comrades: “That Englishman drops now.”

Although a few slaves went over to the English side, the vast majority remained loyal to the Spaniards despite numerous English concessions and the failure of the Spanish guerilla movement. After the Spaniards finally gave up hope, a number of their black supporters left the island with them and went to Cuba and Hispaniola, while some few decided to surrender to the English. Still another group of blacks elected to stay on the island and continue the irregular war against the English. They became the nucleus of the Maroon population; but whether they decided to continue the war out of free choice, were encouraged to do so by the Spaniards, or simply wanted to escape both English and Spanish domination is as yet undetermined.

The Maroon Wars

THE ORIGIN of the term Maroon was thus explained by Edward Long in 1774: “The word signifies, among Spanish Americans . . . Hog-hunters: the woods abounding with the wild boar, and the pursuit of them constituting the chief employment of fugitive negroes. Marraino [sic] is the Spanish word for a young pig.” In the forty years between 1656 and 1696 the English, concerned with Spanish and French threats to the island, had little interest in the roving blacks in the interior; and since much English settlement was confined to the coastal [Page 21] areas, the Europeans had little contact with the Maroons. The English, however, were never unaware of this potential threat. Lieutenant-governor Sir Charles Lyttleton offered free pardon, twenty acres of land, and freedom to any Maroon who would surrender to the government in 1663, but few blacks accepted. English settlers gradually penetrated into the interior of the island and suffered from Maroon raids. The government of Jamaica launched a number of offensives against the blacks and suffered a signal victory with the surrender of an important Maroon leader, Juan de Bolas, who agreed to organize a black regiment against his former comrades. His party was ambushed by the Maroons; and many, including de Bolas himself, were killed. As a consequence it became increasingly difficult for the government to recruit either whites or blacks to fight against the Maroons. By 1696, it also became clear Maroons were being aided by supposedly loyal black slaves, so the government felt impelled both to tighten its control over the slaves and to escalate the war against the Maroons. The Jamaican Assembly passed a law requiring each plantation owner to maintain one white servant for the first five slaves, two for ten slaves, and thereafter one for every ten slaves, and he was required to reside where his slaves worked. At the same time efforts were made to encourage Englishmen to migrate to Jamaica, and in 1661 each Englishman who came out was to get thirty acres for each person he brought with him. All of this proved to be of little avail as the Maroons rallied about Cudjoe, an all-island Maroon leader and a “bold, skillful, and enterprizing man,” and grew so strong in northeast, northwest, and southwest areas of the island (in the parishes of Clarendon, St. Ann, St. Elizabeth, Westmoreland, Hanover, and St. James) that a number of European settlements had to be abandoned.

Explaining Maroon successes against the English. Bryan Edwards, a spokesman for the Jamaican planters, states:

indeed, from the commencement of the war till this period [the 1730s], they had not once ventured a pitched battle, but skulked about the skirts of remote plantations, surprising stragglers, and murdering the whites by two or three at a time, or when they were too few to make any resistance. By night, they seized the favourable opportunity that darkness gave them, of stealing into the settlements, where they set fire to cane fields and out-houses, killed all the cattle they could find, and carried the slaves into captivity. By this dastardly method of conducting the war, they did infinite mischief to the whites . . . for they always cautiously avoided fighting, except with a number so disproportionally inferior to themselves as to afford them a pretty sure expectation of victory. They knew every secret avenue of the country; . . . [they] were not reducible by any regular plan of attack. . . .

[Page 22] A typical Maroon strategy was to take up a position overlooking a canyon with steep walls. Some Maroons, serving as decoys would lead an English force into the canyon and would communicate with the ambushers by means of horns or drums. At a signal, given near the end of the day when the English were near exhaustion, the Maroons would open fire; they were said to be excellent marksmen and careful with each shot. These ambuscades not only demoralized English troops and volunteers but also enabled Maroons to obtain weapons, ammunition, and supplies abandoned by frightened survivors in their flight. As might be expected in such a war, there was considerable brutality on both sides. To English attempts to destroy Maroon towns and sources of provision wherever they could find them Maroons responded with a campaign of deliberate terror. In the face of increased English watchfulness Maroons were hard pressed to obtain weapons and ammunition. But ammunition was supplied by blacks, mixed bloods, Indians (free and unfree), and whites who were sympathetic to the Maroon cause, and by the Maroon campaigns. The Jamaican Assembly believed many blacks and mixed bloods who claimed to be engaged in hunting were passing on weapons and munitions to Maroons, so it forbade such persons to hunt unless accompanied by a white. White renegades were to be controlled by forcing all men, regardless of color, to register and account for their expenditure of powder and shot. About this same period the island was placed under martial law for months at a time, and a series of small forts was established in the interior so that expeditions would not have far to travel in order to reach Maroon country. Because of Maroon successes, it became necessary to force whites to fight against them; and, on at least one occasion. whites who volunteered to do so were imprisoned on a ship off the coast, lest they should, on reflection, change their minds and desert before a sufficiently large complement could be raised. The leaders of the few successful expeditions against the rebels sometimes received as much as six hundred pounds from the Assembly and rewards were given to common soldiers for each Maroon killed or captured. In 1737, in despair over Maroon victories, the government determined to import Indians from the “Moskito Coast” in the hope they might be able to track down and defeat the Maroons. While the Indians, some two hundred in number, were unable to conquer the Maroons, they did discover many hidden Maroon croplands and herds and in destroying them worsened an already difficult Maroon food problem.

As a result of the shortage of food supplies, and of their confidence in their ability to defeat Europeans in battle, the Maroons became so bold that Jamaicans feared the black slaves would be encouraged: “as all or most of them want . . . to withdraw from their servitude, and . . . they may be probably spirited to such a disposition by the success of the rebel slaves. . . .” Governor Sir Edward Trelawny raised a massive army for the invasion of the interior but hesitated [Page 23] to place it in the field lest it meet the fate of previous armies called up against Maroons and, therefore, spark a black uprising. He decided to make one last peace overture; and, to the surprise of government officials, the Maroons, led by Cudjoe, accepted. After the peace, the government discovered the Maroons to be in difficulties, for they were running short of ammunition, hard hit by the Indian discovery of croplands, and much hurt by the withdrawal of British colonists from the interior as a result of their own successful tactics. Without such colonists, Maroons lacked ready access to supplies and English weapons and, therefore, had no choice but to surrender. Those led by Cudjoe surrendered, after some preliminary maneuvering, on March 1, 1738, but the windward Maroons on the eastern part of the island did not sign a peace treaty until 1739. Even then, small isolated bands of Maroons continued to roam the island and to attack English settlements; these blacks were eventually defeated by their former comrades as a clause in the peace treaty required Maroons to aid the government against runaway and rebellious blacks.

The Jamaicans whom the newly pacified Maroons were to protect were a varied lot. To understand Maroon identity before 1738 it is necessary to say something of stratification on the island between 1656 and 1738. Of course, no system of ranking remains constant, but there were probably not a great many changes in the outline of the Jamaican one. Sociologists are sophisticated enough today to realize that complexity in social organization and class ranking did not await industrialization, so it should come as no surprise that the Jamaican class system was incredibly complex. Prestige, wealth, birthplace, race, ethnicity, family background, and religion were all important. These were crosscut by occupational categories; present in Jamaica were planters, soldiers, priests, traders, sailors, overseers, bookkeepers, servants, surveyors, imperial bureaucrats, local politicians, and a wide range of skilled and unskilled workmen. A social distinction was drawn between those whites born on the island and those who were born in Europe, and it was possible for persons who were known to have nonwhite ancestors to be legally accepted as white. Beyond all these distinctions was the vast gulf between slave and free, and divisions existed within the slave caste itself. Slaves were divided into black, mixed blood, and Indian; and black slaves were further divided as to whether they had been born on the island or in Africa. Black slaves also drew certain tribal distinctions between themselves and, indeed, perpetuated many African rivalries on the island. The consequence of these many distinctions was not a simple homogeneous system in which everyone was much like everyone else but a stratified, diversified society, in which each individual was keenly aware of his own social position and the differences between himself and his neighbor. Years ago Emory S. Bogardus, the distinguished sociologist, coined the term “social distance” to refer to felt differences between two groups and explored the meaning of social distance in an urban milieu. The concept would appear to be especially useful for the understanding of social relations among the various strata of Jamaican society. As Bogardus has suggested, mechanisms exist for the reduction of social distance, [Page 24] but it would appear that few were applied in Jamaica; for the most part social and legal means were utilized to maintain and reinforce feelings of distance rather than to decrease them. In the face of such differences and deliberate reflections on self, a conscious Maroon identity was inevitable. The Maroons had some knowledge of the enemy and were surely aware that there were many different types of Jamaicans, so a Maroon who asked himself “Who am I?” could not simply answer “I am a Jamaican” or “I am a black man,” for there were too many types of Jamaicans and too many types of black men. Maroons then were forced into conscious reflections on their own identity, and these reflections were influenced by their perceptions of the Jamaican class system.

Maroon Society

MAROONS were probably influenced as much, if not more, by their own society, which was separate and distinct from that of other Jamaicans. The Maroons themselves were scattered and divided; and, for all that is known of Maroon settlements before the Treaty of 1738, there may well have been important cultural differences among the settlements. This is especially likely as the different Maroon towns tended to be dominated by different African tribes, although most towns contained representatives of many tribes. Until the 1730s the Maroons had no unified command, and it was only after the British began to escalate the war that it proved possible for them to agree on one, all-Maroon leader, Cudjoe. Even then Cudjoe’s powers were probably limited; for example, he was not able to persuade windward Maroons to surrender in 1738 along with his own forces. Probably, Cudjoe held broad, overall control but left day-to-day decisions to his subordinates, as is usually the case in a guerilla war. Even after the peace treaties of 1738 and 1739 there continued to be differences and quarrels among the various Maroon towns. There were four such towns in existence before 1738: Moorestown in Portland parish and Charlestown in St. George’s parish, both of Surry County; and Accompongtown in St. Elizabeth’s parish and Trelawnytown in Trelawny parish, both in Cornwall County. Scot’s Hall in St. Mary’s parish in Middlesex County did not come into existence until some time after the peace treaties. Because of repeated failures to defeat the Maroons in battle colonists consistently overestimated the Maroon population. At the signing of the peace treaties, it appeared there were fewer than seven hundred Maroons on the island, and their number grew slowly over the next few years. Although these seven hundred were divided geographically, and perhaps culturally, they were generally able to present a united front to the English.

Indeed, the English military threat may be viewed as the most important single fact in Maroon existence, and for this reason I shall focus especially on the Maroon warrior who was expected to bear the brunt of the English attack and on whose shoulders rested the survival of Maroon society. The warriors protected a people isolated from the bulk of Jamaicans not only by warfare [Page 25] but by geography, since Maroons tended to dominate certain portions of the island and gradually to drive white settlers out. Indeed, the success of Maroon warriors against such settlers may have been one of the reasons they were eventually forced to accept a peace treaty; in driving the settlers out, the Maroons cut off important sources of supply of weapons and ammunition. In effect, the blacks were victims of their own all too successful tactics. In addition to dominating certain land areas, Maroons also spoke a distinct language, although observers could not agree as to whether it was an African tongue or a blend of English, Spanish, and (unknown) African languages. Some Maroons could speak English and after the peace treaties more became proficient in the language, but a separate tongue probably influenced the development of a special world view, if much of the anthropological literature is to be believed. Even if such a hypothesis is rejected, the distinct language surely added to already existent feelings of solidarity. In addition to land and language, Maroon solidarity was probably also reinforced by Maroon ability to meet most of their physical needs without recourse to Jamaican society. The Maroons maintained hidden fields and herds, supplementing these with periodic raids on English settlements. The tight organization necessary to carry out such raids, and the relatively small size of Maroon society probably also worked to strengthen Maroon feelings of unity and to sharpen their conceptions of themselves. Maroon character, then, had its origin in these social, geographic, and economic realities.

The outlines of Maroon society suggest that it may fairly be regarded as a kind of extension of West African society, but whether this in fact is the case will have to await further research. There is evidence to suggest that Maroons, like most primitive peoples, were oriented to the present, having no real sense of their past and no real concern for the future. Their day-to-day lives revolved about securing the necessities of life and maintaining their freedom. Charles Leslie, who spent some time on the island during the war, said of the Maroon commitment to independence:

Is it not natural to observe how strongly the Love of Liberty prevails in the Breasts of Men, not withstanding the most wretched of Circumstances? These Runaways endured more for near the Space of a Century, than can be found on Record of any State or People. They struggled with a superior Force, went naked, exposed to the inclemencies of the Air, fed on Roots and Fruits, and cheerfully ventured their lives to secure themselves free. Can the History of Rome produce greater Examples? They, tho unfortunate, held it out to the last, and made terms not inglorious to themselves.

The independence of Maroon society was reflected in the patterns of Maroon behavior which were unaffected by European society, even though many Maroons had lived among Europeans, and most had an opportunity to observe [Page 26] European life. In matters of religion, for example, Maroons were said to believe that “Accompong was the God of the Heavens, the creator of all things, and a deity of infinite goodness: but they neither offered sacrifices to him, nor had any mode of worship.” This accurately describes the West African cosmology held by the Maroons, for Accompong was believed to be such an exalted god as to be little concerned with the affairs of man. His power was acknowledged, but when Maroons sought supernatural influence in this world they made use of Obi (spelled in some sources Obeah), a form of witchcraft. Obi shamans were said to hold the power of life and death over their followers and were able through certain spells and incantations to call upon supernatural forces to do their bidding. They were utilized in battles against the English and were so important in boosting the morale of Maroon warriors that the English offered special rewards to those who were able to kill an Obi witch or warlock. Maroon leaders were said to rely heavily on shaman support, and all Maroons were believed to be much demoralized if one were slain by the enemy. Although Europeans of the time were unable to understand the relationship between Obi and belief in an all-powerful god, the anthropological conception of magic and religion would appear to shed some light on the matter. Since Accompong was indifferent to the fate of man, prayers and pleas (religion) were of little use, and some means had to be sought to gain influence over supernatural forces in the universe. Obi (magic) was the solution. Obi did not originate on the island, but in all likelihood was imported from Africa; this assumption gains credence when it is realized that slaves also practiced Obi and that their religious beliefs were almost identical to those of the Maroons. Maroons did not turn to Christianity, although some of the original Maroons who fought along side the Spaniards must have been baptized Catholics.

In addition to holding West African religious beliefs, Maroons were also much influenced by the family structure of that region, and it may be argued that in the absence of Christianity there was no reason why Maroons should have been inclined to change patterns of marriage and family organization. Among the Maroons, there were no marriage ceremonies as such; instead a ritualistic exchange of gifts served as community recognition of the union. The friends and family of the bride gave the groom foodstuffs and livestock, while those of the groom gave the bride ornaments and household implements. The marriage could be terminated by mutual consent, and a man was allowed to have more than one wife, although few actually did, because (again in the West African tradition) few were able to support more than one. When a [Page 27] man had a plurality of wives, he spent a set number of days with each one, and only while living with that wife did he acknowledge their children as his own. The wives had separate dwellings, and controlled their own property, although the husband had a share in each. Maroon folkways demanded respect for the elderly, as was the case for most Africans; John Browne Cutting, an early nineteenth-century historian, has written of the “Universal veneration with which old age is treated by the African race. Accused, as they justly may be, of brutality to cattle, which they are prone to maltreat; to their aged people they are benevolent and respectful.” For the Maroons such attitudes, legitimated by West African tradition, were also functional because the older people would have more knowledge of the island than any other segment of the populace. The old included those who had survived the wars against the English. They were, therefore, most knowledgeable about English techniques and temperament and in the best position to anticipate how Englishmen might react in a given situation.

Something has already been said of Maroon politics and economics. For the most part Maroons were under the control of a chieftain who controlled a village; under the chief were various lieutenants, who supervised what are probably best termed clan leaders, who were men having responsibility for a group of families. In actual battle Maroons were tightly controlled and directed by signals from their leader. Europeans who reached Maroon villages shortly after the peace treaties remarked that this rather rigid discipline carried over into everyday life. The authority of the village chief was said to be unquestioned. The same discipline prevailed in the economic sphere, as Maroons planted crops, hunted, owned cattle and minor livestock, and not infrequently engaged in trade with various Jamaican renegades for weapons and ammunition, all under the careful supervision of their leaders.

This picture of Maroon society is obviously incomplete, and perhaps it will never be fully developed, as few Englishmen (if any) reached Maroon settlements during the long period of warfare; and those Maroons, few in number, who deserted the Maroons for the English were obviously predisposed to distort Maroon life in various ways. In order to gain a clearer picture of Maroon life it might be possible to consider carefully those aspects of West African society which would probably pass unchanged to the Maroons. A few such examples have already been given, but there are surely others. Not only has little been uncovered about Maroon institutions such as religion and family, but little has been learned about status groupings within Maroon society. For example, what were the different responsibilities of men and women? What different roles were played by young and old? These are legitimate questions which cannot, at present, be answered from the existent sources. But in the attempt to understand the parameters of Maroon identity it is possible to say something of the character of Maroon warriors, based on what is known of their lives.

Warrior Identity among the Maroons

MAROON WARRIORS were the central concern of the English between 1656 [Page 28] and 1738 and were frequently discussed in dispatches, reports, and memoranda. The warrior’s identity was derived in some degree from his contact with English society, although it would be too simple an argument to suggest that Maroon identity was merely a kind of counter-English identity and that Maroons were everything Englishmen were not. But the blacks, of necessity, spent considerable time in observing and reflecting upon Jamaican society, as their very survival depended on their understanding how it functioned. The one factor all Maroons had in common, regardless of other differences, was the English threat; and their response to it was an element in Maroon character.

Among the more important identity traits among Maroons was discipline. Maroons attacked and withdrew on signal and, as indicated above, also practiced such discipline within the villages. A second Maroon character trait, loyalty, was equally crucial for survival, and there is every reason to believe it was systematically inculcated. Nothing could have been more disastrous for the blacks than traitors who could lead the English to hidden cattle and croplands, betray the meaning of signals given by horns and drums, and even reveal the locations of Maroon settlements themselves. The small number of deserters to the English side testifies to the success of the Maroons in inculcating loyalty. The English themselves recognized the importance of this virtue in Maroon belief by legitimizing the existent Maroon order of succession in the treaties of 1738 and 1739. The relatively low rate of desertion is surprising given a third Maroon value: freedom. As early as 1663 Maroons refused an offer of pardon, land, and the privileges of all free blacks rather than give up their independence. The Maroon conception of himself as free (and he certainly knew the meaning of the term after contact with the Jamaican slaves, and the tales of runaways who joined the Maroons) probably produced some tension when it come into conflict with the demands of discipline and loyalty, but it would appear that individual Maroons did have opportunities to act on their own, independently of any higher authority, as raids or hunting expeditions might be carried out by two or three men. Some Maroons formed liaisons with women (both slave and free), and it would appear such relationships were important sources of Maroon information on English plans. In battle and in the village the Maroon warrior was under some control, but away from the village he was rather free to do as he pleased. Maroons would have been less than human if they did not contrast their lot with that of Jamaican slaves and further determine to maintain their freedom.

There is another character trait which appears to fit logically here. If individual Maroons were given (or took) freedom to roam about the island, and if discipline and silence were essential to sustain hidden settlements, there must have been considerable trust among Maroons. Maroon Chieftains must have allowed individual warriors to go their own way, confident they would not betray the village. Even if it is assumed that chieftains were powerless to control individual warriors when they were not in battle, there still had to be a certain amount of trust, or a village would have to be moved each time a [Page 29] warrior wandered off about his own pursuits. This trust was probably not an empty, unsupported faith, but a trust buttressed by Maroon beliefs in their own resourcefulness and ingenuity. The average warrior probably had considerable confidence in his own cleverness and in that of his fellows, for Maroons had been able to defeat the colonists at almost every turn and to gain needed supplies and weapons.

My concern here is not with what the Maroons were like but with their conception of themselves, with their conscious identities. The character traits listed above are all positive, because they were conscious ones; indeed, few societies in history have been willing to ascribe negative characteristics to themselves. The Maroons were no different, and although they conducted a brutal, cruel war against the English, it is unlikely they would have accepted descriptions of themselves as cruel or brutal. The English conducted an equally vicious war against the Maroons, but there is no evidence the English saw themselves as a vicious people. Maroons were thieves, murderers, arsonists, assassins, and, by the English standards of the time, cowards; but probably no Maroon saw himself in this way. Rather he saw himself as a fighting man doing what he had to do in order to retain his freedom. Just as Maroons did not see themselves as cruel, it is unlikely that they saw themselves as black. In fact, the divisions of geography, tribe, training, birthplace, admixture of European blood, religion, and occupation made it doubtful that any Jamaican negroids saw themselves as black. At most the Maroons may have seen themselves as particular kinds of black men, whose interests were not always the same as those of other blacks on the island. Maroons probably saw themselves as disciplined, successful warriors, fighting to be free, and contemptuous of those who were willing to accept European domination and control.

After 1738 Maroon identity tended to become fragmented because the most important social force in the creation of warrior character, the English threat, was removed. Despite the fact that after 1738 Maroons participated in actions against rebel slaves and the French, the functional importance of discipline as a value essential to survival vanished, and along with it vanished the commitment to the values of loyalty and trust. The power of the chiefs began to decline, and by the time of the Second Maroon War the Maroons were divided. In Trelawnytown old and young were divided on the issue of war, with old men advising caution, while young men determined on revolt. Other Maroon settlements refused to join Trelawnytown Maroons; windward Maroons violated their peace treaty by not going to the aid of the English, but they did not fight with Trelawnytown blacks in rebellion. Accompongtown Maroons fought briefly on the side of the Europeans. In addition to the elimination of the outgroup threat, the treaties of 1738 and 1739 hastened the fragmentation of Maroon identity in other ways. For example, with English military pressure removed, Maroon contact with other blacks on the island increased. Although Maroons were forbidden by law to own slaves, many did; and although they were required to return to their villages after an absence of ten days, few paid any attention to this rule. Peace made it possible for Maroons to move freely [Page 30] about the island and to encounter others different from themselves, but it did not automatically eliminate social distance between Maroons and other status groups. With regard to Maroon-black relations, it is important to remember that after 1738 Maroons were involved in capturing runaway slaves and in putting down slave revolts despite the fact that some Maroons continued to enjoy liaisons with slave women and to participate in slave recreational activities. Maroon-black interaction was, therefore, more frequent and, at the same time, more complex.

Facilitating this move into Jamaican society was the Maroons’ increased use of English. Before 1738 Maroons had utilized a distinct dialect, but after the peace treaties more and more of them came to speak English. The elimination of the language barrier tended to make it easier for Maroons to accept English ideas and values. Some indirect proof of this is found in the tendency of Maroons to give their children English names after the peace, where before children had been given African names. Not all Maroons did so, just as not all Maroons chose to go to war in 1793-96, and this in itself is some indication of the plurality of Maroon identities which were to come into existence in the years beyond 1739.

In summary, the Maroon warrior between 1655 and 1738 saw himself as disciplined, loyal, fteedom-loving, trustworthy, and resourceful. It is doubtful that he identified to any extent with other blacks on the island. The long struggle with the English was a crucial factor in the shaping of Maroon identity, which was much influenced by this struggle and by its impact on both peoples. With the signing of the peace treaties the Maroon found himself in a very different position. The English threat, a basis for Maroon solidarity, was removed; and old virtues were no longer as important as they had once been. As some Maroons came to take on more of the English colonial culture than others, Maroon identity beyond 1738 was fragmented, blurred, and profoundly changed.

[Page 31]

The Challenge of the Bahá’í Faith

A NON-BAHÁ’Í ASSESSMENT OF REASONS FOR STUDYING THE BAHÁ’Í RELIGION

BY V. ELVIN JOHNSON

WHY STUDY the Bahá’í Faith? Is the religion worthy of the time and effort required for its investigation? Could not one spend the time more profitably on some other subject? Actually, rather than being a subject on the periphery of vital concerns, the Bahá’í Faith may be regarded as a subject of central importance not only for the student of the history of religions but for anyone interested in world problems and proposals for their solution. Ernst Kliemke, president of the Esperanto Society of Germany, said in an address in Esperanto delivered in Danzig on July 30, 1927: “Because of their cultural principles alone, Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá are worthy to be regarded among the highest Lights of all times, even by those who are not able to accept the religious part of Their teachings . . .” The Bahá’í Faith is worthy of intensive study for the following reasons.

Its Imposing Claims

THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH compels attention, first, because of its imposing claims. It claims that the prophets of all religions of the past have foretold the coming of Bahá’u’lláh and the golden age which would be ushered in by his coming. This claim was not manufactured by the Faith’s followers but is based on the word of Bahá’u’lláh, the prophet or Manifestation of God after whom the religion is named, who himself declared:

The Revelation which, from time immemorial, hath been acclaimed as the Purpose and Promise of all the Prophets of God, and the most cherished Desire of His Messengers, hath now, by virtue of the pervasive Will of the Almighty and at His irresistible bidding, been revealed unto men. The advent of such a Revelation hath been heralded in all the sacred Scriptures. Behold how, notwithstanding such an announcement, mankind hath strayed from its path and shut out itself from its glory.

Bahá’ís maintain that as the Jews were blinded from accepting Jesus as the Messiah because of their preconceived ideas about the Messiah and about interpretations of the prophecies concerning him Christians are guilty of rejecting Bahá’u’lláh as the returned Christ because of preconceived interpretations of New Testament prophecies concerning Christ’s return and the events connected with his coming. If Jesus has returned in Bahá’u’lláh, as Bahá’ís maintain, that event is the most singularly important event since the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth; for Christians to fail in recognizing him would be the most grievous sin.

William S. Hatcher, who became a Bahá’í

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This article is based on a portion of the first chapter of the author’s doctoral dissertation, “An Historical Analysis of Critical Transformations in the Evolution of the Bahá’í World Faith,” Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 1974.

[Page 32] while a student at Vanderbilt University, testifies that he studied the thought of such philosophers and theologians as Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Niebuhr, Nels Ferré, and Paul Tillich but found “nothing which is in any way comparable to the Bahá’í Revelation either in the dynamic qualities of the Spirit or in the satisfaction of the intellect.” Hatcher is disturbed that Christian leaders “refuse to consider even the possibility that the claims of Bahá’u’lláh might be true.”

Could Bahá’u’lláh’s claims be true? Bahá’ís not only acknowledge Bahá’u’lláh as the returned Christ but also make the astounding claim that Bahá’u’lláh is the expected deliverer hoped for in all the revealed religions; he is the expected Lord of Hosts of Judaism, the Fifth Buddha of Buddhism, the Sháh-Bahrám of Zoroastrianism, the “Great Announcement” of Islám, and the return of Krishna for the Hindus. Since Bahá’u’lláh, according to the Bahá’ís, fulfills the hopes of the world’s religions, Bahá’ís believe that the adherents of these diverse religions may at last be united in Bahá’u’lláh by one common devotion.

The Bahá’í claim to be a uniting influence among the diverse peoples of the world finds verification in actual practice, for in Bahá’í gatherings one may find converts from Judaism, Christianity, Islám, Hinduism, and other religions, worshiping and serving together in their common loyalty to Bahá’u’lláh. The Bahá’í Faith puts to shame some of the older religions which, although holding in theory that men are equal in God’s sight, often sadly fail to carry theory into practice.

Bahá’ís claim not only that Bahá’u’lláh is the return of Christ and of the prophets of other religions but that in him is to be found the solution to the world’s ills. When men accept Bahá’u’lláh and begin to put into action his teachings, the world’s millennium will become a reality, peace will finally be achieved, and men will be able to live in harmony and unity with one another in world brotherhood. The religions of the world, moreover, will become united under the banner of Bahá’u’lláh. When the nations, races, religions, and other divisions of men find their unity in Bahá’u’lláh, many of the world’s current problems will disappear, and whatever problems remain will find solution under the direction of Bahá’u’lláh’s divinely guided administrators. The Bahá’í Faith aims at nothing less than the union of all the world’s presently existing divisions—racial, religious, national, political, economical, social, and sexual—in one world brotherhood and one common faith. No wonder George Craig Stewart exclaimed: “Of all the fantastical dreams that men have ever dreamed this religion is the most ambitious.”

Certainly, other religions have had great dreams, and other religious figures have claimed to be the return of Christ, but Bahá’u’lláh’s claims are not so easily dismissed. The Bahá’í Faith has proved to an exuaordinary extent its ability to unite in its cause the members of various religious creeds and backgrounds, and this diversity in unity is evident in many Bahá’í gatherings.

If Bahá’u’lláh is the return of Christ, if he is the expected deliverer of all the world’s religions, if he is the hope for world peace and unity, his appearance in the world is an event of unsurpassed importance, and to ignore him would be tantamount to a betrayal not only of one’s own religious heritage but of all humanity. The Bahá’í claims are of a nature to demand that attention be given and some response be made to them.

Its High Praise by Non-Bahá’ís

ANOTHER REASON the Bahá’í Faith is worthy of study is the high praise lavished upon the new Faith by non-Bahá’ís. The adherents of [Page 33] a religion might naturally praise it highly and see great prospects for its future; but when non-Bahá’ís, many of distinguished merit, speak of the Bahá’í Faith in the terms they do, one’s attention may properly be aroused.

Robert E. Speer, for some forty-six years the secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., a world traveler familiar with religious currents of the time, said of the Bábí religion: “It is one of the most remarkable movements of our day . . .” Edward G. Browne, who translated various Bahá’í works into English, called the Bábí-Bahá’í movement “the greatest religious movement of the century.”

Herbert A. Miller, a sociologist at Ohio State University, wrote: “What will be the course of the Bahá’í Movement no one can prophesy, but I think it is no exaggeration to claim that the program is the finest fruit of the religious contributions of Asia.” A Christian theologian, Nels F. S. Ferré, admits: “I have been surprised at the depth and devotional character of the best in Bahá’í scriptures as presented, for instance, in Townshend’s The Promise of All Ages.”

Marcus Bach, formerly a professor of comparative religion at the University of Iowa, says of the Bahá’í Faith: “Wherever I have gone to research the faith called Bahá’í, I have been astonished at what I have found.”

He mentions his astonishment when he visited the Bahá’í World Center in Haifa, Israel, and stood on Mt. Carmel in the shadow of the golden-domed Shrine of the Báb and his equal astonishment at the Bahá’í Nine Year Plan, projected for the years 1964-1973. He then says:

But most of all, I am continually intrigued by the Bahá’í people, . . . representing the basic cultural and ethnic groups around the world and embracing obscure and little-known localities in far-flung lands where even Christianity has barely gone. . . . I have met them in the most unexpected places, in a war-torn village in southeast Asia, in African cities, in industrial Mexico, in the executive branches of big industry in Iran, in schools and colleges on foreign campuses, in American cities and villages, wherever people dream of the age-old concept of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, somewhere in the unfolding rapture of the phrase, the Bahá’ís are there.

Although the Bahá’ís are a small and sometimes unnoticed presence amid the fast-moving, technological currents of the modern world, the historian, Arnold Toynbee, suggests something of the potential of the Bahá’ís when he observes how the Christian faith, at the beginning of its second century, was little esteemed by the cultured elite of the time:

In a Hellenizing World early in the second century of the Christian Era the Christian Church loomed no larger, in the sight of an Hellenically educated dominant minority, than the Bahá’í and Ahmadi sects were figuring in the sight of the corresponding class in a Westernizing World mid-way through the twentieth century.

Toynbee feels that syncretistic religions constructed artificially from elements of existing religions (such as the attempts of the Roman Emperor Julian and of Emperor Akbar, in India) have little chance of capturing mankind’s imagination and allegiance because such attempts are made partly for utilitarian [Page 34] rather than religious reasons, but Toynbee says, “At the same time, when I find myself in Chicago and when, travelling northwards out of the city, I pass the Bahai temple there, I feel that in some sense this beautiful building may be a portent of the future.”

Such recognitions by non-Bahá’í scholars of the importance and possible destiny of the Bahá’í Faith require that the religion be given careful attention.

Its Approximation to Christianity

ANOTHER REASON for studying the Bahá’í Faith, particularly for Christians and those in the Western part of the world, is its approximation to Christianity. “No religion,” one writer observes, “shows more strange parallels to Christianity. . . .” William A. Shedd, a Christian missionary in Persia, reported: “For the most part the ethical ideals are Christian.” When Edward G. Browne visited Persia in 1887-88, he was “much touched by the kindliness” of the Bahá’ís. When he mentioned this to his Bahá’í companion, the latter responded by saying that the Bahá’ís were nearer in sympathy to Browne than were the Muslims:

To them you are unclean and accursed: if they associate with you it is only by overcoming their religious prejudices. But we are taught to regard all good men as clean and pure, whatever their religion. With you Christians especially we have sympathy. Has it not struck you how similar were the life and death of our Founder (whom, indeed, we believe to have been Christ Himself returned to earth) to those of the Founder of your faith? . . . But besides this the ordinances enjoined upon us are in many respects like those which you follow.

Browne observed that few of the Muslims were conversant with the Christian Gospels, whereas the reverse was true of the Bahá’ís, many of whom, he noted, “take pleasure in reading the accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ.”

Unlike many Muslims who believe that the Qur’án teaches that Jesus did not die on the cross, Bahá’ís accept the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, and whereas Muslims refuse to regard Christ as more than merely a prophet or teacher from God, Bahá’ís profess him to be indeed the Son of God, a perfect manifestation of deity.

In one eloquent passage, Shoghi Effendi, great-grandson of Bahá’u’lláh, delineates the striking parallels between the ministry of [Page 35] Jesus Christ and that of the Báb:

The passion of Jesus Christ, and indeed His whole public ministry, alone offer a parallel to the Mission and death of the Báb, a parallel which no student of comparative religion can fail to perceive or ignore. In the youthfulness and meekness of the Inaugurator of the Bábi Dispensation; in the extreme brevity and turbulence of His public ministry; in the dramatic swiftness with which that ministry moved towards its climax; in the apostolic order which He instituted, and the primacy which He conferred on one of its members; in the boldness of His challenge to the time-honored conventions, rites and laws which had been woven into the fabric of the religion He Himself had been born into; in the role which an officially recognized and firmly entrenched religious hierarchy played as chief instigator of the outrages which He was made to suffer; in the indignities heaped upon Him; in the suddenness of His arrest; in the interrogation to which He was subjected; in the derision poured, and the scourging inflicted, upon Him; in the public affront He sustained; and, finally, in His ignominious suspension before the gaze of a hostile multitude—in all these we cannot fail to discern a remarkable similarity to the distinguishing features of the career of Jesus Christ.

In the distorted reports of their teachings and activities, in the persecution to which the Bábís were subjected, in their religion’s power to effect progressive social change and to inspire its followers to self-sacrifice and martyrdom, the Bábí movement reminds one of essential features of early Christianity.

Early Christian appraisals of the Bábí-Bahá’í movement saw it as a stepping stone in reaching the Muslims with the Christian gospel. An early notice in The Missionary Review of the World reported that the new teaching

has opened the door to the Gospel as nothing else has done. Bible circulation is almost doubled every year. It is computed that in many towns and villages half the population are Babis. This is a clear indication that the people of Persia are already, in large measure, wearied with Islam, and anxious for a higher, holier, and more spiritual faith. Almost all through the country the Babis are quite friendly to Christians. The rise of this faith is in a large measure due to the spread of the Gospel, the best of their doctrines are borrowed from it, while they openly reverence our Scriptures and profess to be ready to reject any opinion they may hold when once proved to be contrary to the Bible.

As late as 1925 Jules Bois wrote, “It is quite possible that Bahaism has a mission to pacify and spiritually quicken races and tribes which we have so far been unable to evangelize.” If Muslims could be won to an acceptance of the mission of Jesus as a divine revealer of God, perhaps they could eventually be won to a full acceptance of Christianity. This expectation, however, seems to have been premature, for instead of being won to the gospel, Bahá’ís began winning converts from Christianity. Robert P. Richardson, a strong critic of the Bahá’í religion, observed that “although so recent, this religion has spread from its birthplace, Persia, to the furthest ends of the earth” and noted with alarm that “Christians by the thousands have deserted the banner of Jesus for that of Bahá’u’lláh.”

Christian converts to the Bahá’í Faith, [Page 36] however, do not feel that they are deserting Jesus for Bahá’u’lláh but are reaching out to Jesus in his second coming. Just as Christians believe that if the Jews had actually believed Moses they would have believed in Jesus (John 5:46), so Bahá’ís believe that true Christians will accept Jesus in his returned form, Bahá’u’lláh. The Bahá’í Faith thus becomes, in Bahá’í thought, a truer form —the modern form—of Christianity. Firuz Kazemzadeh, an eminent Bahá’í and a professor of history at Yale University, in a recorded commentary on one of Bahá’u’lláh's writings, says: “The Bahá’í Faith . . . encompasses all the previous faiths and is organically linked with them. . . . The Bahá’í Faith is Christianity today; the Bahá’í Faith is Islám today.”

Because of the Bahá’í approximation to Christianity, Samuel G. Wilson, a Christian missionary to Persia, felt it necessary to stress that the Bahá’í Faith is “a distinct religion” from Christianity. Since the Bahá’í ethics also are similar to those of Christianity, the transition to the Bahá’í Faith is easy for some Christians. Be that as it may, the Bahá’í approximation of Christianity affords another reason for studying this remarkable religion.

Its Appeal to the Modern Age

A FURTHER REASON for studying the Bahá’í Faith is its appeal to many people in the modern age. Charles W. Ferguson wrote in 1929, and his statement is still true in the 1970s, that “No cult bears a gospel better suited to the temper of our times than the Bahai.” Indeed, Bahá’ís believe that the Bahá’í message is God’s word to the present age just as his word through prophets of the past was directed in a special way to the people of those former ages. Part of God’s message through previous prophets, such as the requirement of love to God and man and the “Golden Rule,” is eternal and is restated by succeeding prophets. But another part of the prophet’s message is directed to the special needs of the time. It is at this point that the prophet employs his divine authority to annul previous laws and to issue new ones commensurate with the requirements of the new age. Bahá’ís feel, therefore, that in Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings are to be found those divine laws, principles, and requirements which speak with special force to the present age. Whether one subscribes to this religious philosophy, it is true that many of the Bahá’í teachings deal with important issues of the time, and this explains in part the Bahá’í appeal to the modern age.

The Appeal to Modern Issues. The Bahá’í teaching concerning prejudice speaks about the current racial problem. The Women’s Liberation Movement finds a friend in the Bahá’í teaching of the equality of the sexes. The threat of nationalism, the problem of war, the hope for a durable peace, the efforts at international cooperation and arbitration by a “United Nations” tribunal, the modern friction between science and religion, the language barriers, the problem of poverty, the scandal of religious plurality—all these important issues of the modern period are dealt with (and the Bahá’ís would say, find their solution) in the Bahá’í revelation.

No religion has addressed itself in such specific manner to so many of the major problems and issues of an age than has the Bahá’í Faith. Arthur L. Dahl, a Bahá’í, explains that the Bahá’í Faith “recognizes that the major problem of our age is the resolution of a series of deeply ingrained conflicts which are interrelated and penetrate various levels of society: conflicts between ideologies, nations, religions, races, and classes.” The [Page 37] Bahá’í Faith, thus, addresses itself specifically to these issues and offers to modern man a faith, based on the concept of progressive revelation, which reconciles these conflicting divisions of man.

At a time when Christians are seeking ways to make the gospel more relevant to the modern world, Bahá’ís feel they already have a gospel which speaks to the modern age in God’s latest revelation. Why, the Bahá’ís ask, should one seek to make a revelation which was directed to a previous age applicable to a later period, when God already has vouchsafed to modern men and women His new message which is specifically designed for the new age? Bahá’ís have for years been directing their energies toward the solution of certain modern problems which some Christians are only now confessing their guilt in having encouraged. This helps explain the appeal today of the Bahá’í Faith over more traditional forms of religious expression.

The Appeal in a Modern Ecumenical Age. The Christian Ecumenical Movement of the twentieth century has been widely acclaimed as a trend which future historians may recognize as “the most significant event of the twentieth century.” The Ecumenical Movement within Christianity no doubt has been one of the major events of modern times, but Floyd H. Ross says, “The great issue of the hour is not Christian ecumenism but human ecumenism.” It is to this larger ecumenism that the Bahá’í Faith addresses itself. The Bahá’ís are concerned not simply with union within the existing religions but with the union of all the religions in one faith and the union of all people in one universal brotherhood.

The Bahá’ís, thus, represent a gigantic ecumenical movement. In an age when the distances which separate peoples and cultures of the world grow smaller every day, when events in one part of the world dramatically affect the entire globe, when the threat of total annihilation endangers all life forms on earth, and when man constantly searches for better and more effective means toward world understanding and cooperation, the worldwide Bahá’í ecumenical program marks one more reason for this Faith’s appeal to men and women of the modern age.

The Appeal to Today’s Religiously Disenchanted. The modern world is justly described as a “post-Christian” and “secular” world. However much some may think these descriptions have been overplayed, the reality remains. Edmund Perry writes:

Respect for the Church is no longer axiomatic in the West and the norms of Christian behavior do not as formerly dictate the morals of Western culture. Indeed, Christian faith, the Church and Christian behavior have become quite unacceptable to the vast majority of folk in the West. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin has aptly characterized this loss of the Church’s power and influence in the West by the phrase “the breakdown of Chtistendom.”

Not only does the secular man outside the church deem the church irrelevant, but a number of notable persons within the church have left it in recent times because of its irrelevance to modern man. James Kavanaugh, the “modern priest” who took a look at his “outdated church” and later decided to leave it, noted that “the most significant religious experiences are taking place outside or in spite of the institutional Church.” He [Page 38] writes:

It is too hard to convince an irrelevant institution that the world finds it intransigent and obsolete. It is hard to “go through channels” when the “channels” are more a vested interest than a reflection of an honest search for faith. A man can only abandon the institution and search for God on his own or with a few friends.

This search for God outside of the institutional church, of which Kavanaugh speaks, is being carried on by an increasing number of modern men and women, from the youthful “Jesus people” to experienced churchmen and trained theologians.

Kavanaugh’s indictment of the institutional church is quite similar to what the Bahá’ís are saying, but instead of looking at only one segment of the modern religious world—the Roman Catholic church, as Kavanaugh did—the Bahá’ís have taken a look at Christianity as a whole and also at Buddhism, Hinduism, Islám, and other religions and found them all outdated and irrelevant to the modern age.

In Bahá’í thought, all religions go through an inevitable process of development and deterioration. For a time each religion develops and makes a significant impact on the world but eventually begins to depart from the pure teachings of its founder and starts a decline in which it continuously loses its spiritual power and its relevance to the world. At an appropriate point, God sends a new revelation to renew and revitalize the religion and to make it more applicable to the religious and social needs of the time.

This revelation of God is continuous and progressive, determined by the world’s needs and by man’s ability to receive new revelation. The various religions are created because the followers of one revelation refuse to accept the succeeding one but continue instead to adhere to the prophet who brought the revelation with which they are familiar. To the Bahá’ís, therefore, since God has sent His latest revelation through Bahá’u’lláh, all previous revelations and the religions which have been built around them have become obsolete, except for the eternal laws which deal with matters such as love, kindness, justice, and humility; and these are restated in the Bahá’í revelation. The messages of previous prophets relating to religious institutions (rituals, sacraments, ordinances, religious laws concerning prayer, fasting, and pilgrimages) and laws directed to social needs are superseded.

To the person who has grown weary of seemingly empty religious practices and teachings designed only to perpetuate the religious establishment regardless of whether it makes any meaningful contribution to society, the Bahá’í Faith, which claims to have no clergy or ordinances and a minimum of dogma but an important social message, makes a definite appeal. Marcus Bach points out that the “many Americans” who “were ready to accept Bahá’u’lláh as the mouthpiece of God” were “not people whom the churches has passed by; some of them had passed up the churches, feeling that creeds and sects were narrow and confining.”

Its Fertility for Insights into Religious Development

ANOTHER IMPORTANT REASON for studying the Bahá’í Faith is the insight it may provide in studying other religions, in tracing and understanding the developments which religions experience. To focus today on the birth and rise of a world religion which is so close to one’s own day at such an early stage in its development may provide in no small way important insights into the origin and development of religions of the past.

To be sure, each religion is unique in some respects so that one could not always conclude that what is true of one is necessarily [Page 39] true of all others; but every religion as a historical and social phenomenon also shares certain common features with other religions, else one could not speak of the general category of “religions.” Every religion, for example, originates within a particular historical context, and it passes through certain stages of development. Every religion possesses a body of “sacred” literature or oral tradition, which is regarded by the religion’s adherents as set apart from other literature or knowledge in a special way.

The Bábí-Bahá’í movement provides the historian of religion with invaluable sources for studying its origin and development as with no other religion. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the Bahá’í Faith is the most recent religion. Other religions began hundreds or thousands of years ago. Of the so-called eleven major, living religions of the world, only Islám (seventh century A.D.) and Sikhism (sixteenth century A.D.) are centuries old; the others—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity —date back thousands of years. The Bahá’í Faith originated only in the last century (1844 A.D.), and only since 1963 has it reached possibly the last phase of its formative development, which incidentally makes the present time most appropriate for making a study of that development. The Bahá’í Faith is, therefore, a religion of modern times and is naturally more accessible for study and understanding than the older religions.

A second reason that this faith is an excellent subject of study is that its origin coincided with the nineteenth-century development of interest in the scientific and critical study of religion. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau and Edward G. Browne were among the scholars who took an academic and scientific interest in the religion, and the material they collected and their observations of the movement have placed all succeeding students of the Faith in tremendous debt to them. Edward G. Browne, for example, had a number of interviews with Bahá’u’lláh himself, the founder of the religion. Moreover, he talked with and corresponded with a number of leaders in the movement and gained much valuable information.

In spite of these researches, a number of important questions regarding the origin and early development of the movement remain unresolved, but the information which is available is considerably greater then is available concerning the rise of any other major religion. Thus the Bahá’í Faith is important not only for its own significance but for the insights it may provide in understanding the manner in which other religions are born and develop.

Its Remarkable Growth

THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH, moreover, deserves study because of its remarkable growth and extension around the world. Since its birth in 1844 the Faith has spread from Persia to all parts of the world and may be called quite appropriately a world religion. The Faith is reporting spectacular successes in recent years. When William McElwee Miller wrote his first book on the Bahá’í Faith, published in 1931, he said:

All impartial observers of Bahá’ism in Persia are agreed that here in the land of its birth this religion, which once showed promise of capturing all Central Asia, is now steadily losing ground. . . . It is only a matter of time until this strange movement, like Manichaeism and Mazdakism before it, shall be known only to students of history.

That description was written in the early 1930s. Much has happened since then. Miller himself was to note later, in 1940, that the [Page 40] number of Bahá’í Spiritual Assemblies and the number of voting members had doubled in the decade from 1926 to 1936. John Elder referred in 1948 to the “surprising vitality” observable in the Bahá’í movement in Iran. Edward B. Calverly, in 1955, remarked, “The Bahá’í cause two decades ago was decreasing in influence in Iran, but is, at present, experiencing remarkable vitality.” Frank S. Mead reported that “since 1963 there has been a marked growth in membership” in the Bahá’í Faith.

Bahá’ís do not give statistics of their worldwide membership, but they do publish periodically, among other statistics, information on the number of countries opened to the Faith, the number of Spiritual Assemblies, and the number of languages into which Bahá’í literature has been translated. A look at the growth of the Bahá’í Faith in countries and territories during the periods of the Faith’s successive leaders reveals the rapidly developing outreach of its influence. During the Báb’s ministry (1844-1850), Bábís could be found in Persia and Iraq. By the end of Bahá’u’lláh’s ministry (1892), Bahá’ís had penetrated into fifteen countries, and when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá passed away (1921), an additional twenty countries had been opened to the Faith.

The period of spectacular extension, however, began under the able administrative direction of Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Cause from 1921 until his death in 1957. At the time of Shoghi Effendi’s passing, Bahá’ís had penetrated 254 countries and dependencies. Most of this extension occurred after 1953, when Shoghi Effendi launched the Ten Year Plan. Achievements during this decade (1953-1963) included the following: the number of countries and territories where Bahá’ís resided more than doubled (from 128 in 1953 to 259 in 1963); the addition of 220 languages into which Bahá’í literature is translated and printed more than tripled the previous figure; the number of National Spiritual Assemblies (the national administrative bodies) quadrupled (forty-seven were formed in this period); seven new Bahá’í publishing trusts were established; three new Bahá’í temples were built (in Frankfurt, Germany; Sydney, Australia; and Kampala, Uganda, Africa); and the acquisition of forty-six new temple sites more than quadrupled the original goal of eleven.

This Ten Year World Crusade was climaxed in 1963 by two important events: (1) the election by the members of fifty-six National Spiritual Assemblies convened at the Bahá’í World Center in Haifa, Israel, of the first Universal House of Justice, composed of nine men, forming the highest administrative body in the Bahá’í Faith, and (2) the convening of the first Bahá’í World Congress in London, England, where more than six thousand Bahá’ís from around the world gathered for the formal celebration of the Most Great Jubilee (April 21-May 2), commemorating the centenary of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of his mission.

The Universal House of Justice launched in 1964 the Nine Year Plan concluded in 1973. The reported growth of Bahá’í membership in the United States within this period is extraordinary. The sixty-second annual National Bahá’í Convention (1971), for example, reported that Bahá’í membership more than doubled within the past one-year period. In a one-month period, nine thousand converts were won in a thirteen-county [Page 41] “‘teaching conference’” based in Dillon, South Carolina. The number of National Spiritual Assemblies has presently reached 119, with 12 more to be established in the course of the present Five Year Plan for the expansion of the Faith.

From the few hundred centers in thirty-five countries in which Bahá’ís could be found when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá passed away in 1921, the Bahá’í Faith has expanded today to more than 69,500 centers in more than 300 countries, islands, and territories of the world. The remark made by a Protestant minister to Marcus Bach that “‘If these Bahá’ís ever get going, they may take the country by storm’” may be coming true today.

[Page 42]

[Page 43]

The Missionary as Historian: William Miller and the Bahá’í Faith

A REVIEW OF WILLIAM McELWEE MILLER’S The Bahá’í Faith: Its History and Teachings (SOUTH PASADENA, CALIFORNIA: WILLIAM CAREY LIBRARY, 1974), 358 PAGES, APPENDICES, INDEX

BY DOUGLAS MARTIN

“We are dealing . . . not with what we would like to believe, but with historical facts established beyond a doubt which we cannot but accept.”

William Miller

WILLIAM McELWEE MILLER is a man with an obsession. Although by profession a Presbyterian clergyman, and for forty years employed in that Church’s missions in Persia, Rev. Miller has focused a great part of his energies as a writer and as a public lecturer on the subject of the Bahá’í Faith. The two books he has written are both on that topic, as are a third work on which he collaborated with the Reverend E. E. Elder, and a number of articles published in the religious press. His most recent book, The Bahá’í Faith: Its History and Teachings (South Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1974) may be fairly regarded as the final flowering of this lifetime preoccupation.

To say this should not suggest that Rev. Miller regards his subject with any affection. He briefly acknowledges that the Bahá’í Faith has become a worldwide religious force to be taken seriously. In speaking of The Bahá’í World, the fourteen-volume summary of the Faith’s activities since 1925, he says: “Whoever peruses [these volumes] . . . will be impressed by the fact that the Bahá’í Faith is indeed a world Faith.” He groups it in this respect with Christianity and Islám, whose “field is the world.” Such a judgment is in itself no small admission. In his initial assessment, written in 1931, Rev. Miller dismissed the Bahá’í Faith as “a dying movement,” a minor “sect” which was on the point of disappearing entirely from the world scene: “It is only a matter of time until this strange movement . . . shall be known only to students of history.” His latest book would, therefore, have benefited greatly from even a brief explanation of so startling a change of mind.

What has not changed is Rev. Miller’s very negative view of the youngest addition to the world’s religions. Essentially, the Bahá’í Faith which he pictures for his readers is a product of a century-long conspiracy conceived by persons of the basest character and motive. Its present-day followers (whose own spititual life Rev. Miller assesses as in no way distinguished) are entirely deceived as to their Faith’s real nature. Its laws and teachings

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This critique formed part of a paper entitled “The Bahá’í Faith and Its Critics,” delivered at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith, held in Toronto, Canada, January 1-4, 1976.

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[Page 44] are either superficial, harmful, or irrelevant to mankind’s needs. Its administrative order is “a dictatorship.”

To be sure, Rev. Miller does not advance these opinions as succinctly or as candidly as they are summarized above. In all of his writings he has earnestly sought to present his views as a detached commentary on a body of neutral “facts” gathered by a dispassionate “scholar” through years of patient research. The concluding effort of his career is no exception. The book begins with an assertion that it was written “for the purpose of presenting in a concise and orderly fashion the facts which have been established by [Edward G.] Browne and other trustworthy scholars . . .” It ends with the measured question “can the Bahá’í World Faith be an adequate religion for the world today, and for the millenium to come?”, and the magisterial judgment that the answer is “decidedly negative.”

No one who has read Rev. Miller’s earlier writings will be distracted even momentarily by the introduction of these academic conventions. The author’s highly partisan opinion of the Bahá’í Faith was formed over forty years ago and was expressed in his first major publication on the subject, written at that time. To what extent those views then represented the results of a study of objective reality and to what extent they were the spontaneous reaction of a Protestant missionary in the barren fields of the Islamic Middle East against what he saw as a successful rival faith is impossible for anyone to know. What does emerge clearly in this final work is an effort to deal with the entirely unexpected developments of the intervening decades and to draw together whatever materials have been turned up in the same period which might be used to reinforce the original argument. The purpose, presumably, is to counteract the demonstrated capacity of the Bahá’í community to attract growing numbers of adherents in nominally Christian lands.

In this aim the book may enjoy a measure of success over the short run. The very scope suggested by the title, together with the historical approach that is taken, the photographs, and the accompanying narrative detail, give the work an air of thoroughness and authority. Where matters of belief and religious practice are discussed, the author’s own opinions are closely woven into the fabric of quotation and reference. The most damning conclusions are presented in a tone of surprise and regret. Throughout, the book is heavily footnoted, drawing on an apparently wide range of sources. While a degree of animus that was much less apparent in Rev. Miller’s earlier writings has now become unmistakable, the author also pays an occasional conventional tribute to the sacrifices which Bahá’ís have made for beliefs which he himself regards as misguided or positively dangerous. No doubt the fact that the author is a Presbyterian clergyman will also lend the book special weight with Christian readers who can be expected to assume that such a profession is itself a guarantee of moral credentials.

When Rev. Miller’s work is examined at closer range the carefully constructed scholarly illusion begins rapidly to fall apart. The most serious shortcoming, indeed the fatal one, is the use which is made of the sources. The problem takes several forms, the first of which appears in the opening pages of the Introduction. As has already been indicated, Rev. Miller presents his book as an attempt to provide “in concise and orderly fashion the facts which have been established by Browne and other scholars.” Had such an effort been undertaken it would have had a rich body of material on which to draw. The rise of the Bahá’í Faith very early attracted an impressive group of scholars and observers: Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, A. L. M. Nicholas, Clément Huart, E. G. Browne, Alexander Tumansky, Baron Victor Rosen, Mirza Kazem [Page 45] Bek, and Hermann Roëmer, to mention only the most important.

Rev. Miller is obviously familiar with the names of most of these writers, as he lists several of them in his Introduction. Apart from E. G. Browne, however, whose work is extensively used, and occasional rather ill-digested references from Gobineau, the author elliptically confides that he has not “been able to benefit” from direct knowledge of these sources. Who, then, are the “scholars” to whom he refers?

The source on whom Rev. Miller most depends is the late Jelal Azal, a descendent of the notorious Mírzá Yaḥyá, Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. Contrary to Rev. Miller’s suggestion, Mr. Azal was not a recognized scholar, nor was he in any sense independent. Rather, he was a person who had long been engaged in a personal vendetta against the religion he is alleged to have been “studying.” His tendentious unpublished “notes,” endorsed by Rev. Miller as “the results of . . . scholarly research,” are used as the basis for some of the most important passages of the author’s thesis. Fortunately, Rev. Miller has provided a detailed index of these notes and the documents on which they are purportedly [Page 46] based, and he has deposited copies of much of the material in the library at Princeton University. There, in time, it will no doubt be subjected to such careful examination as circumstances may warrant. For those familiar with the history of the Bahá’í Faith, however, the entire performance has a depressing air of déjà vu. The long series of exposures of forgeries and misrepresentations perpetrated by an earlier generation of Azalí writers places the onus squarely on any modern writer who seeks to make use of such sources, to demonstrate their reliability beyond any possible doubt. Rev. Miller, on the contrary, places himself entirely in the hands of Mr. Azal, especially so far as the post-Bábí period of his narrative is concerned, reproducing quite uncritically whatever his correspondent sent him, and turning large sections of his book into little more than an Azalí tract. The result is a work in which gross errors of fact undermine the value of every chapter.

Where responsible sources are drawn upon, the use which is made of them often seems remote from the accepted methods of historical writing. Edward Granville Browne suffers particularly in this respect. Professor Browne, a Cambridge orientalist, traveled extensively in the Middle East during the latter part of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, met many of the early Bábís and Bahá’ís, and produced a number of translations and scholarly commentaries as a result of his several years’ research. [Page 47] These are extremely valuable documents and have been heavily used by various writers, both Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í, in succeeding decades. As a professional scholar, however, Professor Browne himself would have been the first to recognize that his work would inevitably be subject to revision, as later generations freed themselves from the particular political and cultural context in which he was working, and as further historical evidence surfaced. Indeed, the process of revision has been recognized as an integral part of the writing of history ever since historiography moved out of the nineteenth century’s naive belief that it could write “scientific history,” “history as it really happened.”

The most thorough and recent revisionist work on the writings of Professor Browne related to the Bahá’í and Bábí Faiths is a critique by Mr. H. M. Balyuzi, Edward Granville Browne and the Bahá’í Faith (London: George Ronald, 1970). Entirely apart from the meticulous scholarship of his study, Mr. Balyuzi treats his subjeCt with a courtesy and respect which could well serve as a model for writing of this nature. It is, therefore, astonishing to note Rev. Miller’s reaction to the Balyuzi critique: “It is indeed regrettable that now after sixty years, when Edward Browne is no longer able to defend himself, his competence as a scholar, and even the integrity of his character, should be thus called in question.”

This, of course, is humbug. If taken seriously it would suggest that a scholarly study like that of Professor Browne should be seen not as a building block in the gradual erection of a comprehensive and many-sided view of a major historical development, but rather as a kind of talisman which endows a particular contemporary point of view with authority and which is itself exempt from examination. So simplistic a view of the nature and function of historical writing has no place in serious study, and its persistent use in the work in question neither advances the author’s argument nor does credit to the source thus misused.

The failure of the book to come to terms with the Balyuzi critique makes it impossible for the uninformed reader to consider intelligently and dispassionately Professor Browne’s own use of the sources available to him at the turn of the century. Professor Browne leaned heavily, one could safely say preferentially, on the views of a small band of men who at the time were involved in a bitter and protracted campaign to destroy the influence of Bahá’u’lláh. These men were Azalís, nominally supporters of Bahá’u’lláh’s younger half-brother Mírzá Yaḥyá Ṣubḥ-i-Azal. Unlike the mass of their fellow believers they had rejected Bahá’u’lláh’s claim to be “He Whom God Will Manifest,” Whose advent the Báb had promised. Professor Browne himself estimated their number to be no more than three or four in every hundred Bábís, all the remainder having recognized in Bahá’u’lláh the signs of the Báb’s “Promised One.”

Against the virtually unanimous voice of the followers of the Báb, who knew the circumstances and the central personalities in the dispute at first hand, Professor Browne gave preference to the statements of the Azalís. What is the explanation for such a departure from historiographical methods and standards to which Professor Browne had earlier demonstrated his commitment?

He himself does not tell us. He presents no evidence from independent sources which would support the Azalí claims, and he makes it clear that he has an equal measure of respect for the integrity of both parties. Obviously, some very powerful influence had intervened. [Page 48] Thus one of the invaluable contributions of Mr. Balyuzi’s recent work is that it has identified this influence, with the help of documentation which has since come to light.

The Bábí Revelation did not exercise only a spiritual and emotional influence on Professor Browne, powerful as that effect obviously was. Beyond this, Professor Browne insisted on seeing the new movement in the context of Victorian democratic and nationalistic hopes. He loved Persia, and he ardently looked to the Bábís to become the chief force in the political liberalization of the country. Persia was at the time in the grip of a protracted struggle between the reactionary elements supporting the feudal autocracy of the Sháh and a combination of somewhat ill-assorted radical and revolutionary elements temporarily united under the title “Constitutionalists.” Naively seeing in the latter a kind of Persian equivalent of the British Liberal and Labor Patties, Professor Browne made himself one of their leading spokesmen in Britain and worked ardently to mobilize Western opinion in their support.

Perhaps even more important than his liberal ideals in impelling Professor Browne along this course were nationalistic convictions which held almost the force of a religion for him. Persia in the nineteenth century had become the key to one of the great international power struggles of the late nineteenth century, the contest of the British and Russian empires for control of the land route to India and the Orient. Each side sought clients on the Persian domestic political scene. As Tsarist Russia increasingly supported the congenial despotism of the Qájár monarchy, English patriots like Professor Browne began to urge on their government the potential value of the Constitutionalists as British allies.

To Professor Browne’s intense disappointment the Bábí community, the most vital, disciplined, and progressive element in Persian society, refused to be drawn into either the domestic or the international conflict. The reason was Bahá’u’lláh’s assumption of His Prophetic role and His refusal to compromise the universal nature of His message for political ends. Professor Browne’s reaction may be read in his own commentary on Bahá’u’lláh’s oft-quoted statement on the oneness of mankind:

Bahá’ism [sic], in my opinion, is too cosmopolitan in its aim to render much direct service to that revival [i.e., of Persian political life]. “Pride is not for him who loves his country,” says Bahá’u’lláh, “but for him who loves the world.” This is a fine sentiment, but just now it is men who love their country above all else that Persia needs. [italics added]

Only one small handful of Bábís were prepared, indeed eager, to assume the political role which Professor Browne had envisioned for them. These were the Azalís, who had by this time abandoned their erstwhile leader, Mírzá Yaḥyá, to his lonely exile on Cyprus, and had suddenly metamorphosed into political ideologists, journalists, and underground agents. In the process they entered into intimate correspondence with Professor Browne and became his trusted collaborators. It was from these men, intensely ambitious for public careers, and blocked by Bahá’u’lláh from utilizing the Báb’s legacy to this end, that Professor Browne received the “documents” and commentaries which Mr. Balyuzi has convincingly exposed.

The only other non-Bahá’í sources whose [Page 49] assistance Rev. Miller acknowledges are an improbable collection of avowed opponents of the Bahá’í Faith, including several Protestant missionaries, a number of individuals who were at one time or another expelled from Bahá’í membership (and whose various reflections on one another’s integrity is an aspect of their views not touched on in Rev. Miller’s highly selective citations from their writings), and two amateur American polemicists who lack even these modest credentials. Most of these persons are presented as independent “inquirers,” and only a very careful reading of the book reveals that, in fact, they represent a group of persons with varying grievances against the Bahá’í Faith, several of whom have long maintained a close correspondence on the congenial subject of attempts to “expose” its claims. In no sense can any of them be regarded as independent, nor their writings as scholarly. One is left to assume that the explanation for the failure of the book to draw on the works of any of the recognized scholars, except for Browne and, in a small way, Gobineau, is Rev. Miller’s ignorance of European languages other than English. Whatever the cause may be, the lack cannot explain the similar neglect of several basic Bahá’í sources which are available in the latter language. Limitations of space prevent a thorough examination of the subject, but one or two of the more glaring examples will illustrate the magnitude of the gap.

It is impossible that any responsible examination of the Bábí era could be undertaken without making extensive use of The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl’s Narrative, the detailed history of that period written by the one person who was both a firsthand observer and a recognized historical writer. For those events which he did not personally witness, Nabíl provides in exhaustive detail, the identity of the observers from whom he received the accounts and very often the circumstances surrounding the transmittal. To understand the significance of such a work one would have to imagine the importance to Christian history of a similar, meticulously annotated record kept by one of the immediate companions of Jesus Christ, and covering all the significant events of the latter’s ministry. This unique body of primary documentation is dismissed by Rev. Miller without further explanation as not “reliable.”

In its place, the principal source used for this period (apart from Mr. Azal) is an extraordinary manuscript produced by unknown writers some time between 1852 and 1863, under the title Nuqṭatu’l-Káf. In his study on the work of Professor Browne, Mr. Balyuzi has demonstrated the unreliability of this strange mélange of historical narrative, superstition, nihilistic thought, and naive partisan propaganda. He also rescues the reputation of Mírzá Jání, the merchant and Bábí martyr whose name and memoirs were misused by the compilers of the work. For a modern writer to discuss the subject, therefore, would again have required coming to grips with the argument contained in the Balyuzi critique. The challenge is particularly acute for Rev. Miller, as the thesis of the section of his book which deals with the Bábí period rests squarely on the authenticity of the Káf manuscript. [Page 50] Rev. Miller seems aware of the seriousness of the problem, but the one lengthy footnote which he devotes to the Balyuzi study is both superficial and essentially off the topic.” Ignoring the obstacle, he simply attributes the manuscript to Mírzá Jání and asserts that it is “the earliest and best history” of the Bábí movement.

Rev. Miller's presentation of the period dominated by the ministry of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause (1921-1957), suffers from a similarly unacceptable neglect of major sources. As with the Bábí era, there is one detailed, comprehensive source, this time provided by the person who, next to Shoghi Effendi himself, had the most intimate knowledge of the events of those thirty-six years. The book is The Priceless Pearl, the biography of the Guardian written by his widow and long-time secretary, Rúḥíyyih Khánum, the former Mary Maxwell of Montreal, Canada, and published two years before Rev. Miller’s book went to press. It is, by any standard, an extraordinary achievement in biography, in which an intricately crafted structure gives form and balance to the wealth of detail and documentation provided for every phase of the subject’s life and work. It is not merely that The Priceless Pearl is the best account of the events with which it deals. It is the only comprehensive account in existence. One is free, if one wishes, to regard it as “official history” (to use Rev. Miller’s disparaging phrase), but to disregard it is to demonstrate either an ignorance of the role of the Guardianship in Bahá’í history or a purpose so partisan as to produce the same effect.

To be precise, Rev. Miller does not entirely disregard Rúḥíyyih Khánum’s writings. Rather, he extracts brief excerpts from moving, personal accounts which the author gives of her marriage and Shoghi Effendi’s death. These fragments lend color and an appearance of authenticity to Rev. Miller’s presentation of the writer (who in contrast to the male writers quoted is tastelessly referred to merely by her first name, “Mary”) as an emotional woman whose range of understanding and even interest goes little beyond a personal attachment to the man who was her husband.

Apart from these highly misleading references, the invaluable biographical work which Rúḥíyyih Khánum has contributed to an understanding of one of the most critical periods in the development of the Bahá’í Faith, the period of its global expansion, is passed over in silence. Yet the next chapter of Rev. Miller’s book finds space for nearly a dozen pages of quotations from the writings of Charles Mason Remey, formerly a figure of prominence in the Bahá’í Faith, who was expelled when he attempted to set himself up as “the hereditary Guardian” of the Faith in 1960. From an objective point of view, and particularly in the light of subsequent events, on which Rev. Miller had fully informed himself, Mr. Remey’s role in Bahá’í history could hardly be regarded as a major one. His unsuccessful efforts to create a rift in the membership of the Faith is no doubt relevant to any comprehensive discussion of modern Bahá’í history, but could have been more than adequately dealt with in a paragraph, illustrated by an extract from one of Mr. Remey’s statements, if that seemed necessary to the writer’s argument.

To present a figure of this kind as a major historical source is unacceptable in any serious work. Mr. Remey was an aged man at the time he produced the writings in question, one whose condition made him a pathetic figure and whose mental state could not have [Page 51] been unknown to anyone in even limited contact with him. His statements throw no light whatever on the extraordinary expansion of the Bahá’í Faith in the past four decades, which had caused Rev. Miller so completely to revise his estimate of the Faith’s capacities. Indeed, Mr. Remey wrote very little on this subject.

Inevitably, introduction of such material embroils its user in serious problems. After a lengthy review of Mr. Remey’s pronouncements, Rev. Miller suddenly asks, “Did it ever occur to Mr. Remey that in claiming to be the Guardian [of the Bahá’í Faith] he was himself violating the Will [of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá], which required that the successor of the Guardian be ‘the fist born of his [Shoghi Effendi’s] lineal descendents,’ . . .” The point seems so obvious that one wonders why it is included at all. Few people, either within the Bahá’í Faith or outside, took seriously Mr. Remey’s pretensions, and he died in his hundredth year, at about the time Rev. Miller’s book was going to press, bereft of supporters or attention. Having given the subject extensive space, however, Rev. Miller seems to lose entirely the thread of his argument. Nine pages after the statement just quoted, the Hands of the Bahá’í Cause are criticized for having failed to “create a new Guardian,” a step for which, as had just been noted, there was no authority in the Writings of their Faith. Rev. Miller’s judgment is most severe:

Unabashed . . . and undeterred by the appeals of Hand of the Cause and President of the First International Bahá’í Council, Mason Remey, to continue the Guardianship, the remaining Hands of the Cause proceeded with their plans [to arrange for the election of the Universal House of Justice].

A discussion of Rev. Miller’s use of sources is rendered extremely difficult by the fact that except for the brief opening chapters on Islám, he fails to provide a bibliography. Next to Nabíl-i-‘Azám and Rúḥíyyih Khánum, the most serious omissions that are readily apparent are the biographies of the Báb and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá which have been produced by Mr. Balyuzi (London: George Ronald, 1971 and 1973, respectively). Both books deal in some detail with a number of the most complex and contentious issues taken up by Rev. Miller. Both are extensively documented and make use of archival material which has only come to light in recent years. So far as The Bahá’í Faith: Its History and Teachings is concerned these two most current and basic texts might as well not exist. Where Rev. Miller does use Bahá’í sources, his editorial comments on them are uniformly hostile and unfair. The writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi especially suffer in this respect. In marked contrast long-time enemies of the Faith are treated with elaborate deference.

Although a wholesale misuse of sources is the book’s most serious flaw, it is by no [Page 52] means the only one. Where congenial sources fail, Rev. Miller leans heavily on the “it is not too improbable to suggest” narrative method. Throughout the book, major gaps are filled with this insubstantial connective. The far from impressive result is worth a moment’s attention because of the revealing glimpse it provides of the historiographical methods and objectives underlying the book. Without exception, these glosses, none of which is supported by a reference to the usual “documentation,” depreciate the significance of some important event or personality of Bahá’í history. Occasionally, they are even used to force some unrelated Christian theological message into the narrative.

The Báb’s teachings on kindness, for example, are attributed to the influence on Him of the Christian scriptures: “It is probable [italics added] that his emphasis on kindness and love, as well as his attitude toward women and children, had been influenced by his reading of the New Testament . . .”

Bahá’u’lláh is accused of having denied His own faith in the Báb: It has been said [italics added] that in order to save his life Baha denied he was a Babi, as the Báb had ordered his disciples to do at the time of his execution. This is not improbable . . . [italics added].

Bahá’u’lláh's assumption of His divine mission is attributed to a recognition on His part of certain practical necessities within the Bábí movement: “Baha . . . probably [italics added] realized that the Babi Cause in order to survive needed stronger leadership than his brother Azal was able to give.”

Not even Muḥammad escapes, although in His case, the vast body of existing scholarly comment imposes a greater degree of caution in the use of the method:

It was probably, in part at least [italics added], as a result of his contacts with them [Jews and Christians] that a strong conviction came to Muḥammad . . . that he had been appointed by Allah.

. . .Therefore, in the Koran, in accordance with the supposed pattern of the books of previous prophets, . . . we find regulations for marriage and divorce, . . .

The Prophet of Arabia probably [italics added] took Moses as his model of what a prophet should be and say and do, for he knew more of him than he did of Jesus.

The results of this wholesale manufacturing of history are unedifying and occasionally grotesque. One of the most firmly established facts of Bahá’í history is the Báb’s recognition of the title which Bahá’u’lláh chose for Himself and those which He conferred on His fellow Bábís. Nabíl, who had the details at first hand from those present describes the scene at the conference of Badasht:

Upon each He [Bahá’u’lláh] bestowed a new name. He Himself was henceforth designated by the name of Bahá; upon the Last Letter of the Living was conferred the appellation oi Quddús, and to Qurratu’l-‘Ayn was given the title of Ṭáhirih. To each of those who had convened at Badasht a special Tablet was subsequently revealed by the Báb, each of whom He addressed by the name recently conferred upon him.

The Báb’s recognition of the title of Bahá’u’lláh (“Glory of God”) was particularly significant since He had used precisely this term in the Bayán to allude to the promised “Him-Whom-God-Will-Manifest.” On the eve of His departure for Tabríz where He was executed the Báb reiterated this recognition in a remarkable Tablet which He forwarded to Bahá’u’lláh. Nabíl, who was himself a witness of the transmittal, describes the document as

a scroll of blue paper, of the most delicate

texture, on which the Báb, in His own exquisite handwriting, which was a fine shikastih script, had penned, in the form [Page 53]

of a pentacle, what numbered about five hundred verses, all consisting of derivatives from the word “Bahá.” . . . So fine and intricate was the penmanship that, viewed at a distance, the writing appeared as a single wash of ink on the paper. We were overcome with admiration as we gazed upon a masterpiece which no calligraphist, we believed, could rival.

The scroll was duly delivered to Bahá’u’lláh at Ṭihrán. The most cursory research would have cleared up any question which a modern student of the Bahá’í Faith might have on the subject. Instead, Rev. Miller ignores Nabíl’s account in favor of an entirely fictitious version of events in which the Báb Himself, in some fashion not explained, conferred titles on all the other Badasht participants except Bahá’u’lláh. The latter then undertook a sedulous search through the Christian and other Scriptures for a title which would advance His own plans: “Mirza Husayn Ali [Bahá’u’lláh] no doubt [italics added] spent many hours searching for this beautiful word in all the sacred writings . . .”

In the same fashion Shoghi Effendi’s exercise of the unique ministry conferred on him in the Bahá’í Writings, a ministry for which he alone had the authority, is attributed to a psychological insecurity on his own part: “It seems that [italics added] he [Shoghi Effendi] did not know how to delegate tasks to others . . .”

The freedom with which this device is used betrays an ignorance on the part of the author of basic and readily available information on his subject. The Comte de Gobineau, for example, the first Western scholar to study the facts at first hand, says of the Bábí heroine, Ṭáhirih: “I have never heard anyone among the Muslims cast any doubt on the virtue of so unusual a person.” Presumably lacking a thorough knowledge of Gobineau’s work, and having objectives other than historiographical ones, Rev. Miller’s discussion of the subject casts a slur on the character of this unique woman, whose personal life is regarded by Bahá’ís as the very model of moral purity: “her freedom of travelling about the country with the Babi chiefs scandalized many people, and there was probably [italics added] some ground for criticism of her disregard for convention.” The writer then quotes an obscure reference from the Káf manuscript and asserts that Ṭáhirih “was on intimate terms” with one of her male colleagues. The implication is clear.

A similar shadow is cast on the reputation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Howard Colby Ives, himself a Christian clergyman, fully acquainted with the details of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Western trip, makes a particular point of the fact that one of the many things which confirmed him in his recognition of Bahá’u’lláh was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s refusal to accept assistance with His personal expenses from Western believers. The funds which were raised by well-meaning friends were courteously returned to them.

. . . He constantly refused the slightest remuneration, and even when entertained by solicitous and generous hosts He was punctilious in seeing to it that gifts to both hosts and servants of the household far outweighed what He received.

Mr. Ives’ book is a commonplace item in [Page 54] any Bahá’í library, and although a number of other sources make precisely the same point, Rev. Miller casually creates an entirely fictitious version of events: “in the spring of 1912 Abdu’l-Bahá, no doubt [italics added] at the invitation and the expense [italics added] of the believers in America, set forth on a journey which lasted nearly two years.”

Almost no aspect of Bahá’í history escapes this treatment. A well-to-do philanthropist like Mrs. W. Sutherland Maxwell of Montreal, and professional people such as Keith Ransom-Kehler and Dr. Susan Moody, whose dedication of their funds and skills to the work of the Bahá’í Faith was an inspiration to their coreligionists all over the worlld, are described as “paid pioneers.” The open and emphatic declaration of her faith as a Bahá’í by Queen Marie of Rumania, in letters to newspapers and to the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith (some of which were published with her consent in photostat form in Volumes VI and VIII of The Bahá’í World) is passed over in silence, and a letter from the Queen’s daughter, a member of a Christian religious order, is used to raise doubt about the “alleged” conversion of the Queen. Countless other examples could be cited.

Moral insensitivity, indeed, is another glaring weakness of the entire work. The shortcoming is unfortunately one which requires some attention here, if for no other reason than the fact that moral sensitivity is so important a requirement in anyone who seeks to write on matters as central to human conscience as is faith. It is also an attribute to which Rev. Miller lays formal claim by virtue of his profession. A single example will perhaps stand for the numerous lapses which tarnish every chapter of his book. It concerns the character of Mírzá Yaḥyá, Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, the half-brother and persistent enemy of Bahá’u’lláh, and a figure whom Rev. Miller’s book presents in the most favorable possible light as an unworldly soul, utterly devoted to the memory of the Báb, and incapable of any form of self-assertion. The picture is one which would have astonished the nineteenth-century Bábís who knew Azal at first hand over a period of many years and whose assessment of his character is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that almost without exception they came to despise him. As his character steadily deteriorated under the influence of a consuming ambition and the manipulation of a former student of Muslim theology, Siyyid Muḥammad, who was his closest associate, no single piece of grossness on Azal’s part so revolted those in contact with him as did his treatment of the widow of the Báb. The Báb had prescribed the marks of respect due her and had explicitly forbidden any man to presume to seek her in marriage after the Báb’s own death. In the turmoil which followed the martyrdom of the Báb and the dispersal of the Bábí community, Azal surpassed his other infamies to that date when he first took this lady as one of his several wives and later “gave” her to Siyyid Muḥammad. Rev. Miller’s incapacity to understand the nature of the events which he [Page 55] is discussing is nowhere more clearly revealed than in the complacent passing reference which he makes to a subject which Bahá’í historians regard with abhorrence: “The blame for the opposition of Subh-i-Azal to Baha’s claims has been laid by the Bahá’ís on Sayyid Muhammad of Iṣfahan, who had been an intimate friend of the Bab, and had married the Bab’s widow Fatima.”

A parallel shortcoming is Rev. Miller’s ignorance of Bahá’í thought itself. It is not to be expected that a Presbyterian clergyman would be sympathetic with theological concepts central to a Faith that he considers to be false. If he chooses to write a book on the subject, however, it is reasonable to expect that he will at least understand these concepts and, as a result of such understanding, presumably make a creditable effort at refuting them in a work written for that purpose.

That Rev. Miller does not understand what the Bahá’í Faith teaches on subjects which are absolutely central to its message becomes apparent as soon as he moves from his historiographical pastiche to conceptual questions. The problem affects his efforts to deal with almost every major issue, including the nature of God, the nature and function of revelation in history, the role of the Messenger of God, the Bahá’í view of the station of the Báb, life after death, and the relationship of each revelation to those which precede and follow it. The subject is far beyond the scope of this review, but one example will perhaps illustrate the seriousness of the problem.

The Bahá’í Faith teaches that religion is progressive. Islám is a fuller revelation than Christianity, and those revelations since Muḥammad, the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths, incorporate and develop the elements which appeared for the first time in Islám, as well as unfolding yet other aspects of the divine purpose. What sets the latter three Faiths apart from Christianity is that they include moral teachings which relate to the organization of society, as well as those which govern purely individual conduct. Far from leaving unto Caesar “the things that are Caesar’s,” Islám contained a wide range of moral instruction related to the state’s administration of human affairs. The extraordinarily beneficial effect of such moral instruction on the conduct of governments was repeatedly demonstrated by the marked contrast between the way in which Islamic and Christian societies carried on warfare, conducted diplomacy, encouraged intellectual advancement, and administered the daily life of the peoples entrusted to their care, throughout the several centuries in which these two religious cultures were locked in their great historic struggle.

It is not surprising in this context, therefore, to find that the Writings of both the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh contained extensive teachings directed at the conduct of institutions and states, teachings which necessarily differ greatly from those intended to guide the life of the individual believer. Bahá’u’lláh states that mankind has now entered the era of “divine justice,” and that it is the duty of governments of the world to administer justice, in accordance with divine principles. Similarly, He creates institutions for the administration of the life of the Bahá’í community and provides these institutions with specific guidance designed to enable them to mold a community which can provide a practical example for the organization of man’s social life. While making it clear that loyalty to government and the strict avoidance by Bahá’ís of involvement in any kind of political activity are fundamental principles of His Faith, He insists that all forms of human organization are today under the judgment of God and will rise or fall depending on whether they conform their philosophies of government and patterns of behavior to the central principle that the time has come for the unification of mankind in one human race and one global society.

[Page 56] On the individual believer, however, the divine command lays the duty of acting with love, mercy, forbearance, and forgiveness. Going one step beyond the so-called “Golden Rule” of earlier stages in mankind’s moral evolution, Bahá’u’lláh calls upon the individual to “prefer others” to himself and teaches that such a standard is the only basis upon which the Bahá’í principle of “unity in diversity” can be realized, with all its implications for the protection of individual identity.

Few if any of the Christian missionary writers who have chosen to attack the Bahá’í Faith over the past several decades have shown the patience to try to grasp this fundamental distinction. For them faith is essentially an individual matter. The individual is saved alone, and society as such is irredeemable. The “coming of the Kingdom” is an event outside history, so far outside indeed as to occur in another world entirely. To be sure, these basic elements of Christian theology have been so muddied by conflicting sectarian interpretations and by twentieth-century attempts to create a “social gospel” that they probably have little relevance for the average member of most Christian churches. Yet Pauline theology itself has not changed. However weakened or inarticulate, it continues to appear in habits of thought and in assumptions which reveal their presence when a mind conditioned by them tries to grapple with new elements in religious truth.

Rev. Miller is a victim of these limitations. While ostensibly aware that the Bahá’í Faith has dimensions other than those related to the moral life of the individual, he clearly has not grasped the implications. In discussing the ministry of the Báb, he sketches briefly the kinds of authority which the Babí Scriptures gave to the Babí state, in preparation for the coming of “Him Whom God Will Make Manifest.” Although inadequate and distorted, the discussion touches on such subjects as regulations governing military activity, the rights of the state in private property, the rights of citizens who have embraced the new Revelation, and one or two related subjects.

The passage then continues:

It is not clear how these regulations about conquest of countries and divisions of booty [sic] were to be reconciled with other commands in the Bayan [the Babí Scriptures], such as: “No one is to be slain for unbelief, for the slaying of a soul is outside the religion of God . . . and if anyone commits it he is not, and has not been, of the Bayan.”

The explanation, of course, lies in the distinction which the three Faiths under discussion make between the moral responsibilities of states (or institutions) and those of the individual soul. The extent to which Rev. Miller has failed to understand the distinction is demonstrated by the fact that the chapter which he devotes to the teachings of the Báb indiscriminately mixes up laws and principles which fall into these two very different categories.

The same conceptual problem handicaps Rev. Miller’s efforts to understand the emphasis which Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and the Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause placed on the integrity of the community entrusted to them. One of the most impressive achievements of the Bahá’í Faith is its success in maintaining its unity during the first critical century of its existence, the period in which schism has divided every religious movement in the past. Rev. Miller seems to some extent appreciative of this achievement, as he devotes considerable attention to the various efforts made over the years to introduce schism into the ranks of the Bahá’í community, without at any point coming to grips with the implications of the Faith’s success [Page 57] in overcoming this age-old enemy of men’s efforts to work together in harmony.

The factor responsible for the achievement has been the conveyance of authority known as the “Covenant,” by which Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá endowed the Guardian and the Universal House of Justice with the powers necessary to govern the community which They had brought into existence. At each stage in the development of the Bahá’í Faith this conveyance of authority was challenged by various elements who sought to advance parties or objectives of their own. These challenges were successfully surmounted only because of the firmness with which the central institutions of the Faith insisted upon the authority established under the Covenant, called upon the entire community to unite in support of one single program, and where necessary did not hesitate to expel from the ranks of the community those few persons who refused to accept the conditions which Bahá’u’lláh Himself had placed upon membership in His Faith. One is at liberty, if one chooses, to criticize this element in the building of a global community, but any such criticism must be founded on an understanding of the theory involved and of the distinction between these principles of social organization and those which relate to the spiritual life of the individual.

Rev. Miller’s inability to grasp the distinction inevitably leads him into a tangle of argument which misses entirely one of the most interesting and important features of the development of the religion he is attempting to describe. In his chapter on the teachings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, for example, he quotes the latter as saying:

You must love humanity in order to uplift and beautify humanity. Even if people slay you, yet you must love them. . . . We are creatures of the same God, therefore we must love all as children of God even though they are doing us harm.

Rev. Miller then goes on to introduce the question of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's vigorous denunciation of those who attempted to break the Covenant established by Bahá’u’lláh, to which they had committed themselves:

After reading these beautiful words it is disappointing to discover in other utterances of Abdu’l-Bahá that he found it impossible to love certain people. It appears that he to the end of his life cherished great bitterness toward the “Covenant-breakers,” the leader of whom had been his own brother Mirza Muhammad Ali.

In fact, one of the features of the lives of both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi which profoundly impressed those in close contact with them and served as a powerful example to the conduct of the members of the Faith at large, was the patience and forbearance which they demonstrated as individuals in the face of almost daily harassment from those whose personal ambitions they had blocked.

Conceptual weaknesses of such dimensions are difficult to understand in a writer whose professional training is in the field of theology and who holds distinguished credentials in this highly specialized discipline. Questions of prejudice aside, they arise presumably from a failure to take seriously the intellectual foundations of the Faith being studied. There is no more risky lapse in the examination of beliefs other than one’s own.

Certainly there is evidence that Rev. Miller frequently flagged as his pursuit of his private white whale carried him on through growing masses of information. Taken as a whole, the book is uneven. While some sections are [Page 58] closely argued and demonstrate the author’s command of a large body of detail, others betray signs of hasty writing and a very superficial familiarity with the sources used. In some cases Rev. Miller’s material seems entirely to escape his control. An example is his treatment of the subject of the powerful impression which Bahá’u’lláh made on persons of capacity who met Him. Rev. Miller seems to resist coming to terms with this incontrovertible fact of the history he is recounting. In an apparent effort to reduce the problem to more manageable proportions, he introduces an explanation which Muslim theologians and other opponents of the Bahá’í Faith early developed to account for the extraordinary impact of the Messenger of God upon human consciousness. Rev. Miller paraphrases their explanation in his introduction of the story of the interview which Bahá’u’lláh granted to Professor Browne:

Each visitor was carefully prepared for his audience with the Manifestation of God. He was told that what he saw when he came into the Divine Presence would depend on what he was himself—if he was a material person he would see only a man, but if he was a spiritual being he would see God. When his expectations had been sufficiently aroused, the pilgrim was led into the presence of Bahá’u’lláh and was permitted to gaze for a few moments upon “the Blessed Perfection” . . . The almost magical effect of such visits is seen in the account which Professor Browne has given of his experience in Akka in 1890.

The explanation is nothing if not ingenious, and taken by itself would no doubt seem quite persuasive to persons who lacked any other information on Bahá’u’lláh’s life. Almost immediately afterward, however, Rev. Miller quotes the memorable words of Professor Browne’s own version of events. Describing his entrance in Bahá’u’lláh’s room, Professor Browne says:

Though I dimly suspected whither I was going and whom I was to behold (for no distinct intimation had been given to me) [italics added], a second or two elapsed ere, with a throb of wonder and awe, I became definitely conscious that the room was not untenanted. In the corner where the divan met the wall sat a wondrous and venerable figure . . . The face of him on whom I gazed I can never forget, though I cannot describe it. Those piercing eyes seemed to read one’s very soul; power and authority sat on that ample brow . . . No need to ask in whose presence I stood, as I bowed myself before one who is the object of a devotion and love which kings might envy and emperors sigh for in vain!

Since the explanation had been introduced to account for the impact of Bahá’u’lláh’s personality on Browne, and since Browne himself states that, far from being told whom he was to see, he had only inferred himself that he might be entering the room of Bahá’u’lláh, one can only conclude that this section of the book, like a number of others, represents a very hasty assembling of material gathered from contradictory sources and quite unintegrated in the writer’s own mind. Ironically, the passage of Professor Browne’s writings which immediately precedes the section quoted by Rev. Miller is devoted to correcting precisely the kind of story which Rev. Miller has carelessly retailed.

Finally, some attention must be given here to one further theme, if for no other reason than the weight of emphasis placed on it by Rev. Miller. This is the charge, brought against the Bahá’ís by Azalís and subsequently picked up by others of their enemies, that the success of the Bahá’í Faith was secured in large part by the murder of persons who opposed it. The Founders of the Faith are accused, if not of initiating these crimes, at least of conniving at them.

[Page 59] The charge derives much of what force it possesses from a tragic incident which tarnished the name of the Faith early in Bahá’u’lláh’s imprisonment in ‘Akká, and which caused Him intense indignation and grief. The full story is given in Shoghi Effendi’s God Passes By and has long served as an object lesson to a persecuted community of the importance and the implications of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings of nonviolence. At the same time, Bahá’í writers have insisted that similar charges which Azalís and other opponents hastened to heap on top of this incident have no basis whatever in fact. Professor Browne, although he sought to avoid discussing the subject, appears to have accepted at least some of the charges leveled against the early Bahá’ís by his Azalí acquaintances. At no time were any of the charges supported by independent evidence, nor were they pursued by Ottoman civil authorities who eagerly took advantage of every excuse to persecute the new religion. In retrospect it is obvious that the charges were conceived not simply to blacken the reputation of the Bahá’ís, but to provide an explanation for Bahá’u’lláh’s success which had so precisely fitted the assurances of the Báb and which had created an inescapable dilemma for Azal and his supporters.

These charges have since been taken up and given wide currency by the several Christian missionaries who have written against the Bahá’í Faith. For the most part these missionaries have contented themselves with simply advancing the charges on the basis of the otherwise unsupported statements of the Azalís. Against this background it is interesting, therefore, to examine how Rev. Miller handles the subject.

The most complete treatment of one such incident occurs in his chapter on the life and work of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It concerns a certain Mírzá Yaḥyá, who had abandoned his pledge under the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh and had become the agent of Muḥammad ‘Ali in the latter’s efforts to set up a party of his own. For this, Yaḥyá was severely rebuked by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and warned in the strongest language that God would defend the unity of His Faith and that unless Yaḥyá desisted he would suffer in both this world and the next. Undeterred, Yaḥyá continued his activity. The following is the account of his subsequent death as written by his father-in-law, Ḥájí Mullá Ḥusayn, and reproduced together with other related documents by Professor Browne in his 1917 work Materials for the Study of [Page 60] the Bábí Religion. The Hájí felt he had witnessed a fulfillment of “prophecy” and was writing to share the details with a friend:

Touching the Tablet which was vouchsafed from the Land of Heart’s Desire [i.e., ‘Akká, the home of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá], in truth if anyone should possess the eye of discernment, these same Blessed Words which were thus fulfilled are a very great miracle. . . .

I read the Tablet to Mírzá Yaḥyá and he listened. . . . Then he rose up and departed to his own house.

A few nights later towards the dawn one knocked at the door of my house. “Who is it?” I cried. Then, seeing that it was a maid-servant, I added, “What wilt thou?” She replied, “Mírzá Yaḥyá is done for.” I at once ran thither. Ḥájjí Muḥammad Báqir also was present. I saw that blood was flowing from his (Mírzá Yaḥyá’s) throat, and that he was unable to move. By this time it was morning. I at once brought thither an Indian doctor. He examined him and said, “A blood-vessel in his lung is ruptured. He must lie still for three days and not move, and then he will recover.” He then gave him some medicine. The haemorrhage stopped for two days, and his condition improved. In spite of this he was not admonished to return to the Truth. After two days there was a second flow of blood from his throat and he was nearly finished. The doctor came again and gave him medicine, but ultimately it profited him nothing. Twice again he vomited undiluted blood, and then surrendered his spirit. . . .

Rev. Miller provides an abbreviated excerpt from the above account, the only document in the series published by Professor Browne which he quotes. He entirely omits, however, that section of the passage that describes the summoning of the doctor, the diagnosis which the latter gave, and the details of the remissions and final hemorrhage which killed Yaḥyá. Instead, he provides a brief summary of the contents of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s letter to Yaḥyá and the efforts of the latter’s father-in-law to admonish him, concluding: “A few nights later Mírzá Yaḥyá was found in the house in a serious condition with blood flowing from his throat, and after several days he died.”

Even more startling is the use which Rev. Miller makes of the fact that Professor Browne had translated and reproduced the document: “Not only did Abdu’l-Baha and his followers not remain silent, they went beyond angry words. Browne has published evidence which proves conclusively [italics added] that at least in one instance the old Babi method of assassination was resorted to by Abdu’l-Baha to get rid of a dangerous enemy.”

In sum, we are told by Rev. Miller that Mírzá Yaḥyá was murdered in a particularly horrendous manner (presumably by having his throat cut), that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, acting in the traditions of His Faith, had ordered this odious crime, and that the authority for all these charges is Edward Browne who subsequently published his findings. Not one of these allegations is true.

FOR ANYONE with some direct experience of the subject, The Bahá’í Faith: Its History and Teachings conveys the impression of a rather ill-tempered amateur theatrical group plodding resentfully through a performance of Hamlet in which no one has been assigned the title role. For what is almost totally absent from the book is the Bahá’í Faith itself. Only a mere shadow, a kind of ghost of Denmark’s murdered king, is present on stage to utter the occasional muffled protest from under the masses of trivia, misrepresentation, and personal prejudice in which Rev. Miller has literally buried his subject.

One searches in vain for a presentation of the great body of ethical and devotional literature [Page 61] which makes up the bulk of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings, and which have exercised so powerful and positive an effect on the lives of millions of persons. Its place is taken by a labored effort to paraphrase and summarize precisely that one of Bahá’u’lláh’s books which its Author Himself states must be undetstood in the light of a vast body of supplementary Writings to most of which Rev. Miller had no access, and of the expositions of those who were named the book’s sole interpreters.

The persons of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, as Rev. Miller presents them, must be virtually unrecognizable to those who knew them at first hand. There is no trace of the great humanitarianism of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, which won Him universal respect from government and public alike and which, at the time of His passing in 1921, evoked the greatest demonstration of public grief from the many religious, ethnic, and cultural communities in Haifa that modern Palestine has witnessed." Nor is there any recognition of the reputation for integrity which Shoghi Effendi built up over the thirty-six years of his Guardianship, which made him the sole public figure in Haifa whose independence was spontaneously respected by all sides in the bitter civil wars that ravaged the country after the 1948 partition, and which made it possible for him to establish through processes of civil law which he had not himself initiated every smallest public detail of the trust which Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant had conferred upon him.

One will search in vain, too, for an adequate presentation of the extraordinary global expansion of the Bahá’í community over the past forty years. The statistics of this expansion must be among the most impressive of any religious development in the past century. Only fragments of the story appear in two of the later chapters, in both cases hedged about by comments which depreciate the importance of the development being described. Since this phenomenon of expansion presumably caused the startling reversal in Rev. Miller’s own assessment of the Bahá’í Faith’s capacities and provoked the years of industry represented by this new book, the absence of an adequate treatment of the subject is all the more remarkable.

But what is most strikingly absent from The Bahá’í Faith: Its History and Teachings is any effort to communicate the spirit which, for over a century, has evoked self-sacrifice [Page 62] on a scale seldom equalled in religious history and which has produced the expansion already mentioned. It would be unrealistic and unfair to expect a Protestant clergyman to admire the beliefs which inspired such devotion, or even to appreciate adequately the devotion itself. The phenomenon nevertheless exists and is the feature of the Bahá’í Faith which has most deeply impressed every disinterested observer who has come in contact with it for over a century. It is almost tangible in the writings of such independent scholars as Browne and Gobineau, neither of whom himself became a believer nor felt his reputation diminished by his recognition of this spiritual force as a fact of history. In an address on “the Bábí Religion” to a scholarly audience at the South Place conferences on comparative religions in 1891, Professor Browne attempted to convey something of the power of this spirit as he had experienced it at first hand. He described the Bábí-Bahá’í movement as “an heroic struggle which I do not hesitate to call the greatest religious movement of the century,” and he concluded:

I trust that I have told you enough to make it clear that the objects at which this religion aims are neither trivial nor unworthy of the noble self-devotion and heroism of the Founder and his followers. It is the lives and deaths of these, their hope which knows no despair, their love which knows no cooling, their steadfastness which knows no wavering, which stamp this wonderful movement with a character entirely its own. For whatever may be the merits or demerits of the doctrines for which these scores and hundreds of our fellow-men died, they have at least found something which made them ready to

“leave all things under the sky,

And go forth naked under sun and rain,

And work and wait and watch out all their years.”

It is not a small or easy thing to endure what these have endured, and surely what they deemed worth life itself is worth trying to understand. I say nothing of the mighty influence which, as I believe, the Bábí faith will exert in the future, nor of the new life it may perchance breathe into a dead people; for, whether it succeed or fail, the splendid heroism of the Bábí martyrs is a thing eternal and indestructible. . . .

But what I cannot hope to have conveyed to you is the terrible earnestness of these men, and the indescribable influence which this earnestness, combined with other qualities, exerts on any one who has actually been brought in contact with them. That you must take my word for. . . .

WHAT IS THE STRANGE DEFECT in the ecclesiastical form of religious organization, which so often prompts its members to seek to destroy the faith of other men? It is a vice which, to one extent or another, has characterized [Page 63] the priestly caste of virtually every religion in recorded history. To our shame here in the West, it has especially stained the record of the religion of Jesus Christ. the religion of which we have been preeminently the trustees. The indecent and grossly unfair slanders against Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islám, which for centuries were impressed upon the populations of Christian lands by those whom they trusted as their spiritual mentors have done incalculable harm to human relations and to the cause of world peace. If an accounting were ever to be demanded (and one of Bahá’u’lláh’s persistent themes is that in this day God and history are demanding just such an accounting), Judaism alone could present the major Christian churches with a billing which none of them is in any moral state to meet.

In recent decades, with a vast increase in education and the simultaneous breakdown of ecclesiastical authority, the open vilification of earlier ages has given way to caution. Rev. Miller’s book can fairly be considered a representative example of the new trend. But the spirit and the essential methods have not changed. Nor has the aim, which is to attack and create contempt and aversion for beliefs which differ from one’s own.

The perennial explanation is that truth must be served, whatever the cost to human sensitivities. It would obviously be pointless and unseemly to dignify such arguments with any serious attention in the face of the methods by which earnest polemicists such as Rev. Miller seek to serve their conception of truth.

What is especially difficult to understand is that attacks such as that of Rev. Miller against the Bahá’í Faith originate with men whose own spiritual ancestors suffered cruelly and unfairly from the same abuse. For the first two centuries after Christ the civilized Roman world was exposed to a picture of the Christian faith which was a mockery of truth, as horrifying as it is unrecognizable. In it Jesus was presented as the illegitimate offspring of a transient mercenary soldier. As the story grew, new details were invented, including a name for this entirely fictional parent. The disciples were pictured as a band of fanatical cutthroats who mixed political conspiracy with highway robbery and casual mayhem. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was portrayed as a lunatic scheme to take over the civil government. Innocently allegorical statements in the Gospels were wrenched out of context and used to hint at obscene and cruel practices. Finally, it was charged that the story of this wretched backwater uprising had then been used to manufacture a new universal religion that would appeal to the educated “Westerners,” of the day, the Greeks and Romans.

These calumnies against Christianity did not originate with pagan tyrants like Nero and Domitian. The original perpetrators were clergyman, the heirs of Abraham and Moses. To their fellow Jews these priests no doubt seemed models of traditional piety and learning. Yet they collaborated with Roman civil authorities whom they considered both godless and corrupt and made use of the “testimony” of apostates like Judas whose moral character they despised.

In the long run the chief result of this effort was to awaken the curiosity of the spiritually hungry. Even before the conversion of Constantine one-twentieth of the population of the empire had already embraced the faith of Jesus Christ.

Bahá’ís can perhaps, therefore, afford to regard Rev. Miller’s effort to discharge his lifelong obsession with their Faith, with a certain degree of equanimity. Whatever interest it may arouse must inevitably excite a wider discussion of their Founder’s message. If at the same time it stimulates His followers to a deeper study of the implications of that message, they will surely have derived the maximum benefit from an experience which believers in all ages before them have had and which the gradual but unmistakable disappearance of the ecclesiastical profession around the world seems likely to deny to their spiritual descendents.

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Authors & Artists

WENDY M. HELLER is a 1971 graduate from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied Spanish. She has also done graduate work in Latin American anthropology at the University of Oregon. She has lectured in English at Feng Chia College in Taichung, Taiwan, and has for the past two years been engaged in research in ancient and medieval numismatics. Her publications include “Nine on the Richter” (Summer 1973, World Order); “The Tradition of the Rose in English Coinage” (Cal-Coin News); “The Wealth of Croesus” and “A Gold Coinage for the Caliphate” (World Coins); and “The Chinese Proverb Tradition” (Echo).

V. ELVIN JOHNSON holds a B.S. degree from Oklahoma Baptist University; B.D. and Th.M. degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; and a Ph.D. from Baylor University. He teaches humanities at Tulsa Junior College.

RHETT S. JONES is a member of the Department of History and Director of the Afro-American Studies Program at Brown University. He holds a B.A. degree in sociology from the University of Illinois and a M.A. degree in sociology from the University of Connecticut. He also holds an M.A. in history from Brown University and will receive his Ph.D. from Brown in June 1976. Mr. Jones has published articles on race and race relations in anthropological, sociological, historical, and popular periodicals. His chief interest is the comparative study of race in the colonial Americas.

DOUGLAS MARTIN holds degrees from the Universities of Waterloo and Western Ontario and is currently completing his doctorate at the University of Saskatchewan. His work has been concentrated in the field of North American social and cultural history. For a number of years he has served as Secretary to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada. He is one of the organizers of the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith.

ART CREDITS: P. 1, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 5, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 10, photograph by Joon Chung; pp. 13 and 15, drawings by Wendy M. Heller; p. 17, drawing by Enrique Campos; p. 42, photograph by Joon Chung; back cover, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.