World Order/Series2/Volume 19/Issue 1 2/Text

←Volume 19 Index

World Order, Series 2 Volume 19 - Issue 1 & 2

Issue 3 & 4→

Return to PDF view Proofread once

[Page -1]

Fall 1984/Winter 1984-85

World Order

Thomas Carlyle and Islam

Geoffrey Nash

Bahá’í Laws on the Status of Men

Linda and John Walbridge

Toward a Revitalization of Higher

Education

Rick Johnson

The Persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í

Community and the Emergence of a

Universal Moral Order

Will. C. van den Hoonaard

[Page 0]

World Order

VOLUME 19, NUMBERS 1 & 2 • 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

JAMES D. STOKES

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to mail at second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091.

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 send three copies— an original and two legible copies—and should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included. Send manuscripts and other editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

Subscription rates: U.S.A., 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $18.00; 2 years, $34.00; single copies $3.00.

Copyright © 1986, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Shaking Off Ancient Feuds

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 Thomas Carlyle and Islam

by Geoffrey Nash

25 Bahá’í Laws on the Status of Men

by Linda and John Walbridge

39 Toward a Revitalization of Higher Education

by Rick Johnson

51 The Persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í Community

and the Emergence of a Universal Moral Order

by Will. C. van den Hoonaard

58 Wasp

poem by Lynn Ann Ascrizzi

60 Authors & Artists in This Issue

[Page 1]

[Page 2]

Shaking Off Ancient Feuds

FROM its earliest days the United States of America has had as one of its ideal purposes to become the place where hatred has expired. Notions of religious tolerance, of the rights of minorities, of universal education and universal participation in government, though conceived largely by European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, received their first practical, human applications in this country. At no time have we ever achieved a perfect realization of these ideals. Inequalities and injustices of every sort continue to plague us; the strifes and quarrels of the old world are renewed as its victims seek sanctuary here, just as has happened since the beginning of what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá called “this American democracy . . . this just government.” And yet the ideal was always there. We have a standard by which to recognize injustice, inequality, and prejudice, wherever they might exist, as well as their new manifestations as they arise with evolving conditions—and, as a people, we arise to correct them.

Perhaps here is to be found a clue to understanding and living by the injunction to love our enemies. The old world definition of enemy was often categorical—one inherited slews of enemies, from the objects of family feuds on up to neighborhoods, ethnic groups, entire religious communities, social classes. It is not hard in the present world turmoil to find examples of every type of prejudice and sanguinary hatred involving individuals who do not know each other and who could very well be genuine friends were it not for their membership in antipathetic groups. The first step toward loving one’s enemies would then be the denial of enmity by categories, the recognition of the unique value of each individual. America has always offered the opportunity to shake off the ancient feuds, to forge relationships anew, without regard for a past become irrelevant.

Americans have, by the same token, a duty to refrain from the creation of new categories of enemies. Let us not fall prey to the currently fashionable “Russian-bashing.” We must not let existing disagreements between governments blind us to the qualities of the peoples they represent. Whether it be the Russians, who have enriched our lives as poets, novelists, philosophers, composers, dancers, mathematicians, chess players, scientists, whose warm nature, whose deep sense of tragedy, as of comedy, have given our lives as Westerners and Americans new depths of meaning; or the Muslims, who in the present heated atmosphere emanating from the Middle East are the object of a sort of baffled wrath, but who have contributed immeasurably to Western culture, from its most idealistic and mystical to the bases of modern science and technology, these peoples who have added to an important degree to the American population, are fully entitled to our love and admiration.

Let us not yield to a fashionable distrust of Arab-Americans, but rather recognize in them people who like so many other Americans have turned their backs on the quarrels of the old world. The Bahá’í injunction against [Page 3] all forms of prejudice applies to them as surely as to all other ethnic groups. The love of justice excludes no one.

Love is not blind; it is constructive, healing. Guided by intelligence, it will not lead us into error. Without the guidance of intelligence as well as of moral principles, love can allow us to be victimized by forces of evil. Cold intelligence, unguided by love, will terminate our existence on earth.

[Page 4]

Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

WITH THIS issue we are happy to add to the masthead the name of a new editor, whom we hereby introduce to you. Dr. James D. Stokes (he likes to be called Jim) is an assistant professor in the English Department of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. He holds three degrees in English—a B.A. and an M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. from Washington State University, where he wrote his dissertation on the roots of the English history play. He has been to England four times (and will shortly leave again for two months) to conduct research for a book to be called The Dramatic Records of Somerset, which is being prepared for the Records of Early English Drama and which will be published by the University of Toronto Press.

In addition to his interest in medieval English literature, Jim has a great love for modern poetry, having studied poetry writing at San Francisco State, and has already helped the Editorial Board by making an initial screening of the poetry submitted to WORLD ORDER over the past months. We are delighted to welcome Jim to our small but hard-working Board.

* * *

THE ARTICLES in this quarter’s WORLD ORDER may, at first glance, seem to be a mixed bag. But they are all linked by at least one major theme: the quest for order.

With Geoffrey Nash’s article on Thomas Carlyle and Islam we begin in the early nineteenth century with the quest of a great thinker of his age for a “life-giving” belief in what he found to be an increasingly unbelieving world. In Muḥammad, and in Islam, Carlyle, and through him many writers, poets, and philosophers of his day, found a “hero” who reminded them that it is “not by material, but by moral power” that “men and their actions” are governed. Carlyle, more than anyone else in the nineteenth century, legitimized Muḥammad and Islam for the West and opened the way to an understanding of the spirit of the religion that has contributed so much to Western civilization.

Linda and John Walbridge, in their discussion of Bahá’í laws on the status of men in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Bahá’u’lláh’s Most Holy Book, take us to 1873, when the Aqdas was revealed, but actually into the twentieth century and beyond, for the laws are to govern the affairs of Bahá’ís for at least the next thousand years. The article examines the reasoning behind Bahá’u’lláh’s laws and concludes that they are designed to make men an integral part of an ordered family life. The recent CBS television program on the breakdown in the family structure among black Americans is sure to come to mind as you read the essay.

Rick Johnson lands us squarely in the twentieth century with a provocative look at the requirements for higher education in an era in which “the possibility of conceiving of a solidarity encompassing the entire planet exists.”

Finally, Will. C. van den Hoonaard invites [Page 5] us to view a broader canvas, one that surely would confirm for Carlyle once again that “life-giving” belief and “moral power” govern the affairs of humanity. Dr. van den Hoonaard, in what can only be described as an examination of the marriage of sorrow and joy, looks squarely at the persecution of the Iranian Bahá’ís and finds not only the distinctive nature of the community clarified by its trials but also the trials contributing to an emerging global order.

* * *

DID YOU know that since 1971, the poetry in WORLD ORDER has been included in the Index of American Periodical Verse? We have just received word that the 1983 edition is now available. It includes more than 200 publications and more than 14,500 entries. The works of each poet are listed under his or her name together with full citations to the periodicals in which they appear. There is also a title index and a list of periodicals that includes names of editors, addresses, and subscription information. The 1971-79, 1980-81, and 1982 volumes are also available from Scarecrow Press in Metuchen, New jersey.

To the Editor

WHERE ARE OUR TEARS?

I should like to commend WORLD ORDER for bringing to the forefront of its readers’ attentions the shocking reality of contemporary torture. The Spring 1984 issue included not only testimonies related to the particular situation of the persecutions against the Bahá’ís in Iran, but also pointed out that torture is, alas, a worldwide practice that must needs be curbed.

The plight of the Bahá’ís in Iran is well-known to WORLD ORDER readers. The imprisonments, tortures, murders, as well as a myriad of other abuses have been documented and attested to. The condition of our Bahá’í sisters and brothers must be made public, but no more so than that of our non-Bahá’í sisters and brothers throughout the world. . . .

In one of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talks recorded in Paris Talks, He emphasized that we must be concerned about the welfare of all peoples, not only those of our own kind. In “The Cruel Indifference of People Towards the Suffering of Foreign Races,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá questioned the concern over the death of twenty individuals due to a train wreck, while there was little sympathy for thousands of Italians, Turks, and Arabs who were being killed in Tripoli. Yes, we should be concerned about twenty of our kinswomen/men, but not to the exclusion of concern about those of other nations, races, religions.

We must be desperately concerned about our Bahá’í sisters and brothers in Iran. We must do all that we can to ease that situation and make it public; but when I see our tears pour forth only for the Iranian Bahá’ís, my heart cries out: Where are our tears at the genocide in Cambodia? Where are our tears over the apartheid in South Africa? Many thousands have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed in the last four years in Uganda—where are our tears? Where were the tears of our parents, grandparents, ancestors, when over six million Jews were brutally tortured, starved, experimented upon, worked to death, gassed and incinerated during World War II, when our African sisters and brothers were taken from their homelands on slave ships, when the Navajo people were sent on the “Long Walk,” when millions of women were put to death as witches during the Inquisition? We must learn from the past so that these atrocities do not continue unabated. We [Page 6] must be aware and anxious for all of our sisters and brothers, Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í, worldwide. By raising the issue of torture, WORLD ORDER is doing a great service in educating us about one aspect of worldwide repression and injustice.

SUSAN BRILL

Gallup, New Mexico

ABOVE AVERAGE? BRAVO!

For several years I have been a subscriber to WORLD ORDER, and whenever I have told the Bahá’í friend who introduced me to the magazine how much I love it, she has urged me to write you saying how excellent I think it is. I have never done so, because I thought my personal opinion wasn’t that important, and, besides, I thought its high quality was so obvious that it would be as unnecessary for me to praise it as it would be to tell Miss Universe that I thought she was pretty! But now, having just read the letter by Joyce Liggitt in your Summer 1984 (sic!) issue, I feel I must speak up in defense of your editorial policy.

Mrs. Liggitt said you use “obscure philosophical jargon which is incomprehensible to thinking people of other disciplines” and “please do not mystify us with words, but give us the inspiration for which we look.” First of all, I personally do find inspiration in your words, and if she doesn't there are many other places where she can find it: the Bahá’í writings are voluminous, and there’s also the Bible, and other spiritual writings.

Yes, if you were less intellectual you might pick up some additional readers—though you would also lose some—but surely in the Bahá’í spectrum of writings there is room (and need) for at least one publication addressed to scholars and “thinkers about thinking” (to use the phrase that she thought was pejorative but which I think is honorific).

I am not a Bahá’í, though I greatly admire Bahá’í ideals and the individual Bahá’ís I have met (to paraphrase Will Rogers, I have never met a Bahá’í I didn’t like). I am a Catholic, and happy in that faith. I love the Church and its ideals and rituals and sacraments and the closeness it gives me to Jesus, and I could never leave it— even if that makes me a historical fossil, and even though I am painfully aware of how inadequate the Church’s ancient institutional forms and some of its rigid dogmas are in many ways to meet the needs of many people in the modern world—but I see great progress in the attitudes of so many of my coreligionists (no more anathemas, for example, and an appreciative and generous outreach to other religions, and a new independence in thinking; I believe all of these are signs of the convergence that Theillard de Chardin and others, including the Bahá’ís, believe is on its way, so that we Catholics along with Jews, Quakers, Mennonites, Buddhists, Hindus, and Bahá’ís and all people of good will, can do our part in helping to build the Great Peace).

I feel one with all people who believe there is a loving and intelligent Being who created us and cares about us and wants us to be and do our best in this world, to develop our spiritual powers so that we can go on to another life of even greater fulfillment—I find it hard to see how anybody who is observant and analytical cannot realize that this life is a training school and preparation for another one. And I should add that an article you ran a few years ago on the immortality of the soul was the most lucid and convincing explanation I have ever read on this subject.

Although I remain a Catholic, my respect for the Bahá’ís knows no bounds—because of the courage and fidelity of the martyrs in Iran and the less heroic but still extremely admirable works of Bahá’ís in other countries and communities and at the United Nations—and because of your magazine.

Although I don’t share your faith (except that, in a way, I do because I also believe in the equality of the sexes and races, in the oneness of all truth both scientific and religious, in God’s providential power and purpose for mankind, and in our need to cooperate with grace), I most certainly do share your hopes about our world’s future, and I find your analyses and comments on historical and current events both enlightening and moving.

Forgive this long digression into my personal opinions. I mention them only to explain some of the reasons I so admire your magazine and why I don’t wanted you to change it.

Most people I know have either never heard of Bahá’ís (as most people in the first century had never heard of Jesus) and therefore assume they can’t be important, or if they have heard of them, they dismiss them as a small lunatic fringe, one of the weird manifestations of the religious instinct. To me, the Bahá’ís are very similar to the first few generations of Christians who were also ignored and/ or sneered at by most “intelligent” people, but who were actually “the wave of the future.” And that’s why I think it is important for you to continue issuing an intelligent, thoughtful, intellectual magazine. The high professional and academic qualifications, as well [Page 7] as the talents, of your writers are proof positive that Bahá’ís are not nutty.

So please continue to run the balanced kind of material you have been publishing in recent years: a stimulating mixture of cultural and religious history, biographies of inspiring people, thoughtful analyses of past and current events, intriguing speculations about the future, plus poetry and photography.

Whenever your magazine arrives in the mail, I am elated. No matter what I have planned to do that evening I cannot resist sitting down and reading it from cover to cover.

JOAN BEL GEDDES

UNICEF

United Nations, New York

As it has been expressed by Others, I have often wished that a Bahá’í magazine existed that was on the level of the “average” person, a magazine that I could offer to family members or friends that was easily read. It has been an education to me, though, reading sentence by sentence, making a study of the articles, as we did in English classes in school for instance, studying Ruskin or Emerson. Now, reading about a volunteer staff, I realize what a tremendous job you do, and how beautiful the result, photos and all. I appreciate you! This is to enter my subscription for another year. The articles are timeless and timely.

MARTHA ERICKSON

West St. Paul, Minnesota

BEHIND SCHEDULE? REALLY?

Hit me over the head! Until I read that you had fallen behind your publishing schedule I had never noticed it. I am always so happy to get WORLD ORDER and enjoy the articles so much that I never notice the date. No matter what the date the articles are up to date and interesting. Don’t skip anything; just keep WORLD ORDER coming.

VERNE KOCH

San Antonio, Texas

[Page 8]

[Page 9]

Thomas Carlyle and Islam

BY GEOFFREY NASH

Copyright © 1986 by Geoffrey Nash.

DURING the nineteenth century religious assumptions held for millennia, most notably belief in the orthodox Christian creed, began to come under fire. For the first time a significant number of intellectuals abandoned traditional religious views. Their new rationalism, together with a scientific spirit of investigation, subjected hitherto sacrosanct mysteries of faith to a rigorous logical scrutiny. Intellectual inquiry, which undercut emotionally based faith, also removed that faith’s power to bring solace to pious men and women. Minds as mystical as Thomas Carlyle’s and as devotional as Marian Evans’ stopped believing in the transcendental superstructure of the story of Christ.

The Church continued to defend traditional doctrines, but the new naturalism —with its insistence that religious truth must be subjected to objective study of the observable world—seemed irrefutable. By showing the shavings on the floor of Joseph’s workshop Millais shocked the religious conscience into considering the implications of the real background from which Christianity had emerged. Emanuel Swedenborg and Mary Baker Eddy produced anti-literalist interpretations of scripture. Biographies of Jesus by Strauss in Germany in 1836 and by Renan in France in 1863 demythologized events in the life and ministry of Christ. Though not antipathetic, such works changed Christ from a divine founder of Christianity into a mere human being, if a great one. Matthew Arnold declared that miracles did not happen. It seemed that religion had been breached by a tide of agnosticism and atheism that has not receded to this day.

In such an intellectual environment some of the deepest spiritual searching of the last century was done by persons generally considered atheists or agnostics. In England Thomas Carlyle had a particularly vital influence on the [Page 10] minds and hearts of his contemporaries. Though it is difficult for opponents and many neutrals to appreciate, Carlyle was more or less the spiritual father of English intellectuals for nearly fifty years. Part of his appeal was the paradox at the core of his own life: He was not a believer, yet he yearned for belief; he could not refute the arguments of rationalism, yet the tenor of his mind was mystical. In an age of religious doubt he spoke to a wider audience than did a more orthodox voice such as John Newman.

Another part of Carlyle’s appeal was the restlessness that led him down paths that were strange yet revelatory to his contemporaries. One of those paths brought him to Islam—at that time still the foremost rival to the Christian Faith. In 1874, for example, a lecturer speaking at the Royal Institution of Great Britain noted that

most Englishmen, who do not condemn the Arabian prophet unheard, derive what favorable notions of him they have, not from Gibbon, but from Carlyle. Make as large deductions as we will on the score of Carlyle’s peculiar views on “Heroes and Hero-worship,” how many of us recall the shock of surprise, the epoch in our intellectual and religious life, when we found that he chose for his “Hero as prophet,” not Moses or Elijah, or Isaiah, but the so-called impostor Mohammed!

Carlyle’s admiration for the Prophet Muḥammad is well known, primarily through his lecture series On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History delivered in 1840. Yet epoch-making as it was, this major statement of Carlyle’s admiration can be over-emphasized if seen in isolation. In fact, it was the culmination of his life-long interest in Islam and its Prophet. Carlyle’s Works, letters, and journals contain many references to Muḥammad and Islam, dating from earlier and later years. They make very clear Carlyle’s personal respect for Muḥammad, his recognition of the Prophet’s sincerity, his regard for the Arabs as a people, and his awareness of the great contribution of Islam to world civilization.

Carlyle’s attitude toward Islam developed in three broad phases: an early stage characterized by respect and toleration; a middle stage culminating in his great lecture of 1840; and a final one in which he called upon Muḥammad in his personal battle with the mid-nineteenth century. There is no doubt that the middle phase, in its vindication of the character of Muḥammad and the historical mission of Islam, is the most important. But because of its originality the entire picture is of interest to students and general readers concerned with the history of ideas.

Certainly, Carlyle was never a Muslim; he was too aware of the separate cultural identities of East and West, and he lacked knowledge of oriental languages. [Page 11] His figuration of the Prophet Muḥammad was his own personal creation —that of an artist rather than of a scholar. He looked at the Islamic religion and its culture through the warm, yet partially detached vision of a European Romantic at odds with his own time. Yet individual and colored as was the result, it contained an element of intuitive truth that was typical of the genius of Carlyle. As John Stuart Mill observed of his one-time friend: He could grasp essential truths through sheer insight, while most men had to hobble along with the aid of mere logic. Thus it is that the lecture on Muḥammad catches a glimpse of the spiritual size of its subject, a glimpse real enough to awaken the appreciation of Europeans after centuries of bigotry.

As a young man Carlyle early established the catholic reading that was the foundation of his later eminence; he displayed a voracious and eclectic appetite for travelogs, histories, works on mathematics and the natural sciences, as well as the major European literatures in their originals. As David Masson, his friend and biographer, noted, “it was not enough that he should be able to write fluently and eloquently in a general way . . . on any subject that turned up. He had to provide himself amply with matter, with systemized knowledge of all sorts, and especially with systematized historical knowledge. Hence the depth and extent of his readings . . . in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to Latin and English.”

CARLYLE’S acquaintance with Islam came early. Between 1815 and 1818 (between the ages of twenty and twenty-three) he immersed himself in a study of the sceptic authors of the Enlightenment. These included the British historians Edward Gibbon and David Hume, and the French philosophes. Voltaire had written a scurrilous play on the Prophet Muḥammad as a part of his general design to discredit religion. Other deists of the eighteenth century used Islam as a means of constructive criticism of Christianity. George Sale, in his Preliminary Discourse to his translation of the Qur’án, reproved Christians for being less consistent in their monotheism than were Muslims. Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made similar comparisons between the two great religions, to the detriment of Christianity. But sympathetic as is his account of the genesis of Islam when read carefully, he also subscribed to the old European prejudice against the Prophet as an “impostor.”

There is no record that Carlyle read Sale at this time, but he undoubtedly did read Gibbon. A letter dating from 1818 shows that Carlyle was aware of Gibbon’s account of the rise of Islam and the spread of the Arab empire. In 1823 he wrote to his fiancee Jane Welsh that “the volume [of the Decline and Fall] which treats of Mahomet is a splendid piece of writing,” but he warned her against the irreverent character of Gibbon’s footnotes. Added to this source there is record that Carlyle was acquainted with Islamic culture even earlier— at fourteen he read the Arabian Nights, a work that remained a favorite long after.

[Page 12] Carlyle’s contact with the East, like that of many Romantics, was thus, obviously, secondhand; he later denied that he was taught even the rudiments of Hebrew. Carlyle mentions in several early essays the name of Sir William Jones, the important Orientalist active during the regency, and a source of contact with the Orient for Shelley and, later, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.

However, it is to Germany that one must turn to understand Carlyle’s acquaintance with refracted ideas of the East. The greatest influence on his early thought was the German cultural renaissance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through such figures as Lessing, Herder, the Schlegels, and, above all, Goethe, Carlyle caught the aroma of tolerance and universalism wafting from Germany. He then conveyed those ideas to British soil, passing them first through the filter of his native Puritanism.

The German idealists were reacting against the mechanistic view of the world fostered by eighteenth-century rationalists and philosophes. Indeed, the idealists’ pursuit of the nonrational and mysterious sometimes led them into the realms of strange and hazy mysticism. Thus it was natural that the East, with its intrinsic love of the spiritual and nonmaterial, held a particular attraction. Carlyle was aware that pursuit of mystical elements in life and religion had been taken to extremes by some German Romantics. He wrote a fascinating exploratory essay in 1828 on the enigmatic poet and pseudo-prophet, Zaccharias Werner, who began as a Protestant, was for a period a debauchee and self-styled messiah, then turned eventually to Catholicism. This last conversion seemed to Carlyle of a piece with the nebulous wanderings of other Germans of the time:

It is a common theory among the Germans, that every Creed, every Form of worship, is a form merely; the mortal and ever-changing body in which the immortal and unchanging spirit of Religion is, with more or less completeness, expressed to the material eye, and made manifest and influential among the doings of men. It is thus, for instance, that Johannes Müller, in his Universal History, professes to consider the Mosiac Law, the creed of Mahomet, nay, Luther’s Reformation; and, in short, all other systems of Faith . . . as Vorstellungsarten, “Modes of Representation.”

He included Friedrich Schelling, even Herder, in this German mode of thought.

Carlyle never accepted completely the airy transcendentalism of the Germans, yet they taught him a tolerance toward all religions that he never lost. It was to refound his religious belief on intellectual grounds that Carlyle had turned [Page 13] to German idealism in the first place. His reading of the philosophes had destroyed his faith in doctrinal Christianity, leaving him in a state of spiritual crisis. Carlyle gained more from the confidence and sagacity of individual writers (Goethe, Johann Christoph Schiller, and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter) than he did from idealist philosophy itself. He was looking for exemplars and felt that these figures had experienced the same doubt and despair as himself but had advanced into a new assurance. German literature was a surrogate religion —an intellectually based creed to replace an emotional one.

Carlyle’s attitudes toward Islam were a part of his general view of religion. He did not evaluate the “religion of Muḥammad” in terms of its credentials as a divine revelation. For Carlyle the question of explicitly divine revelation was a moot point. Because he could not acknowledge that his own, ancestral Christianity was the purposeful creation of a divinity, how could he be expected to endorse the divine origin of Islam? Yet, paradoxically, it was this detachment from all creedal belief that made it possible for him, though from a Christian background, to speak so sympathetically of Islam.

The problem of revelation and inspiration had been implicitly raised by Lessing, the religious seeker and philosopher. Turning away from the narrow, traditional exclusiveness of Christianity, Lessing pleaded for tolerance of one another by the three Judaic faiths. “Why should we not in all positive Religions see nothing other than the order in which the human understanding solely and by itself is developed and must continue to develop, rather than either smile or carp at any one of them.” Lessing may have been addressing both deist rationalist and Christian fundamentalist alike; his own position fell indeterminably between the two. In the scheme of progressive revelation adduced in The Education of the Human Race, he vacillates between the idea that human understanding develops “solely and by itself” and the view that it is somehow providentially directed. Christianity emerges as a stage along the road of mankind’s spiritual education—not an absolute and final revelation of the divinity. Lessing’s rationalism was innovative and enlightening; his tolerance rubbed off on figures like Goethe and Herder, as did the monistic implications of his scheme of progress. In rejecting the revelationary character of Christianity, Lessing was opening the way for the grand mystical schemes of human salvation favored later by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Hegel. In these later schemes divinity became an unfolding idea; inspiration, a force residing in great men; and divine revelation in its orthodox sense, a fiction of ruder ages.

As a young man, Carlyle was well aware of the implications of the German idealists’ move away from traditional notions of revelation. When he read Herder’s Reflection on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, he remarked that it was a strange work for a clergyman to have written; all was “the effect of circumstances and organisation.” Yet the view that he adopted for most of his life was far closer to that of the German Romantics with its accent on the [Page 14] mystical forces of nature and the example of great men in history than to the Christian doctrine of divine revelation.

No one did more to effect a change in Carlyle than Goethe. In early manhood Carlyle was influenced by Goethe’s lofty poise and apparent conviction that nature and man were in ultimate harmony. Carlyle imbibed Goethe’s message of toleration, brotherhood among the nations and races, whether of East or West, and his aim of spreading understanding between them. If any book was his Bible, Wilhelm Meister, which he translated from Goethe’s German, would qualify. Toward the end of Carlyle’s translation the following prescript for an Order figured by Goethe to undertake the enlightenment of men, appears:

Under this aspect, we can look upon ourself as members of a Union belonging to the world. Simple and grand is the thought; easy is its execution by understanding and strength. Unity is all-powerful; no division, therefore, no contention among us! . . . Two duties we have most rigorously undertaken: first, to honor every species of religious worship, for all of them are comprehended more or less directly in the Creed; secondly, in like manner to respect all forms of government.

Carlyle’s belief in the value of conviction and spiritual unity in the religious community was strengthened by the ideal community of Wilhelm Meister. He brought these ideas to his appreciation of the Muslim community.

From Goethe, Carlyle learned of Hafiz, the Persian poet, and through Hafiz, of Muḥammad and His faith. In The West-Eastern Divan (which Carlyle evidently digested well to judge by the frequency with which he quoted from it), Goethe has the following lines: “If Islam means devotedness to God / In Islam all will live and die.” Carlyle paraphrased these lines in his lecture on Muḥammad, saying with regard to the main teaching of Islam—submission: “we resign ourselves to God—‘If this be Islam, says Goethe, do we not all live in Islam?”

While Carlyle’s reverence for the East and spirit of tolerance came from Goethe, his historical perspective of Islam came through reading the literary and philosophical writings of Herder and Friedrich Schlegel. In his Lectures on the History of Literature Ancient and Modern, Schlegel included the literatures of Persia and Arabia, as well as of India. Carlyle’s references to Hinduism are relatively few, but he seems to have received the idea of the Qur’án as the epic of the Arabs from reading Schlegel and Herder.

Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind and Schlegel’s Lectures on the History of Literature Ancient and Modern celebrate the literary epics of the Germans of pagan and Christian epochs. But their appreciation of diverse cultures (Schlegel’s praise of Dante and Medieval Spain and Herder’s eulogy of the Arabs) revealed no narrow patriotism. Herder stressed the value of the literary epic as the epitome of the people that produced it. Both saw the Arabic Qur’án as a testament to the valor and nationhood of the Arab [Page 15] people, rather than as a religious code. They also appreciated the great Arab influence upon European civilization, including its contribution to European chivalry. Carlyle undoubtedly read both authors and incorporated ideas from their works on Islam into his literary criticism.

In the years between 1825 and 1834 Carlyle approached religion and philosophy in a spirit of toleration fostered by his German reading. In 1829 in an essay entitled “On Voltaire” he compared the power of the great religious teachers to the short-lived destructive forces of the philosophes:

the Pharoahs, with all their chariots of war, are buried deep in the wrecks of time; and that Moses still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts and daily business of all civilised nations. Or figure Mahomet, in youthful years, “travelling to the horse fairs of Syria.”

His primary example was Christ Himself, Whose faith had been dismissed by the Roman historian Tacitus as a “baneful superstition.” In “Voltaire,” then, Carlyle includes Muḥammad with Moses and Jesus as bestriding figures whose influence long outlived the petty fashions of the day. Carlyle has often been charged with supporting authoritarian force, but it is not fully appreciated that his concern with power originated with his belief in moral strength. By 1834 he was already convinced of the power of deep, still forces in history that lasted long after the tumultuous deeds of conquerors and revolutionaries. He wrote: “Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed.”

In the early 1830s Carlyle experimented with the idea that great achievements were somehow linked with divine inspiration. He thought of earlier epic poems as manifestations of what he called “belief”; such works as the Iliad and the Qur’án were so profoundly believed that they acquired an actual “reality” for the age in which they figured. The became virtual embodiments of transcendental truth, and because they were so deeply held as true, they were akin to reality or fact. These ideas were Carlyle’s nearest approximation to an actual spiritual philosophy; intuitively rather than discursively conceived, they owed much to the idealism of the Germans. Their conception of divine revelation is hazy and imprecise, but the general tenor is clear enough. Carlyle, like the German poets and philosophers before him, was endeavoring to invest history with transcendental truth; it was to replace the Bible as the greatest source of revelation. Carlyle would speak of the “Bible as History,” and it would not be long before the scheme of historical avatars that we meet in the lectures on heroes was set out in his mind.

Lacking in Carlyle’s attitude to Muḥammad and Islam at this point was a defined historical focus to match his admiration. Like the Germans, he was still viewing the Qur’án as the embodiment of the spirit of belief of the Arab nation; there is no suggestion that in 1832 Carlyle had actually read the Qur’án. However, by his second course of lectures in 1838 Carlyle had done so. It is probable that he had gone back to Herder, as well as to other sources, to fill in some details on the Arab empire.

[Page 16] IN THE LECTURE course of 1838 entitled Lectures on the History of Literature Carlyle devoted a very considerable part of his sixth lecture, which was mainly concerned with chivalry, to Islam. The Arabs, he observed, had been a civilizing influence—first during their period in Spain and subsequently in the influence they had upon European civilization. They had translated the Greek classics, which would otherwise have been lost, and “in short, were the instructors of Europe in many respects.” They were a proof that the Middle Ages had not been wholly dark. As for Muḥammad Himself, He had been the inspiration behind all this; until His arrival the Arabs had lived in obscurity; He had delivered them from the depths of idolatry to knowledge of the great truth that “God was one.” A century after, the Arabs had spread from Poitou to India. Their civilization, in its arts and sciences, was “greatly superior in all respects to any European nation of the time.”

The lecture on chivalry and Islam, predating the lecture on Muḥammad in 1840, is a fascinating precursor. In its insistence on the historical achievement of the Arabs and its stress on the scope of Arab control after Muḥammad’s death it goes as far as anything in the later, famous lecture. Not present is the vision of the Prophet as hero, shaper of his circumstances and conqueror of his epoch and ages to come. This limitation was natural in a series of lectures designed primarily as an historical survey. Still, many of the seeds of the great lecture were already in the sage’s mind. As with his two completed masterpieces, Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution, the “Hero as Prophet” lecture needed the spark of inspiration to stir the scattered ideas already present in his mind.

At the end of 1838 Carlyle began to record in his letters and journals a special interest in Muḥammad and Islam. In December he wrote of searching his brother’s trunk without success for a copy of the Qur’án. Soon he had acquired a copy, and his letters record his reading through “partly with a view to lecturing,” and, again, “deep in perusal.”

At the same time he was rereading the Arabian Nights, which inspired him to write in his journal:

Arabian Tales by Lane; very pious. No people so religious, except the English and Scotch Puritans for a season. Good man Mahomet, on the whole; sincere; a fighter, not indeed with perfect triumph, yet with honest battle. . . . The “vein of anger” between his brows, beaming black eyes, brown complexion, stout middle figure; fond of cheerful social talk—wish I knew Arabic.

Typically Carlyle tried to visualise the physiognomy of his subject. From the outset he also associated the Muslims with the revolutionary Puritans of the seventeenth century whom he admired so much. But his most important reading on Islam during this period was George Sale’s translation and Preliminary Discourse to the Qur’án itself. This work, together with Gibbon’s section in [Page 17] the Decline and Fall, was undoubtedly Carlyle’s main source for his coming lecture.

On Friday, 8 May 1840, Carlyle arose to address a fashionable audience of politicians, philosophers, fellow men of letters, and important clergymen. His subject was the “Hero as Prophet,” the second in his series of lectures on “Hero-Worship and the Heroic in Hisrory.” If his first lecture—a celebration of Norse myth and Germanic paganism—had raised eyebrows, this new one was innovative to say the least. He chose to discuss the chief rival faith to Christianity, long held to be among the worst kind of infidelity, and its Founder, a personage associated with the Devil himself. An establishment figure might have found it difficult to carry off the lecture in this period of renewed religious earnestness. Carlyle, however, had much in his favor. He was considered a Bohemian, even a madman; his rugged Annandale accent and appearance aided the aura of foreignness that surrounded him. As it was, the occasion passed off with no greater dissent than the protest withdrawal of Carlyle’s past friend, John Stuart Mill, who was angered by a disparaging remark about Utilitarianism.

The lecture on Muḥammad follows the same basic pattern as the rest in the series. Some opening remarks introduce the general theme of heroism and relate it to the subject of the lecture; an account then follows of the life of the hero in question, with commentary interspersed; finally, a concluding summary dwells on the greatness of belief and the achievement of the hero. While Odin had been called a god, later heroes were seen to be God-inspired. Yet they were of the same heroic stuff, their acceptance or rejection being the test of an epoch. Carlyle dismisses the absurd stories designed to prove Muḥammad an imposter (that, for example, a pigeon had been trained to pick peas from Muhammad’s ear—to pass for an angel dictating to him!). Muḥammad has to be judged on His achievement. Carlyle then introduces Arabia, praising the Arabs for their strong feelings and restraint, their religiosity, prophets, and holy sites. There follows a brief account of the life of Muḥammad from His first years accompanying the caravans to the horse fairs of Syria to His growth into a genuine, brotherly man. The lecture then moves from His marriage to Khadíjah and success as a merchant to His actual call, and, finally, to the trials He faces thereafter.

Next Carlyle discusses the propagation of Islam, dismissing the notion that it was spread by the sword alone. He reveals the difficulty he had in appreciating the Qur’án, admits that it must suffer in translation, but confesses that it is difficult reading. Its message, however, is geniune and true. Criticism that Islam’s teaching is sensual is incorrect, as far as Muḥammad is concerned. He was a frugal man Who suffered trials for twenty-three years, yet remained completely free of cant. Though His precepts were not superfine, they contained the truths that duty was man’s highest calling and that the duality of right and wrong remained eternal. The lecture ends with an impressive and moving appeal to the testimony of history and the achievement of a people once roaming leaderless in the desert but raised to light by their Prophet.

At first sight one is struck by the mixture of Carlyle’s image of Muḥammad and historical details to create an impression of the Prophet’s straightforwardness. As in his other re-creations of historical figures and events Carlyle’s picture gains from the impressionistic relation of diverse facts and details, interspersed [Page 18] with approving remarks, sometimes defensive, at other times declamatory, but all contributing to a central vision that is enthusiastic and affirmative.

Carlyle used anecdotal stories to create striking images: the wild desert, the untutored son of nature—Muḥammad—Who could neither read nor write. Carlyle overemphasizes this latter aspect of the Prophet’s personality and seems to derive inspiration from it, though Muḥammad was, in fact, no nomadic Bedouin but related to the most powerful figures in Mecca. Carlyle also chooses stories to highlight those aspects of Muḥammad’s character that he particularly admired: His freedom from cant, generosity, earnestness, sincerity, and disingenuousness. It is the human side that Carlyle delights to picture. He repeats the incidents related by Gibbon when Muḥammad refused to assure ‘Á’ishah that He loved her more than Khadíjah and how He grieved after the death of His friend Zayd. Carlyle liked the simple poverty of the Prophet’s household and relates Gibbon’s story that before He died, the Prophet had it asked publicly if He were debtor to any man so that He might requite him before His passing.

Carlyle makes much of Muḥammad’s rapport with nature, of the wonder and awe with which He responded to its expanse and attributes to Him a pantheistic mysticism similar to his own. Muḥammad’s revelation thus consisted of an apprehension of the undefined transcendental truth behind nature, but the ethical conclusions he is made to draw from this owe much to Carlyle’s childhood faith—the ascetic Puritanism of a lowland Scottish Presbyterian sect.

A great Carlyle scholar, C. F. Harrold, long ago pointed out the similarity between the pious resignation to the will of God in Islam and the effective stoicism of Calvinism. Shorn of its theological superstructure, Harrold argued, the Calvinist’s strict stoicism was similar to what he termed the “ascetic fatalism” of Islam. While this appraisal of Islam is arguable, its essential point is certainly true: Carlyle was drawn to the Islamic community because the piousness of the Arabs reminded him of the simple faith and deeds that he described in his Reminiscences:

Very venerable are those old Seceder Clergy to me, now when I look back on them. . . . Men so like what one might call antique “Evangelists in modern vesture, and Poor Scholars and Gentlemen of Christ”, I have nowhere met with in Monasteries or Churches, among Protestant or Papal Clergy, in any country of the world.

In the lecture of 1840 he said that “No Christians, since the early ages, or perhaps only the English Puritans in modern times, have ever stood by their Faith as the Moslems do by theirs,—believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it.” Carlyle could not praise this faculty of belief too highly.

From his earliest days Carlyle had fortified himself with a stoical acceptance of his fate, which he continued to call “the decrees of Providence.” He admired the Islamic resignation to Providential decree, even the suggestion of predestination. [Page 19] In his letters and journals he would often include the remark: “‘Allah Akbar’ [sic]—God is great say the Moslems, to which we also add, God is good.” Carlyle equated the saying “Allah Akbar” (Allah-u-Akbar) and “Allah Kareem” with verses from his favorite Book of Job: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in him” (13:15), and “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:21). He quoted both verses in the lecture on Muḥammad. Carlyle also took pleasure in noting the belief that the Book of Job was actually composed in the region of Arabia. The lecture, then, reveals Carlyle’s pantheism, but it also displays the strict ethical monotheism of his native Calvinism and the sympathy he felt for these same characteristics in Islam.

Carlyle also found a firm ethics in Islam. According to Carlyle, Muḥammad had understood the “infinite difference between right and wrong.” Muḥammad, Carlyle says in the lecture, had apprehended

That man’s actions here are of infinite moment to him, and never die or end at all; that man, with his little life, reaches upwards high as heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden. . . .

This dualism of right and wrong, according to Carlyle, had in earlier ages been figured as resting on a future existence in either heaven or hell. Though he remained unsure of the survival of individual identity after death, Carlyle still held, in common with other Victorian agnostics, that moral distinctions must remain sacrosanct. He was gratified to find in the teachings of Islam as strict an adherence to morality.

Probably for this reason Carlyle virtually dismissed traditional Christian criticism that Islam was “sensual,” owing to its description of a paradise where the believers would enjoy beautiful houris without taint. Carlyle acknowledges that Muḥammad’s figuration of heaven and hell was somewhat “sensual” but adds that “in the Koran there is really very little said about the joys of Paradise.” The “worst sensualities” were the “work of doctors”—that is, the sheikhs of Islam. Sale had included a lurid catalogue of sensual delights in his Preliminary Discourse; Carlyle, in comparison, dismisses this Western prejudice. Indeed, one feels that Carlyle only entertained what little deference he did show for such criticisms out of consideration for his audience.

Carlyle also saw a congruence in the emphasis that both Calvinism and Islam placed on the active promotion of religion. For Carlyle both Muḥammad and Oliver Cromwell were heroic fighters in God’s cause, men who had set about establishing the divine law on earth. “Theocracy, Government of God,” he stated in the lecture, “is precisely the thing to be struggled for! . . . Cromwell wishes it, fought for it; Mahomet attained it.” In this comparison Carlyle saw a triumph of law and belief in history that took in the Romans, the medieval Christians, the Muslims, and, finally, the English and Scottish Puritans. Moreover, Islam had succeeded where Carlyle’s ancestors had not: It had established [Page 20] the law of God in the daily lives of men over a long period and without opposition.

Carlyle longed for a return to a society pervaded by belief in God; it was a part of his personal struggle for belief in an increasingly unbelieving age. As the nineteenth century grew more secular, more atheistic, Carlyle felt his hope the more forlorn. All that remained were historic eras of religious ascendancy, when faith shone, and men were sure of their destiny. No wonder, then, that Carlyle felt the value of Islam, for in spite of its differing climate, culture, language, and era, he could appreciate the ingredients of worship and faith in Islam. The notion that it was founded on falsity was abhorrent:

A greater number of God’s creatures believe in Mahomet’s word at this hour than in any other word whatever. Are we to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual legerdemain, this which so many creatures of the Almighty have lived and died by? . . . I will believe most things sooner than that.

The fact that nature had accepted the teachings of Islam proved their truth. Carlyle’s own predestination led him to assert that “Nature admits no lie.” For him Islam was one of history’s clearest examples of this law. He was not at all concerned with the traditional objection that Islam was spread by the sword: “On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can”; the great thing was that the Prophet’s word had been believed; were this not so, Islam would never have spread. Carlyle rejects suggestions that Muḥammad manufactured His religion out of Christian doctrines received from a Nestorian monk whom He met in Syria during His youth, or that He distorted Christian and Jewish doctrines and in so doing produced the Qur’án through trickery. He does, however, indirectly accept that Islam devolved from Christianity. But by refusing to discuss the ultimate origin of the “revealed” religions Carlyle does accept indirectly that Islam devolved from Christianity.

For Carlyle the proof of the genuineness of Islam was its power to sweep away the corrupt, divided Syrian Christian sects and replace the pagan idolatry of the Arabs with a firmly monotheist creed. As a result the Arabs had arisen from obscurity to lead mankind in civilization. The extent of Islamic power and dominion was a fact that no European could deny and that Gibbon noted with admiration. For Carlyle the phenomenon was a proof of spiritual belief:

A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable . . . glancing in valor and splendour and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving.

The last sentence sums up the message of Heroes and Hero-Worship; belief and resulting heroic actions have brought the deepest changes in history. History’s heroes were those who became infused with the inspiration of heaven and convinced others of their “revelation,” spreading their belief to whole epochs that, in turn, were rich in achievement. The Arabs had established a civilization that spread from Delhi to Granada; their inspiration had been the “Great Man” [Page 21] who always came “as lightning from heaven” (note the echo of the New Testament). The one man “Mahomet,” in “one century,” had inspired an “unnoticed people” to spread their civilizing influence from India to Spain.

Carlyle’s re-creation of the phenomenon of Islam is, therefore, based on the following: first, his personal admiration of Muḥammad, Whom he paints as a proud, untutored visionary, responding to the mystic wonder of nature; then, the kinship between the piety and faith of the Islamic community and Carlyle’s own covenanting Presbyterian background; next, the ethical strictness both communities displayed in practice; and, finally, the success of Islam in creating a society ordered on the law of God. In setting out such a picture Carlyle won for Islam for the first time a sincere respect. All previous commentators in the West had maintained reservations; many had been openly hostile.

Though Carlyle’s own preoccupations greatly influenced the conception and presentation of his theme, he was the first European to present Muḥammad in a factual rather than prejudiced way. Muḥammad was not an impostor—such a view could no longer be tenable; he had not been motivated by opportunism; his conviction of his message had been entirely genuine. Islam was not a monstrous heresy perpetrated on history but a great, creative epoch in the development of mankind. Carlyle made these facts undeniably clear.

The nature of Carlyle’s audience in 1840 required him to present more of an apologia than he would have liked. “I had bishops and all kinds of people among my hearers,” he wrote in his journal after the lecture. But he had shown them that Muḥammad “had points about him which it were good for all of them to imitate . . . that, in short, it was altogether a new kind of thing they were hearing to-day.” Despite his enthusiasm for the Qur’án he also admitted in the lecture that the Qur’án was a difficult book for any European to appreciate, partly because it must suffer in translation but also because of its apparently repetitious form of composition. It had been a sense of duty that had made him read the Qur’án through.

THOUGH the lecture is Carlyle’s clearest treatment of Islam, it was not his final reference to the theme. His letters occasionally contain an approving quotation, and as his frame of mind grew more gloomy, Islam became a source of consolation and a tool of reproof. Muḥammad, like Cromwell, became a belligerent instrument to wield against a heedless age. The hedonism and false liberty of utilitarianism seemed to Carlyle to be a spreading evil. A Cromwell was needed once more to lead the nation back to the paths of righteousness; the destruction of the idols of the Kaaba needed to be repeated in the modern age, which had erected new idols. The Prophet Muḥammad was now to be used almost as a figure of spiritual coercion, to save by force the soul of the individual, or to slay him. As earlier, Carlyle’s own state of mind determined his view of his hero.

In the third volume of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845) Carlyle appends to a speech of Cromwell the following remarks addressed to a nineteenth-century liberal politician:

[Page 22]

He fills me with terror, this two-legged Rhetorical Phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without Rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive-eloquence, with wild-flashing heart and scimitar, is: “Wretched mortal, give up that; or by the Eternal, thy Maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou blasphemous scandalous Misbirth of Nature, is not even that the kindest thing I can do for thee, if thou repent not and alter, in the name of Alah?”

In The Latter-Day Pamphlets, his iconoclastic series of broadsides against liberal, Victorian England, capitalism, and secularism, Carlyle apocalyptically invokes Muḥammad’s destruction of the idols of Mecca:

The Idol of Somnauth, a mere mass of coarse crockery not worth five shillings of anybody’s money, sat like a great staring god, with two diamonds for eyes; worshipped by the neighbouring black populations; a terror and divine mystery to all mortals, till its day came. Till at least, victorious in the name of Allah, the Commander of the Faithful, riding up with grim battle-axe and heart full of Moslem fire, took the liberty to smite once, with right force and rage, said ugly mass of idolatrous crockery; which thereupon shivered, with unmelodious crash and jingle, into a heap of ugly potsherds, yielding from its belly half a wagon-load of gold coins.

Elsewhere in the Pamphlets he sardonically describes a statue of the railway king, George Hudson (1800-71), as a visible symbol of the Victorian’s true religion— money-making and success: “The new Apollo Belvidere this, or Ideal of the Scrip Ages. What do you think of it? Allah Ilallah there is still one God, you see, in England; and this is his Prophet.” Though he uses the Islamic declaration of faith ironically to parody the sacrilegious character of the new gods, the images of Islam retain their special distinctions for Carlyle. They show how Carlyle took Islam into his personal Pantheon, how his admiration grew from an early tolerance learned from the Germans, developed through the major portrait of the lecture in Heroes, and eventually became an important part of Carlyle’s personal myth. Nor is the last stage negligible; in the artistic consciousness, as Yeats showed, especially in that of the Romantic artist, heroes and personal myth making are a vital sustenance. Islam contributed much to the spiritual life of a deeply religious man disinherited from faith.

[Page 23]

[Page 24]

[Page 25]

Bahá’í Laws on the Status of Men

BY LINDA AND JOHN WALBRIDGE

Copyright © 1986 by Linda Walbridge and John Walbridge.

AMONG the social principles of the Bahá’í Faith is the equality of men and women. Although the position of women in Bahá’í law represents a radical change from traditional roles, Bahá’u’lláh’s legislation, in fact, does not treat men and women identically in every respect. An examination of these differences reveals a pattern for a society in which the continuity of the family is traced through the father—a patrilineal family. A similar pattern is to be found in the Qur’án where drastic improvements in the status of women are accompanied by a restoration of the patrilineal family.

Both sets of laws, one can argue, address the problems caused by an increasingly matrilineal family. In a matrilineal family the father has an incidental role, and women and children are left with inadequate support and protection. In a patrilineal family the father is tied to the mother and child by social rewards and constraints. The Bahá’í Faith, however, rejects the traditional patriarchy in which men dominate the family and society.

The equality of men and women is a fundamental principle of the Bahá’í Faith. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—the son of Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith—compares men and women to the two wings of a bird, both of which are necessary for flight, and promises that, given equal education, the intellectual attainments of women will equal those of men:

The world of humanity consists of two parts, male and female. Each is the complement of the other. Therefore, if one is defective, the other will necessarily be incomplete, and perfection cannot be attained. . . . Just as physical accomplishment is complete with two hands, so man and woman, the two factors of the social body, must be perfect. It is not natural that either should remain undeveloped, and until both are perfected the happiness of the human world will not be realized.

The education of girls, in fact, is to receive priority over that of boys, should a choice be necessary, because their role as mothers makes them the first educators of the next generation.

The Roles of Men and Women in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas

IT IS thus with some shock that Western Bahá’ís reading A Synopsis and Codification of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Most Holy Book of Bahá’u’lláh discover that the treatment of men and women in Bahá’í law is not identical in every respect. In some cases the differences reflect simple common sense: Women who are pregnant or nursing are not required to fast; sons inherit the clothing of the father while daughters inherit the mother’s clothing. In other cases the differences may not correspond to contemporary sensibilities: Menstruating women are excused from most ritual obligations. There are, however, significant [Page 26] differences in the laws of marriage, inheritance, and individual status that could be interpreted as implying a socially inferior station for women. However, since Bahá’u’lláh explicitly makes major changes in the status of women, it is not possible to argue that He was simply adopting Islamic law and custom. Typical of the whole problem is the law making the father (not the parents) responsible for educating both sons and daughters and requiring the House of Justice to see to their education if he is unwilling or unable to do so.

In many respects, however, the Aqdas treats men and women identically. Both men and women reach maturity at fifteen, the age at which they become subject to the laws of prayer and fasting and are allowed to marry. Though menstruating women are not required to perform the obligatory prayer or to fast, they are required instead to perform ritual ablutions (which are required in general for obligatory prayers) and to recite a particular verse. The reasons for this are not explained, but there is no reason to suppose it has anything to do with ritual purity; all the other exemptions to the laws of fasting and prayer are for circumstances in which the obligation would be difficult, inconvenient, or unhealthful: in illness, old age, childhood, travel, or heavy labor. Elsewhere in the Aqdas Bahá’u’lláh requires that each person work (the Arabic text implies useful activity, not necessarily paid employment) and equates work with worship. Moreover, each person, man or woman, should acquire a profession by which he might support himself as necessary.

The most obvious area in which the relative stations of men and women are defined is the law of marriage. Men and women both can marry at fifteen, and it is forbidden for a girl to be engaged before then. The parties themselves choose their partners, but all living parents must consent. As in Islam the groom gives the bride a dowry, but this is limited to about 330 grams of gold. Since Bahá’u’lláh states that it is preferable that the dowry be a much smaller amount, about 65 grams of silver, and allows it to be given in the form of a promissory note, it seems clear that He intended that the dowry not stand in the way of marriage, an institution He strongly recommends.

Although either the husband or wife may initiate divorce, there are significant differences. A marriage may be annulled at the very beginning if the girl is not a virgin and if the marriage was conditioned upon virginity, but if the girl were not a virgin, Bahá’u’lláh strongly encourages the husband to conceal the matter. During long periods of separation the husband is required to keep his wife informed of his whereabouts. If he does not, she may remarry after remaining for nine months without word from him. Otherwise, Bahá’u’lláh assumes divorce to be a matter of mutual agreement, completed after a year’s waiting. If a separation leading to divorce occurs while the couple is traveling, the husband is required to assume the expenses for his wife’s return home. Unless divorce occurs because of the wife’s infidelity, the husband is required to pay her living expenses for the year of waiting. (Incidentally, the punishment for adultery is the same for both men and [Page 27] women.) Bahá’u’lláh abrogated the Islamic law of divorce that normally prohibited a couple’s remarrying each other unless the woman had been married to and divorced from someone else.

In the Aqdas Bahá’u’lláh requires each Bahá’í to write a will, but He also lays down a complicated system for dividing the estates of the intestate, a system derived with significant modifications from the laws of the Báb in the Bayán. Under His scheme about 43 percent of the estate, twice that which the Báb allotted, goes to the children—a change that Bahá’u’lláh specifically says was motivated by concern for their well-being. This share is divided equally among all the children. Fifteen percent goes to the surviving spouse, 13 percent to the father, 11 percent to the mother, 8 percent to brothers, 6 percent to sisters, and 4 percent to teachers. Various provisions are also made for dividing the estate if not all the above classes are extant. If there are no children, for example, their share goes to the House of Justice to be spent on orphans and widows and on what will profit mankind, but if other classes of heirs are missing, two-thirds of their share goes to the children. In most cases, although not in all, male heirs receive better treatment than female heirs. While the shares of all the children, male and female, are equal in value, the eldest son receives the father’s house and clothes as part of his share, while daughters receive the mother’s clothes as part of their share. A deceased son’s inheritance from his parent goes directly to his children, while a deceased daughter’s share is forfeited to the other heirs. Stepchildren do not receive a share of the stepparent’s estate. The half brothers and sisters from the same father receive the same share as full brothers and sisters. Half brothers and sisters from the mother’s side receive less or nothing. If a man dies, any property he has purchased for his wife’s use is considered part of his estate except for the clothing and property he has specifically given her.

It should be noted, of course, that the provisions for dividing an estate apply only in the case of intestacy and that all Bahá’ís are obligated to make wills adapted to their circumstances. Nevertheless, one can assume that the provisions Bahá’u’lláh made for intestacy do represent what He considered to be a normal and equitable division of an estate, all other things being equal.

One additional difference in the treatment of men and women in the Aqdas should be noted: Only men are obligated to make pilgrimage although women in practice are encouraged to do so.

In Bahá’u’lláh’s provisions for marriage, divorce, and intestacy one can perceive three common themes: First, the continuity of the family is traced through the male line. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said in another context, “In all the Divine Dispensations, the eldest son hath been given extraordinary distinctions.” The father’s principal residence, the chief symbol of the family, goes to the eldest son. If any son predeceases his father, his children inherit his share of his father’s estate, but the children of daughters receive nothing. In many cases, although not in all, the inheritance of a male relation—a father, for example—is greater than the inheritance of a woman in the same degree of kinship. Finally, a widow inherits relatively little of her husband’s estate: A man’s chief heirs are his children, and first among them is the eldest son. The effect of all these provisions is to channel the inheritance [Page 28] and the continuity of the family through the male line.

Second, insofar as possible the biological father retains social and economic responsibility for his children. An adopted child who marries must obtain the permission of his biological parents. Stepchildren have no claim on inheritance from their stepparents. The laws concerning chastity, marriage, and divorce —whatever their other purposes—have the effect of making paternity absolutely clear.

Third, men bear primary economic responsibility for the family. In marriage the husband gives the wife a small dowry as her personal property, and in the case of divorce the husband will normally provide the wife’s living expenses during the year of separation. In inheritance the shares of female heirs are sometimes smaller than those of male heirs. There is an assumption that the basic expenses of the household are being met by the husband, implied by the provision that the assets of the household are part of his estate. Moreover, the share of a surviving spouse is relatively small. For a widower this would not matter, since the bulk of the household assets would be assumed to be his. For a widow, however, the amount inherited is rather small. Given the concern about the well-being of widows and orphans expressed in other provisions of the Aqdas, it seems likely that the mother would normally be expected to remain part of the household of the eldest son, particularly since her home was now his property. If this is so, it would seem that the widow’s share would be sufficient to provide some independent assets in the absence of the need to provide completely for her own support. Likewise, the provisions that a man’s children take precedence over his stepchildren and that orphaned children do not receive a full inheritance from their maternal grandparents seem to imply that they are the responsibility of another family—that is, the family of their father. The law giving the father responsibility for the education of the children seems to imply that it will be he who has the financial resources to pay the teacher.

Fourth, women are given primary responsibility for the early care of children, both in the Aqdas and in various statements of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi on the special responsibility of the mother for the early education of children.

A letter written by the Universal House of Justice to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of New Zealand supports the interpretation of the roles of men and women in the Bahá’í family deduced from the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. The House of Justice first emphasizes that any distinctions made in the Bahá’í writings should be considered in the light of the general principle of the equality of the sexes and cites a Tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “In this divine age the bounties of God have encompassed the world of women. Equality of men and women, except in some negligible instances, has been fully and categorically announced. Distinctions have been utterly rernoved.” The House of Justice further emphasizes that the central fact of Bahá’í family life should be unity, harmony, and frank and loving communication.

Nevertheless, there are differences in rights and responsibilities within the family:

it can be inferred from a number of the responsibilities placed upon him, that the father can be regarded as the “head” of the family. The members of the family all have duties and responsibilities towards one another and to the family as a whole, and these duties and responsibilities vary from member to member because of their natural relationships. The parents have the inescapable duty to educate their children—but not vice versa; the children have the duty to obey their parents—the parents [Page 29] do not obey the children; the mother—not the father—bears the children, nurses them in babyhood, and is thus their first educator, hence daughters have a prior right to education over sons and, as the Guardian’s secretary has written on his behalf, “The task of bringing up a Bahá’í child, as emphasized time and again in Bahá’í Writings, is the chief responsibility of the mother, whose unique privilege is indeed to create in her home such conditions as would be most conducive to both his material and spiritual welfare and advancement. The training which the child first receives through his mother constitutes the strongest foundation for his future development.” A corollary of this responsibility of the mother is her right to be supported by her husband—a husband has no explicit right to be supported by his wife. This principle of the husband’s responsibility to provide for and protect the family can be seen applied also in the law of intestacy which provides that the family’s dwelling place passes, on the father’s death, not to his widow, but to his eldest son; the son at the same time has the responsibility to care for his mother.

Finally, the House of Justice points out that Bahá’u’lláh explicitly envisaged that women as well as men would be breadwinners, a principle confirmed by His provision that both boys and girls would follow essentially the same curriculum in school and by His and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s repeated emphasis on the future worldly attainments of women.

The Laws of the Qur’án on the Roles of Men and Women

IT IS instructive to compare the legislation of the Aqdas with that of the Qur’án. The Qur’án in many places explicitly addresses the question of the status of women. As does the Aqdas, the Qur’án strongly asserts the spiritual equality of men and women. Even though in Arabic the masculine plural of such terms as “Muslim” and “believer” can normally be construed as referring to a group including both men and women, the Qur’án often uses both the masculine and feminine plurals together to stress the inclusion of both men and women:

Men and women who have surrendered,

believing men and believing women,

obedient men and obedient women,

truthful men and truthful women,

enduring men and enduring women,

humble men and humble women,

men and women who give in charity,

men who fast and women who fast,

men and women who guard their private parts,

men and women who remember God oft—

for them God has prepared forgiveness and a mighty wave.

The Qur’án addresses the social station of women in the context of its concern with morality and social justice. It strongly criticizes the lax morals of pre-Islamic Arabia and sets out to reform sexual conduct and strictly regulate the institution of marriage. It shows pre-Islamic Arabia as a society in which marriage and sexual relations were casual and shallow, women were promiscuous but nonetheless at the mercy of men, mates were exchanged casually, men and women were pitted against each other in marriage, and children were at the mercy of circumstance.

Though the Qur’án is the most reliable source of information on Arabian society at the advent of Islam, such other evidence as exists tends to confirm its picture of the state of the family. Many patterns of marriage existed simultaneously in pre-Islamic Arabian society. Indeed, among Arabs “marriage” was [Page 30] a very general term referring to conditions ranging from arrangements whereby a woman received only occasional visits from a man or several men to contractual relationships in which one or more women became the property of a man. For example, according to tradition, Salmá bint ‘Amr, a great-grandmother of the Prophet, would nor marry anyone except on condition that she live apart from the man and be her own mistress. The lady in question was married for a time to Háshim, a Meccan of Quraysh. During this marriage she bore him a son, known later as ‘Abdu’l-Muṭṭalib. At first the child remained with Salmá’s people, but they were finally prevailed upon to turn him over to his father’s kin. A certain Umm-Khárijah contracted marriages in more than twenty tribes, and the story has it that she lived among those sons who had not gone off with their fathers. Ibn-‘Abbás, a famous traditionist of the generation after the Prophet, reported that formerly when a man went to a city where he was a stranger, he would marry a woman for the duration of his stay to keep house for him. According to Ibn-‘Abbás, the Prophet forbade this sort of union. Slave women, of course, were their masters’ to do with as they would; and there were, as well, incidents of free women being treated as property and being lost at gambling or as security for a debt.

The traditionist Bukhárí, writing in the third Muslim century, identified four types of marriage practiced before Islam:

In the first type a man would betroth his daughter or ward to another man. The latter would then pay a dowry and marry her. Muḥammad’s marriage to his first wife Khadíjah, which took place before His call to prophethood, was of the kind later prescribed for Muslims: Permission was sought from Khadíjah’s father, and a contract for a dowry was arranged.

In the second type of marriage the husband, when his wife was finished menstruating, would instruct her to send to a certain man and ask him to have intercourse with her. The husband would then refrain from sexual relations with his wife until it was clear that she was pregnant by the other man. This he would do in order to get a child.

In the third type of marriage a small group of men would visit the same woman and all have sexual relations with her. If she bore a child, she would summon them all and say, “I have borne a child, and he is your child . . . ,” naming one of them. The child would then bear the name of that man and be attached to him, and he could not refuse.

Finally, there was the prostitute who set up a banner at her door and accepted any man who came to her. If she bore a child, the physiognomists were summoned to announce the man the child most resembled. The child then remained attached to the man chosen and bore his name, and the father would have no recourse.

Divorce also was a simple matter. Among the Bedouins a woman might change the direction of her tent door, a sign to her husband [Page 31] that he had been dismissed. Wives, of course, could be dismissed at will, although the dowry might not be returned.

Although men undeniably dominated the economic, political, and military life of pre-Islamic Arabia, they did not necessarily insist on ascertaining the paternity of the children they raised. Indeed, in many cases the identity of the father was simply unknown. Women commonly married while pregnant with another man’s child. If a woman was essentially dependent on her own family, there was no need to insist on chastity.

It can be argued that in a tribal society such as pre-Islamic Arabia where loyalties were almost exclusively to the clan, such a situation would not be harmful. A woman was, after all, under the protection of her own family, and her brother or uncle would be the protector and provide for her children. In Arabia no one could exist without the full cooperation of others, and one could rely on the support and protection of the clan or tribe under almost any circumstances. However, this was changing by Muḥammad’s time. While the tribe was still primary, traits such as personal ambition were reducing the concern for the general welfare of the tribe. In Mecca at that time individual men were preoccupied with gathering personal wealth, and the obligations of tribe and clan no longer bound them so strongly. The Qur’án harshly criticizes the callousness and greed of the rich merchants of Mecca. The old virtues of generosity, protection of the weak, and defiance of the foe were no longer their main concern. The ones who suffered the most from such structural change were those most in need of protection: women and children. Muḥammad Himself was an orphan and spent His childhood living precariously on the suffrance of one relative or another.

Islam abolished all types of marriages and sexual unions except for the first type described by Bukhárí—that in which a man betrothed his daughter to another man, and a dowry was given in return. Moreover, the Qur’án commanded strict chastity and made provision for modest dress and some separation of the sexes (though the institution of the veil was mainly a later development).

Marriage was first a relation of love between a man and women:

And of His signs

is that He created for you, of yourselves,

spouses, that you might repose in them,

and He has set between you love and mercy.

Having sexual relations with one’s wife was encouraged, a response both to pre-Islamic abuses and misguided Muslim asceticism. All were exhorted to marry, even if they were poor and could not afford a free woman’s dowry; but the virtuous were to marry the virtuous. The Qur’án carefully defined the prohibited degrees of relationship for marriage —indicating, presumably, that incest was known in pre-Islamic Arabia. From the fact that it was particularly prohibited, evidently marriage with stepmothers had caused problems.

The Qur’anic reformation of marriage took much of its impulse from Islam’s concern with social justice, and certain of the laws concerning marriage were intended to redress specific economic injustices. First, the Qur’án guaranteed women a degree of economic independence. The dowry was evidently to be paid to the woman, not to her father; and the man was to pay it willingly unless she voluntarily remitted it. (Presumably, this referred to dowries paid in installments after marriage.) As has been seen above, however, the lack of a dowry was not to stand in the way of marriage.

A concern for social justice was also behind [Page 32] the Qur’án’s acceptance of polygamy. Men were permitted to enter into polygamous marriages with their wards if they feared they could not treat them justly otherwise; but if they could not treat each of their wives fairly, they were to confine themselves to one wife. There is reason to believe that polygamy was uncommon in Arabia before Islam. Although it is not mentioned in the Qur’án, the Prophet also encouraged polygamous marriages in order to provide security and respectability for women who would otherwise be unprotected and to deal with problems that might have led to divorce or adultery.

The Qur’anic laws of divorce and remarriage were designed to discourage divorce, to prevent divorce’s being used to exploit women and children, and to clarify the paternity of any children born during or after divorce. In pursuit of the first end the Qur’án strongly discouraged divorce and encouraged arbitration when there was ill will between the husband and wife. There had been an old Arabian practice of taking a vow making one’s wife “like the back of my mother”—that is, making sexual intercourse with her to be incest. The wife was thus in a limbo, unable to remarry. The Qur’án, in accordance with its general teaching that vows to do evil were invalid, outlawed this practice, making it a sin to be expiated by the freeing of a slave or two months’ fasting. Though a husband could divorce his wife merely by saying so, he could freely take her back any time during her period of waiting. However, if he had done so twice before, she would have to marry and divorce another man before he could remarry her. This law, intended to prevent men from casually threatening divorce, later degenerated into the practice of repeating the formula of divorce three times to make the divorce irrevocable.

The second purpose of Qur’ánic divorce law was to prevent the exploitation of women. A man divorcing his wife was required to support her in her usual style during the period before the divorce became final and until any children born had been weaned at the customary age of two. After that, some fair but unspecified provision was to be made. Moreover, divorce was not to be used as a way to avoid paying the dowry. Although a woman could voluntarily remit her dowry in order to obtain a divorce, her husband could not treat her harshly in order to force her to do so, nor could he demand the return of any gift he had given her or accept remission of the dowry were he to divorce her to marry another. Whatever terms were agreed to in a divorce, they were not to be such as to take advantage of the woman.

Normally, there had to be a waiting period of four months before a divorce became final and the woman could remarry. The explicit purpose was to ascertain whether the woman was pregnant. If she was, her husband had the first right to take her back. In any event, during the four months she could neither have sexual relations with her husband nor betroth herself to another man. Moreover, if she were to learn that she was pregnant during that time, she was forbidden to conceal the fact. A divorced man was then absolutely responsible for the support of his child. In Qur’anic law the role of the woman’s family after marriage was almost eliminated.

The legislation of the Qur’án and the surviving evidence of pre-Islamic marital practices indicates that ancient Arabian society had become distinctly matrilineal. In a matrilineal society name, property, and family continuity are transmitted through the female line while in a patrilineal society they are transmitted through men. This is not to be confused with patriarchy and matriarchy. Patriarchy includes descent and inheritance through the male line but also implies that [Page 33] the wife lives with or near the husband’s family and that women and children are subordinate to men. To say that pre-Islamic society was matrilineal is to say that the continuity of the family went through the mother and her family. The most important sign of this was that men were not greatly concerned with the true paternity of their children and thus did not insist on chastity in women.

Before Islam it was never specifically stated who had the obligation to care for progeny. It may have been assumed that a maternal uncle or other kinsman would do so. While there were certainly fathers who provided for their offspring, there were no hard and fast rules making this obligatory.

Societies, it seems, can easily slip into matrilineality. The descriptions of marriage practices in pre-Islamic Arabia show that there is nothing inevitable about men’s insisting that their role as progenitor be linked with their role as social father. As Robertson Smith put it, “Procreation and nurture together make fatherhood, but the first is too weak without the second.” A woman and her child form a natural social unit based on a mother’s biological tie with her child. The father is not necessarily bound in this way to his child and, furthermore, is not actually required to complete the unit.

If a man does not insist on being certain of the physical paternity of the children who are born to the woman with whom he has sexual relations, he obviously does not insist on her chastity either. Therefore, in any type of matrilineal union, there will be no emphasis placed on chastity since it has no social function.

That women and children were not always properly provided for and protected in ancient Arabia is evident from Muḥammad’s emphasis on the plight of widows and orphans. His sanction of polygamy, despite the abuses He knew to be possible, itself addressed this problem in that it allowed women to be incorporated into a polygamous family life rather than leaving them to contract temporary marriages with various men.

Although there were superficial advantages in the freedom pre-Islamic matrilineal customs offered women, on balance its main effect was to leave them unprotected. The Qur’án catalogs the abuses that resulted: female infanticide, widespread prostitution, divorce used as a tool of extortion, and shallow and unhappy marital relationships.

The Qur’án attempted to create a patrilineal society that subjected men to a system of rewards and constraints. Chastity was enforced for both men and women. Prostitution in its various forms was outlawed. The marriage contract was strengthened and divorce made more difficult. Polygamy was introduced as a way of dealing with sexual conflicts within the confines of marriage. Adultery was made a serious crime (although it was also made very difficult to prove legally). These regulations served to ensure that men could identify their children with confidence, while denying men sexual relationships outside of marriage.

Second, men were given explicit economic responsibility for the care of their wives and children, even after divorce. The dowry was to be given to the woman herself. Divorce was made financially burdensome for men but not for women. To balance the financial responsibility, men were to be given a larger share of inheritances than women. Specifically because of their economic responsibilities toward women, men were to have a social rank a degree above women:

Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended their property.

The Qur’án, in short, dealt with the oppression to which women and children were subject in pre-Islamic Arabia by providing for their protection within the context of a strong and happy family. Thus men were given explicit economic responsibility for their offspring and their wives, and the sexual freedom of both was restricted. To make the arrangement [Page 34] palatable to men the structure of the family was weighted in favor of the man, replacing his sexual freedom and social and economic irresponsibility with the satisfaction that comes from providing for his family. A matrilineal society, the Qur’án implies, is a degenerate condition that must be replaced by a patrilineal society in order for the weak to be protected; for men to take their full place in the family; and for men, women, and children to have the warm family life that God wishes for them.

Matrilineality in Modern Society

IN JUDGING the contemporary relevance of the legislation of Bahá’u’lláh’s Kitáb-i-Aqdas, it is necessary to look at the structure of the family in modern society. It is not difficult to see parallels between the matrilineal family of pre-Islamic Arabia and the contemporary North American family. In the matrilineal family the children’s tie is to the mother and her family. The biological father’s role is peripheral —if his identity is known at all—and his economic and social functions are filled indifferently by him, the woman’s current husband or lover, or the woman’s family or other protectors.

A generation ago the structure of the typical North American family was unquestionably patrilineal—the fabled “nuclear family.” A man married and supported his wife and children, and they took his name. A woman was expected to be chaste before marriage; an illegitimate pregnancy was a family disaster. Divorce was relatively uncommon and, for the man, accompanied by social disgrace and ruinous financial settlements, often preventing his remarrying. A man who could afford it might keep a mistress—in effect, polygamy, a thoroughly patrilineal practice—but the matrilineal practice of a married woman’s adultery was less acceptable. (It should not be thought, of course, that the North American family of thirty years ago represents a Bahá’í ideal. The woman generally was not allowed to be an equal partner in the relationship, generally did not work outside the home, and certainly did not enjoy equal privileges with men in economic, social, and intellectual life.)

Though this idealized nuclear family was hardly universal then and is still common now, matrilineal family structures have gained greatly at its expense. Certainly, the nuclear family is no longer the only socially acceptable family structure. Women keep their own names after marriage as an explicit signal of their independence of their husbands. The most significant change toward matrilineality is the vast increase in divorce and remarriage. Since the children almost invariably follow the mother, a man’s closest ties are often not to his biological children but to the children of his current wife by her former husband. The children’s contacts with their biological father are likely to be confined to occasional weekend visits, and their contacts with their father’s family almost nil (as witnessed by recent lawsuits demanding visitation rights for grandparents). It is generally expected that a man will treat his wife’s children by other men as his own, and it is significant that the children will often take his name.

With men no longer as concerned about the paternity of the children they raise, there is little need for them to insist on chastity in women, nor do women derive any particular benefit from it. In middle-class families this leads to late marriage as women and especially men are freed of the need to undertake the responsibilities of marriage in order to obtain a sexual partner. Correlate with it are such phenomena as epidemics of teenage pregnancies and venereal disease, a large number of abortions, and instability of the marriages that are undertaken.

Among the poor the problem is aggravated by a social welfare system that supplants even the economic functions of the father, who— perceiving quite correctly that his labors are neither needed by his family nor likely to offer them any hope of improving their condition —drifts away, to be replaced by other lovers.

The losers in this game of sexual musical chairs are the single mother and her children —her former husband most likely remarried [Page 35] and with another family to support. In many cases these single mothers exist on the edge of poverty, receiving little or nothing from the former husband, unable to earn enough to support the children comfortably, yet often too distracted by the need to earn a living to meet the children’s emotional and intellectual needs. Such fatherless families have now largely supplanted the traditional poor whom the modern social welfare system was designed to help.

It is striking that the sexual experimentation of the last two decades has been virtually all in the direction of matrilineal family structures: “open” marriage, living together before marriage, group sex, casual divorce and remarriage, carelessness about paternity, single women choosing to bear children, and so on. Such patrilineal practices as early marriage, arranged marriage, and betrothal of children are generally felt to be unacceptable. And institutionalized polygamy is scarcely more accepted than it was when it was suppressed by Federal troops in Utah a century ago.

As in pre-Islamic Arabia, the weakness of the family and its degeneration into matrilineal forms have given men a high degree of irresponsible sexual freedom and left women and children exploited and without any means to compel men to provide for their needs. Men have been encouraged to pursue immediate sexual gratification at the price of the long-term happiness and spiritual growth fostered by the responsibilities of caring for a family.

Implications for the Future

IMPORTANT though the problem of the family may be, it is not the only issue relating to women treated in the laws of Bahá’u’lláh. The legislation of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas relating to men and women in the family may be understood as reflecting the following principles:

First: Bahá’u’lláh’s most important reform is the emancipation of women. The Kitáb-i-Aqdas requires that girls as well as boys be educated and have professions. The Middle Eastern Bahá’ís understood immediately the revolutionary implications of this. There is no reference in the Aqdas to any obligatory division of labor within the family other than the father’s responsibility to provide for the education of his children and the importance of the mother in the child’s earliest training. There is no commandment that wives obey their husbands; nor is there, in striking contrast to the Qur’án, any reference to men having a higher rank than women. In the family, as elsewhere in Bahá’í life, decisions are to be made by consulting, not by the dictate of an individual with authority. Although the most important statements of the equality of men and women in the Bahá’í writings are contained in certain of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talks in the West, the American Bahá’ís had already isolated it as a fundamental principle of the Faith on the basis of the relevant laws of the Aqdas. The principle is also stated in certain of Bahá’u’lláh’s tablets. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá made very clear that women in the Bahá’í dispensation were to take a full role in society. In the Bahá’í Faith there is no restriction on the freedom of women other than the ordinances that apply to men and women alike.

Second: Nonetheless, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas does make the assumption that women will be mainly responsible for the care of young children, though it does not ordain that this must be so. It is, after all, women who become pregnant and give birth. The mother’s bond with her newborn child is intense and forms almost instantly. If the mother nurses the child, she will quite naturally undertake most of the child’s earliest training. The mother’s role may vary in different societies, but it is not entirely an arbitrary imposition.

Third: While the mother/child unit is biological and not easily broken, society must shape the family to make a place for the father. The Aqdas thus skews the structure of the family slightly to place its continuity in the male line. In the law of inheritance the family home passes to the sons. Moreover, the father is assumed to have the primary economic responsibility for the family. The assumption behind the division of an intestate estate seems to be that the eldest son will assume [Page 36] responsibility for the care of his mother and unmarried sisters, and orphaned stepchildren will be cared for by the family of their biological father. The patrilineal family structure that the legislation of the Aqdas fosters thus ensures that the father has a place and a responsibility within the family.

Conclusion

GIVEN the unfortunate polarization of views that has arisen recently on the role of women in the family and in economic and public life, there are certain comments to be made concerning the implications of this paper:

First, it concerns only a minor theme within a very specific area of Bahá’í law: the role of men in the family. Were its subject the Bahá’í teachings concerning women in general, the subjects discussed above would have formed only a small part.

Second, the subject of this paper is in reality not women but men and how they can be made part of the family. It does not argue that women should or should not be in the home but only that men should be an integral part of the family.

Third, the essay does not touch on the question of whether mothers should work outside the home. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá specifically says that girls should study the same curriculum as boys so that as women they can participate equally in all aspects of society. While He does say that women should receive good educations so that they can be good mothers, that is not the only reason they should be educated. Nonetheless, both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi lay great stress on the importance of the mother in the early intellectual, moral, and spiritual training of the child. Women should thus have the freedom to be mothers without needing to work outside the home while their children are young. Men should be able to provide for their wives and children and should do so willingly. No woman should have to chose between financial survival and caring adequately for her children. Also, society must make some accommodation to the special needs of mothers and children, which means that it must act on the basis of a genuine recognition that children are important. On the one hand, there must be respect for motherhood, so that the bearing of children is not accompanied by a collapse of a woman’s self-esteem. On the other hand, work life must be structured so that women can reenter their careers gradually and with honor.

Fourth, divorce must be taken much more seriously than it is at present. Too casual an attitude toward divorce undermines all that Bahá’u’lláh tried to accomplish by His reform of the family.

Finally, nothing discussed in this study should be taken as an excuse for the oppression of women within the family. Bahá’u’lláh advocates a mildly patrilineal family, not a patriarchal society. While one might still say with the Bible that a woman leaves her father’s house and goes to her husband’s, her husband is not her master or her owner. Bahá’u’lláh does not prescribe rigid family roles. The Bahá’í family is based on love, unity, and consultation. The argument here is that the laws of the Aqdas recognize that women, at least in the years when their children are young, have special needs best met by their children’s fathers. But if men are to be a real part of the family, they must have an essential role in it. They must have the self-respect that comes from providing for their families and the satisfaction of seeing their families as extensions of themselves.

[Page 37]

[Page 38]

[Page 39]

Toward a Revitalization of Higher Education

BY RICK JOHNSON

Copyright © 1986 by Rick Johnson.

OUR HISTORICAL moment is marked by the nuclear bomb—the symbol of a crisis that it does not exhaust. Mortal peril threatens from several directions, nuclear holocaust being perhaps the worst because it may cause in minutes the death and misery that other antagonists may produce in decades. Ecological deterioration, grinding poverty, and oppression affect hundreds of millions and are little less dangerous to humanity’s long-term collective security, happiness, and well-being than is the bomb. A friend recently observed that it is pointless to worry about such things: “Throughout history people have feared that the end of the world was near; even in the 1950s everyone was sure we would all be blown up before 1985, but it hasn’t happened; so much for the doomsayers.” Perhaps there is reason to avoid succumbing to the “doomsday syndrome,” but the situation is serious enough to call for a deeper stirring of concern and creative thinking among teachers than ever before.

Now is a singular time to be involved in higher education, for the perils that confront the human family put into question the legitimacy of the higher educational enterprise. The world-threatening dangers that confront humankind cast in the starkest possible light an age-old question: What is the purpose of education? Teachers are divided and confused on the question because often there is no central integrative purpose that appropriately unites disciplines, scholars, and teachers in common endeavor, and sometimes because they fail to articulate their central purpose to the public they serve in such a way that the purpose is generally recognized and understood.

Higher education obviously serves many practical functions in society: socialization for maintaining systems and acquisition of skills for a career, to name but two. At certain points such functions compete with other goals that most teachers, upon reflection, would accept as the philosophic objectives of higher education: the training of human beings to use their reason to shape their destinies so that they do not have to submit passively, ignorantly, or superstitiously to fate, and the stimulation of intellectual growth so that everyone may realize greater personal development and contribute more fully to society.

However, higher education is experiencing a serious crisis of legitimacy because teachers often do not clearly communicate whether the central guiding imperative of the academy is to fulfill in the most effective manner practical functions or to pursue philosophic goals. The lack of clarity is encouraged by the fact that a good number of students only want a degree to gain a more lucrative future and are angry or frustrated when a teacher tries to expand their awareness because they thought colleges were simply places to earn a degree. Moreover, there are citizens who think that education that is not oriented purely toward system maintenance is irrelevant or dangerous. The problem is not that higher education fulfills different, sometimes conflicting functions but that teachers fail to identify, clearly articulate, and defend a central purpose, an imperative, to which other purposes are subordinate.

The noble philosophic goals generally remain as honorable objectives for most educators, [Page 40] but their strength as powerful integrative principles is greatly diminished. While there may be general agreement that “higher goals” exist that transcend career and professional training or applied research, these are not clearly articulated in a coherent vision or program that is currently appropriate. There is generally a lack of dynamic expression of the noblest vision of education other than formless, age-old rhetoric. Educators willy-nilly end up serving other masters whose goals are more clearly defined.

In its genteel, elitist, and somewhat quaint style the old liberal arts tradition held that certain things went into the making of an educated person, that certain subjects, such as literature, philosophy, language, and history, were essential for inculcating refined, cultivated tastes and values. Such a consensus about the ends of education, and thus its process and subjects, has long been breaking down under various pressures, not the least of which are specialization, professionalism, and careerism.

Today finding common agreement on the content of a good education is difficult, if not impossible, for teachers cannot agree on what the essential subjects for today’s student are. Most teachers have been involved in enough faculty discussion of such topics to recognize the lack of agreement, even within one’s own discipline. Today the explosion of information, the vast expansion of fields and subfields of study, the development of ideological splits within many disciplines, and a general climate of moral relativism make educators much less prescriptive regarding appropriate educational content and process. Educators, while they may agree in a general way that education ought to contribute to people’s ability to shape their destiny and develop intellectually, often are unwilling or unable to say what subjects or curricula are essential to stimulate or encourage such growth. Education is increasingly fragmented. The integrative spirit of the old liberal arts tradition often remains only as a ghostly sheet covering a multitude of diverse, disconnected, and fragmented majors, disciplines, subfields, and requirements. The ghostly spirit of an integrative core often remains as “distributional general education requirements” (at leasr for some majors or programs), but this is usually a smorgasbord with little in the way of an orienting, integrative center.

Educational fragmentation is encouraged by increasing specialization, which is often necessary in the modern world and has its benefits. But it also has costs. Sometimes it is the case that colleagues in different corners of the same discipline can hardly converse with one another with genuine interest and understanding. Specialization is, of course, only one aspect of the fragmentation in higher education generally and within specific disciplines.

Professionalization plays a part as well. In every field there are mysterious languages or jargons; professional associations and conferences within which specialists talk to one another; and whole systems of power, status, and reward that screen out the merely curious and produce good professionals.

Careerism is related to professionalism because to advance one’s career one must be a professional member of the discipline and respond appropriately to the demands of administrators, grant officials, and students that one’s work and teaching be relevant to advancing their careers. The cumulative effect of all these pressures is fragmentation.

In a provocative article Burns H. Weston, an international law scholar and senior fellow at the Institute for World Order, discussed the final report of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education—the six-year, $6 million product of twenty-one special reports and series of studies “to study and to make recommendations about higher education . . . ahead to the year 2000,” While the report is well known for its comprehensive description of many of the problems now plaguing [Page 41] American higher education, Weston highlights an important omission in the report: any discussion of curriculum of scholarly values. In other words, the report is strong on practical analysis but lacking in any consideration of what is taught and why. That members of the academy, both at the level of prestigious national commissions and at the level of particular institutions deal so little with humanistic concerns when they consider Priorities of Action—the title of the Carnegie report—is a measure of how much in need of reappraisal educational imperatives are.

To pursue a vision of an integrative center for education requires a fundamental reappraisal of the imperatives that currently guide higher education. For higher education in the United States has become a supermarket with colleges and universities selling degrees as commodities to a consuming public. In an era of declining numbers of students there is enormous pressure for colleges to become even more an emporium of marketable skills and titles than was the case in the best times. Of course, students must be assured that they will be able to find employment upon graduation, and deans are less than happy when classes have low enrollments because they are not perceived to be relevant to getting a job or establishing a lucrative career. But if these are the imperatives that teachers serve, let them admit as much and stop all talk about any different or more exciting vision of higher education. On the contrary, if teachers are reluctant to give up such visions, they must struggle to reclaim them.

THERE is a profound cultural disorder in the United States (although not limited to the United States) that is day by day undermining respect for education as a legitimate and, indeed, necessary path to human development. Of course, some of the blame for this educational crisis of legitimacy lies with the widely noted failings of the educational system and the consequent perception that the educational system is so flawed as to make it hardly worth the effort. But once the cultural disorder and failings of the educational system are acknowledged, the essential argument becomes that education as a lifelong search for answers to crucial questions has become a very nearly unattainable goal for many twentieth-century Americans. It is precisely this conception of education as a continuing and necessary quest that lies at the heart of a truly excellent educational process.

Times of great social stress, change, and peril are also often times of widespread doubts about the legitimacy and usefulness of institutions, political systems, traditional beliefs, and norms. These doubts are perfectly understandable. What except doubt and confusion could be expected when opinions, values, lifestyles, and faiths increasingly diverge and multiply? In times of great social change values and social institutions seem tremendously malleable and radically uncertain and conventional. Standards of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false are then not understood within a single objective reality but are posited as acts of choice or whims of convention. In such a cultural environment the basis for evaluating one’s own attitudes and behavior seems equally uncertain and conventional. It is small wonder that students have little faith in the salutary effects of education when their primary experience of the world leads them to see the written and spoken word, no less than people’s ideas and behavior, as fundamentally uncertain and conventional. Thus the perspective that “everyone does his or her own thing” and that this individualism is necessarily good becomes one of the bedrock features of contemporary culture.

To many educators individualism does not appear as a problem because for them education is simply concerned with the discovery and dissemination of the facts about whatever is the object of study. One might fairly readily agree except that the facts are often not self-evident. Facts do not present themselves already labeled; people label them. The [Page 42] kind of facts one finds depends upon the conceptual presuppositions from which one begins the search and, in large measure, upon the kinds of questions asked. The kinds of questions one asks depend upon what one thinks it is possible and appropriate to know.

No one, moreover, ever succeeds in finding or teaching all the facts about anything. Of necessity, one’s ability to live and function in the world, let alone one’s ability to learn and teach, depends upon employing some principle of selection in one’s focused perception of the world and in a selection of the facts. Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German social theorist, said that without an underlying principle of selection there is a jumbled mass of “dead facts” without meaning or value.

The proposition that whether an education is a good one or not depends upon whether it will yield the kind of intellectual growth educators are looking for, whether it is most appropriate to the goal of the intellectual search. Education is not so much about the gathering of facts as it is about the questions one seeks to answer. The search for facts becomes a relevant part of the educational process when educators know what kind of information they are looking for.

Students seem to be plagued by a growing doubt about the worth of the education they undertake, about its end’s being just another value, tradition, or institution as uncertain and conventional as anything else. And, by and large, the educational system does nothing to answer this doubt. Facts are generally disseminated but without any word of the goals toward which such information ought to lead. There are a thousand and one goals, each with its adherents and proselytizers. But there is no unifying focus or coherent, agreed-upon vision of the value, usefulness, or even necessity of the intellectual search. Students know this—they learn it early, and their curiosity is killed by the realization. Consciously or unconsciously education has become so poor in spiritual substance and vision as to appear not worth the effort for all but the most committed and self-motivated students.

An educational process stripped of its mission and vision—of its spiritual substance— is one limited to only the most pinched and worldly of goals; in this society it is the mass production of producers and consumers. Education without vision can hardly be expected to do more than machine tool youth for the most practical of pursuits (careers) or provide a union card (diploma) that certifies the bearer to be patient and good at following instructions. The situation is oversimplified, but not by much.

Nor is the wish for a unified vision of education mere nostalgia for some past golden age in American higher education. At some points in the past American higher education was unified by a central vision and goals and thus was more successful at achieving its goals, which is not a claim that the goals were noble or that they are now appropriate.

The careerism and professional mania that afflicts higher education in the United States are often attributed to the greater security and more lucrative jobs that these areas offer, which is true to an extent. However, the principal reason students flock to careerist or professional schooling is that they are smart enough to recognize the lack of vitality and vision beyond these practicalities. If students seek the practical for the obvious and relatively short-term payoff it offers, it is principally because there are no obvious long-term payoffs offered elsewhere. Education has no motivating vital vision, no view of what should be studied to pursue the question of what it means to be a human being in the late twentieth century.

The moment one speaks of the need for an orienting vision, one plunges into the realm of values. The very mention of value is enough to ruin for some the rest of this discussion. Yet there is no choice but to stay the course because the problems plaguing education are [Page 43] all fundamentally rooted in confusion about values. Each of the problems analyzed above is essentially rooted in the lack of a central purpose to guide and define education. Robert Lynd, one of the major American sociologists of this century, once published a book entitled Knowledge For What?—the fundamental question that must be asked in education.

One way to state the goal of education as it has traditionally been conceived is to say that good education is a process of personal growth, development, and self-realization. Perhaps a useful place to begin is basically to accept this description no matter how vague and ambiguous. To do so allows one to state the first point: The fundamental purpose of education is service to humanity. The world’s great religions have historically taught that the highest stage of personal development and self-realization is servitude. The determination of the quality of education thus could be said to depend on the degree to which the basic capacities and abilities of a person are developed and the goal toward which they are directed. An education lacking in the acquisition of either knowledge or skill and of reflection on value is flawed. The process of becoming educated is, then, the process of developing basic capacities and dedicating them to the service of humanity. While the religious motive for such a conception of education is significant, there are profound rational reasons to support it.

If people wish to use the knowledge they gain through education to make others suffer or even to create and use instruments of war that may destroy civilization, they do not need divine revelation to assert that such actions should be condemned. The obvious problem in building a rational argument for the goal of education outlined above is that in any question considering the good of something, especially the good of humanity, one is confronted with the limitations of inaccessible evidence and the egoism and stubbornness of human beings. How is one to know that a conception of what is good in education and, hence, good for humanity, reflects more than the prejudices of one’s age and culture? Here the recourse to religious and philosophical arguments claiming universal validity is one legitimate line of inquiry, but the purpose is to argue that there are certain factual aspects of human existence that support the conception of education offered here.

With but a few exceptions if people are to live at all, they have to live in society. And if people are to live in society, it may as well be with as much safety and opportunity for self-determination as possible. It may be granted that conceptions of value change with changing historical conditions. Such change is not a valid objection, however, because no significant group has ever seriously held that pain and suffering were desirable in themselves. They have often been regarded as means to an end, of course, but the consequences of even such violence if pushed very far have generally been recognized to be the cause of the disintegration of society. As a primary behavior or value the imposition of suffering on large groups of people is incompatible with the continued existence of society. Thus, at the most obvious level, it is clear that the strong preference of people throughout history has been to avoid suffering for themselves and to impose it only on others. Those who have used cruelty or oppression generally have used some grounds to exclude the victims from humanity. Those people accepted as really human generally have not been subject to huge amounts of cruelty. As Albert Memmi, an authority on racism, has pointed out, violence and oppression are rooted in exclusion—in excluding the subjects of such cruelty from humanity. Given all the cruelty and oppression throughout history, there has also been general agreement across time, place, and culture that it is better for those with whom one stands in solidarity [Page 44] to suffer less rather than more. To make the point clearly one can trace much of the cruelty and oppression to an exclusive parochialism that allows one to differentiate between oneself and one’s fellows and outsiders.

Thus one might say that conceptions of value change as historical conditions change. But while there is agreement that less suffering is better for one’s fellows rather than more suffering, it is more noteworthy to observe that when historical conditions change the definition of who one’s fellows are also changes. The conception of who belongs to one’s group and thus is deserving of friendship, acceptance, love, and protection is culturally and ideologically conditioned.

Thus the argument that the integrative purpose of education ought to be service to humanity is entirely in harmony with the basic truth that conceptions of value change over time. What needs to be maintained is that a conception of group solidarity has always existed and that the members of one’s own group, with whom one stands in solidarity, have been seen as deserving of service, friendship, and so on. That people in this historical moment have a different understanding of who is human or in one’s group and, therefore, worthy of service, friendship, acceptance, protection, or love than did Neanderthal man is obvious. That one’s conception of who one’s brothers are is more inclusive today than that of the ancient Greeks or Chinese is clearly a result of the historical moment in which one lives. Surely this more inclusive conception of “who is in one’s group” is appropriate to this age.

THROUGHOUT history there has been a continuing process of building wider networks of solidarity, political integrations, and the ideological structures to support expansion; then fragmentation and breakdown; then reintegration and expansion. The process is not a purely linear one; there are many dips, reverses, and moves sideways, but the general pattern has been a spiral with a definite direction toward ever wider, more inclusive political and social groupings and inclusive ideologies. In this sense it is entirely understandable that the ancient Greeks and Chinese were exclusivist—seeing everyone beyond their immediate group as barbarians, beings of an inferior sort—there was no way, given their historical situation and cultural heritage, that it could have been otherwise. It is equally understandable how nationalistic loyalties have allowed Americans to see Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, and others as enemies. The nation-state represented a legitimate and wholly reasonable response to the historical and cultural situation at the close of the medieval era. It represented a wider political integration to provide the necessary environment for the expansion of trade and commerce in the budding capitalist era. Thus the nationalistic solidarities created by the rise of the nation-state were obviously the creatures of a distinct historical setting.

People today also live in a distinct historical setting, far different from other historical junctures. For the first time in history the possibility of conceiving of a solidarity encompassing the entire planet exists. At the same time the rapidly developing reality of an integrated global economy and budding forms of transnational political integration provide structural encouragement for transnational cooperation, interaction, and integration. The increasing pressure of serious global problems such as arms control, environmental degradation, and massive poverty provides perhaps the strongest motive for transnational integration—there is a growing awareness that these problems transcend the problem-solving abilities of individual nation-states and that human survival requires an integrated transnational response. Finally, one cannot help but note a nascent global culture —in some ways trivial and vulgar (McDonald’s in Paris), but in some ways substantive and meaningful (the sometimes incredibly large global networks and friendship rings of some religious groups, political activists, and scholars and teachers).

For the first time the current historical setting makes global solidarity with a wholly inclusive definition of humanity a viable possibility [Page 45] as well as a practical necessity. To say that people’s conceptions of value are different from past ages is to state the obvious. Current conceptions of value, like those of past eras are, indeed, conditioned by what is possible and necessary or, more accurately, by what the socially dominant groups think is possible and necessary and successfully interpret to other groups as being so.

Such a concept of global solidarity is precisely the principle upon which the central integrative purpose of education ought currently to be based. The redefinition of conceptions of solidarity groups is the single most important task if humankind is to survive and have hope of a higher, more general level of fulfillment than has been yet achieved. The major roles of education are always the acquisition of knowledge and training for socialization. In the best sense of both roles what education does is equip people to live and positively contribute to their society. In a global society, of which we are inescapably a part, the educational task is to develop an understanding of the factual and moral basis of global solidarity. No country can erect walls around itself; to ensure national survival global systemic problems must be internationally solved. The moral claim of global solidarity or universal brotherhood is eminently practical. Indeed, the moral and ethical virtues are not ethereal but the practical basis on which a humane civilization is made possible.

THE PRIMARY task of teachers must be to prepare students to live in a world where change is omnipresent. Global transformation is inevitable. The political, economic, social, and religious systems with which people are now familiar will be radically altered in the next century—either by war and violence or by relatively peaceful means that will transform them into institutions and systems never seen before. Moreover, the transformation is taking place even now. It is not possible to see the future, but pressures for such global change are everywhere. The world fifty years from now will be more violent or less violent, more oppressive or less oppressive, than it is now. Who knows which will prevail in fifty years?

Richard Falk, an international law scholar concerned with issues of peace and world order, believes that

we are in the midst of a world order transition from the state system to some form of central guidance. In my view, the most probable outcome of transition, as matters now stand, is likely to be a world order pattern that is even more dangerous, exploitative and repressive than the state system.

World order is thus not necessarily sweetness and light, but Falk goes on to insist that “such an undesirable outcome, although the most probable course of events, is not yet by any means inevitable.” It was mentioned earlier that one of the historic claims of higher education has been that through the application of trained reason human beings may shape their destinies rather than passively, ignorantly, or superstitiously submit to fate. It ought to be the purpose of educators to struggle against the inevitable or fated coming of the dismal future of which Falk warns. If higher education is to retain any claim to respect and legitimacy as an enterprise worthy of the ideals associated with it, it must play an active role—and find its central purpose —in the creation of human solidarity and other minimum conditions for peace, justice, and human dignity.

If one believes that higher education should have as a unifying focus education for human survival, how would such a focus be described? Cecil Findley, an educator and a strong advocate of peace studies, has argued that peace education provides a unifying focus for education because it answers several needs for such an integrative point: value commitment (passion); broadness of focus to [Page 46] allow various disciplines and fields to contribute (capacious concern); worthiness to claim the collective energies of the academy (significance); a concern for diversity and critical thinking (richness); persistence and perseverance (staying power). This focus puts in modern terms the aim of liberal education: “to be centrally concerned with the meaning, value and improvement of life as a whole.”

Higher education should have as a major part of its work, indeed the central focus, the study of the large problems that challenge humanity severely and are likely to challenge it increasingly severely in the future—that is, the root causes of war, sociopolitical injustice, and ecological deterioration. As Christian Bay, a prominent American political scientist, has argued, educators and scholars should not simply offer their services as surveyors and architects while bulldozers run over people. Their primary responsibility should be to inquire, to search, and to question—with the goal of developing alternatives for the future, organizational innovations, and social-political experiments that will allow humanity to survive and carry on an every-advancing civilization in which all people share.

How does this somewhat abstract concern for the future of humanity relate to the individual student? Education begins in human anxiety. From the beginning conscious, goal-directed teaching has been to prepare a person to face the unknown. One can imagine prehistoric hunters teaching their sons how to hunt (would they send their sons out totally ignorant of what to expect, how to approach the animal, and so on?). Or one can remember Plato’s Academy, the first institution of Western higher education, where education was a process of existential conversion, of “turning around” from ignorance to truth. Education, indeed, began with self-knowledge, for it was only through the anxiety created by a potential threat to one’s security that one could acquire the power to become a self-motivated learner, and it was only in such a self-motivated learner that education could engender the life-changing conversion. For Plato and for most of the Western intellectual tradition the ultimate challenge to one’s security is death, but there are also lesser unknowns that people question. The key point is that true education is rooted in unknowns that are challenging enough to make one unable to leave them alone until one has a satisfying answer. There is no way to become a self-motivated learner without such an existentially felt challenge. Education seeks to answer the question: What does one need to know to deal successfully with troublesome unknowns?

Education still begins with self-knowledge because people must search themselves for the challenges that are significant enough to release the energy necessary to carry them through lifelong learning. Determining that challenge (or challenges) and what that response should be is the single most important educational act, for such a decision provides the motivational energy and behavioral structure essential to self-motivated learning— precisely what Plato had in mind when he spoke of the “turning around.” Such a response is the experiential conversion of one’s will to a commitment to learning.

Obviously such an educational process is based in a conception of “man the questioner” and presupposes the possibility and necessity of asking comprehensive questions about God, humankind, world, and society. Education is a social act—that is, it requires more than one person. This social activity occurs not only because teachers traditionally use age groupings to make up classes of students. More fundamentally education is a profoundly social activity because the sort of [Page 47] existential challenge or anxiety in which it is rooted exists at the level of the pathos shared by all people by virtue of their common humanity. The pathetic experience of anxiety or wonder is the only possible basis for a good education.

It should be clear that an educational system that does not seek to encourage, stimulate, and provoke pathos and wonder by allowing and, indeed, stimulating the asking of comprehensive questions is terribly flawed.

The comprehensive questions awaken curiosity even as they begin in curiosity. As people continually search and explore, they begin to see themselves, their historical setting, and their environment differently. As they begin to see themselves and their life context differently, they begin to feel differently about these things. Feeling differently is to begin to act differently. The questions serve as intervening stimuli that enable people to become free from all attachments that keep them imprisoned and unable to take that risky but creative step beyond what they know now. This process in itself is an anxiety-producing experience, since to go beyond what is now known is to be different. The educational search is not just going to class, reading, taking notes, or memorizing things; it is an experience for the whole person that can become intense enough to “turn him or her around”—to use Plato’s metaphor—to free people from ties to the status quo and to set them forth on the pursuit of their destiny. As people are freed from shackling attachments to what other people think about them, they become freer to examine critically what people think about other people and what they do to them. Such experience is the dynamic process that “transforms personal problems into social issues” to adapt social theorist C. Wright Mills’ statement. That this process can become very critical of the prevailing social order is obvious; that it can be dangerous for the questioner is equally obvious. Seeking the truth may make one free, but it may also lead to ostracism, exile, imprisonment, or death. Unfortunately, it cannot be otherwise since there is a greater likelihood that seeking the truth will subvert the established order than the other way around simply because significant inquiry is bound to upset someone’s cherished preconceptions or question someone’s privilege. Any significant inquiry as to the causes and solutions of the present global crisis is necessarily bound to take principal shape outside of, and often in opposition to, a multitude of presently dominant interests, ideologies, beliefs, and institutions.

IF THE QUEST for knowledge is to be the noble enterprise that teachers have traditionally held it to be, it must be a process that enables and encourages them to recognize and be sensitive to all that is ignoble—the base, false, ugly, and barbaric. Social historian Theodore Roszak has asked, does not the educational quest necessarily involve the willingness to study and work bravely against those forces that debase human lives and threaten the survival of civilized [Page 48] life? Good education cannot separate the acquisition of knowledge from reflection on value, reasoning soundly from feeling soundly.

Educational systems are social institutions, like other social institutions such as the family, government, and economic and religious systems, in which human experience is accumulated, distilled, and disseminated in a society. All social institutions “educate”—that is, transmit possible and preferred patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. Thus it is fundamentally impossible to define learning as simply assimilating facts or to say learning only happens in school. Education is basically the learning of a culture—a way of approaching, understanding, and living in the world— and this process must involve the whole person, examine comprehensive questions, and transcend formal schooling.

At the present time people are in the midst of the most extensive crisis ever known. The ways they have learned to feel, think, and act are not appropriate to the historical moment. To survive the crisis people must learn new ways of thinking. They must be educated in ways and toward goals that are functional for human survival. The educational system cannot do this by itself because culture is transmitted through many institutions, but if higher education is still to lay claim to one’s affection and commitment as a worthy and noble enterprise, it must be involved in leading humanity toward a new culture. An educational system and the broader culture of which it is a part become obsolete only when something exists to replace them. In order for teachers to build an educational system that positively contributes to the conditions for human survival, they must first believe that change is possible, and then define their educational purpose in the light of that belief.

There is not one person or a thousand people who will lead humanity out of the present crisis. It will take everyone, or at least a critical mass, which does not yet exist. If humanity survives, it will surely be with great effort and along a great variety of paths, each of them in its own way maintaining what is useful or at least not positively harmful in the past and each transforming the past into something qualitatively different. Howard Boughey, a sociologist, says that the minimum necessary for survival is the Sanskrit concept of Sataavadhaana, the capability of being aware of one hundred things simultaneously. The idea of broadening narrowly focused perspectives to reach an awareness and understanding of multiple realities, complexities, and diversity is the thrust of teaching for human survival. Teachers should take up the challenge of Sataavadhaana. As Frances Moore-Lappé, cofounder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy and one of the truly creative minds working on global problems, said in a recent interview, one of the most powerful obstacles to understanding obal problems is that intellectual and other leaders are “incapable of seeing outside the boundaries of their own work environments.” Educators can do better.

[Page 49]

[Page 50]

[Page 51]

The Persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í
Community and the Emergence of a
Universal Moral Order

BY WILL. C. VAN DEN HOONAARD

Copyright © 1986 by Will. C. van den Hoonaard.

This article has been considerably revised from “Emerging from Obscurity: The Response of the Iranian Bahá’í Community to Persecution, 1978-1982,” which appeared in Conflict Quarterly 3.3 (1982): 5-16, and is an expansion of another version of the essay that will appear in The Bahá’í World, Vol. 18. The author is deeply indebted to editors of World Order for many constructive comments.

THE RECENT persecutions of the Bahá’ís in Iran, reminiscent of similar attempts to exterminate the Bahá’í Faith in the nineteenth century, have left a powerful impression on people throughout the world and has prompted Bahá’ís to use four approaches, or methods, for exploring the spiritual and social significance of the persecutions.

The first approach, martyrology, attempts to preserve and memorialize the tragic events ensuing from persecution. The second approach describes resistance, whether active or passive, by individual Bahá’ís in the face of relentless oppression. The third approach studies the specific policies and mechanisms of oppression and destruction. Each of these methods for studying the persecutions of the Bahá’ís provides accounts that help one understand the fierce oppression and the human suffering and heroism associated with the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran. The narratives invariably show the victory of the spirit over the forces of materialism and reveal the depth of the individual’s response to persecution. Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder Of the Bahá’í Faith, referring to the early companions of His forerunner, the Báb, spoke of the divine attributes that such persons manifested:

All these stainless hearts and sanctified souls have, with absolute resignation, responded to the summons of His decree. Instead of complaining, they rendered thanks unto God, and amidst the darkness of their anguish they revealed naught but radiant acquiescence to His will. . . . The persecution and pain they inflicted on these holy and spiritual beings were regarded by them as means unto salvation, prosperity, and everlasting success.

The studies of the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran that focus on martyrology, resistance, and the mechanisms of oppression are all descriptive by nature, and they do succeed [Page 52] in conveying the dynamic quality of the persecuted Bahá’ís. But there are two other ways, discussed in this essay, that can help one grasp the significance of the persecutions.

One approach stems from the sociological fact that the fundamental nature of social groups becomes apparent during times of social conflict or stress. For example, it has been shown that the nature of the bonds that unite a marriage only manifest themselves during a time of crisis. In the case of communities social scientists sometimes focus on periods of crises in order to assess properly the underlying community structure. In such periods loyalties, alliances, and the “glue” of community life become apparent. Although no such formal study of the Bahá’í community in Iran has been undertaken, there is evidence to suggest that the situation in Iran provides an opportunity to analyze the distinctive nature of the Bahá’í community.

The other approach relates the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran to the parallel emergence of the Bahá’í community from obscurity and to the emergence of an international moral order.

The Distinctive Nature of
the Bahá’í Community

THE PERSECUTIONS of the Iranian Bahá’ís have brought to the attention of the world the unique character of the Bahá’í Faith and have served to highlight the novel features of the Bahá’í community, the blueprint for which was established by Bahá’u’lláh.

The impact of the persecutions has thus been felt worldwide by many who have been challenged to ponder the qualities of the Iranian Bahá’í community—its cohesive force, the nature of its leadership, its apolitical character, its diversity, and its ability to grow, all of which stand in sharp contrast to other contemporary communities. The persecutions have shown the specific strengths of the Bahá’í order during times when “all manmade and essentially defective political institutions” would have failed or collapsed. Those who look to the Faith are not only impressed by the fact that the Bahá’í administrative order is “fundamentally different from anything that any Prophet has previously established,” but are also encouraged to examine critically the Faith “which the bewildered followers of bankrupt and broken creeds might well approach . . . and seek, ere it is too late, the invulnerable security of its world-embracing shelter.”

Social Cohesion. Independent observers have noted the social cohesiveness of the Iranian Bahá’í community. Although suffering extensively under the burden of oppression, it shows signs of vigor and increased spiritual devotion. Individual Bahá’ís, in fact, link their own personal welfare with that of the Bahá’í community as a whole. For example, Le Monde recounts the story of Mr. Kamran Samímí, who had the opportunity of leaving Iran but refused to do so in order to be of assistance to his fellow believers. That same report states that “The Bahá’ís are not deprived of spiritual direction, even now.” Another account, in the Globe and Mail, relates the story of Dr. Farámarz Samandarí, a medical doctor who had practiced in Canada, but who returned to Iran to “help his countrymen,” knowing that he would be arrested and possibly executed, which, indeed, happened soon after his arrival in that country. Professor Manuchihr Hakim, a medical practitioner and recipient of numerous awards for his discoveries in anatomy and founder of the Bahá’í hospital in Tehran, returned to Iran anticipating death, having chosen to share the burdens of the Bahá’í community. Other expatriate Bahá’ís have returned to Iran, despite [Page 53] the warnings of Amnesty International. The example of such inspired personalities driven by their commitment to the Bahá’í community as a whole, has the power to touch and change human history.

Bahá’í sources of information also indicate a general spiritual rededication within the Persian Bahá’í community. A telex from the Universal House of Justice, the international governing Bahá’í body, stated that “thousands of [Iranian] Bahá’ís, unmindful of consequences, have courageously appealed by letter or cable to various high officials complaining about barbaric acts, gross injustice and revealed their names and addresses.” The heroic events that speak of the “courage, steadfastness, and unity which has suffused the Bahá’í community in Iran” are too numerous to mention. Such events are presently being recorded for the benefit of future generations of believers.

The distinctive quality of personal behavior can also be seen in the response of average Bahá’ís. When harassed daily by looters, Bahá’í families in Yazd, for example, treat the looters as children who want to be satisfied with playthings. Fereshteh Bethel, who recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the martyrdom of some Persian Bahá’ís, found through a study of 95 personal documents that their behavior showed an “unconventionally positive stress-belief pattern.” In the prisons Bahá’ís are known to have instituted programs of benefit to the prison populations as a whole and to have assisted prison guards who were having personal or marital problems. In areas where Bahá’ís have been forced from their homes, they have been such a cohesive group that they have even refused help or food from their persecutors.

The courageous and imaginative responses of individual Bahá’ís correspond to the equally courageous responses associated with the organized activities of the Bahá’í communities in Iran. For example, the Bahá’ís of Yazd established a Bahá’í program of education after the dismissal of over one hundred children from schools. Other reports indicate that many Bahá’í communities have coordinated activities to provide clothing, food, heating facilities, and spiritual counseling for families whose homes have been burned, looted, or confiscated. The elected bodies of communities continued to meet and their committees continued to function until September 1983, when, complying with a government order, the Bahá’í governing bodies agreed to cease their formal functioning.

The creative and cohesive response to persecution also has its effects on non-Bahá’ís in Iran. Attendance by large numbers of people of all religious backgrounds is characteristic at funerals for slain Bahá’ís, and non-Bahá’í spouses of Bahá’ís have declared their faith in Bahá’u’lláh.

In brief, the Bahá’í community in Iran is responding dynamically and with spiritual élan, despite the methodical plan by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities to uproot it entirely. The persecutions have not only transformed the Bahá’í community into a more cohesive one, but that very cohesiveness has affected the other Iranians.

Leadership in the Bahá’í Community. One of the chief underpinnings of the present regime’s strategy is to undercut the Bahá’ís by removing their leadership. But this approach [Page 54] reveals the extent to which the authorities misunderstand the distinctive system of Bahá’í governance.

Leadership in the Bahá’í community is vested in elected bodies on the local and national levels. Every year in April in every locality with nine or more adults the Iranian Bahá’ís, as do the Bahá’ís throughout the world, elect from their membership nine adult believers to serve on the local governing body, which is called a “spiritual assembly.” Delegates, in turn, elect the nine members of the national spiritual assembly. The qualities required by members being considered for election to both local and national spiritual assemblies are devotion, experience, loyalty, and a well-trained mind. There is no electioneering or campaigning of any kind. Moreover, leadership is vested in the elected assembly as a whole, not in the individuals serving on it. In addition, no person serving on the body has any powers extending beyond the confines of that body; the spiritual assembly itself renders decisions only when in session.

To the Bahá’ís the spiritual assembly is a divine institution, irrespective of its membership, for Bahá’u’lláh has written that “The Lord hath ordained that in every city a House of Justice be established wherein shall gather counsellors to the number of Bahá. . . .” Membership may change, but the spiritual assembly, as such, does not. This principle of continuity has become particularly evident in the Iranian experience. In numerous instances arrested or executed members of the local spiritual assemblies or the national spiritual assembly have been replaced by other members of the Bahá’í communities, frustrating all efforts by the authorities to do away with Bahá’í “leadership.”

The means by which authorities in Iran have tried to do away with Bahá’í “leadership” not only provide insight into how traditional authorities understand leadership in general; they also highlight the unique Bahá’í conception of leadership, a conception radically different from any existing type of leadership. It is the traditional, conventional understanding of leadership that prevents Iranian authorities from extirpating Bahá’í leadership.

The Apolitical Nature of the Bahá’í Community. Equally distinctive is the apolitical nature of Bahá’í communities in Iran, as elsewhere in the world. One hundred and forty-four years of persecution have not moved the Bahá’í community to partisan politics. Efforts by previous regimes in Iran to involve, or implicate, the Bahá’í community in politics have been singular failures. The Bahá’í teachings are very clear on the matter of partisan politics: Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, through his secretary, encouraged the Bahá’ís to “shun politics like the plague.” The Universal House of Justice, drawing on the writings of Bahá’u’lláh Himself, has reiterated this principle of noninvolvement in politics.

Under the regime of the shah a number of Bahá’ís occupied prominent scientific and administrative posts. But despite opportunities to gain some political, short-term advantage, they never, except in the case of one individual, seized such opportunities, for the writings of Shoghi Effendi had forewarned the Bahá’ís of the danger of such involvement when they became a large social force:

As the number of the Bahá’í communities in various parts of the world multiplies and their power, as a social force, becomes increasingly apparent, they will no doubt find themselves increasingly subjected to the pressure which men of authority and influence, in the political domain, will exercise in the hope of obtaining the support they require for the advancement of their aims.

[Page 55] The single Iranian Bahá’í who permitted himself to become involved with politics, General Asadu’lláh Sani’í, was expelled from the Faith for that reason alone. To date, no other charge regarding the political involvement of the Bahá’ís made by either present or previous authorities has ever been substantiated.

Thus the continued existence of the Iranian Bahá’í community, which cannot be explained in terms of the alleged power possessed by the Bahá’ís, is an anomaly. While most social analysts state that political power is the primary source of influence in society, the continued existence of the Bahá’í community offers proof that moral power is superior to political might. The establishment and evolution of Bahá’í communities reflect the implementation of a divine law designed to reshape human society. According to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the appointed successor to Bahá’u’lláh, the “laws of God are not impositions of will, or of power or pleasure, but the resolutions of truth, reason and justice.” The continued vitality of a community whose influence is based on moral rather than political power is attracting notice from members of a world community who are seeking an alternative to the power principle that presently rules social entities.

The Diversity and Scope of the Bahá’í Community. The distinctive features that have most prevented the full-scale uprooting of the Bahá’í community in Iran are its diversity and scope. By April 1983 there were 1,100 spiritual assemblies in Iran, incorporating almost all of the diverse elements, both tribal and religious, of the population as a whole. Representatives of almost two-thirds of all tribal minorities are found among the Bahá’ís, as well as peoples of such diverse backgrounds as Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Indeed, there is almost no group in Iran not “represented” in the Bahá’í community. Since it has neither a social nor an ethnic uniformity, the persecutors have been unable to touch a particular “psyche” among the Bahá’ís or to predict a uniform response to persecution.

There are other ways in which the diversity of the Bahá’í community has frustrated persecutions. In the Bahá’í view diversity acts as a stabilizing element in a community rather than as a disruptive force, particularly when such variegated personalities and cultures are under the influence of the Revealed Word of God: “The other kind [of difference] which is a token of diversity is the essence of perfection and the cause of the appearance of the bestowals of the Most Glorious Lord.”

The scope of the Bahá’í community has also enabled it to frustrate the efforts of the persecutors whose envy drives them to slander it. With 350,000 Bahá’ís in Iran in every civil area, the ratio of Bahá’ís to non-Bahá’ís is about 1:70, at least one Bahá’í for every eleven or twelve households. Thus many non-Bahá’í families are personally acquainted with the Bahá’ís’ way of life. Today, as in the past, this way of life has aroused both emulation from the general population and envy from fanatical elements. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá often referred to such emulation during the early days of the Faith—for example, when He spoke of an early Bahá’í who had found the Bahá’í Faith through the turmoil of the persecutions:

When the clamor of the people rose high he hastened into the street, and, becoming cognizant of the offence and the offender, and the cause of his public disgrace and punishment in full detail, he fell to making search, and that very day entered the society of the Bábís, saying, “This very ill-usage [Page 56] and public humiliation is a proof of truth and the very best of arguments.”

Personal friendships of many Iranians with Bahá’ís and knowledge of the Bahá’í way of life has served in other ways to prevent further destruction of the Bahá’í community. The admiration and respect of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, whether personal friends or business associates of the Bahá’ís, have undercut in some cases the workings of mobs and persecutors. Muslim neighbors are known to have opened doors and offered their homes, albeit furtively, to some of the havenless Bahá’í families. This undercurrent of unofficial and informal opposition has even become evident among some officials in the administrative hierarchy. In some instances, at the price of firing or demotion, they have opposed the measures leveled against the Bahá’ís. One headmaster of a school in Yazd decided to resign after receiving the order to dismiss his Bahá’í pupils.

What the persecution of the Bahá’í community in Iran has revealed is its social cohesion through which individual and community welfare merge, the unique character of the Bahá’í style of leadership, the apolitical nature of the community, wherein moral might is stronger than political power, and the diverse community membership that has prevented the persecutors from touching a particular ethnic or cultural fiber among the Bahá’ís.

Emergence of a Universal Moral Order

JUST as the persecutions of the Iranian Bahá’ís demonstrate the distinctive aspects of the Bahá’í community, on a larger scale the persecutions also demonstrate the emerging trends in world public opinion and the rise of a universal moral order. While many agree that such a moral order is now taking shape, some observers, including this writer, believe that its relatively slow and recent emergence is mainly due to the fragility of moral orders in any given nation-state. However, it is the persecution of the Bahá’ís and other minorities that is speeding the birth of a universal moral order and crystallizing an international consensus.

Civil, political, cultural, and economic freedoms are often based on precarious sentiments and social consensus, even in “enlightened” countries. Such freedoms have been of too recent gain to occupy a firm foothold in the political and social structures of society. We need fuller knowledge of conditions that allow authorities to deny fundamental freedoms to minorities. This knowledge provides a good antidote against the precariousness with which human institutions of governance have been invested. If this realization takes hold among all peoples, other minorities whose right to exist has been heretofore denied will be less likely to suffer. Such a realization takes the shape of a moral order that is universal in scope.

The Bahá’í persecutions are linked to the emergence of a universal moral order in two ways. First, the global response to the persecutions has brought the Bahá’í Faith out of obscurity, an empirical fact that the persecutors have naively ignored. Never in the history of the Bahá’í world community has the world become more cognizant of the aims and teachings of the Bahá’í Faith than during the current wave of persecution in Iran. The “no-win” situation that presents itself to the persecutors must bring little comfort to those responsible for the oppression. This point is made by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

they [the oppressors] thought that violence and interference would cause extinction and silence and lead to suppression and oblivion; whereas interference in matters of conscience causes stability and firmness and attracts the attention of men’s sight and souls; which fact has received experimental [Page 57] proof many times and often.

Second, the suffering of the Iranian Bahá’ís, requiring as it does some response from the world community, helps to define a new moral order and to accelerate its emergence. The two are inseparably linked together by a dialectical process. Through the media and other international entities and structures the world is more informed today; atrocities can no longer be so easily hidden. This greater awareness has led to declarations and covenants that seek to establish international codes and standards of conduct and that reflect an emerging universal moral order. The promotion of the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief is a case in point. While it is true that nations may choose to accept or ignore such international standards of human rights and obligations in order to further their own political advantage, the fact remains that universal standards are contributing an ever-increasing share in the development of the sense of justice and universal morality among nations and such international phenomena as the media.

The persecutions of the Bahá’ís and of other groups elsewhere have thus become an affront to every global citizen who has become immersed in this universal, moral consciousness. Every person attacked in even the most remote place by the most ignorant of men does not go unnoticed. The more severe the persecutions, the louder is the outcry of humanity as a whole. This outcry is also the means by which universal, moral sentiments become clarified and crystallized. It contributes to the emergence of the Bahá’í community into the light of world awareness. And it is the spur to the universal recognition of fundamental moral principles that the Bahá’í community brings to the world.

Conclusion

THE PERSECUTION of the Bahá’í community in Iran has drawn the attention of humanity to the unique features of the Bahá’í community and its link to the emergence of a new universal moral order. While until recently any matter than affected the well-being of a country was considered the exclusive concern of the secular or religious authorities in that country, now the welfare of every nation, community, group, or family is rapidly becoming a universal concern. The walls that have at once protected those who violated human rights and hindered the development of human society have begun to fall away and human policies are increasingly subject to international sentiments. The patchwork of human policies is giving way to a universal pattern of human rights and obligations. We are witnessing the abandoning of inadequate, limited human standards and the emergence of a new universal moral order.

[Page 58]

Wasp

Flying like Dante’s pen

She hits the ceiling

Frayed and sparkling like a wire—

Then wings a line

Straight to the stubborn window.

Burning and sizzling

Up and down—

At last

This stingling nettle’s

Captured in a jar

And sings eccentric

As she ricochetes,

Mindless of the risk involved

In rescuing her,

Or of the carriage

Smooth and wheelless

On its way to freedom.

One dangerous instant

She stumbles on the rim—

But balancing—in haste—

Reworks her needlepoint,

Collects her jet,

Unfolds her cellophane—

And lifts—

And lightly steadying

Graduates her spark,

Blazing like Beatrice

Some traceless paradise.

—Lynn Ann Ascrizzi

Copyright © 1986 by Lynn Ann Ascrizzi

[Page 59]

[Page 60]

Authors & Artists

LYNN ANN ASCRIZZI, who is a poet and a senior editor of Freedom Press in Farmstead, Maine, makes a second appearance in World Order.

RICK JOHNSON, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Duke University, is an assistant professor of political science and coordinator of international education at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, where he has been working on the New Horizon Project, a new, integrated approach to education. He has published several poems and two articles, one entitled “Teaching Critical Thinking to Students.” His major interests include global politics, world history, future and peace studies, political theory, and alternate approaches to education.

GEOFFREY NASH, a sometime lecturer in English at Omdurman Islamic University in the Sudan, holds a Ph.D. from London University. In 1982 he published with George Ronald Iran’s Secret Pogrom: The Conspiracy to Wipe Out the Bahá’ís and in 1984 The Phoenix and the Ashes: The Bahá’í Faith and the Modern Apocalypse.

WILL. C. VAN DEN HOONAARD is director of graduate studies and associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. He has served as an alternate representative of the Bahá’í International Community at the United Nations and is currently serving as social science editor of a multivolume Bahá’í dictionary project. Dr. van den Hoonaard has published articles on history, sociology, education, and resource management. His “World Views and the Shape of Communities” appeared in the Spring 1984 issue of World Order.

JOHN WALBRIDGE, who holds a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard University, divides his time between a family business in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and overseeing the Bahá’í dictionary project sponsored by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois.

LINDA S. WALBRIDGE holds a master’s degree in psychology from the American University of Beirut, but her chief interests include Islam and the culture and history of the Middle East. Her novel, To Dance in the Market Place, is scheduled for publication in 1987 by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois; she has completed two other novels on the Middle East.

ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz, photograph by David L. Trautmann; p. 1, photograph by Grace Nielsen; p. 8, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 23, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 24, photograph by David L. Trautmann; p. 37, photograph by Lori Block; p. 38, photograph by David L. Trautmann; p. 49, photograph by Charlotte D. George; p. 50, photograph by Steve Garrigues; p. 59, photograph by Steve Garrigues.

[Page 61]