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[Page -1] World Order

FALL 1976

IS ECUMENISM HOPELESS?

Editorial

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH’S MODEL FOR WORLD FELLOWSHIP

Douglas Martin

ISLÁM’ S TAḤRÍF: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH

William Collins

THE DYNAMICS OF INDO-PAKISTANI MODERN ISLÁM

Joseph Graziani

ERRORS IN JENSEN’S ANALYSIS

Hossain B. Danesh and William S. Hatcher

[Page 0]

World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1 • 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 © 1977, 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

1 Is Ecumenism Hopeless?

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

6 Bahá’u’lláh’s Model for World Fellowship

by Douglas Martin

22 Islám’s Taḥríf: Implications for the Bahá’í Faith

by William Collins

33 The Dynamics of Indo-Pakistani Modern Islám

by Joseph Graziano

46 Three Bahá’í Poets

poems by Jeffrey Jentz, Ján Kuusenjuuri, and Gerald B. Parks

52 Errors in Jensen’s Analysis

by Hossain B. Danesh and William S. Hatcher

62 Attempting a Survey of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings

a book review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

64 Authors and Artists in This Issue

[Page 1] Is Ecumenism Hopeless?

ECUMENISM is out of fashion. Only a few years ago the press regularly reported dozens of meetings, symposia, and conferences at which scholars, clergy, and concerned laymen debated issues raised by the prospect of growing religious unity. No longer. Other interests have crowded ecumenism off the front pages and out of the popular mind. The word itself is gradually resuming the arcane ring it had nearly lost.

The proponents of ecumenism had set themselves a most difficult task. If the reconciliation of Christian sects proved beyond reach, the gap between major religions was too wide to bridge even in theory, even in dreams. Thus the movement lost momentum and was abandoned by many of its supporters. Yet its achievements were not negligible. The idea of religious unity was given currency. Sectarian exclusiveness and claims to a monopoly of truth were vigorously challenged. There developed a healthy desire to know and a capacity to appreciate spiritual traditions other than one’s own.

We Bahá’ís feel that the setbacks recently suffered by ecumenism are temporary. We firmly believe in the unity of religions. Seen from the vantage provided by the principle of progressive revelation, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam lose the appearance of incompatibility. A simple reinterpretation of a few key concepts permits us to find the underlying unity and not be misled by assertions of irreconcilable contradictions. At a still deeper level we perceive Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism as members of the same great family, merging into a single religious experience of mankind.

It is, therefore, natural that we should wish ecumenism well and hope that it will regain its vigor. For it represents a right path, a long step in the right direction, that of the unity of religions and of mankind.

[Page 2] Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

IT IS with a sense of grateful incredulity that we look back upon ten years of WORLD ORDER magazine. We have reason to be encouraged and happy. While a number of periodicals, both specialized and of large, general circulation have disappeared, we have managed to reach a respectable, though modest, number of readers, and stay in existence. We have seen our magazine placed in a growing number of public and institutional libraries; we are carried in several important general and special periodical indexes; reprints are in heartening demand from non-Bahá’í sources; our letters to the editor have been lively and independent; we have received for consideration manuscripts from non-Bahá’í authors who are simply seeking to place articles of general interest in a widely read medium—such are the surface manifestations of a viable enterprise.

As we look more deeply into our work between 1966 and 1976, seeking at least a certain coincidence between our goals, as stated ten years ago and several times since, and our results, we think it may reasonably be affirmed that our product has more often than not reflected our promise. An important goal, as stated in our first number, was to touch on the “whole range of social and ethical problems.” As we glance back, we remember articles on history, comparative religion (Conner, Needham, Raman, among quite a few others), problems of international language (Gruber, Hardin). The theory of esthetics has been explored from several points of view, notably by Hopson, Marconi, and Tuman; economics has been a frequent concern, especially with respect to the future and in a global perspective (Dahl, Hatcher, Huddleston, among others); the preservation of the environment was discussed in our pages before ecology had become a household word; women’s rights have been a frequent center of discussion all through the decade (Marans, Conrader, for example); problems of race and human rights have been dealt with often, as is appropriate for a Bahá’í publication (race in Brazil, multiracial adoption, American Indians, Canadian Eskimos). The series of articles on ANISA has brought a steady demand for reprints from educators and has occasioned lively discussion in our “Letters” column. World peace and, of course, world order have been threads running through the entire period. Our society, our changing civilization have been explored in a number of articles (for example, by Heller and by Jordan), as has the preservation of the moral and mental health of the individual, most signally in Daniel C. Jordan’s “Becoming Your True Self,” which has been reprinted to become one of the most widely read Bahá’í pamphlets.

Speaking of pamphlets, other WORLD ORDER articles have been similarly immortalized: Conrader’s “Women: Attaining Their Birthright,” Raman’s “My Quest [Page 3] for the Fulfillment of Hinduism,” and Mitchell’s “Alcohol and Alcoholism” (much used in scientific circles, it is “on the computer” in major research organizations and the object of many requests for reprints) have also been distinguished as Bahá’í pamphlets. A number of editorials have been reprinted as attractive broadsides for use on college campuses.

Editorials and book reviews have manifested a consistent interest in the same range of concerns. A glance at the ten-year index will show what books have claimed our reviewers’ attention; just a few will suffice: Jamshed K. Fozdar, The God of Buddha; Ugo Giachery, Shoghi Effendi; H. M. Balyuzi, The Báb; René Dubos, So Human an Animal; Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness'; Colin M. Turnbull, The Mountain People; George B. Leonard, The Transformation; Charles Fair, The New Nonsense; Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do. The mere list of titles shows not only a variety of titles but also a salutary diversity of points of view.

Poetry has also played an important role in WORLD ORDER. The compositions of several distinguished American poets have received their first printing in our pages. A rich mine of young poets was presented by Robert Hayden in “A Portfolio of Recent American Poems” (Spring 1971), an offering so successful that it was followed by “Recent American Poetry: Portfolio II” (Summer 1975) and promises to become a biennual event.

Our editorial board meetings have always been a delight. Several times a year we gather in New Haven or Wilmette to set goals for the next few issues, to discuss contributions, to consider the material and technical aspects of publishing, and to enjoy the company of souls engaged in a common enterprise which grows directly from our deepest convictions—convictions we share with the greater part of WORLD ORDER’s readership.

Can you blame us if we seem rather cheerful?

• • •

A final note on our tenth anniversary has been inspired, not by browsing through ten years’ worth of issues, but by the more pedestrian activity of reading galley, first, on the index for Volume 10 (Summer 1976) and, more recently, on the index for Volumes 1 through 9 (at press at this writing). Reading through such a compressed list is like reading headings for diary entries spanning ten years of one’s life. The memories of the richness of our varied topics, as detailed above, are there. But beyond the subjects are the immensely variegated memories of the articles which were easy to edit, and those which brought grief before they brought pleasure, a process which has contributed to the growth and renewed dedication of the Editorial Board. Perhaps happiest of all are the memories of the many letters, telephone [Page 4] calls, and conversations which have linked us to our contributors, without whom, in the end, we could not have published the magazine.

To the Editor

JOHNSON’S ARTICLE

I wish to applaud V. Elvin Johnson and his article “The Challenge of the Bahá’í Faith,” which appeared in your Spring 1976 issue. My feeling was that he gave a very clear presentation of the Bahá’í teachings, while his scholarly, dispassionate style of writing only served to throw into a greater relief the [light] which these teachings must cast on the mind of a man who is searching for truth. Inspirational! Let me salute the author for his outstanding work, and give thanks to the editorial staff for bringing it forth in another fine issue of WORLD ORDER.

PETE LINGLE

Seoul, Korea

MARTIN’S CRITIQUE

I have just finished the Spring 1976 issue of WORLD ORDER and am moved to write and congratulate you on the noble tone and high academic quality you have consistently shown. . . .

I was especially impressed and touched [by] Mr. Douglas Martin’s fine rebuttal of Miller’s biased book on the Bahá’í Faith, a book that is shamelessly dedicated “to all those who practice independent investigation of truth.” Mr. Martin’s arguments are overwhelming, showing Miller’s book to be so slanted that [it] capsizes. Aside from the piercing analysis, lucid rebuttals, and professional scholarship he so adeptly uses, the most remarkable characteristic of Mr. Martin’s critique is the restraint he unfailingly manifests in dealing with a subject that is truly upsetting to those who are acquainted with the aspects of the Faith that Miller ignores. An important piece of work, too, for I am personally acquainted with Bahá’ís who have been troubled by Miller’s work. Hopefully, your publishing of Mr. Martin’s work will facilitate the inevitable slide into oblivion of books of Miller’s ilk.

MARK FREEHILL

Santiago, Dominican Republic

[Page 5]

[Page 6]

Bahá’u’lláh’s Model for World Fellowship

BY DOUGLAS MARTIN

IT IS a great privilege to have the opportunity of addressing the World Congress of Faiths on this important anniversary. It is a great pleasure as well, and especially so for a Bahá’í speaker, conscious of the remarkable extent to which the central theme of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, enunciated over a century ago, finds itself reflected in the concept and purpose of the Congress.

Resting on the conviction that divine revelation is universal and that mankind is one family, the World Congress of Faiths seeks to find and share spiritual truths which are so transparently clear that anyone, in the words of Sir Francis Younghusband, “would see that what we prayed to was what they prayed to, and what we worshipped was what they worshipped.” The phrase which seems to have best stood the test of time in summing up this great purpose is “spiritual fellowship.” Such an ideal is not merely in harmony with the Bahá’í teachings but lies close to their very heart. Over a century ago Bahá’u’lláh wrote:

Gather ye together, and for the sake of God resolve to root out whatever is the source of contention amongst you. Then will the effulgence of the world’s great Luminary envelop the whole earth, and its inhabitants become the citizens of one city . . . There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source, and are the subjects of one God.

My aim in the remarks which follow, therefore, will be to share with you the contribution which the Bahá’í Cause has made to the work to which the Congress has committed itself and to suggest some implications for the next stage in the prosecution of the task handed on by Sir Francis. I do so with some diffidence. Apart from my awareness of the spiritual and intellectual credentials of the group which has gathered together this weekend here at Canterbury, I am conscious, as I am sure all of us are, of the hopes which those who have gone before us must hold for this fortieth anniversary meeting: Sir Francis himself, Sir Herbert Samuel, Dr. Radhakrishnan, Sir Abdu’l-Qadir, Baron Palmstierna, Lady Ravensdale, Lord Sorenson, and a galaxy of others.

Beyond this, I am keenly sensible of my inadequacy before the standard set by my Bahá’í predecessor in this forum at the inaugural Congress in Queen’s Hall in 1936. The organizers of the Congress had invited His Eminence Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, to deliver one of the major addresses. Although it was not possible, for a number of reasons, for Shoghi [Page 7]Effendi to take part in person, he placed very great importance on the work of the Congress and commissioned a paper which was prepared and presented by one of his closest Bahá’í collaborators here in Europe, Mr. George Townshend, formerly Archdeacon of Clonfert and Canon of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. I will want to return in a moment to the subject of that paper.

Before moving into my theme, however, I would like to preface my remarks with digressions into two areas which seem to me to be essential to providing an intelligible context. The first concerns the history of the interfaith movement throughout the world; the second relates to the method which those of us who are interested in the subject must, I feel, pursue if we are to contribute effectively to it. The first may be dealt with briefly, as our friend Marcus Braybrooke has so concisely covered a part of the ground in the introduction to his recent and very interesting history of the Congress.

It is to our credit here in the West that the first approaches to the study of other faiths were initiated in Europe and America. The reason no doubt has less to do with our particular religious background, which of course was Judeo-Christian, than with the fact that the West had become the most highly developed, the most expansionist, and the most self-conscious expression of material civilization. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the attention of a few enlightened minds in the West began to turn sympathetically toward the major sources of Asiatic philosophical and religious thought, and translations appeared of such Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, and sections of the Upanishads, as well as of the major Islamic poets, Rúmí, Ḥáfiẓ, and Sa‘di. These new resources deeply influenced the romantic renaissance in my own part of the world and in time attracted widespread popular interest, both in Europe and America. The comparative study of religion became a serious and respectable intellectual pursuit. A literature impressive both in its quantity and in the quality of its scholarship rapidly grew up, producing such classics as J. F. Clarke’s massive Ten Great Religions and Max Müller’s Introduction to the Science of Religion. By 1873 Boston University had established the first chair of comparative religion; and Princeton, New York, Cornell, and Chicago followed this lead over the next two decades. In 1890 the American Society of Comparative Religion came into being. Similar developments [Page 8] were occurring in Europe.

The event which dramatically introduced the subject to the general public, however, took place in neither the academic nor the publishing world. On the morning of September 11, 1893, in the Hall of Columbus at the World’s Fair in Chicago, representatives of the “ten chief religions of the world” gathered in the first “Parliament of All Religions.” No words at this late date can suggest the thrill of discovery which swept through the Parliament and through the reading public. It was this intense expectancy —the belief that mankind was poised on the threshold of a new age of human brotherhood and spiritual discovery—which accounts for the extraordinary scenes that took place in Chicago. One thinks, for example, of the storm of emotion which greeted the innocent salutation of a then obscure Hindu monk Vivekananda when he opened his address with the words “sisters and brothers of America!”, an emotion which swept the audience of four thousand participants to their feet, applauding uncontrollably, many of them in tears.

I mention this feature of the Parliament because no mere recital of the program and the list of participants can suggest the impact the Parliament had on North American consciousness. Beyond this spirit of enthusiasm the papers which were delivered make interesting and instructive reading in themselves. Although there were ample expressions of dogmatism and bigotry, and although a number of the participants apparently saw the study of comparative religion chiefly as another tool for proselytism, the great majority of those who took part clearly felt that a historical breakthrough had occurred in terms of human brotherhood. Marcus Braybrooke has traced some of the subsequent efforts to capitalize on this widespread sentiment, of which efforts the World Congress of Faiths has been the most impressive, the most consistent, and the most organized.

However discouraging the struggle since then may often have seemed, and however difficult it may be to draw connections between the work of the Congress and developments in the world at large, there is no doubt that the vision of a handful of men and women in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries now enjoys widespread public sympathy throughout the World among people of all faiths and is served in varying ways by impressive educational, cultural, and ecumenical agencies at the national, the international, and even the local levels. We could well wonder whether activities such as this Congress may not be in danger of becoming the victim of their own success.

Any such concern quickly dissolves when we examine the modern condition against the background of the nineteenth-century hope. How far short of the vision has the achievement actually fallen! The early Transcendentalists who discovered Rúmí and the Gita, and the masses of people who eagerly followed the sessions of the great Parliament did not hope merely to deepen their understanding of their own and of other faiths or to overcome religious prejudices, important as these goals are. Nor did the impulse which moved them see itself as being fulfilled through interfaith dialogues or even through interfaith services of prayer, precious as are such experiences. The organizers of the Parliament summed up their vision in the following words:

Believing that God is, and that He has not left Himself without witness; believing that the influence of religion . . . is the most vital force in the social order of every [Page 9] people; and convinced that of a truth God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him, . . . [we propose] to consider the foundations of all religious faiths, . . . and thus to contribute to those forces which shall bring about the unity of the race in the worship of God and the service of man.

The dream of these nineteenth-century idealists found one of its most articulate heirs and most able prosecutors in Sir Francis Younghusband. It is clear that Sir Francis saw fellowship among the followers of all faiths not merely as an end in itself but as the primary force contributing to the unification of the human race:

A new world order is now the dream of men, but for this a new spirit is needed. This is the special concern of men of religion—non-Christians as well as Christians—all combined to create a world consciousness, a world conscience, a world loyalty, and a sense of world fellowship, and to provide the spiritual impetus, the dynamic and the direction to statesmen and economists whose business it is to give it bodily expression.

And it is this which brings me to the second part of the context in which I would like to set my remarks on the Bahá’í Cause. As you know, Bahá’ís have taken a very lively interest in the work of this Congress from the time of its inception. If it is not an impertinence for me to say so, we have been deeply impressed by the way in which the Congress has consistently avoided what Teilhard de Chardin has called the blind alleys of evolution which have so enticingly opened for you at every hand: the pressures to concentrate energies primarily on an examination of the minutiae of theological differences in a vain attempt to resolve them; the tendency to see this universal forum as a platform for proselytism in the interests of this or that member faith; and the greatest lure of them all, the temptation to “fill in the gap” in the divine scheme by seeking to create a synthetic universal religion. In this respect the Congress clearly represents an important advance over the Parliament of Religions and over any of its other successor movements; to this integrity of purpose I know my fellow Bahá’ís around the world would expect me to pay particular tribute on this historic occasion.

The work of the Congress which has won out warmest admiration is that which can, I think, be fairly characterized as scientific in its general spirit and method, if by scientific method we mean the systematic, directed, and conscious application of our mental faculties to the phenomena of existence. The method is universal in scope. Man’s experience over the past century and a half indicates clearly that it can be applied to all phenomena, visible or invisible. The truths it yields are admittedly always relative—never absolute—proofs, but rather the most probable statements on given subjects which human effort has been able to produce, and in every case considerably more probable and acceptable than such a statement’s negation. But these relative truths have also been the keys to the transformation of the conditions of life on our planet.

It is surely significant that intellectual history reveals a process in which the scientific method has been progressively applied to increasingly complex phenomena. Thus it is that, building upon the foundation which mathematics had earlier laid, physics, chemistry, biology, and anthropology each in turn emerged as a discrete and mature intellectual discipline. Nor is it surprising that in time the method should have been applied to the [Page 10] emotional, intellectual, and social aspects of human life and that we should see the painful development in our own day of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, which are clearly destined in time to take their places as mature and responsible sciences in every sense of that word.

The work of the World Congress of Faiths seems to me to lie directly in this great tradition. From its very beginning the interest in the underlying nature of all religions involved an attempt to apply the principles of scientific study to those phenomena which extend beyond even the social and emotional aspects of human life. I am speaking, of course, of the systems of spiritual and moral truth which the great majority of those most familiar with them have insisted are dimensions of the historical phenomenon they call Revelation.

The effort represents the most ambitious scientific undertaking which man has ever attempted or can ever attempt, since it aims at penetrating the most subtle, the most complex, and the most comprehensive aspects of existence, aspects which profoundly influence and perhaps determine those other phenomena which the social sciences seek to grasp. My point is that true science views all existence as a single continuum and recognizes, to use the marvelous words of Sir Julian Huxley, that humanity is “evolution become conscious of itself.”

The problem is compounded by the fact that it is difficult or impossible to establish the features or in some cases even the existence of the original impulses which gave rise to the cluster of cultural forms and forces we group under the heading “World Religions.” The real nature of the original teachings of the Buddha, the events of Jesus’ life, the era in which Zoroaster lived and the nature of His influence, and even the historical existence of Krishna—all of these present the most serious problems to the student of the history of religions. The life and person of Muḥammad are, of course, much more accessible, as is the Qur’án, but even here disagreements so serious as to produce many conflicting schools of thought testify to the magnitude of the problems which the sources present. Let me say in passing that, much as we must respect the pioneer work done by Professor James and by his modern imitators, I do not see how the “varieties of religious experience” can be realistically and profitably studied, as such, outside the scriptural and historical context of the great Revelations which gave rise to them. Pierre Teilhard’s comment seems applicable to the study of all of the religious life of man: “it is beyond our souls that we must look, not the other way round.”

I trust I have said enough to convince you that I do not underestimate the difficulties. Yet the challenge is both inescapable and urgent. I need hardly underline for this audience how late is the hour and how appalling the catastrophe which threatens to engulf mankind unless we can find a common humanity and a practical basis for world order, and do so very soon. All who are believers have no doubt that ultimately God’s Will shall be done on Earth and His Kingdom established. But far from relieving us of responsibility such an awareness makes only the more pressing our responsibility to contribute to the process in whatever way it has been given to us to do. How much greater still is the challenge facing those of us who have been singled out for the gift of the conviction that God has revealed Himself in all ages, to all peoples, and to all religions.

Nor do I anticipate serious disagreement when I say that we hardly suffer from a shortage of ideas in this vast field of work. Rather the opposite. We run a serious risk of suffocating in a surfeit of ideas which are [Page 11] either so vast, so self-evident, and so urgent as to generate intense anxiety, or so esoteric and divisive as to preclude any unified approach to their examination and even to discourage any general interest. However important religious ideology may be, therefore, I do not feel that a discussion of it can ever be anything other than one aspect of the study of a given religion. If the disappointments and frustrations of the past century have taught us anything, they have surely proven beyond any possible doubt that an approach to religious truth which is not phenomenologically oriented is doomed to sterility.

Let me briefly recapitulate, then, the context in which I feel my remarks on the Bahá’í Cause must be set. For a century and a half now the feeling has steadily grown among people everywhere that the revelation of God is in some sense universal and not confined to any one of the historical religions. Those who were earliest, most intimately, and most strongly convinced of the truth of this idea also passionately believed that in it lies the secret of the unification of mankind and the establishment of world peace. But, as in all things, the hypothesis alone, no matter how beautiful or how ardently held, is not enough. Real progress has always required, to use the words of the definition which I earlier offered, “the systematic, directed, and conscious application of our mental faculties” in testing our hypotheses against the phenomena of life. What I am arguing, therefore, is that the challenge facing the World Congress of Faiths, at this critical moment in its history, and in the history of mankind, is the task of applying such study to promising religious phenomena in an even more intensively responsible and self-sacrificing way than ever before. I am emboldened to make this suggestion because of the inescapable fact that our world is now gripped in the final stages of a historical crisis which, long before another such anniversary as this present one has arrived, will most certainly have removed from our hands the opportunities and the instruments which, even at this late hour, we still possess.

IN DISCUSSING the Bahá’í Cause in this context it is not my primary purpose to present it as a religion urging a claim on the sympathy and the understanding of this Congress. The Bahá’í communities around the world are not yet, at this early stage of their history, sufficiently large and influential, nor are they entangled in long-standing historical controversies so as to require this kind of attention (which this Congress can in any event ill afford to spare). Doubtless a proper education of the public and clergy in the origins, purpose, and teachings of the Bahá’í Cause would be of great assistance in some countries where it would serve to remove misunderstandings and relieve the members of the Cause of some of the serious and often tragic disabilities under which they are presently forced to live. That, too, however, is not the primary concern of this Congress.

Rather, I have accepted your invitation, on behalf of my fellow Bahá’ís around the world, because I believe that the Bahá’í Cause has a vital contribution to make to the major work of this Congress, a contribution to the search for world unity. Its central theme was enunciated over a century ago in a remarkable series of letters which Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, addressed from His prison cell in the Turkish penal colony of ‘Akká, to the temporal and spiritual leaders of His day. To these nineteenth- century monarchs Bahá’u’lláh declared that the world they knew was about to be burst apart by the emergence of a world civilization. The letters warned that God had set in motion historical forces which no man could resist and which would in time compel universal recognition of the truth underlying all existence, the organic oneness of the [Page 12] human race:

This is the Day in which God’s most excellent favours have been poured out upon men, the Day in which His most mighty grace hath been infused into all created things. It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their differences, and, with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness.

O Kings of the Earth! . . . If ye pay no heed unto the counsels which, in peerless and unequivocal language, We have revealed in this Tablet, Divine chastisement shall assail you from every direction. On that day ye shall have no power to resist Him, and shall recognize your own impotence. Have mercy on yourselves and on those beneath you . . .

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world.

Bahá’u’lláh’s appeals were ignored by those to whom they were addressed, and mankind moved into its long struggle with the enormous new social and material forces of which He had warned, not in the context of a search for unity, but rather in one of attachment to the sectarian, political, nationalistic, and racial loyalties of the past. The result is the world we live in.

Forty years later the leaders of thought and the general public throughout the major nations of Europe and America were the recipients of yet another appeal, this time on a scale which has no parallel in religious history. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Son of Bahá’u’lláh, upon His release from years of imprisonment and house arrest in ‘Akká, undertook an epic journey to the West, during the course of which he presented the essentials of Bahá’u’lláh’s message to university faculties, church congregations, labor unions, statesmen, ecclesiastics, a host of societies for peace and reform, vast public audiences, and virtually all of the major newspapers in the cities He visited. In these addresses He said:

Today the world of humanity is walking in darkness because it is out of touch with the world of God. That is why we do not see the signs of God in the hearts of men. The power of the Holy Spirit has no influence. When . . . divine instruction and guidance appear, then enlightenment follows, a new spirit is realized within, a new power descends . . .

I now wish you to examine certain facts and statements which are worthy of consideration. My purpose and intention is to remove from the hearts of men the religious enmity and hatred which have fettered them and to bring all religions into agreement and unity. . . . For the foundation of the divine religions is one foundation.

The mission of the prophets of God has been to train the souls of humanity and free them from the thraldom of natural instincts and physical tendencies. They are like unto gardeners, and the world of humanity is the field of their cultivation. . . If all should be true to the original reality of the prophet and his teaching, the peoples and nations of the world would become unified and these differences which cause separation would be lost sight of. To accomplish this great and needful unity in its reality, His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh appeared in the Orient and renewed the foundations of the divine teachings. . . . expressed in principles and precepts applicable[Page 13] to the needs and conditions of the modern world; amplified and adapted to present day questions and critical human problems.

Despite the widespread attention and respect which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá received on both sides of the Atlantic, His appeal cannot be said to have elicited significantly more response from the leaders of thought and the public at large than had that of Bahá’u’lláh Himself. Before His return to His home in Palestine in 1912, He predicted quite explicitly and repeatedly, on public platforms and in newspaper interviews, the world war which followed, as He said it would, less than two years later.

It was therefore in this long tradition that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s grandson and Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, Shoghi Effendi, responded to the invitation of the inaugurators of the World Congress of Faiths in 1936. The paper, prepared and read on his behalf at that time by Mr. Townshend, made reference to its source in the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh and the work of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá but expressed Their vision in the form of a “Plan for World Fellowship”:

This plan, in every feature, plainly implies that nothing less than a concerted effort on a world scale, with the spiritual energies of mankind informing its practical energies, will now suffice to awaken the spirit of fellowship and secure deliverance from danger . . . In all its faculties the human race is passing from childhood and ignorance towards maturity; towards the tasks that befit manhood . . . It is called on to put into practice the lessons of moral principles and human fellowship in which it has been instructed for so long . . . We have accomplished enough to convict ourselves of being fitted for a better social order . . . and of lacking the resolution to put our ideals into effect. There is enough of good in our recent record to incriminate us, but not enough to deliver us . . . Since the whole world as a unit is involved, the ideals which are to guide this movement must be given definite shape. If there is to be concerted action towards a single goal, some map of the journey must be made. Vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, will not suffice. Some explicit agreement on principles will be required for any co-ordinated progress.

Mr. Townshend then outlined the main features of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, conceived as a plan of practical effort, and concluded by asking:

In such an emergency does not this bold, original scheme of fellowship merit serious consideration and even the test of experiment? In advocating peace to a western audience ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once said: “You have had war for thousands of years; why not try peace for a change? If you do not like it you can always go back to war.” One might hazard a similar suggestion about this fellowship plan. We have tried every other advice, why not now try this?

For whatever reason the appeal did not evoke from the interfaith movement the effort of trial and study for which it called. By 1936, however, Shoghi Effendi had at hand the instrument through which he could act on the vast project conceived by Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and touched on in Mr. Townshend’s presentation to the inaugural conference of the World Congress of Faiths. For over a decade, ever since his assumption of the role assigned to him by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, Shoghi Effendi had pursued the laborious task of [Page 14] constructing the framework of the Administrative Order conceived by Bahá’u’lláh and inaugurated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It included the creation of a system of democratically elected Assemblies to conduct the affairs of the Cause at the national and local levels. By 1936, as the essentials of Bahá’u’lláh’s Plan of world unity were being presented to the first World Congress of Faiths, Shoghi Effendi was completing preparations to use this administrative instrument in implementing the plan on the scale which Bahá’í resources at that time made possible. For the next twenty years, until his death in 1957, and through a series of phased programs, he persisted in this extraordinary undertaking.

The magnitude of his success is indicative of both the spiritual energies upon which he drew and the vast hunger for unity and the capacity to respond of the peoples of all faiths and lands. You might be interested and encouraged by the scope which Shoghi Effendi’s project has now achieved. Let me, therefore, sketch briefly for you the outlines of the work.

In 1936, outside the land of its birth, the Bahá’í Cause had only a few thousands of followers, living in fewer than perhaps a thousand localities in approximately forty countries and territories of the globe. Its administrative structure consisted of 10 National Spiritual Assemblies, several of them serving two countries at the same time, and fewer than 120 Local Spiritual Assemblies. Only a handful of these bodies were incorporated. At its World Center in the Holy Land, near the burial places of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, external circumstances had made it impossible for the Cause to pursue more than a token development. To the great mass of the people of the world even the name of the movement was as yet unknown.

Today, forty years later, the Bahá’í Cause is established in over 330 countries, territories, and major islands of the globe, from isolated villages in Canada’s furthest Arctic to the remotest islands of the South Pacific. It includes in its embrace representatives of virtually every religious, racial, ethnic, national, and social group on earth. There are today as many National Bahá’í Assemblies as there were Local Assemblies in 1936, and the number of Local Assemblies now approaches twenty thousand, quite apart from the more than sixty thousand centers where Assemblies are being built by Bahá’í groups or by individual believers. Wherever this institutional development has occurred, the creation of Houses of Worship, schools, hospices, and administrative headquarters, and the acquisition of other properties for such purposes have followed. In 1963, on the one hundredth anniversary of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His mission, representatives of all of the National Spiritual Assemblies in the Bahá’í world gathered on the slopes of Mount Carmel and, in what may well have been the first democratic global election in history, brought into existence the crowning unit of the Administrative Order conceived by Bahá’u’lláh. That body took the name which Bahá’u’lláh had given it a century earlier, “The Universal House of Justice.” Through the acquisition of consultative status in the nongovernmental organizations of the United Nations, as well as through the [Page 15] continuously expanding recognition of its institutions and practices by scores of national and provincial governments around the world, the Cause has secured those relationships with civil authority which are necessary to its various humanitarian purposes. Its literature, which in 1936 was translated into fewer than forty languages, can today be read in most of the languages on earth and includes not only the collected Writings of the Founders and the commentaries of Shoghi Effendi as Guardian but also a vast range of works which elaborate the principles and teachings of the Cause for both the scholarly and the popular reader. Most recently an intensive program for the use of various communication media has begun in order to assure that the message of Bahá’u’lláh is as accessible to the illiterate seeker as it is to his more fortunate brother, as comprehensible to modern youth as it is to adults. The total phenomenon may well represent the most rapid expansion of a serious religious movement in modern history.

These statistics will suggest, as I say, the scope of the program undertaken by Shoghi Effendi. What is important to our concerns here is the qualitative development which has taken place within this outer structure. What Shoghi Effendi succeeded in bringing into orderly existence is a global community, a model inspired by the teachings which had been enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh and presented to the nations of the West by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, a model which faithfully incorporates all of the features of these teachings. And it is because this model exists—because the past forty years have been spent in intensive, concerted, and, I am happy to say, successful effort—that I felt able, as a Bahá’í, to accept your invitation to this important anniversary conference. Because that model lies directly in the path of the central thrust of this Congress, directly in that particular path of the universal search for Truth, which the founders of the World Congress of Faiths adopted for themselves and which you have since pursued with such single-mindedness and integrity. It is a model, to use the words of Sir Francis Younghusband, of “World Fellowship.”

Forty years ago, at the completion of the presentation of the paper outlining Bahá’u’lláh’s Plan, Sir Herbert Samuel, who was then in the Chair, had the kindness to express his belief that

If one were compelled to choose which of the many religious communities of the world was closest to the aim and purpose of this Congress, I think one would be obliged to say that it was the comparatively little known Bahá’í community. Other Faiths and creeds have to consider at a Congress like this, in what way they can contribute to the idea of world fellowship: but the Bahá’í Faith exists almost for the sole purpose of contributing to the fellowship and unity of mankind.

Sir Herbert can, I think, safely be acquitted of any suspicion of partisanship or proselytism. Without doubt he was responding to an instinctive recognition of the role of the Bahá’í Cause not as a religion competing with other religions but as a social force with a very special, perhaps even a unique contribution to make to the aims of this Congress. If that is the case, the emergence of [Page 16] Bahá’u’lláh’s model more than justifies remarks which, forty years ago, may well have appeared extravagant to some of Sir Herbert’s listeners.

What are some of the features of this model which recommend it to the serious study of members of this organization? The first, and the one most relevant to our concerns here, is the model’s universality. That is to say, that in attracting adherents from every race, class, and creed the process of assimilation has not occurred at the expense of cultural and spiritual diversity of its members. If we are to take our fellow human beings at their own word (and their testimony is both unanimous and emphatic), those who have entered the community of Bahá’u’lláh from Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, or Zoroastrian backgrounds believe that they have done so with their original faith fully intact. If I may be forgiven a personal note, I, for example, do not regard myself in any way as less a Christian today than when I was a member of one of the churches known by that name, or necessarily than is one who uses the term in an exclusive sense. Quite otherwise. It is a fact, established now through a century of experience, that a worldwide community can revere the Founders of all the great revealed religions equally; can draw for their devotions on the Bhagavad Gita, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’án; can experience the precious benefits of “interfaith dialogue” in the homeliest occasions of local community life and in the truest sense of that much abused phrase.

A second feature of the model which has emerged from Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation and which seems to have special relevance to the concerns of this Congress is its success in remolding human conscience—in establishing a set of universal moral standards relevant to the age of mankind’s maturity. Solely out of devotion to the Founder of the Bahá’í Cause ordinary people in every part of the world have surrendered themselves to a process of education in ideals as comprehensive and challenging as the goals of the most advanced social reformers: the eradication of prejudices, the independent investigation of truth, the assurance of equality of opportunity to men and women, a program of universal education, the attainment of social justice, and the establishment of an effective world order, to name only a few of these ideals. The point is that these principles are not merely matters of sociological theory within the Bahá’í community but integral parts of the psychological pattern and emotional life in which generations of human beings, one generation after another, are being patiently and deliberately raised.

Third, a point dear to my own heart, Bahá’u’lláh’s community enjoys its own history. It has its “noble army of martyrs,” some twenty thousand of them, whose self-sacrifice won the unstinted admiration of Sir Francis Younghusband, when he first encountered their stories several decades ago. Apart from its lively interest in the spiritual giants of earlier Revelations it has its own archetypal heroes and saints (for whom its children are named) whose lives provide moral example and whose spiritual achievements have already begun to evoke the first halting response of Bahá’í artists, writers, and musicians. Today, all around the world, an entire generation of Japanese, Italian, Bolivian, [Page 17] Ugandan, Canadian, and Persian children are being educated in this common tradition. Together, for example, they are hearing the story of Ashraf’s mother, the woman who, seated in her home with her sixteen-year-old daughter-in—law one day, heard a mob approaching, shouting imprecations at the “Bábí heretics.” Before either woman could move, the mob hurled through the window the severed head of Ashraf, the son of the one and the bridegroom of the other. The young bride fainted, but the mother took the head of her son to a washbasin, cleaned the blood from the face, and threw the head back to the mob with words which are now known by heart in Bahá’í households in every part of the globe: “What we have given to God, we do not take back!”

Finally, there is the feature of the Bahá’í community which is related to the pivotal teaching of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation: “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” Bahá’u’lláh asserts that “The well-being of mankind, its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.” A feature of Bahá’u’lláh’s model, therefore, which has enormous significance for the future, is the fact that it has passed safely through the first critical century of its history with its unity firmly intact. No single effort to create sects and factions has survived the generation which saw it appear. There is not, so far as I am aware, any other great movement in recorded history—religious, political, or social —of which this can be said. Time and again in all other forms of human association, the process of schism has taken hold in the early, vulnerable stages; and the originating impulse has had to continue its work through the activities of often contending parties and sects.

A point which a Bahá’í speaker would wish not merely to acknowledge but to point out is that this model has been produced by and is identified with an independent world religion. Like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all of the other major revealed religions, the Bahá’í Cause has a center of authority in its own Prophet, its own laws, and its voluminous sacred scriptures. As Buddhism respects the Vedic tradition out of which it emerged, as Christianity cherishes its Judaic origins, the Bahá’í Faith fully acknowledges and appreciates the Islamic matrix in which it first appeared. Unlike the many other admirable modern religious movements which have slipped early and inevitably into the role of sects of their mother religions, however, the Bahá’í Faith has entirely escaped the gravitational pull of the parent Faith, a fact of its history which both Western scholars and Muslim religious authorities have hastened to recognize.

Indeed, Bahá’ís see the success the model enjoys as the result of its organic wholeness. This integrity, they further believe, arises from the fact that Bahá’u’lláh is the Manifestation of God to our age, the One promised in all the scriptures of the past. Is an [Page 18] acceptance of this extraordinary claim a prerequisite to a scholarly study of the Bahá’í community? Must a scientific examination of the evidence by a scholarly community be prefaced by a discussion of a principle of faith? Surely not. The influence of Bahá’u’lláh in the creation of the model must compel the attention of any serious observer; but this, too, is surely the province of detached and careful study. Indeed, it offers an opportunity which seems to be open to us in no other quarter. We have already noted that one of the most serious handicaps to a scientific Study of the phenomenon of revelation is that the originating impulse in each case has receded so far in history as to be accessible to us in only a very limited and unsatisfactory degree. Far otherwise with the work of the Founder of the Bahá’í Cause. The details of His life are massively documented, as are the contributions of those whom He inspired and led. His spiritual and social teachings are available in the original texts, under His own seal, often in His own hand. The same may be said of the provisions He made for the organization of His Cause. The sequence of events by which these concepts, laws, and institutions molded the development of the Bahá’í community also lie open to our scrutiny, unobscured by time, by myth, or by the glosses of conflicting schools of interpretation.

One thinks inevitably of the statement of Professor T. K. Cheyne as he looked ahead to the spiritual struggle in which our generation is now engaged: “The want of a surely attested life, or extract of a life, of a God- man will be more and more acutely felt. There is only one such life; it is that of Baha’ullah.”

Here, then as with all forms of life, the qualified observer may examine in detail not only the organism itself, but the processes by which it has come into existence and assumed its form and functions. The fact, therefore, that the Bahá’í community stands identified with an independent religion in no sense disqualifies it as a model of the kind I have described. To impose limitations on research because of a priori assumptions about the nature of the phenomena which command our attention is clearly out of harmony with the scientific spirit.

Our common and consistent religious experience over the past three millennia would, in any case, argue quite the opposite. If a key to the realization of the spiritual and social unification of the race does exist and is to be found through human effort, experience suggests that it is far more likely than otherwise to be associated with another intervention of the Divine in human affairs. Such a possibility, moreover, would seem also to have been anticipated in virtually all of the scriptures of the past. And it would appear to be entirely in harmony with the original impulse which gave rise to the creation of the Congress. One thinks of the remarkable intimations which came to Sir Francis Younghusband on that memorable morning in 1904, near Lhasa, and which he later recorded in words familiar to us all: “I had visions of a far greater religion yet to be and of a God as much greater than our English God as a Himalayan giant is greater than an English hill.”

I do not in any way insist upon the point, which is incidental to my remarks here. My sole concern, as I have said, is to free our discussion of any lingering or transient assumption that the object of our long search must, by its very nature, be incompatible with a new Revelation of God, with a new religion. Science needs no more reassurance than that in order to begin its patient work of discovery. Faith we can safely leave to pursue its ends within each individual human [Page 19] heart, free of obligation to account to any other.

IF I MAY then sum up: my remarks today have been essentially a progress report on the implementation of the Plan suggested here at the time the Congress of Faiths was born forty years ago. The results, I think you will agree, could not be more encouraging. I have indicated that there now exists a promising, operating model for the spiritually based world society which this Congress was founded to seek. The model is a global community which, far from seeing itself as already complete or self-sufficient, is embarked on an infinite series of experiments at the local, national, and international levels in its efforts to realize the vision of mankind’s oneness which it finds in the Writings of its Founder and of all the Messengers of God. In this great undertaking all people of good will are free to participate.

I have thought it important to draw your attention especially to a number of notable features which the model demonstrates: universality, unity, a relevant and effective moral system, a common history, a coherent administrative framework, and an embrace which accepts all the varieties of human life. For a global community to manifest these features at this critical stage in history seems to me to be quite the most significant development which could come to our attention. For its existence is, so far as I am aware, the first convincing evidence that the goal we seek here is fully realistic and eminently attainable within the foreseeable future. No matter how limited in size or still restricted in influence the model may be, such a phenomenon deserves the most able and the most disinterested study mankind can bring to it. I trust I shall not be misunderstood when I express my belief that it is preeminently deserving of such attention from this Congress.

In closing, therefore, I warmly invite the World Congress of Faiths to undertake such a study, with all that term implies, and to share the findings with mankind. Such a project would seem to me to be a natural extension of the Congress’ work and fully in harmony with its founding principles. Admittedly, it implies a further major development in methodology, perhaps even in organization. Such challenges, however, are inherent in the very nature of the search for truth in any field of endeavor. Indeed, the Congress itself represented at the time of its founding nothing other than a practical response to these familiar challenges by those who were the heirs of the nineteenth century’s spiritual visions.

What these methods and organizational developments should be I am obviously not competent to say. They will arise naturally out of the consultations of the Executive Committee and the Congress itself. And should another field of investigation emerge, demonstrating equally impressive possibilities for our purpose, let us by all means find the resources to respond appropriately to it as well. That is surely the spirit of truth.

The gloomy and sterile philosophy of materialism which, in one form or another, today dominates the minds of men everywhere owes its power and prestige to nothing more than the enormous productivity of science; this in turn has been the result solely of the faithful application of the method of science to material phenomena. But science is the heritage of all alike. What distinguishes the physical scientist is that he searches in the expectation of continual discovery, and in that confidence transforms our environment. Search is not for him merely a feature of personal identity or a pastime. Why should those of us who are aware that the range of human possibilities extends far beyond the physical universe fear to take up this human birthright and demonstrate by serious study and experiment its limitless creativity in those areas of life on which human happiness and indeed human survival absolutely depend?

Bahá’u’lláh’s model is a proof, a gage that the universe in which we live is rational, [Page 20] progressively evolving, and at its heart loving and joyful, the intended home of a united human race. We have only to claim it. Words Bahá’u’lláh uttered a century ago seem to be particularly appropriate to the decisions facing the Congress; I leave them with you:

Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.

That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause . . .

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[Page 22]

Islám’s Taḥríf: Implications for the Bahá’í Faith

BY WILLIAM COLLINS

IN THE COURSE of the history of the religions of the past theological doctrines have been formulated as a natural result of man’s intellectual powers and historical or social necessity. And doctrines, in time, have been modified and molded to have relevance for new generations of believers and to parry the criticism of unbelievers. The Bahá’í Faith not only consists of a new body of divine teachings but also, having been revealed in an Islamic context, may serve as a force to correct the imbalances engendered in Islamic religious thought and society after the time of Muḥammad. This process serves the purpose of vindicating the truth of Islám to those outside its pale and, in addition, provides the Bahá’í Faith with rich foundations for its own doctrinal development, a deeper understanding by its followers of the historical milieu in which the Bahá’í Revelation was promulgated, and a hint of the universalizing influence of Bahá’u’lláh’s interpretations of previous Scriptures.

A case in point is the Islamic doctrine of taḥríf, or corruption of the texts. Originating from some of the Qur’ánic verses taḥríf is the view that past Holy Books have been corrupted by the Jews and the Christians and that the true text of the Bible is not in existence among them. The influence of this doctrine upon Islamic peoples is evident from the several pages Bahá’u’lláh devotes to the subject in The Kitáb-i-Íqán (the Book of Certitude). The present examination of taḥríf attempts to outline its historical origins, considers some of its influence on Islám, and tries to examine its effect upon Bahá’í thought and the way in which Bahá’ís view their own and other religions.

The concept of taḥríf originated and developed amid the complex political,

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In addition to works cited in footnotes I also consulted the following books for a general view of relations between Islám and the Judaeo/Christian religion: J. Windrow Sweetman, Islam and Christian Theology: A Study of the Interpretation of Theological Ideas in the Two Religions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1945), 4 vols. Harry Gaylord Dorman, Toward Understanding Islam: Contemporary Apologetic of Islam and Missionary Policy (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1948).

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[Page 23] social, and religious atmosphere of seventh-century Arabia. Muḥammad received His first revelation in 610 A.D. while residing in Mecca. Aware that revelation is progressive and that He was one in a line of Apostles or Messengers of God, Muḥammad proclaimed to the Meccans that: 1) there is one true God, with Whom no partner is to be associated.

God there is no god but He, the Living, the Everlasting. . . . God is the Protector of the believers; He brings them forth from the shadows into the light. And the unbelievers—their protectors are idols, that bring them forth from the light into the shadows; . . . (Qur’án 2:256, 258-59)

2) He was the promised Prophet of the one true God announced by Jesus and Moses; and Christians and Jews are people of the Book.

Surely We have sent unto you a Messenger as a witness over you, even as We sent to Pharaoh a Messenger . . . (Qur’án 73:15)

. . . the Prophet of the common folk, whom they find written down with them in the Torah and the Gospel . . . (Qur’án 7:157)

And when Jesus son of Mary said, “Children of Israel, I am indeed the Messenger of God to you, confirming the Torah that is before me, and giving good tidings of a Messenger who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad.” (Qur’án 61:6)

3) Evolution of human society required that God revise His laws of social conduct, while guarding the eternal spiritual truths of religion.

Every term has a Book. God blots out, and He establishes whatsoever He will; and with Him is the Essence of the Book. (Qur’án 13:39)

4) God sent earlier Prophets either for a specific people or a specific period, but Muḥammad was the Messenger to all previous religions.

Thereafter, after them, We produced other generations; no nation outstrips its term, nor do they put it back. Then sent We Our Messengers successively . . . (Qur’án 23:44-45)

Say: “O mankind, I am the Messenger of God to you all . . .” (Qur’án 7:157)

Muḥammad’s presentation of His relationship to past Prophets was made first to the Meccans, a people almost wholly pagan, with only a few Jews and Christians among them. As pagans, the Meccans were largely unaffected by any of Muḥammad’s claim to a connection with past Prophets and Revelations; [Page 24] such a teaching could have little meaning or relevance for them.

The forced flight (Hegira) of Muḥammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 brought Islám to a new stage of development—from a relatively small number of believers, to the controlling religious and political force of a large city, and from pagan surroundings to the first large-scale contact with people of the Book, particularly the Jews.

When the Prophet entered Medina, nearly half its population of ten thousand was Jewish; and of the Arab remainder, some fifteen hundred were Muslims. This was to be the Prophet’s first extended contact with the Jews and the most strenuous test of His claims to be successor to Moses and Jesus, and the One promised in the Torah and the Gospel. Though Muslims were in a minority, a complex series of social and political factors led to the acceptance of Muḥammad by the tribes of Medina as their leader. The Prophet cemented the political unity of the Medinan city-state with a constitution which may well have been the first written constitution. Although the Jewish tribes of Medina were signatories to this document, it was clear in the text of the constitution itself that acceptance of Muḥammad as leader in political and judicial affairs did not imply acceptance of Muḥammad as Prophet of God, as attested by the elimination of the phrase “Apostle of God” from the early articles of the document.

The opposition which had been directed toward the Prophet by the Meccan idolaters had been an inconvenience which Muḥammad and the believers could withstand because it was based on a clear-cut difference between those who accepted one God and those who worshiped many in the form of idols. It was not to be long, however, before the Jewish tribes of Medina would begin to criticize and cavil at Muḥammad for His claim to be successor to Moses. It became steadily clearer to Muḥammad that He would be rejected by the people of the Book, a challenge which would require a response to the attacks and an explanation to the believers. Both were forthcoming in several revelations in the Qur’án.

First, Muḥammad stated a positive connection among all the divine Revelations by identifying Islám with the original religion of Abraham,

No; Abraham in truth was not a Jew, neither a Christian; but he was a Muslim and one pure of faith; certainly he was never of the idolators. Surely the people standing closest to Abraham are those who followed him, and this Prophet, and those who believe . . . (Qur’án 3:60-61)

by stating that Jews had killed and disobeyed Prophets before,

Say: “Why then were you slaying the Prophets of God in former time, if you were believers?” (Qur’án 2:86)

and by showing that Jews and Christians reject each other though they recite [Page 25] the Book and have divided the religion of Abraham into sects

People of the Book! Why do you dispute concerning Abraham? (Qur’án 3:58)

But they split in their affair between them into sects, each party rejoicing in what is with them. (Qur’án 23:55)

He thereby implied that the renewal of the ancient religion of Abraham lay in its fulfilment in Islám, inasmuch as Jews and Christians had forfeited their connection to Abraham by their sectarianism and opposition to each other. As a concrete assurance of this tie with the primeval Revelation God revealed to Muḥammad that the Ka‘bih in Mecca had been raised by Abraham as an altar and that the Qiblih of Islám should be changed from Jerusalem to Mecca. Needless to say, the coupling of Islám with the religion of Abraham enhanced the continuity with past Revelations and established their truth in the eyes of the faithful, while the changing of the Qiblih indicated the independence of Muḥammad’s Revelation and its status as harbinger of a new civilization.

Second, Muḥammad revealed the concept of taḥríf, the perversion or corruption of the texts of past Scriptures by the people of the Book. The Jews, if they read their own Holy Book rightly, and if Muḥammad fulfilled its prophecies, would have to be held responsible for their acceptance or rejection of Muḥammad as the promised Prophet. As Muḥammad’s claims were received with much ridicule from the Jews, Muḥammad was put in the difficult position of appearing to have falsely claimed that He was promised in the Bible; therefore, in the Qur’án He declares that the Jews had maliciously perverted the Message which had been revealed to them through Moses and describes several ways in which this taḥríf was accomplished: One way is tampering with the meaning of the text of the Holy Books through incorrect interpretation.

Are you then so eager that they should believe you, seeing there is a party of them that heard God’s word, and then tampered with it, and that after they had comprehended it, wittingly? (Qur’án 2:70)

So for their breaking their compact We cursed them and made their hearts hard, they perverting words from their meanings . . . (Qur’án 5:16)

Another way of corrupting the text is concealing or neglecting verses prophesying Muhammad.

thou wilt surely be among the evildoers whom We have given the Book, and they recognize it as they recognize their sons, even though there is a party of them conceal the truth and that wittingly. (Qur’án 2:142)

Those who conceal the clear signs and the guidance that We have sent down . . . (Qur’án 2:154)

Yet another way is using texts to ridicule the Prophet or dispute with the believers.

Hast thou not regarded those who were given a share of the Book purchasing error, and desiring that thou shouldst also err from the way? (Qur’án [Page 26] 4:48)

Still another way of perverting or corrupting the text is writing commentaries on the Bible and passing them off as the word of God or as divinely inspired.

And some there are of them that are common folk not knowing the Book, but only fancies and mere conjectures. So woe to those who write the Book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a little price. (Qur’án 2:73)

The vague way in which the charges of falsification of Scripture by the Jews and Christians were made in the Qur’án resulted in later Muslim scholars’ holding quite divergent views of what lay at the basis of the charge and culminated in three schools of thought. One school, which came to represent the orthodox point of view, held that the verse “woe to those who write the Book with their hands” indicated that Jews and Christians had performed a literal falsification or forgery of the Torah and Gospel, resulting in texts that were almost completely corrupted. The second school held that the Scriptures of previous religions were intact but that Jews and Christians were in disagreement due to erroneous interpretations of those Scriptures. A middle school conceded that literal falsifications had taken place, though it limited them to a minimum.

Within a century after the Prophet’s death, as a consequence of increased contacts with the outside world, there was a concomitant necessity for development of the doctrine to parry the polemical and intellectual attacks of Christians and Jews. The doctrine of a literal forgery of the Bible became a defense, which had the effect of removing all basis for spiritual discussion between Muslims, on the one hand, and Christians and Jews, on the other, not only making Islám somewhat isolationist but causing Muslims to regard all existing texts of the Bible as valueless. W. Montgomery Watt points out, however, that “the doctrine was never precisely formulated, since there were advantages in a degree of indefiniteness—when one formulation of ‘corruption’ proved unsatisfactory one could shift to another.”

Obviously this led the Muslims into a quandary regarding apologetics, especially in the attempt to prove that Muḥammad was prophesied in the Bible (for example, Deut. 18:15), for the Muslim use of any Biblical passage presupposed its authenticity. Upon what basis could a Muslim reject all other verses of the Bible as corrupted while accepting this one? Moreover, how could Christians and Jews be converted to Islám if the Scripture they held sacred were disparaged and considered valueless by Muslims?

Far worse for the unity of Islám itself was the turning of the charge of taḥríf inward, particularly in the case of the Shí‘ih who claimed that the Sunní and other sects had corrupted the text of the Qur’án itself to remove all references to the Imáms.

The literalness with which the majority of Muslims endowed the doctrine [Page 27] of taḥríf undoubtedly lost Islám many potential converts, irreparably closed the minds of most Muslims to any open and rational contact with Christians and Jews, and partially broke the unity of the Faith itself.

IN The Kitáb-i-Íqán, Bahá’u’lláh, with succinct explications of passages of past Scriptures, sweeps away the spurious and superstitious elements of old doctrines while giving them a new and generally more symbolic meaning. As part of a general discussion of the reasons for the rejection of Muḥammad by Christian and Jewish divines, Bahá’u’lláh devotes several pages to the question of corruption of the texts. But Bahá’u’lláh characteristically applies His words not only to the people of the past (Jews and Christians) and their rejection of Muḥammad but also to those of the present (Muslims) and their blindness to the Báb. He writes: “Verily I say, throughout all this period they have utterly failed to comprehend what is meant by corrupting the text.”

Bahá’u’lláh then provides a specific illustration of what is meant by taḥríf— the story of the people of Khaybar. These people were a Jewish tribe which lived at the oasis of Khaybar north of Medina. They had shown a marked hostility to Islám and the Prophet and had allied themselves with other tribes against Medina. After a short campaign Muḥammad captured the town and concluded with the tribe a treaty which bore some features similar to the constitution of Medina, among which was the application to the Jews of their own laws, not the laws of Islám. Bahá’u’lláh records:

When the people of Khaybar asked the focal center of the Muḥammadan Revelation concerning the penalty of adultery committed between a married man and a married woman, Muḥammad answered and said: “The law of God is death by stoning.” Whereupon they protested saying: “No such law hath been revealed in the Pentateuch.” Muḥammad answered and said: “Whom do ye regard among your rabbis as being a recognized authority and having a sure knowledge of the truth?” They agreed upon Ibn-i-Súríyá. Thereupon Muḥammad summoned him and said: “I adjure thee by God Who clove the sea for you, caused manna to descend upon you, and the cloud to overshadow you, Who delivered you from Pharaoh and his people, and exalted you above all human beings, to tell us what Moses hath decreed concerning adultery between a married man and a married woman.” He made reply: “O Muḥammad! death by stoning is the law.” Muḥammad observed: “Why is it then that this law is annulled and hath ceased to operate among the Jews?” He answered and said: “When Nebuchadnezzar delivered Jerusalem to the flames, and put the Jews to death, only a few survived. The divines of that age, considering the extremely limited number of Jews, and the multitude of the Amelekites, took counsel together, and came to the [Page 28] conclusion that were they to enforce the law of the Pentateuch, every survivor . . . would have to be put to death according to the verdict of the Book. Owing to such considerations, they totally repealed the penalty of death.” Meanwhile Gabriel inspired Muḥammad’s illumined heart with these words: “They pervert the text of the Word of God.”

With the oracular and unwavering clarity characteristic of the Manifestations of God, Bahá’u’lláh declares that by corruption of the texts is meant “that the meaning of the Word of God hath been perverted, not that the actual words have been effaced.” Anticipating any other criticism of this interpretation that might be raised from the Qur’anic verse from which the idea of literal corruption of the text had arisen Bahá’u’lláh says:

Again in another instance, He saith: “Woe unto those who, with their own hands, transcribe the Book corruptly, and then say: ‘This is from God,’ that they may sell it for some mean price.” This verse was revealed with reference to the divines and leaders of the Jewish Faith. These divines, in order to please the rich, acquire worldly emoluments, and give vent to their envy and misbelief, wrote a number of treatises, refuting the claims of Muḥammad, supporting their arguments with such evidences as it would be improper to mention, and claimed that these arguments were derived from the text of the Pentateuch.

Bahá’u’lláh then goes on to explain that taḥríf refers to tampering with meanings and writing commentaries attacking the Prophets; it does not include a literal falsification and forgery of the texts of the Holy Books. Indeed, Bahá’u’lláh also mentions that some Muslims even held to a belief that the “genuine text of the heavenly Gospel” had been taken by God to heaven, to which He replies by asking how the Christians could have been held responsible for their belief or unbelief if they had no genuine written testimony from God.

Bahá’u’lláh does not stop at a simple clarification of the meaning of taḥríf because a full meaning implies relevance and application for present as well as past conditions. Indeed, Bahá’u’lláh makes plain that the corruption of meanings which He has mentioned is not just an occurrence of previous ages but is as current and applicable to Islamic orthodoxy as it had been when applied by the Prophet Muḥammad to Jews and Christians twelve centuries before: “ . . . by corruption of the text is meant that in which all Muslim divines are engaged today, that is the interpretation of God’s Holy Book in accordance with their idle imaginings and vain desires. . . . Consider how abundant are the denunciations written by the foolish divines of this age against this most wondrous Cause!”

It is at this point that Bahá’u’lláh’s redefinition of taḥríf has specific application to the development and history of the Bahá’í Faith. Bahá’u’lláh revealed [Page 29] the Kitáb-i-Íqán almost two years before He declared His mission in Baghdád in 1863. Thus the members of the religious community of which Bahá’u’lláh was the most noble and influential representative were still known as Bábís, or were referred to by Him as “people of the Bayán.” The significance of Bahá’u’lláh’s explanation of taḥríf was thus further enhanced by its immediate relevance to the impending announcement of His mission and the opening of a new Revelation. If the Jews, Christians, and Muslims could all pervert the meaning of the Word of God, why could not the people of the Bayán do likewise?

And now, We beseech the people of the Bayán, all the learned, the sages, the divines, and witnesses amongst them, not to forget the wishes and admonitions revealed in their Book. Let them, at all times, fix their gaze upon the essentials of His Cause, lest when He, Who is the Quintessence of truth, . . . is made manifest, they cling unto certain passages of the Book, and inflict upon Him that which was inflicted in the Dispensation of the Qur’án.

In speaking of the time “when He, Who is the Quintessence of truth . . . is made manifest,” Bahá’u’lláh is referring to His own imminent declaration, and prophesying rejection by those who would corrupt the meaning of the Bayán —a rejection which did in fact take place and was led by none other than Bahá’u’lláh’s half-brother, Mirzá Yaḥyá.

Bahá’u’lláh’s clarification of the true meaning and implications of the doctrine of taḥríf serves for Bahá’ís both as a historical lesson and as a foreshadowing of the protection with which Bahá’u’lláh was to endow His Faith and its institutions. It is a lesson in avoiding a very mistaken view of past Scriptures. The Muslims, by seeing the Bible as a literally corrupted Book, cut off all hope of useful examination of Jewish and Christian tradition; and as the doctrine of taḥríf came to be a barrier to finding truths in the Holy Books of previous Revelations, Islam not only lost a part of its foundation and its continuity with mankind’s spiritual history but also put an almost insurmountable barrier in the way of those Jews and Christians who might have been inclined toward conversion. Indeed, had Islamic apologists understood that taḥríf meant the perversion of the Word of God from its true meaning, an open system of apologetics using the Bible might have succeeded in winning the people of the Book to the light of Muḥammad’s Revelation, “for if these [the Christian divines] had believed, they would have been followed by the mass of their countrymen.” By analogy, so must the Bahá’í view be a vision of one continuous progressive Revelation and acceptance of the Scriptures [Page 30] of all the revealed religions. This acceptance seems to imply several things. First, it calls for the recognition of the divine inspiration of these Holy Books as presently constituted because the followers of these religions accept them as such and because “the words themselves eloquently testify to the truth that they are of God.” Second, it implies a recognition of the multiplicity of understandings which can be derived from these collections of sacred oral traditions comprising the Scriptures of the past inasmuch as Bahá’u’lláh records: “Thou must believe with undoubting faith that its [the Word of God] meaning can never be exhausted.” To accept the divine origin of previous Holy Books is the only way to maintain enlightening exchanges between people of different religions; to believe that other religions are working from a false basis is to make such exchange almost impossible. The Bahá’í recognition of the genuineness of all the Holy Books does not require a concomitant acceptance of sectarian dogma, literalism, and incorrect interpretation because, unless approved or expounded by the Manifestation Himself, they may constitute that perversion of meaning to which Bahá’u’lláh refers. Bahá’u’lláh’s interpretation of the taḥríf concept, however, neither explicitly affirms nor questions the literal authenticity of every single word of earlier Scriptures but rather criticizes the misinterpretation of the sacred Books, the distortion of the spirit in which they were revealed, and the mistaken view that conscious forgery and interpolation had taken place.

The other warning implicit in Bahá’u’lláh’s discussion of taḥríf is that His followers should not indulge in the same corruption of meaning to which He refers in these passages of The Kitáb-i-Íqán. Fortunately, Bahá’u’lláh has provided several safeguards within the Bahá’í Faith to prevent those twisted meanings and petty differences, which have dampened the spiritual life in previous Revelations, from doing irreparable harm to His Faith.

The existence of authenticated originals of the Bahá’í Sacred Writings is a unique protection against disagreement and misinterpretation. That Bahá’u’lláh wrote many Tablets in His own hand, or put His seal upon those written by His amanuenses, precludes any challenge from within or outside the Bahá’í Faith regarding the authenticity and authority of the Sacred Texts. Whatever is not authenticated as being by Bahá’u’lláh or having His approval cannot be accepted as Bahá’í Scripture.

Most momentous of all Bahá’u’lláh’s provisions is His Covenant with the believers, by which Bahá’ís accept His Son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as Exemplar and Interpreter of the Writings, His great-grandson Shoghi Effendi as Guardian and Interpreter, and the authority of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme elected governing Bahá’í council. The existence of clear succession and authoritative [Page 31] interpretation, coupled with the power of the Universal House of Justice to “ensure the preservation of the Sacred Texts” and to “elucidate questions that are obscure,” effectively eliminates the problems of corruption of the texts within the Bahá’í community. This does not mean that Bahá’ís cannot interpret Bahá’í Scripture according to their own individual understanding. In a letter to an individual Bahá’í the Universal House of Justice, by clarifying the distinction between authoritative and individual interpretation, gives some indication of how the Bahá’í Faith may prevent individual interpretation or possible corruptions of meaning from overpowering the original teachings of the Manifestation and the authoritative interpretations of His chosen successors:

A clear distinction is made in our Faith between authoritative interpretation and the interpretation or understanding that each individual arrives at for himself from his study of its teachings. While the former is confined to the Guardian, the latter, according to the guidance given to us by the Guardian himself, should by no means be suppressed. In fact such individual interpretation is considered the fruit of man’s rational power and conducive to a better understanding of the teachings, provided no disputes or arguments arise among the friends and the individual himself understands and makes it clear that his views are merely his own.

As a protection, anyone violating the Covenant established by Bahá’u’lláh, rebelling against the authority of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi, or the Universal House of Justice, is liable to expulsion from the Faith. Thus no person can pervert the meanings of the Sacred Texts to gather himself a following and create division within the ranks of the faithful. Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant has the effect of minimizing the chances for taḥríf to undermine the effectiveness of the Bahá’í Faith in promulgating Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings and prevents it from destroying the internal solidarity and unity of the Bahá’í Cause.

The essence of Bahá’u’lláh’s redefinition of the doctrine of corruption of the texts is the prevention of the introduction into the Bahá’í Faith of any view of Scripture which would lead Bahá’ís to reject the validity of previous Holy Books or would cause Bahá’ís to indulge in the same distortion of meaning which arose among the followers of earlier Revelations. That the Books and the Prophets are their own proof and the embodiment of spiritual truth is abundantly confirmed by Bahá’u’lláh Himself:

And if thou dwellest in the land of testimony, content thyself with that which He, Himself, hath revealed: “Is it not enough for them that We have sent down unto Thee the Book?” This is the testimony which He, Himself, hath ordained; greater proof than this there is none, nor ever will be: “This proof is His Word; His own Self, the testimony of His truth.”

[Page 32]

[Page 33]33

The Dynamics of Indo-Pakistani Modern Islám

BY JOSEPH GRAZIANI

OVER forty years ago, in three major towns in India, Sir Mohammad Iqbal gave a lecture entitled, “The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam,” which later became a chapter of his book Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. In the discussions Iqbal explored the traditional sources of Islamic law—namely, the Qur’án, ḥadíth (tradition, reports of a precedent set by the Prophet), ijmá‘ (consensus of opinion), and ijtihád (effort or independent judgment, exercise of human reasoning to ascertain the Islamic Religious Law). Iqbal’s own treatment of them, however, was not quite traditional. Both his handling of the subject and the title he gave to his lecture can be seen as an index to a significant trio of the modernist Muslims’ psychological commitments —religiosity, modernity, and change— which have characterized the Muslim modernist as much after Iqbal’s time as before him. Since India’s confrontation with the thought of the modern West in the nineteenth century down to our own day the Muslim mind has been working to reconcile religiosity and modernity through changing concepts and ideas in traditional Islám.

My objective in the present essay is to examine ideas which seem to be a product of this dual concern and which can be understood as intellectual instruments to enable the Muslims to respond productively to new existential needs and to make room for newer adaptations in the thought of Islám. My discussion is divided into two sections. In the first section I extract from the total thought of modern Islám in the subcontinent ideas which evince a desire for progress as well as for religion and simultaneously analyze their underlying function of facilitating a reconciliation between religion and modernity. In the second section I discuss the problem as to whether modernist Islám, so far as it is represented by such ideas, has come to differ significantly from the traditional Islamic religion.

I

AN EXAMINATION of the ideas developed by the Indo-Pakistani Muslims in the past century and a quarter indicates that the modern Muslim mind in the subcontinent has used two closely allied modes of turning Islám into a more flexible thought system for better accommodating religion to modernity. The first of these modes could be described as the elimination of constraining ideas. Many an Indian Muslim intellectual, dissatisfied with the plight of the Muslims, has rejected, or put limitations upon, those elements in traditional Islám which he considered responsible for the Muslim decline, thereby gaining a freedom to adopt new perspectives. The second mode either reinterprets some basic beliefs in traditional Islám or substitutes a new for an old element. These reinterpretations and substitutions have tended to fix upon those elements which we might roughly describe as philosophical doctrines inherently capable of being rendered into doctrinal bases for assigning a larger role to human reason in life than was formerly allowed.

1

To Muslim modernists taqlíd (accepted legal authority, the principle of strict adherence to the law as interpreted in the authoritative manuals) has been most conspicuously [Page 34] the constraining factor and the one mainly responsible for inertia in Islám. Even in the premodern period the principle of taqlíd was attacked by such religious leaders as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Shah Waliullah of Delhi (d. 1762). In the modern period taqlíd was the first principle to be eliminated by the Muslim modernists from the guiding doctrines of Islamic religion. Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), for example, rejected the doctrinal basis of taqlíd as erroneous:

By this erroneous belief (i.e. that the door of ijtihad would be closed and that nowadays a mujtahid [a learned interpreter of Islám] would be superfluous) we do harm Islamic religion and society seriously. We should be aware of the fact that times change and that again and again we are confronted with new questions and new needs . . . In other words: today also we want mujtahidin.

After Sayyid Ahmad Khan the need for ijtihád continued to be championed, taqlíd being considered increasingly responsible for the problems of Muslims. In the most popular of his works, The Spirit of Islam, Ameer Ali observed:

The present stagnation of the Musulman communities is principally due to the notion which has fixed itself on the minds of the generality of Moslems, that the right to the exercise of private judgment ceased with the early legists, that its exercise in modern times is sinful, and that a Moslem in order to be regarded as an orthodox follower of Mohammed should belong to one or other of the schools established by the schoolmen of Islam, and abandon his judgment absolutely to the interpretations of men who lived in the ninth century, and could have no conception of the necessities of the twentieth.

. . . The Prophet had consecrated reason as the highest and noblest function of the human intellect. Our schoolmen and their servile followers have made its exercise a sin and a crime.

. . . before there can be a renovation of religious life, the mind must first escape from the bondage which centuries of literal interpretation and the doctrine of “conformity” have imposed upon it.

From the late nineteenth century on such self-criticism and self-advice became lasting features of Indian Islám and of modern Islám elsewhere. They constitute now some of the points on which “liberals” are in agreement with “fundamentalists,” to use the terms in Professor Gibb’s sense.

The first step, then, was the rejection of the binding character of the traditional law. Next came repudiation of the binding character of ḥadíth. Shah Waliullah, discussing his own theory of the universal and the particular, which we shall consider below, challenged the validity of at least a part of the ḥadíth corpus. He does not appear, however, to have applied his theory to separate the ḥadíth of universal validity from those of local validity. On the contrary, for legal purposes, he exhorts his readers to accept the ḥadíth whenever one is available.

It was Iqbal who actually used Shah Waliullah’s theory to justify his deemphasis which soon became essential to the thinking of Muslim modernists. Discussing the sources of Muslim law in the sixth chapter of Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, he quoted Shah Waliullah’s doctrine that the

law revealed by a prophet takes especial notice of the habits, ways and peculiarities of the people to whom he is specifically sent. The prophet who aims at all-embracing principles, however, can neither reveal different principles for different peoples, [Page 35] nor leave them to work out their own rules of conduct. His method is to train one particular people, and to use them as a nucleus for the building up of a universal Shari‘at. In doing so he accentuates the principles underlying social life of all mankind, and applies them to concrete cases in the light of the specific habit of the people immediately before him. The Shari‘at values (Ahkam) resulting from this application (e.g., rules relating to penalties for crimes) are in a sense specific to that people; and, since their observance is not an end in itself, they cannot be strictly enforced in the case of future generations.

Iqbal did not mean to reject ḥadíth altogether: his criticism was not so much that they were forged as that changing times had rendered the legal ḥadíth obsolete and that they cannot be strictly enforced in different cultural milieux. But later a trend toward total rejection of ḥadíth emerged, among whose representatives Ghulam Ahmad Parwiz (b. 1904) is the most outspoken.

Iqbal, however, had alluded to a significant point in the same lecture. He hinted that the value of ḥadíth was as an index to the Islamic spirit with reference to law and society rather than as a vehicle of Islamic legal regulations. He wrote in Reconstruction:

And a further intelligent study of the literature of traditions, if used as indicative of the spirit in which the Prophet himself interpreted his Revelation, may still be of great help in understanding the life-value of the legal principles enunciated in the Quran. A complete grasp of their life-value alone can equip us in our endeavour to re-interpret the foundational principles.

Recently this idea has been more fully developed by Professor Fazlur Rahman (former director of the Institute of Islamic Research, Pakistan) in a series of articles on the genesis of the concepts of sunna (literally, “trodden path,” local custom or traditional practice), ḥadíth, and ijtihád. His findings confirm Professor Schacht’s thesis that ḥadíth came to be regarded as a binding source of Muslim law only after the writings of al-Sháfi‘í (d. 820 A.D.), before whose dissertations the status of ḥadíth had been semiformal. Professor Rahman refuses to accept the traditional concept that the present collections of the ḥadíth constitute the vehicles of the prophetic sunna. Sunna, he maintains, is a behavioral concept which, contrary to traditional belief, includes not only the “ideal sunna” (by which he means the real practice of the Prophet) but also the “living sunna” (which implies the behavior of the Prophet’s companions, successors, and their succeeding generations). Technical ḥadíth—that is, the collected ḥadíth—he holds as not entirely the same as historic ḥadíth:

Certainly, in the extant works of the second century, most of the legal and even moral traditions are not from the Prophet but are traced back to the Companions, the “Successors” and to the third generation. But as time went on, the Ḥadīth movement, as though through an inner necessity imposed by its very purpose, tended to project the Ḥadīth backwards to its most natural anchoring point, the person of the Prophet.

At the same time, however, Professor Rahman strongly criticizes the view held by such ahl al-Qur’án (people who follow the Qur’án) as Ghulam Ahmad Parwīz, which implied that the ḥadíth were unreliable and that the Qur’án was enough for the Muslims:

. . . there are strong trends in our society which in the name of what they call “progressivism” wish to brush aside the Ḥadīth and the Prophetic Sunnah. In their anxiety to “clear the way”, they resort to methods [Page 36] much more questionable than Nero’s method of rebuilding Rome. . . . they sometimes tell us that the Ḥadīth is unhistorical and therefore unreliable as a guide to the Prophetic Sunnah.

On the contrary, continues Professor Rahman, even that corpus of generally accepted ḥadíth which may not historically go back to the Prophet himself, but only to the early Muslims, should be taken as an index to the Prophetic sunna. He claims most of such ḥadíth were based on the Prophetic sunna but adds that one should, nevertheless, always keep in view the early developments of Islamic history whenever one interprets ḥadíth. Conversely, even when the ḥadíth originate with the Prophet himself, the Muslims are not obligated to accept all such individual ḥadíth as necessarily binding on their behavior. An understanding of the general tenets of the totality of ḥadíth, which Professor Rahman calls the “living understanding,” is what he regards as desirable. Thus, criticizing the revivalist position which requires a return to the Qur’án and the sunna, he urges that

not just a simple “return” to the Qur’ān and the Sunnah as they were acted in the past but a true understanding of them that would give us guidance today. A simple return to the past is, of course, a return to the graves. And when we go back to the early Muslim generation, this process of a living understanding of the Qur’ān and the Sunnah is exactly what we find there.

Another manner of reducing the area of traditional religious obligation has been to separate the political from the personal realm. This intellectual trend of secularizing politics and social life in general, later shared by some Middle Eastern Muslims as well, was first developed in India. It was implicit in Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s policy of loyalism to the British, but the theory was more emphatically presented by some other members of the Aligarh movement.

Altaf Hussain Hali (d. 1914), having described the rise and the decline of the glorious Islamic civilization in his powerful quatrains Madd-u-Jazr-i-Islám (the ebb and flow of Islám) implores the Muslims to rid themselves of their ignorance and economic plight by taking advantage of the opportunities provided through the administrative machinery of the British rule in India, which he believed was indeed conducive to such an undertaking.

Chirāgh ‘Alī of Delhi, another important contributor to Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s journal Tahdhíb al-Akhláq (ethics), championed the division between personal and political realms with boldness and determination. In the preface to his book The Proposed Political, Legal, and Social Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and other Mohammadan States (1883) he wrote: “Islam as a religion is quite apart from inculcating a social system. The Mohammadan policy and social system have nothing to do with religion.’” He quoted a ḥadíth according to which the Prophet disapproved of the accustomed method of date growing and asked one of his followers to relinquish it, only to realize later that he was mistaken in his suggestion, observing that since he was a man, and, therefore, fallible, his instructions having to do with everything except religious matters were to be only lightly regarded. Chirāgh ‘Alī concluded that this saying of the Prophet “‘shows that Mohammad never set up his own acts and words as an infallible or unchangeable rule of conduct in civil and political affairs, or, in other words, he never combined the Church and State into one.’”

This tendency continued with Khudā Bakhsh, a professor of Islamic history at Calcutta University, who, much like Chirāgh ‘Alī, held that “The Qur’ān, rightly understood, . . . is a spiritual guide, . . . putting [Page 37] forward ideals to be followed . . . rather than a corpus juris civilis to be accepted for all times.’”

This drift toward secularism, which was most pronounced among the pro-British Muslims of the Aligarh movement before the First World War, was detached from its loyalist leanings and given further impetus in the postwar period by the anti-British nationalist Muslims. Sometime later Aligarh itself became the base of the Pakistan movement, which was committed to reuniting the political and personal realms by maintaining that religion offered as fruitful a source of guidance for the one as for the other.

The majority of those who chose to oppose the idea of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state in the subcontinent believed in a nationhood comprised of Hindus and Muslims living in India. Two distinctly identifiable currents ran in the stream of this composite nationalism. According to one, nationhood was based on territory and nonreligious culture, an Indian, therefore, being identified socially and politically simply as an Indian and nothing further. The sense of belonging to one religious community or another was taken to be mainly a misconception, although it was considered quite appropriate for an Indian to believe in any of the different religions. This was, in the main, the official theory of the Indian National Congress to which a number of the Muslim nationalists within the Congress fully subscribed.

According to the second stream of thought, religious culture was a significant factor in the social as well as the personal life of Muslims. Thus Muslims were taken to constitute an entity distinct from Hindus and other religious communities in India. They might, and indeed should, for their own benefit as well as for that of the other Indians, conclude an alliance with Hindus and thus form an ‘umma (community of believers). Nationhood, it would follow, is the result of a specific contract between various religious communities in a country, rather than merely the sharing of a common territory and nonreligious culture. This is the position of Jam‘íyat ‘Ulamá-i-Hind, a group of religious leaders from the seminary of Deoband, and of Abul Kalam Azad, the chief Muslim spokesman of composite nationalism, who, for several years, was president of the Indian National Congress.

Both Azad and the nationalist ‘ulamá (Muslim scholars) derive religious sanction for such composite nationhood from the covenant which the Prophet concluded with the Muslim tribes and the Jews of Medina in the seventh century. In this contract Muslims and those non-Muslims who were attached to and fought side by side with them are said to constitute one ‘umma. The covenant lists nine groups of Muslims and Jews which had rights and duties under the terms of the covenant and which, thus, constituted ‘umma wáḥida (one nation). This covenant is seen by Azad and the nationalist ‘ulamá as an historical precedent for and approval of Hindu-Muslim composite nationhood.

Abul Kalam, and the nationalist Deobandi ‘ulamá who followed him, regarded the sharí‘á' (revealed law or Islamic law) as fully authoritative in personal and nonpolitical relations. Particularly the ‘ulamá always regarded the sharí‘á' as fully valid in its totality. But among some modern educated Indian nationalists all law—and not constitutional law alone—came to be understood as falling outside the pale of religion; thus they conceived of religion in much the same way as did the earlier members of the Aligarh movement. The leading contemporary exponent of this trend was Professor Asaf A. A. Fyzee (b. 1909), the author of works on Islamic jurisprudence. Professor Fyzee developed his position in a number of articles, later published in a book entitled A [Page 38] Modern Approach to Islam. In his article “Islamic Law and Theology in India: Proposals for a Fresh Approach” he succinctly stated the fundamental principle of his perspective:

The first task is to separate logically the dogmas and doctrines of religion from the principles and rules of law. To me it is an axiom that the essential faith of man is something different from the outward observance of rules; that moral rules apply to the conscience, but that legal rules can be enforced only by the state. Ethical norms are subjective; legal rules are objective. The inner life of the spirit, the “Idea of the Holy,” must to some extent be separated from the outward forms of social behavior. The separation is not simple; it will even be considered un-Islamic. But the attempt at a rethinking of the shari‘ah can only begin with the acceptance of this principle.

2

All of the currents of thought which I have examined thus far are similar insofar as they attempt to accommodate religion to change basically by rejecting various elements of traditional religion, thus, in effect, shrinking the area of religious obligation. There were, in addition, other attempts to accommodate change which proceeded in a different fashion —not only by rejecting older elements but also by going on to substitute newer perspectives on man and the universe for the traditional ones.

In the eighteenth century, Shah Waliullah developed the theory that religion consists of two parts: form and essence (manhaj or ṣúra kháṣṣa, manner or special way of action, and aṣl al-dín, the basis of the religion). By form he means those temporal elements in a religion which are shaped through the influence of a particular environment; by essence, a religion’s universal (immutable) elements. He did not, however, actually work out and classify the temporal and the universal elements in Islám.

The idea of the universal and the particular was extended by Iqbal into his concept of life as a constant progress. With regard to social organization Iqbal found freedom, equality, and solidarity to be the basic verities of Islám. As the movement for Pakistan gathered momentum, Iqbal’s interpretations of the essence of social tenets of Islám were reiterated by an increasing number of western- educated intellectuals and even today continue to be championed by such intellectuals. Khalifa Abdul Hakim, a professor of philosophy and the late Director of the Institute of Islamic Culture at Lahore, comments in his book Islamic Ideology about the unchangeability of natural laws and eternal values, and perpetual evolutionary change, which are given by the Qur’án as the nature of reality. S. A. Rahman, a former Chief Justice of Pakistan, speaking at the Political Science Conference of Pakistan in 1950, stated that:

According to the Qur’ān, change is one of the greatest signs of God. . . . We have been given immutable principles . . . but the existence of these external principles leaves a very wide field for evolutionary progress in the political and social spheres.

He further added, “The time has now arrived when the power of Ijtihād should be removed from the representations of the [Page 39] schools to a Muslim Legislative Assembly.”

This belief in the continuing relevance of the basic principles of Islám, on the one hand, and in the concept of ijtihád exercised collectively by the legislature, on the other, has come to characterize most of the modern liberal interpretations of Islám. The concept of ijmá’, in the sense of collective ijtihád, is also advocated by the Jamá‘at-i-Islámí. Mawlana Abul A‘lā Mawdūdī, the leader of the Jamá‘at from its inception in 1941, advocated a return to the Qur’án and the sunna and claimed that all important rules of man’s social and individual life were given in these sources. To prove his thesis he attempted in over seventy books and pamphlets (most of which contain his published lectures) to deduce social, political, economic, and moral “systems” from the Qur’án, ḥadíth and the classical intellectual tradition of Islám. However, because of Mawlana Mawdūdī’s fundamentalist leanings, in general, and his assigning of a binding character to the corpus of standard ḥadíth, in particular, the collective ijtihád of his conception emerges as much less permissive than that of the modernist Muslim liberals, who do not attribute such a binding character to the collected ḥadíth.

This theory, which distinguishes between universal principles and local customs in a religion, and which has come to serve as the basis of the concept of collective ijtihád among Muslim modernists was initially designed to demonstrate that Islám has been compatible with liberal social values. The problem of Islám’s compatibility with liberal scientific values, as distinguished from liberal social values, was earlier faced by Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He set himself the task of establishing the idea that Islám was free from the concept of the supernatural, a concept which he held to be contrary to human reason. He wrote in one of his essays that

Any religion which is true or claims to be true cannot contain such elements in it as are contrary to nature and offend human reason, so that a sensible person would find it impossible to believe in them. A true faith in its pristine purity, is absolutely free from such supernatural and irrational elements. It is always at a later time that those who hanker for the supernatural interpolate into it supernatural and miraculous elements. I am sincerely convinced about Islam that it is absolutely free from such strange stories and unnatural and irrational mysteries. May God save us from such mystery worshippers.

In justification of his rejection of the supernatural and his claim that findings of science and true religion (in the case of Islám, the Qur’án) must agree, Sayyid Ahmad Khan argued that the physical world is the “work of God” while the Qur’án is the “Word of God.” There can be no inconsistency between the two:

Whatever God has said in the Glorious Qur’ān about the things that exist in the world and the created beings is either absolutely, or, in some respect or other, in accordance with reality. It is not possible that what He declares to be opposed to what He has created, or vice-versa. In some places we have called speech of God: vūrd of Gād (i.e., ‘word of God’) and have called what He has created: Vūrk of Gād i.e., ‘Work of God’) and have said that agreement between the word and the work of God is essential. If the word is not according to the work, then such word cannot be the word of God.

Sayyid Ahmad Khan thus set out to change Muslim religious views by purging their beliefs of what he considered to be mere superstitions, [Page 40] thus preparing the Muslims to utilize fully the findings of science. Implied in his argument was the nineteenth-century deterministic view of “nature.” Iqbal, on the contrary, asserted that the universe was dynamic in character. His ultimate objective, however, was the same, in one respect, as Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s. Iqbal, too, wanted the Muslims to engage in the investigation of nature and thereby to realize progressively the potentialities inherent in man. This, according to Iqbal, was one of the teachings of the Qur’án:

When attracted by the forces around him, man has the power to shape and direct them; when thwarted by them, he has the capacity to build a much vaster world in the depths of his own inner being, wherein he discovers sources of infinite joy and inspiration . . . Thus in his inmost being man, as conceived by the Quran, is a creative activity, an ascending spirit who, in his onward march, rises from one state of being to another . . .

II

To DISCOVER even a tentative answer to the question of whether modernist Islám has come to differ significantly from traditional Islám, I have found it useful to adopt the analytic concepts developed by the late Professor G. E. von Grunebaum in his discussion of the phenomenon of cultural influence. According to Professor von Grunebaum, the intellectual and emotional framework of a culture may, for the purpose of analysis, be divided into three parts: the “vantage point” and the primary aspiration, the “method,” and the “content.” The “vantage point” of an intellectual and emotional framework is constituted by “presuppositions that are implicit in its objective.” The objective or the primary aspiration of a culture, therefore, is basic to the vantage point of its intellectual and emotional ethos. “Method” is von Grunebaum’s term for the accepted procedures of reasoning and conceptualization utilized to attain results which are experienced as at once satisfactory and conclusive. Finally, by the “content” of an intellectual and emotional system of a culture von Grunebaum understands the aggregate of values and concepts found in that culture.

The primary aspiration of traditional Islám, on which all schools of Muslim thought agree, is happiness in the next world. The world view which supports this aspiration is that this world is transitory and a place for testing man who is ultimately responsible to God, the Creator of man and all existence. In traditional Islám, despite the strong contrary leanings of the ṣúfís (Islamic mystics) and the falásifa (philosophers), the distinction of the Creator and the created, of God and nature, has always been upheld. Muslim modernists, for the most part, also maintain this position, though, in the theories treated above, they have a tendency to reject it. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for example, identified nature with God’s behavior. And though he rejected the charge of being a materialist, his notion of God as the first cause, his belief that God’s attributes are identical with His nature, combined with his concept of nature as God’s behavior, produce an image of God who is characterized by abstractness and inertness, qualities not quite compatible with the Deity of orthodox Islám. However, his reinterpretation of Islám’s world view did not significantly alter its basic aspiration— namely, felicity in the next world.

Iqbal’s was a world view which did affect [Page 41] the primary aspiration of the Islamic thought system. We have noted in the above section Iqbal’s theory of the dynamic character of the universe. He also said that “Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self.” The practical result of this view was important for Iqbal, or as he himself put it: “In our observation of Nature we are virtually seeking a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego; and this is only another form of worship.” In other words, whereas to Sayyid Ahmad Khan progress in the world was merely compatible with Islám, for Iqbal it became something necessarily required by Islám.

Besides Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Iqbal we do not find any significant thinker of modern Indian Islám championing such a world view; the primary aspiration of Muslim modernists remains, at least theoretically, largely the same—happiness in the next world. The latter statement, however, must be further qualified. Except among the ranks of the ‘ulamá and the fundamentalists happiness in the next world constitutes an aspiration of which the modern liberal Muslim is aware but about which he is not very enthusiastic. Indeed, if the liberal Muslim modernist were still to grant a primary position to this notion, he would do so more because he is led by the internal logic of the idea of God whose essential nature (as the Judge and the Rewarder) he continues to conceive of as similar to that of the God of traditional Islám than because of the inherent appeal to him of the otherworldly aspiration. Accordingly, this category of Muslims seems not to find this aspiration a motivating force in their individual lives; moreover, they do not make any use of it in their writings when they implore the Muslims to work for progress. The role of the conscious, collective motivation of the Muslim society is increasingly being played by an aspiration whose focus is not on well-being in the next world but on well-being in this world. What was theoretically a secondary aspiration of the traditional Muslim culture has now, perhaps, practically become the primary aspiration of the dominant minority of the modernist Muslim intellectuals.

In one sense, the dominant minority of Muslim intellectuals—mainly the administrative and political elite of traditional Islamic societies—have always, in practice, occupied themselves with worldly life without great regard to the hereafter. But the situation is different now, inasmuch as worldly power and involvement are sought not despite Islám, in deviation from its injunctions, but because of Islám, in conformity with its teachings. Modernist interpreters of Islám maintain that the Qur’án offers great encouragement for Muslims to achieve these goals, finding justifications for this view which range from a simple argument which quotes such verses from the Qur’án as “O, our Lord! give us good in this world and good in the next,” to such metaphysical conceptualizations as those of Iqbal and Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Indeed, it is in Iqbal, as we have seen above, that the aspiration of the conquest of nature reached its climax.

However, two points should be noted in this connection. First, even when the involvement of man in this world is extolled and utilization of the forces of nature recommended for the Muslims by modernists like Iqbal, such involvement and utilization are not meant for the sake of enjoyment but for perfecting the human ego through its action upon the universe. Life in this world, according to Iqbal, “offers a scope for ego-activity,” and death is not an end but “the first test of synthetic activity of the ego.” If man does not take the initiative of acting upon the universe in this world, “if he does not evolve the inner richness of his being, if he ceases to feel the inward [sic, inner] push of advancing [Page 42] life, then the spirit within him hardens into stone and he is reduced to the level of dead matter.” On the contrary, if man engages in such a pursuit, he rises from one state of being to another, finally to win immortality. Even heaven, according to Iqbal, who in this belief runs counter to the traditional Islamic notion, is not a holiday resort. Instead, “Man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illuminations from an Infinite Reality which ‘every moment appears in a new glory.’”

The second important point one should note about the Muslim modernists’ aspiration for the conquest of nature is that, although material good in this world is sought as an end in itself, such material good is not meant, strictly speaking, for the enjoyment of the individual but for the glory of the nation. And the concept of “nation,” one should further note, as understood by the bulk of the Muslims in the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent, is different from the concept held by either Europeans (which is obvious) or by Muslims themselves in the Middle East (which is not so obvious).

The absence of a common ethnic bond or shared secular tradition (for example, language) among the various communities of the Indian Muslims, on the one hand, and the presence of a large majority of the followers of Hindu religion and culture in India, on the other, has prevented the growth of ethnic nationalism or patriotism among any significant numbers of the Indo-Pakistani Muslims. But at the same time these two conditions helped to strengthen the religious bond among the Muslims before independence. Consequently, the conflict between the two loyalties, religious and national, did not prove so disturbing in the subcontinent as it continues to be in the Middle East, largely because the nation in Muslim India was almost completely subsumed under “‘ummat” or as more popularly understood in the subcontinent, the “millat” (religious community). The only significant exceptions to this general tendency are, as I have noticed above in a different context, Abul Kalam Azad and his Muslim associates in the Indian National Congress. The Deobandi ‘ulamá, who favored the Indian National Congress before independence and thus practically supported Indian nationalism, did not really believe in the concept of nationalism or fatherland. Rather their policy was based on expediency and prudence. Before the partition of the Indo- Pakistan subcontinent, such a policy was the result of their own choice; today it amounts to making a virtue of a necessity.

Of all the Muslim peoples those of the subcontinent have been the most critical of the concept of fatherland. Iqbal, for example, wrote in his Asrár-i-bíkhudí (The Mysteries of Selflesness):

Our essence is not bound to any place;

The vigor of our wine is not contained

In any bowl; Chinese and Indian

Alike the shard that constitutes our jar,

Turkish and Syrian alike the clay

Forming our body; neither is our heart

Of India, or Syria, or Rum,

Nor any fatherland do we profess

Except Islam.

The function of the concept of ‘umma in bringing about a modification in the aspiration of Islám can be seen as facilitating, without compromising the religious conscience of the Indo-Pakistani Muslims, a greater emphasis upon power and involvement in this world than has been traditionally granted by Islám. Material good sought by the individual for his own ends is seen by Islám as greed, while power and glory by a kinship group, as the survival of the spirit of jáhiliy-ya (pre-Islamic period); but if the same power and glory are said to be desired for [Page 43] the ‘umma, it is readily approved by a religious conscience which, despite some Islamic teachings of quite different implications, has been fed for centuries mainly upon such admonitions as that “The world is too worthless to engage our thoughts; for whenever you occupy yourself with what is perishable, you are made blind to what is eternal.”

Let us now turn our attention to the question of how far these modernist interpretations represent a departure from the method of classical Islamic thought. A significant change, which strikes us immediately, is in the modernists’ style and tone of reasoning. Whereas discourse in the standard works of the classical period of Islám is presented in a serene and confident style, the modern expositions of Islám tend to be marked by irritability and confusion. This solidity and serenity of the classical style do not seem to grow out of a superior logical procedure. Rather, they might well emanate from the unspoken sense of contentment which the medieval Muslim felt with his commitments. The fact that the medieval Muslim’s emotional identity was defined by, and his intellectual admiration was genuinely directed toward, the single religious, social, and political system of traditional Islám, must have been of paramount importance in giving him a sense of confidence in himself and clarity of reasoning in his expositions.

For the Muslim modernist, on the contrary, the objects of emotional attachment and intellectual admiration are no longer the same. Thus the conflict between the identification with historical Islám and an admiration —either overt or covert—for the modern West as the model of intellectual, political, and economic advancement, which most Muslim modernists experience, seems to be partly responsible for their contradictory attitudes and the unsoundness of a good part of their reasoning. Nowhere is such confusion of thought more evident than in the insistence of some Pakistani Muslims that the sovereignty of God as a legal principle is quite compatible with the notion of the supreme authority of a legislature responsible to its human electorate.

At this point one can perhaps justifiably argue that inconsistencies in religions are purely relative, for what is experienced as sound and valid by the believers in a religion is sound and valid within the framework of that religion. One can further point out that traditional Islám itself is not lacking in purely logical inconsistencies. Such observations are certainly legitimate as far as they go. I should like to submit, however, that modernist Islám sometimes manifests—while traditional Islám did not—a high degree of ambiguity and indecision. Many Muslim modernists seem to be perplexed and their thinking capacities suspended as they get lost in the web of their own ideas and reasoning. Consider, for example, their thinking about the same notion of an Islámic constitution. After having spent a year in Pakistan studying and talking about the concept of Islamic constitution Professor Leonard Binder tells us that he “left Karachi with a gnawing feeling of unfulfillment.” He described the concept as an idea which a great many Pakistanis hold dear but which nonetheless consistently eludes them. There is not enough space in this essay to permit a full discussion of the differences between the essential procedures of reasoning in traditional Islám and those in modernist Islám. However, leaving aside the question of the Muslim modernists’ predispositions actually to practice one method of reasoning or another, we can at least note here that some Muslim modernists strongly desire a more extensive application of the inductive and the scientific methods of acquiring knowledge. This has indeed been an underlying motive of the entire naturalist approach to religion of Sayyid Ahmad Khan. [Page 44] But even Iqbal, despite his strong emphasis on intuition and love as sources of deeper meaning of life extolled the scientific method, as we can see in the following statement:

The first important point to note about the spirit of Muslim culture then is that for purposes of knowledge it fixes its gaze on the concrete, the finite. It is further clear that the birth of the method of observation and experiment in Islam was due not to a compromise with Greek thought but to a prolonged intellectual warfare with it.

These departures of modernist Indo-Pakistani Islám in its aspiration and method from their counterparts in the traditional Islám can be seen as the ideological and psychic concomitants of the immense social change which the Indo-Muslim society, like all other Asian societies, has been undergoing for the past century and a half. Western influence is, to be sure, largely responsible for the departure of the Muslim modernists’ outlook and approach from those of traditional Islám. This influence has been, however, not so much a matter of straight borrowing from the Western intellectual tradition, as some scholars seem to have concluded, but is much more of the influence of those forces which have accelerated rapid social change which, inevitably, created different psychological orientations. And these new psychological orientations, in their turn, modified, to some extent, the religious outlook of the Muslim modernists. To be precise, modernization and industrialization, irrespective of their introduction —whether by foreign overlords as in India, or by the national governments as in Turkey and the rest of the Muslim countries of the post-independence period—violently shook up the traditional social order. This milieu of social dislocations left its marks of disquiet and insecurity on those whose sensibilities were formed during these years, instilling within them the need to discover new grounds for security through reconstructing the old system of thought. Thus ideologies such as pan-Islamism and nationalism, in the subcontinent at least, cannot be fully understood without realizing the importance of this pervasive existential need.

I should, perhaps, pass over the question of the change in the content of Islám with a few words, inasmuch as change is, apropos of content, too obvious to require a discussion here. The influence of the intellectual tradition of the modern West, also, is too obvious and, indeed, too enormous to require more than a passing mention. It is enough to say that most ideas relating to the structure of liberal institutions such as representative government, the rule of law and individual liberty, the socialist organization of the national economy, the natural sciences, and many literary techniques have come from the West. To some extent it is indeed to justify such content that various theories outlined in this paper have been developed by Muslim modernists. We have seen how both the traditional and the modern concepts have been utilized to this end.

Many scholars have recently studied modern Islám from various angles. Barring a few, however, the overall objective of their studies has been to discover and define those concepts and ideas which characterize the thinking of Muslim modernists, such as the concepts of God, revelation, nationalism, or law making. Certainly these studies are valuable insofar as they increase our knowledge of the different trends of thought in the Islamic world. But it seems to me that an approach which treats Islám as an organic system of thought and emotion rather than a mere stream of discrete currents has the virtue of making Islám more intelligible. Indeed, only by viewing the dynamic relationship between the parts and their whole and by assigning different values to these constituents—a step which is supplementary to the systematic approach —as Professor von Grunebaum has suggested, can a comprehensive understanding [Page 45] both of the tradition and of the relative significance of the individual ideas within that tradition, be achieved.

But functions and values of individual ideas within a thought system vary from time to time, depending on the psychological needs of the society in which that thought system prevails. In a changing society, as is Islám today, ideas no longer possess the same weight or meaning they once did in relatively stable times. Nor do the dimensions and magnitude of the entire complex of ideas hold steady. Therefore, if we are to attain a genuine grasp of a culture in transformation such as “modern Islám,” it would be virtually essential to study its individual ideas with reference to the functions they are made to perform for satisfying the psychological needs of the society at a given juncture; and since one major psychological need of a society in the throes of dynamic change is to restore the intellectual harmony and emotional security which have been disturbed by such change, and to do so without compromising what the society may regard as progress, it is also necessary to examine how a changing society produces new ideas or reinterprets the old ones to achieve this objective. This is what I have attempted to do in the context of Indo-Pakistani Islám.

[Page 46]

Three Bahá’í Poets

Candle Prayer

Our smoky errands here are like the candle

man of a child’s bedside wish.

Precarious heroes or villains—blown

around the room by the night breeze

coming through an open window.

The flame, too, feels strong on its wick

until the bright sword cools

and cannot cut what is only fear.

We give off same wax, vapors, oily clouds

that stain the roses on the wallpaper.

Our shadows climb the walls

or hug the sunning log on the hearth.

The table . . . moves closer in the dark

that keeps us insubstantial as angels

wrapped in blessed ash and incense.

And the stars floating above and beyond

always just out of reach in the blue

elude the halo of our meagre lights

here sending so cleanly upward.

“Conserve on all except light,” He said.

Only tilt the candle, Bahá’u’lláh, closer.

Closer, Bahá’u’lláh, closer!

—JEFFREY JENTZ

October 1973

[Page 47]

Simplicities

a

it is winternow

I feel cold and

lonely I once a

gain wonder why

b

source of light is

warmth for all our

light and amity ho

w will we get warm

c

it seems I am nearly

next to Reality now

to get the Hell out

d

Children burst from

houses seeing March

snow it tastes like

the Vernal Equinox

—JÁN KUUSENJUURI

[Page 48]

Stained Glass

It is not a window to see the world,

but to see itself.

The brilliant reds, blues, greens

and golds

that assemble to form a saint

permit no vision, only

a strained light, to filter

to the astounded retina:

what is outside the nave

has no importance except

to illumine this image

of a man beyond the world

who annihilates the world

in a careful mosaic of beauty.

—GERALD B. PARKS

Poem

Honest like the long rain

that drains the air: ideal

of an unwanted truth

that allows no convenience

to lord it over me.

When I could no longer

obey the tight laws,

I laxed my conscience

and thought the looking-

for was the meaning:

but a close God

stalks ineluctable behind

one’s childhood images.

I know faithfully

a Prophet has spoken

for us: and we shall make

his vision the perfecting

process of our lives.

—GERALD B. PARKS

[Page 49]

Being and Unbeing

I kick my shadow

into the beyond

and a ghost rises up

in a calmness of fog:

I am removed

from the casual neurosis

of honking, swerving cars

and can peruse

the strange, illegible

cipher of my

being. The love

of self is a bad habit

to be put away,

a load of pelf

to trade in—for what

only the unbeing

can lend. A precarious

love of the All

shakes my wary balance:

I know I must

give in or give up.

Our life is at most

an unpaid debt,

at least a forfeiture

of truth. What I need

is a concentration of joy

or value, where the ghost

is holy and the fog

dies in a sudden

limpidity of belief.

—GERALD B. PARKS

[Page 50]50 WORLD ORDER: FALL 1976

Disciple of Being: For Jonathan Edwards

I

Boy, observing spiders—

how they fly, how

they emit filaments of web,

how to prevent

an excess of the species

they are blown each year

to sea: and so

you made a myth of them

held over infernal flames

like man, like you.

Then, playing God

you threw them into the fire

and from that sin

you knew your own enflamement.

An angry, observing, minute

God over us, whose mercy

is doom, whose creature

dies because to die

is just.

II

The beauty, the excellence

of the images and shadows

of divine things. A day

corresponds to our humor; child’s

crying an image of worldly

sorrow, man’s birth

like beasts’ a sign

of his brutality. Nothing

escapes the embracing logic

of God. Original

sin is our doing and undoing,

freewill the daydream

of a tantalized spider.

But all is beauty, order,

the orbits of planets and men

have laws, the mind

a sensorium perceiving

images of the excellence

of Being.

[Page 51]

III

Virtue, you said, is Being’s

consent to Being. And you consented,

though at times with pride

in the consent. Then

the Great Awakening

put your senses to sleep.

Phoebe’s four years astound

the telling, neurotic

weeping in a closet to call

on God against images of sin.

And bastards multiplied,

impulsive speakers and spoken

sowed a strange wind: you

harvested a fall. Useless

to cavil with predestiny:

accept is all. Renounce

to awaken all. Not every

mind can perceive

the new simple idea

that is God.

IV

And in exile you

deciphered the rigid

laws of will and sin.

And brought the Word

to unbaptized minds, heathen

ways of consenting

to Being. Tired, planning

a summa of God’s thought

in Locke’s and Newton’s

axioms, you expired

before inspiration panted.

But your word on the Word

vaccinated you against

obloquy. Sinner, return

to the hands of an angry God;

perhaps he will not be quite

so angry now. Learn

the perception of death

and the destiny

of the spider.

—GERALD B. PARKS

[Page 52]

Errors in Jensen’s Analysis

BY HOSSAIN B. DANESH AND WILLIAM S. HATCHER

IN the December 1973 issue of Psychology Today there appeared an article by Arthur Jensen entitled “The Differences Are Real” (pp. 80- 86), in which he argued that the statistically significant differences between black and white children with respect to their performance on standard IQ tests are of racial, genetic origin. Such a view, unless based on incontrovertible evidence and sound reasoning, is more than an opinion, quietly subject to scientific verification. It is a statement uttered in a social context in which its effects can be downright mischievous. Beneath an appearance of calm objectivity lurk tacit assumptions of a racist character, woven into a reasoning whose circularity is not instantly apparent to a reader untrained in formal logic. The controversy stirred up by Jensen’s article has not abated since its publication. Recently the New York Times reported that the studies of the eminent British psychologist, the late Cyril Burt, a proponent of the theory that the IQ is genetically determined, has come under attack. Burt has been accused of scientific dishonesty and doubt has been cast on his entire work. The editors of WORLD ORDER are very much aware of the implications of the controversy about the nature of the IQ and are pleased to present to their readers an analysis of Arthur Jensen’s arguments, an analysis which demolishes the line of reasoning by which he tries to demonstrate the correctness of his belief in the genetically determined intellectual inferiority of the black race.

IN THE DECEMBER 1973 issue of Psychology Today, Professor Arthur Jensen has undertaken to expound directly, unequivocally, and in more or less popular terms his convictions about race and intelligence as measured by IQ tests. We feel strongly that there are a number of errors in Jensen’s analysis presented in this article, some subtle and some quite blatant. Since none of the “responses” to Jensen’s article contained in the same issue has taken up these points in a satisfactory way, we would like to present a brief discussion of some of them here. In order to avoid any possible charge of treating a modified or strawman version of Jensen’s ideas, we will confine our remarks wholly to Jensen’s Psychology Today article alone.

Under the heading “Culture-Fair Vs. Culture-Biased” Jensen attempts to disprove the claim that IQ differences can be attributed to culture-biased tests [Page 53] (pp. 81-82). In order to prove his point he suggests that he has undertaken a “rigorous study” and presents the following reasoning. He first makes the point that “the fact that the test is culture-loaded does not necessarily mean that it is culture-biased,” even though he acknowledges that the comprehension of these items is directly related to culture (p. 81). He then goes on to state that there are reputable culture-fair tests which measure the ability to generalize, to distinguish differences and similarities, to see relationships, but that blacks tend to perform better on the more culture-loaded tests while other minorities show the opposite trend. Among the other minorities mentioned as comparison groups by Jensen are Chinese, Mexican-Americans, Indians, and Eskimos.

In drawing conclusions from these observations Jensen omits a number of crucial facrs and observations. One of the most important of these omitted variables is that of parental and family influence in early childhood. Indeed, there are similarities which are shared among Chinese, Mexican-Americans, Indians, and white Anglo middle-class Americans and which differentiate these groups sharply from the blacks. For the most part members of these former groups were all raised by their families; they have close bonds of affection between themselves and their parents; they receive encouragement, guidance, and values concurrent with their (respective) cultural values and points of view; they have the opportunity to identify with their people and thus be free of anxieties, deprivation, isolation, and rejection—while these latter are characteristic experiences of many black children.

One should ask Jensen whether in his studies the black children came from a similar family background as those of other children. Did they have a cohesive and close family? Or did they frequently come from broken homes with an absent father and perhaps a distracted, overwrought mother, laden with inferiority feelings, rage, and fears for the world into which her child is growing? Were they taught about the uniqueness of their culture, the splendor of their past, the stories of their nation and race?

Because black children live within the confines of white society, they are bombarded with the same cultural values as the white children through the strong influence of the mass media. But this “culture” is only a selective and disjointed input, directed, produced, and acted by the white majority. Indeed, this very “culture” teaches the black children their own inferiority. Since this is the only information they receive, it is not surprising that they do relatively better on the culture-loaded and verbal kinds of tests.

Furthermore, culture-fair tests are structured in the same way as culture- loaded tests in that they both use symbols to make sense out of life and the world. If a child is born into a family and culture where there are constant and specific norms, the child is able to make sense out of life, to construct a consistent model of the world. Lacking this initial successful model-building [Page 54] process, the individual often struggles for the rest of his life, piling layer upon layer of reinterpreted material on the false foundation. The effects of such early deprivation on the intellectual growth of the child are well documented.

Since the fact of the disastrous family structure of blacks is well-known to social scientists, Jensen’s neglect of this variable is particularly significant, for one would expect it to be among the most influential of the relevant cultural variables. Indeed, there is no more pervasive finding in the whole field of psychology than that of early parental influence on personality development (of which the intelligence is a part). These findings date from the beginning of the modern period and have continued to be confirmed in subsequent studies. And, as we have argued above, it is of even more particular significance with regard to the questions raised by Jensen concerning blacks.

Nor can one doubt the serious and widespread effect caused by racial prejudice and the negative self-image of the black American. The belief in the subhumanness of blacks was part of the black experience in America from the beginning. The multiplicity of cultural cues which the black child assimilates with every breath he takes—all telling him he is stupid and sometimes even rewarding him for acting so—cannot possibly be measured by any one-parameter system of measurement. In particular, one is certainly not going to neutralize this sort of massive education by such a trivial device as manipulating the race or color of the testing person or by giving a test in ghetto dialect (see pp. 82-84). We find these examples of Jensen ludicrous in their oversimplification of cultural variables. Indeed, the word “cultural” is much too weak to carry the full weight of the educative process inflicted on blacks by whites.

Moreover, there are many examples of physical systems in which different variables reinforce each other, amplifying their total effect in such a way that the outcome can never be predicted by varying each variable separately. For example, it could be that the particular combination of disastrous family structure and socioeconomic disadvantage (to be discussed later) to which the black child is so widely subjected has a redoublingly negative effect on IQ which is greater than the sum of each such condition acting separately. The highly probable occurrence of such “resonance” among purely environmental variables is never discussed by Jensen, nor does he seem to take it into account in drawing his conclusions or designing his experiments.

Although many other ethnic minorities such as Jews have been the object of prejudice in America and elsewhere, no such group in America has been an extraneous, highly visible minority totally cut off from its prior culture. The effect of this total deracination of the black by which he was reborn in a strange land as a chattel slave—as a physical object, no more, no less— cannot possibly be measured in such oversimplified terms as Jensen cites against the “environmental hypothesis” (p. 84).

In sum, we feel that Jensen neglects certain highly significant environmental variables (family structure and early parental influence, total cultural deracination, the accumulated effect of “learned inferiority”) and that he fails to take into account the highly probable effect of resonance among environmental variables. It is not a question of “feeling sorry” for the plight of the black child (though we would not feel obliged to apologize for some such emotions). [Page 55] It is a question of serious logical and empirical omissions in Jensen’s analysis of data and the design of experiments.

Not only are there neglected variables in Jensen’s analysis, there are quite serious errors in the analysis given to some of the factors he does discuss. The most blatant is probably his discussion of the so-called “‘sociologist’s fallacy’” (p. 84). Jensen’s argument here contains a serious non sequitur (or a circularity —it only depends on how Jensen would choose to defend his reasoning). His discussion, though terse, is highly confused; and we will examine it with care.

JENSEN is concerned with refuting the validity of studies in which blacks and whites were matched for IQ according to socioeconomic status (abbreviated SES) and according to which the black-white IQ differential was substantially reduced. Jensen states: “Since whites and blacks differ in average socioeconomic status (SES), the matching of racial groups on SES variables such as education, occupation, and social class necessarily means that the black group is more highly selected in terms of whatever other traits and abilities correlate with SES, including intelligence” (p. 84).

There are several parts to this statement. We want to identify them for future analysis and reference. There is first the affirmation of an empirical fact of black-white difference in “average socioeconomic status.” Let us call this (1). There is then a first conclusion from this “fact”—namely, that the black group is more “highly selected” according to certain other variables than the white one, and “necessarily” so. Call this (2). Finally, there is a second conclusion that intelligence (implicitly and crucially for Jensen’s argument, native intelligence) is one of the variables with respect to which the black group is more highly selected. Call this second conclusion (3).

What Jensen presumably means when he speaks of whites and blacks as differing according to “average” SES is that, given the total black population as a sample space, on the one hand, and the total white population, on the other, there are proportionally fewer blacks in higher SE categories than whites. What this means in and of itself is precisely that the ratio of the number of blacks in higher SE categories to the total population of blacks is numerically smaller than is the corresponding ratio for the white case. It is most important to see, from the very beginning of this discussion, that nothing further can be drawn from this fact unless and until one determines the de facto criteria by which the black sample was determined—that is, the variables according to which the black sample is selective. One cannot simply presume that a sample is selective for some particular variable without furnishing evidence to support the affirmation.

Without such justification, the first conclusion (2) is already a non sequitur. For it does not follow from the pure logic of the situation that a given sample of a total sample space is necessarily selective according to any given variable because it is relatively smaller than some other sample. A smaller sample could [Page 56] select, for instance, native intelligence in a random manner while a larger sample selected intelligence in a nonrandom way. Of course, it may happen, and frequently does, that a sample is in fact selective according to some given variable. But the simple logical point here is that the empirical fact of such selectivity has to be justified. It is not due to any inherent “necessity,” logical or otherwise.

Of course, in (2) Jensen does not purport to identify the parameters along which the black sample is more selective. He only says that it is more selective according to “whatever other traits and abilities correlate with the given SES” (p. 84). But this statement by itself is just a tautology: any sample whatever is always selective according to those variables (if any) for which it is selective.

Finally, in (3) Jensen jumps to include, without justification, native intelligence as being one of the variables for which the black sample is more selective. He is arguing, in effect, that relatively brighter blacks are being matched against relatively dumber whites, thus accounting for the erasure of the black-white IQ differential when the comparison is made in this way.

Now if one begins with the a priori assumption that the average black-white IQ differential based on the total black and white populations (or on supposedly representative samples thereof) is due to genetic factors, the very fact that the comparison according to SE categories erases the difference will be evidence of the higher selectivity of the black samples according to native intelligence. But such an appeal is not open to Jensen as he is trying rather to establish independently the selectivity by intelligence of the black samples as an argument against the environmental thesis. To invoke here an assumption that the IQ differential is based on genetic factors would be to introduce a circularity in the argument.

This observation immediately raises another related question: To what extent is IQ a reflection of native (genetically determined) intelligence? In particular, if one assumes from the start that native intelligence is the prime variable being measured in IQ tests, the average black-white IQ differential is already complete and overwhelming proof of Jensen’s thesis. No further arguments or proofs are necessary! But Jensen clearly states that our knowledge concerning the causes of the black-white IQ differential is uncertain and that the “issue” is “an open question, calling for much further scientific study” (p. 86). He, therefore, cannot hold it to have been established that IQ measures native intelligence.

Thus, even if IQ is found to be positively correlated with certain SE categories, such a fact is not in itself evidence that native intelligence is. It further follows that, in lieu of independent justification of the assumption that the black SE categories are significantly more selective with respect to native intelligence than are the corresponding white ones, the reduction of the black- white IQ differential for matching SE categories must be interpreted as furnishing strong evidence for the environmental thesis. No other logical conclusion is possible.

Therefore, the crucial link in the chain of this apparently simple argument is that of justifying the implicit assumption Jensen makes that native intelligence is a selective criterion in determining SES for blacks and is positively [Page 57] correlated with SES, and more strongly so than for whites. (Notice that it is logically possible that different criteria determine the SE categories for the two races; thus we could not even argue naively from selectivity in the white case to that of the black.)

Let us now try to assess the justifiability of this assumption. Let us begin by focusing on the fact (1) and by asking the question: “To what is the average difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and whites due?” No one seriously debates the answer to that question. It is clearly that, from the beginning of their life on this continent, the blacks were crushed by a dominant and highly prejudiced white majority, first by a degrading chattel slavery and then, in the last one hundred years, by the exercise of numerous strategies to keep the blacks in the lowest possible SE categories. That any significant proportion of blacks have succeeded at all in achieving higher economic or social status in the face of such obstacles is in itself a miracle of human endurance.

But the important point here in terms of assessing the selection criteria of SES for blacks is the following: during the whole period from the beginning up until roughly the present hour, it was the whites who were “calling the shots.” It, therefore, seems most reasonable that the blacks who succeeded (and who are thus now in the highest SE categories) are those who best conformed to the white image of blacks—that is, those who were docile, submissive, relatively unintelligent yes-men. These were “allowed” to succeed. These are the “Uncle Toms” that the newer generation of blacks have so strongly rejected as models for their own lives. Since the white notion that blacks are subhuman and not possessed of normal intelligence was part of the black experience from the beginning, as we have already observed in the preceding discussion, the more naturally intelligent blacks were consistently viewed as upstarts who “had airs” and who did not know their place. They were even more vigorously repressed than the average of blacks and have been so for a period of almost three hundred years. In other words, those blacks most capable of functioning in a white way in the white world were most consistently prevented from doing so. All of these well-known social faCts, however unpleasant, are highly inconsistent with the assumption that native intelligence was a selective criterion in determining SES for blacks. The whites have, in effect, rendered the black dysfunctional (in the white world at any rate) and then observed that he was in fact dysfunctional.

Moreover, even within the white sample, the relationship between native intelligence and high SES seems tenuous at best. High status in America has traditionally meant success at making money. This ability seems most notably coupled with a certain aggressiveness, a certain kind of shrewdness, the ability to withstand certain kinds of stress and to take certain kinds of risks, and so on. A minimum of intelligence is undoubtedly necessary for success in business, but it is not at all clear that this minimum is not possessed by the person with an average (randomly selected) native intelligence which, when combined with the characteristics listed above, produces the successful individual.

Of course, since the Second World War it has become increasingly possible for people with high abstract intelligence (and without those other qualities) to make a decent living at being professors or the like. Thus a significant proportion of natively intelligent whites are certainly now to be found outside [Page 58] the lower SE categories. But this current fact does not mean that the sociological selection criterion which formed the category in the first place involved exceptional intelligence in any way: a fortiori for the blacks whose selection was determined by a still more complicated (and more irrational and anti- intellectual) criterion of conforming to white stereotypes.

Moreover, blacks with high native intelligence have not had the same opportunity to advance as whites and, therefore, are not likely to be found in as high SE categories as whites with the same native endowment. Also, it is clear that when one is primarily concerned with gut-level survival on a day-to-day basis, one would have no great inclination to devote himself to the abstract pursuits of the intellectual even if, under other conditions, he would be so fitted.

Of course, all these sociological observations do not, in themselves, prove that the black SE sample is not relatively more selective than the corresponding white ones as regards native intelligence. They do, however, constitute strong prima facie evidence that such is not the case. But the crucial logical point at issue here is that the burden of proof is on Jensen’s shoulders, for it is he who asserts without justification that the black sample is in fact more selective. Lacking such justification, his argument against the SE matching studies is without any logical foundation.

Let us remark in passing that even the variable of educational level may have, in the American context especially, only the most indirect relationship to native intelligence with respect to the population as a whole. This is due in part to the prevailing values in our schools which tend to “turn off” many of the best and brightest students. Also, economic level (making money again) is probably the factor most directly related to educational level since it helps govern access to education and since extended formal education is part of the life Style of the more affluent classes, and this independently of the intrinsic intellectual value or content of the education. Thus the variable of educational level is probably more correctly viewed as a function of economic status rather than as an independent variable; and economic status is, as we have suggested, only marginally related to native intelligence.

We do not insist on this last point but offer it only as a possibly interesting reflection.

Perhaps Jensen means to imply that performing at a certain economic level in society takes at least a minimal level of intelligence and that blacks must be more highly selected since, on the average, they score fifteen points lower than whites on IQ tests and are, therefore, in the majority, below this minimal level. But again, this argument is valid only if one attributes the average IQ difference to genetic factors in the first place, and this is the assumption Jensen must refute in order to avoid circularity in his argument.

Let us note also that social and economic variables (extreme poverty to put it simply) are among the major causative factors involved in bringing about the disastrous family environment of large numbers of blacks (though not the only cause). Thus the relative stability of the home life of blacks with higher SE status is one possible cause of the higher IQ scores by blacks in these groups. It is, at any rate, totally consistent with the environmental explanation.

In the paragraph immediately following the statement quoted above Jensen [Page 59] pushes his reasoning one step further. In a statement which must be read to be believed he writes: “Those who cite the socioeconomic matching studies also fail to take account of the well-established genetic difference between social classes, which invalidates their comparison. For example, when the two races are matched for social background, the average skin color of the black group runs lighter in the higher SES groups. This difference indicates that genetic characteristics do vary with SES. Thus, SES matching of blacks and whites reduces the IQ difference not only because it controls for environmental differences, but because it tends to equalize genetic factors as well” (p. 84). Having failed to realize the lacuna in his argument of the previous paragraph, Jensen repeats a similar error here and further fails to realize that such a fact (if it is a fact) only serves to reinforce the interpretation that the SE selection criterion for blacks was determined by white prejudice more than anything else. For it is a fact, truly “well-established,” that light-skinned blacks have always had an easier time in the white world than darker ones, and this obtains independently of any other factor. Less intelligent light-skinned blacks advanced much further than more intelligent darker ones. Thus lighter-skinned blacks in higher SE categories, though genetically closer to whites in general racial characteristics, could still have been selected randomly (or even negatively) according to native intelligence. Indeed, the known social facts of the situation reinforce this possibility. Yet Jensen steadfastly ignores this possibility and reasons naively from selectivity by skin color to selectivity for intelligence.

Clearly, no one doubts that individual native intelligence is primarily genetically determined. The point at issue is precisely whether, in the case under consideration, such genetic determination is linked to other casually observable genetically determined characteristics such as skin color. Jensen’s reasoning here is thus question begging of the worst sort. (Could it be that he finds the opposite conclusion “unthinkable”?; see p. 80.)

Indeed, without further justification, one cannot even take the lighter skins of blacks in higher SE categories (if this is established) as increasing the probability of a nonrandom selection with respect to native intelligence. This required, further justification leads back to the same question as before— namely, that of determining the de facto selection criterion for SES for blacks. But the fault in Jensen’s skin-color argument remains in any case.

IN A BRIEF DISCUSSION of malnutrition and intelligence, Jensen acknowledges that malnutrition can affect intelligence but affirms “I have found no evidence that the degree of malnutrition associated with retarded mental development afflicts any major segment of the US. population” (p. 81). However, on page 12 of Negro American Intelligence, Thomas F. Pettigrew reports on studies concerning the effects of prenatal nutrition on IQ scores of young children. In a sample of mothers from the lowest socioeconomic level, of which eighty percent were black, comparisons were made between a control group and a group fortified with iron and vitamin B complex. Children of mothers in the fortified group had a mean IQ at three years of age which was five full points above the children in the (unfortified) control group (103.4 to 98.4). It is [Page 60] also reported that the same researchers failed to find a similar effect among white mothers from a mountain area. This suggests that the black mothers were much more malnourished than the white sample from the mountain area. It also suggests strongly that malnutrition among blacks in America can and does attain degrees sufficient to affect IQ scores significantly.

On page 81 of his article Jensen states that it is not a priori unreasonable that genetics could produce significant differences in intelligence and that these differences could exist between two large population samples and that these differences could be positively correlated with other casually observable features such as skin color. To this any reasonable person must assent. After all, few things beyond logical contradictions are a priori unreasonable. But we are not operating a priori. We are operating a posteriori—after the fact of nearly three hundred years of the operation of many strong environmental factors any or all of which could, in various combinations, produce the effect which so impresses Jensen. We would say, then, that it is a posteriori most unreasonable that this effect (the average black-white IQ difference in America) is not largely or wholly due to environmental factors.

Of course, until the environmental hypothesis is conclusively proved or the genetic hypothesis disproved, we are left only with different degrees of reasonableness and not with a conclusively established explanation. And until there is such a conclusive resolution of the issue (which might, in fact, take generations of study), any person has a right to affirm publicly that the situation is inconclusive.

Jensen presents himself as saying nothing more than this, but in fact he is saying much more. When he says such things as “Most of the attempts to politicize the issue, I have found, come from the radical left. True liberals and humanists, on the other hand, want to learn the facts” (p. 86) or “I presented my research in a careful and dispassionate manner, hoping that it would stimulate rational discussion of the issue as well as further research. Much to my dismay, however, my article set off an emotional furor in the world of science” (p. 80), he is putting himself on the side of scientific objectivity and reasonableness and attributing emotional, pseudo-humanistic bias to those who object to his analyses.

Jensen strikes a pose of olympian objectivity as if he were a social scientist newly arrived from a distant planet, wholly detached from the culture he was observing. In fact, Jensen, as well as the writers of the present article, live, move, and have their being in the very white society which has inflicted such untold suffering on black people. Jensen must certainly be as aware as anyone else of these pervasive social facts (one wonders), yet his analyses consistently ignore their existence or their possible influence. Why? Is it because he thinks they truly do not matter, or does he feel somehow that “objectivity” requires that they be ignored? Perhaps, having already acquired the conviction, expressed in the title of his article, that there is a significant genetic difference, he has simply lost all interest in a careful (and possibly long and tedious) consideration of them.

Be this as it may, and whatever the ultimate resolution of the IQ controversy turns out to be, the lacunae and errors in Jensen’s analysis of environmental factors stand to be corrected now.

[Page 61]

[Page 62]62 WORLD ORDER: FALL 1976

Attempting a Survey of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings

A REVIEW OF ADIB TAHERZADEH’S The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh: Baghdád 1853-63 (OXFORD: GEORGE RONALD, 1974), 314 PAGES, APPENDICES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, REFERENCES, INDEX

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

FOR FORTY YEARS in prison and exile Bahá’u’lláh revealed God’s will to man. In books, epistles, prayers, meditations, and exhortations He laid the foundation of a religion whose purpose is to inaugurate a new era, to unify the human race, and to usher in a world civilization. Bahá’ís believe that Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings are endowed with a special potency, that they are inherently creative, and that they contain the spiritual energy needed by mankind for its survival, progress, and happiness. It is, therefore, supremely important for the Bahá’ís to know Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings and to understand them properly.

Over the laSt seventy-five years a portion of Bahá’u’lláh’s works has appeared in English. However, until now there was no systematic guide to these in any language. Mr. Adib Taherzadeh in The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh: Baghdád 1853-63 has made a valiant attempt to survey Bahá’u’lláh’s works and to introduce them with his own commentary to the Western reader. Bahá’ís believe that the Teachings of their Faith have had only two authorized interpreters, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, whose elucidations of the Sacred Texts are binding and final. However, every believer is encouraged to analyze the Writings and to share his personal understanding with others, provided he make no attempt to impose his views upon them. Thus the door is open to meditation and commentary upon the Writings, and discussion of them, while it is shut against every attempt to substitute the opinions of individuals for revealed truth.

Mr. Taherzadeh has performed an extraordinarily useful service. His book begins with a brief sketch of Bahá’u’lláh’s early life, His adherence to the Cause of the Báb, His imprisonment in the Black Pit of Ṭihrán, and His exile to Baghdád. There follows a chapter on the nature and circumstances of revelation. The next seven chapters, except chapter 4 which introduces some early disciples, deal with the early Writings, which culminated in The Kitáb-i-Íqán, one of the most important products of Bahaullah’s pen. Subsequent chapters alternate history and a study of texts, introducing a large number of Tablets (epistles), some entirely unknown in the West. Though the effect is at times uneven, the historical and biographical material is indispensable.

Religion does not exist in a vacuum. It comes to man and, while shaping his life, is shaped by him. Revelation is recorded in a particular language, at a particular place. It grows in the soil of a particular civilization and interacts with it, producing fruits unlike those which grow at other times and in other soils. While Mr. Taherzadeh is not writing a history of Bahá’u’lláh’s times, he does give us sketches of people and places which were important in Bahá’u’lláh’s life. The volume, the first in a series which will eventually encompass the entire Revelation, ends with Bahá’u’lláh’s journey to Constantinople.

Mr. Taherzadeh’s work is not easy to evaluate. He has done a great deal of reading and has exercized commendable care in [Page 63] presenting the results of his labor. As a Bahá’í he treats his subject with infinite enthusiasm and infinite love. The non-Bahá’í reader will have to understand that this is not an academic performance, no doctoral dissertation in Oriental studies, but rather a book by a committed believer for other believers. It does not argue its premises; it assumes assent to its basic proposition that Bahá’u’lláh was indeed a Messenger of God. Mr. Taherzadeh was entirely right in doing this. A work for non-Bahá’ís would have been valuable, of course, but it would have been quite unlike this one.

Though most readers will ignore minor defects, one must express a lingering regret that the manuscript was not more carefully edited. Stylistic and grammatical lapses are inevitable, but it is the editor’s job to catch most of them before copy goes to the printer. Perhaps a more serious objection can be raised to the rather labored imagery that, starting from the traditional attribution of fatherhood to God, turns the Prophet into a mother who gives birth to revelation. “Like a mother who impresses upon her child certain traits of her own character, the Bearer of the Message of God influences the outer form of the Word of God.” The analogy does not hold since we know that the mother supplies half the chromosomes to the offspring and plays a role fully equal to that of the father in transmitting hereditary traits. The use of such imprecise analogies in any but poetic passages is fraught with danger of misunderstanding.

However, a few debatable passages and some unfortunate turns of phrase do not detract significantly from the value of this important book which constitutes a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Bahá’í Faith.

[Page 64]

Authors & Artists

WILLIAM P. COLLINS is a newcomer to the pages of World Order. He holds a B.A. in Russian and French from Middlebury College and an M.S. in library science from Syracuse University. He has recently moved from the Middlebury College Library, where he was head catalog librarian, to the Library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where he is a cataloger in the pamphlet collection. His interests range from library automation, rare books, and a universal decimal classification, on a professional level, to Sherlockian studies, Mormonism, and Islám and the Bahá’í Faith.

HOSSAIN B. DANESH is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa; a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Canada; and Director of the Center for Studies on Anger in Ottawa. He holds a medical degree from the University of Iṣfahán and a psychiatric degree from the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Danesh has published studies on a nomadic tribe in Írán and on psychiatric problems. His interests include harmonizing the spiritual and emotional needs of man. Dr. Danesh makes a second appearance in World Order, his “Universal Man and Prejudiced Man” having been published in Spring 1974.

JOSEPH GRAZIANI is a professor of Middle Eastern culture and civilization and Semitic languages and literature at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Near Eastern languages and literature and a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, all from U.C.L.A. His interests include Arabic medicine and studies in comparative religion involving Judaism, Christianity, and Islám. He has published a number of articles on the role of women in the Arab world and on Arabic medicine; he now has at press a book entitled Arabic Medicine during the Eleventh Century.

WILLIAM S. HATCHER is a regular contributor to World Order. He is a professor of mathematics at Laval University, holds two degrees from Vanderbilt University, and a doctorate of sciences from the University of Neuchatel. His publications include Foundations of Mathematics and numerous articles on mathematics, logic, computer science, and philosophy.

JEFFREY JENTZ, a poet in the schools of North Dakota, has published in small press publications in the Midwest and in college literary magazines. He has recently completed a manuscript of poetry entitled “Wayfarer in the Valleys.” His interests are wide and varied—children, old Indian ways, organic farming, ecology, geology, Tolkien, and science fiction.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is a professor of history at Yale University and Editor of World Order.

JÁN KUUSENJUURI makes a second appearance in World Order.

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 of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada. He helped organize, in 1975, the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith.

GERALD B. PARKS is a lecturer in English at the Interpreter’s School of the University of Trieste. He holds a B.A. in Latin from the University of Washington at Seattle and an M.A. in classical studies from the University of Michigan. He dabbles in photography and amateur films and has written several plays. He has published poems in English, Latin, and Italian, as well as articles and a short story. Two of his poems appeared in our Spring 1971 issue and his “The Necessity of a Utopia” in our Fall 1974 issue.

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ART CREDITS: P. 4, photograph by Tom Halstead; p. 21, photograph, courtesy Bahá’í National Information Office; p. 32, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 61, photograph by Joan Miller; back cover, photograph by Hugh Semple, Jr.