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Fall 1986/Winter 1986-87

World Order

Twentieth Anniversary Issue
A Retrospective Including . . .

The Spiritual Revolution
Douglas Martin

Science and Religion
William S. Hatcher

Women—Attaining Their Birthright
Constance Conrader

World Education in Quest of a
Paradigm
S. Pattabi Raman

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World Order

VOLUME 21, NUMBERS 1 & 2 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WDRLD ORDER IS INTEND£D 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

Subscriber Service:

CANDACE MOORE

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. 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 can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be 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 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., Canada, Mexico, 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $15.00; 2 years, $28.00; single copies, $3.00. Airmail, 1 year, $20.00; 2 years, $38.00.

WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 1989, 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   Twenty Years—Looking Backward and Looking

Forward

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

11   The Spiritual Revolution

by Douglas Martin

20   On the Quest for World Order

a selection of editorials

29   Science and Religion

by William S. Hatcher

44   On Persecution and Martyrdom

a selection of editorials

50   And all the atoms cry aloud

poem by Robert Hayden

53   Women—Attaining Their Birthright

by Constance Conrader

70   Two Hundred Years of Imperishable Hope

a bicentennial editorial

75   World Education in Quest of a Paradigm

by S. Pattabi Raman

89   Awakening to Universal Manhood

a book review by Glenford E. Mitchell

96   Authors & Artists in This Issue

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Twenty Years—Looking Back
and Looking Forward

TWENTY YEARS have passed since, after a brief interruption, World Order resumed publication in the fall of 1966. During that fifth of a century the world has changed, and our magazine has changed with it. There have been gradual modifications in format and style. the circle of our interests has widened, but the essence has remained the same. World Order is more than ever committed to peace, the equality of races, the equality of sexes, universal education, the abolition of extremes of poverty and wealth, and all the other principles of the Bahá’í Faith that are the indispensable prerequisites of a universal and spiritualized civilization.

Leafing through some eighty issues of the magazine, we note first of all the diversity of subjects and issues dealt with in our pages: “California Coast Redwoods” by Richard St. Barbe Baker, “The Institutionalization of Religion” by Jalil Mahmoudi, “Anthropology and Education” by Zdenek Salzmann, “Ann Frank: The Child and the Legend” by Rosey E. Pool, “A View of World Order” by then Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “The Economy of a World Commonwealth” by John Huddleston, “Health, Nutrition, and the Future of Children” by Elizabeth L. Bowen, “Some Aspects of Bahá’í Expressive Style” by Alessandro Bausani, “The Poor in America: A Visionary Assessment” by June Thomas . . . Ecology, sociology and history of religion, international economic problems, education, art, poetry are topics to which we have returned year after year.

It is not up to us, the editors, to evaluate the manner in which we have managed the magazine. We have received our share of praise and blame. Occasionally our articles provoked lively controversy that helped clarify issues and afforded our readers a chance to speak their mind. Our readership has been exceptionally faithful, many subscribers having remained with us for twenty years.

In our anniversary issue we present to our readers a small selection of editorials, articles, and book reviews published over the last two decades and reflective of the essence of World Order. We hope that in the next two decades our magazine will continue to serve the noble purpose for which it was created.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

During our first seven years some of our readers found WORLD ORDER a bit too “intellectual” and asked for a more accessible style and a more spiritually inspiring choice of subject matter. This plea plunged the Editorial Board into a good bit of soul searching: Were we too esoteric? sometimes obscure? perhaps pedantic? Here is our answer. You decide: Is this Interchange, published in our Summer 1973 issue, an exercise in rationalization, or a valid justification of our policy and our decision to stick to it? It is reprinted from World Order 7.3 (Spring 1973): 14-18, Copyright © 1973 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

OCCASIONALLY the Editors of WORLD ORDER receive letters from readers who feel that the magazine’s approach or manner is too intellectual, too difficult to read, too complicated. One such reader writes:

. . . Do I detect in your Fall 1972 issue . . . a slight lack of balance?

As far as I can see, this issue is written by University professors and for University professors only. . . . When a rank-and-file Bahá’í (like myself), or a casual reader in the Public Library opens this dignified and beautifully made-up Bahá’í magazine (it is still a Bahá’í magazine?!), expectantly, and hopes to find some inspiration in its pages, he or she will be disappointed.

The reader goes on to make specific complaints about three of the articles on the grounds of their being abstract, heavily documented, lacking in human interest, and devoid of Bahá’í content. Our articles, she implies, should be couched in simpler language and concern matters that would not be unfamiliar to a majority of Bahá’ís or, indeed, of Americans.

Although such letters comprise a marked minority of the letters we receive—letters ranging from simple expressions of opinion to requests for reprints (for example, we have received messages asking for large numbers of reprints of the ANISA articles along with expressions of appreciation of the impact they are having in educational circles)—the Editors have taken these loving criticisms very seriously, in the spirit in which they have been offered. They confirm us in our long-standing intention to state once again and more clearly than ever before the role of WORLD ORDER, for it is important for Bahá’ís, and useful for their friends, to know the orientation of this magazine, the reading public which it envisages, and the impact which it is expected to make on the community of thinking Americans, not to mention the wider, world community to which the English language is accessible.

Every issue of WORLD ORDER has, on the inside cover, the following statement: “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.”

The first issue of the post-war WORLD [Page 5] ORDER made an explicit statement of its policy:

. . . WORLD ORDER . . . provides a forum for those who are convinced that only through unity can mankind escape destruction and move resolutely toward a world civilization. Our editorial policy may be deduced from the very title of our magazine . . . , but an explicit statement of this policy will be useful.

We are providing an opportunity for the discussion of a vast number of problems that must be solved if the goal of a unified and peaceful humanity is ever to be achieved; whence our interest in the poverty question . . . ; in the social implications of racial and cultural differences, and in the physical and anthropological facts that underlie such differences; in linguistics, as a clue both to the nature of human thought and to cultural differentiation—in short, in the whole range of social and ethical problems.

The past, from which we seek instruction and inspiration, will be dealt with, and we will publish from time to time historical materials. . . . The esthetic side of life will not be neglected. . . .

Believing that religion is the source of man’s highest aspirations and ultimately the only force capable of leading mankind to peace and unity, we will deal with every aspect of the Bahá’í Faith, as well as with other religions of the world. . . .

Thus our magazine represents a dialogue among those, whether Bahá’í or not, whose efforts to understand and do something about the human condition have brought them to a point at which the exchange of ideas and insights will be of common benefit.

We do not believe that the suggestions made by some of our readers are directed to the modification of these aims; their criticism is, rather, that these aims are implemented in a way that excludes a certain number of potential readers, or alienates some of our present readers. In this connection we must take note of the following statement of the Universal House of Justice (the international governing body of the Bahá’í Faith), dated October 31, 1967, and later published in Wellspring of Guidance, p. 124:

The same presentation of the teachings will not appeal to everybody; the method of expression and the approach must be varied in accordance with the outlook and interests of the hearer. An approach which is designed to appeal to everybody will usually result in attracting the middle section, leaving both extremes untouched. No effort must be spared to ensure that the healing Word of God reaches the rich and the poor, the learned and the illiterate, the old and the young, the devout and the atheist, the dweller in the remote hills and islands, the inhabitant of the teeming cities, the suburban businessman, the laborer in the slums, the nomadic tribesman, the university student . . .

[Page 6] Clearly, the task of any Bahá’í bringing the message of God to the people is to get to know those to whom he brings it, in terms of their “outlook and interests.” It would appear, from the policy statement concerning the content of the magazine, that WORLD ORDER’s reading public might fairly be described as “intellectual.” Now, what is an “intellectual”? In the first place, this is a term that neither praises nor blames. It does not mean “intelligent,” and it does not mean “pedantic”; it does not necessarily even mean “educated” or “well-read,” although there is a certain positive correlation between the “intellectual” and the “well-read.” It can conveniently be taken to refer to a social subgroup: “Intellectuals” are to be found in certain professions; they range typically within a certain income group; they have, or claim to have—which from the sociological point of view is just as important— roughly the same tastes (literature, music, art, and so on) and the same social attitudes. Like any other social group, intellectuals are subject to superstitions, taboos, prejudices, blind spots, more or less peculiar to them. Intellectuals are important, from a purely practical point of view, because they represent an influence on our destinies far out of proportion to their numbers. They exert enormous influence in government, in moral attitudes, in popular taste; and they exert this influence quietly, in a way of which the common man is mostly unaware.

If one examines the taboos, the “folk-mores” of the intellectual, what does he see? Primarily, a dedication to objective truth, as it is called. This has the consequence that there are certain cues or clues that arouse the instant suspicion of the well-indoctrinated intellectual. It means that no statement can be confidently asserted without objective proof. It also means that emotion and intuition are not constituents of proof—that is, that proof must carefully exclude appeals to intuition, to faith, to feeling; it must rest solely on objective fact.

The intellectual position described here is defective in that it defeats its stated purpose of seeking truth. The Editors hold that the exclusion of feeling, of faith, of intuition, is an impossibility. Those who claim to be capable of it are simply fooling themselves. They are doing themselves two kinds of harm: First, they are repressing the whole world of feeling and love, on which their mental and emotional health depends—they impose on their lives a kind of barrenness that leads to confusion and despair. Second, in hiding from themselves the emotional and intuitive basis of whatever they claim to believe, they are allowing free play to the disguised forces of passion, of the very baneful interferences with truthful insights that they think they are avoiding. Let them discover the richness of an honest emotional and spiritual life, and they will be much fortified in their search for the truth.

Many of those “intellectuals” who indulge the illusion of cold objectivity know, deep down, that they are missing something. They do not, perhaps, realize the gravity of their loss. They have been trained in the ways of repression, not only of the bestial instincts Freud makes so much of, but also in the repression of the best part of themselves, the operation of the spirit that enables them to sense clearly that God exists and that religion is as real as thought, emotion, and esthetic experience. Many intellectuals have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they react with suspicion to such words as spiritual, divine, God, soul, revelation, prophet; and recently their moral life has become as eroded as their spiritual life—that is, having ruled out the divine as being objectively nondemonstrable, they are beginning to rule out the moral. One of the moral principles left to them is that of tolerance, which is praiseworthy; [Page 7] but tolerance is being extended to the sinful, the immoral, the criminal, and the depraved.

So it is evident that the intellectual to whom one tries to bring the message of Bahá’u’lláh must be approached, like anyone else, with sensitive understanding. He can only be reached by those means, those appeals, to which he has not been trained to react negatively. Once there is introduced a notion or even a method of reasoning of whose intellectual respectability he has not been assured, he is alienated perhaps for good: the bearer of the message has been discredited, and the word Bahá’í in danger of being, however unjustly, associated with something intellectually unacceptable.

To deal with people, intellectuals or not, one must operate at first within the framework of their preconceptions. One does not want to offend an intellectual any more than one would want to offend, say, a Catholic. One does not start off with a Catholic by telling him everything that is wrong with Catholicism; rather one tells him what is right about the Bahá’í Faith, preferably in terms that correspond to those deep truths it shares with Catholicism. Given the essential unity of religions, this approach to a Catholic is possible and indeed the only proper one. Given the harmony of science and religion, the duty of free and independent investigation of the truth, the approach to the intellectual is similarly facilitated.

Just as the Bahá’ís have harmony among people of all religions, so that the Bahá’í community numbers among its members former Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists, atheist humanists, and so forth, not through renunciation of what had been true in our previous faiths, but through the addition to those faiths of the precious new insights of Bahá’u’lláh, so the intellectual, too, has the right to share in this ecumenism. Our perhaps unflattering description of some seif-styled intellectuals is really no worse than what one might say of a religious bigot. The intellectual, too, insofar as he is privileged to know any truth at all, shares to that degree in the Bahá’í Faith. When we Bahá’ís talk about the harmony of science and religion, we must respect science, genuinely and wholeheartedly, just as we have been enjoined to respect Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Science is a gift of God. If scientific methods are used in support of spiritual truths, as has happened more than once in our pages, they must be considered with respectful attention. A plain, serious presentation of the sociological and political adaptations of Eskimos to life in this new age, such as appeared in our Fall 1972 issue, tends, in addition to telling the moving story of human beings in transition, to underline the principle of the reconciliation of science and religion. This principle. a primordial article of the Bahá’í Faith for more than a century now, has just been “discovered” in the past decade under the name of “relevance.” In a similar manner, an attempt to place educational principles in their philosophical perspective is of enormous importance to those who feel that an honest stand on any issue must be taken on the ground of a philosophy, an ideology, a set of consciously held principles. The series of articles on ANISA—a project that enjoys the collaboration of Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í educators—explains the philosophical basis of this new approach to education and compares it to essentially defective philosophies of the past, philosophies that continue to have powerful support from intellectuals of our time. What can be more important than bringing to the attention of this community of educators the importance of loving and—this must not be omitted—knowing God and, through God, our fellowman? With regard to WORLD ORDER’s exploration of the past, the unity of mankind [Page 8] and of religion is as striking in the time dimension as in geographical and cultural space. The insights of Joachim of Flora can help us to understand our own relationship to religion and to intellectual pursuits, whether we are Bahá’ís or not.

Membership in the socially defined group of intellectuals is a matter of choice; but if one chooses the role of anti-intellectual, one chooses disunity, division. Prejudice against the intellectual is essentially no different from other kinds of prejudice; if a Bahá’í should find himself suspicious of or hostile to professors, let him try to see through to the man, his brother, underneath the symbolic academic robe.

The Editors of WORLD ORDER are trying to be loyal to the human family, not to any subgroup thereof; but they can best serve the Faith by using their membership in the intellectual community as a means of establishing themselves as pioneers therein.

It is with these considerations in view that the Editorial Board has decided not to make any essential change in the editorial policy of WORLD ORDER. We shall continue to try to make the language of our magazine as clear, as easy to understand, as the subject matter will allow. We will, however, make no compromise with standards of literary quality, of clear, responsible reasoning, or of scrupulous documentation of facts. We will maintain to the best of our ability a standard like that of Shoghi Effendi, of whom Rúḥíyyih Khánum wrote that he “set a standard that educates and raises the cultural level of the reader at the same time that it feeds his mind and soul with thoughts and truth.”

The Bahá’í who does not think of himself as an intellectual must make a decision as to his way of adjusting to his status, largely self-conferred. In a very positive way, every Bahá’í has found his life immeasurably enriched by his feeling—a feeling reinforced by knowledge—of kinship to all peoples: to the nomads, the tribesmen, the people of distant lands and different cultures. When this feeling is translated into action, the Bahá’í finds that he can talk and interact with an enormous variety of people; he can explain the Faith to Catholics and Muslims, to Buddhists and to atheists; his new and intense interest in religion has led him to examine religions of whose existence, very often, he was only dimly aware, before he became an adherent to the Cause of God. Let him, therefore, inform himself about the preoccupations, the ideals, the love of truth that characterize the intellectual at his best, just as he informs himself about the religion of the seeker with whom he is speaking; for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said that the seeker must first be confirmed in his own faith. The Editors feel that it is in the pages of WORLD ORDER that the nonintellectual Bahá’í can learn how best to appeal to his intellectual brother.

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The Spiritual Revolution

BY DOUGLAS MARTIN

After other “revolutions”—as great social, economic, and political transformations have been named—a spiritual revolution is now dawning that will accomplish what the others have only pointed to. This 1974 article, in conjunction with those by Hatcher and Raman (see pages 29-41 and 75-87), brings together the elements of reason and spirituality essential to a sane world order.

Reprinted from World Order 8.2 (Winter 1973): 14-21. Copyright © 1974, 1989 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

GLOBAL REVOLUTION is the dominant fact of life in our age. Throughout the world men are rebelling against the dead weight of the past. Typically, the challenge to traditional institutions and assumptions now insists on the need for changes that reach to the very roots of the social order. Typically, too, it manifests an increasing readiness to resort to force to achieve such changes.

The origin of this vast upheaval has been the subject of unending academic and public discussion. In seeking to comprehend a phenomenon that clearly goes far beyond demands for specific political, social, and economic reforms, social scientists have felt compelled to formulate a new vocabulary. They depict the crisis as a “cultural” revolution, a challenge to the “quality” of modern life, a search for “relevancy” and “authenticity.” However suggestive such terminology may be, it remains tragically inadequate to grasp the reality of human experience in the second half of the twentieth century. It is apparent that we in fact are witnessing a massive revulsion on the part of mankind against ways of life that, in their nature and their goal, are seen as anti-life. In so sweeping and profound a reaction violence is incidental. The essential revolution advances quietly, often for a time unnoticed, in the hearts of millions of people who spiritually “drop out” of a world they have found meaningless. The routine tasks may or may not be done; laws may be obeyed or flouted; but the roots of faith—without which no society can long endure—have been severed.

This is the first thing that can with confidence be said about the revolution of our times: it is in essence spiritual.

The first voice to make this statement, a century ago, was that of Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. In announcing Himself to be the Messenger of God awaited by all the world’s religions, Bahá’u’lláh declared the unification of mankind in one people and one universal social order to be the Will of God in this age. He asserted that the revelation of this divine purpose had set in motion forces within both man and society that would in time transform human existence:

I testify that no sooner had the First Word proceeded, through the potency of Thy will and purpose, out of His mouth . . . than the whole creation was revolutionized, and all that are in the heavens and all that are on earth were stirred to the depths. Through that Word the realities of all created things were shaken, were divided, separated, scattered, combined and reunited, disclosing, in both the contingent [Page 12] world and the heavenly kingdom, entities of a new creation. . . .

Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His Mission was rejected by the rulers of society to whom He addressed it in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Humanity was therefore left to struggle with these forces of which He had spoken, but left to do so in a context not of search for global unification, but rather of attachment to national, racial, cultural, class, or political loyalties. The fruit is the world we live in. There is not on earth today a social system that can be said to serve man’s needs. There is none in which human identity does not seem endangered. There is none which appears to possess real moral authority. This is as true of socialistic societies as it is of capitalistic ones, as true of cultures based on Christian values as it is of those founded on Islam or Buddhism.

In briefly tracing the course of mankind’s struggle over the past century, Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of Bahá’u’lláh’s Message, underlined a further characteristic of the resulting crisis:

Every system, short of the unification of the human race, has been tried, repeatedly tried, and been found wanting. Wars again and again have been fought, and conferences without number have met and deliberated. Treaties, pacts and covenants have been painstakingly negotiated, concluded and revised. Systems of government have been patiently tested, have been continually recast and superseded. Economic plans of reconstruction have been carefully devised, and meticulously executed. And yet crisis has succeeded crisis, and the rapidity with which a perilously unstable world is declining has been correspondingly accelerated. A yawning gulf threatens to involve in one common disaster both the satisfied and dissatisfied nations, democracies and dictatorships, capitalists and wage-earners, Europeans and Asiatics, Jew and Gentile, white and colored.

The second feature of the revolution is that it is universal.

The elements of society most keenly sensitive to the crisis are the underprivileged, the youth, and the minorities. Unlike those who are deeply involved in the existing order, they do not have the emotional commitment to the status quo that past habits or considerable personal investment bring. In their eyes present-day civilization stands or falls on its own record. In a technological age that record is coldly exposed for all to read. The evidence is now overwhelming that Western civilization like its older counterparts in other areas of the world has failed the test of such an examination. That is to say, its values have been largely rejected by the people on whom those values must depend for their survival. One may or may not feel that the examination has been adequate or fair. What demands attention is the almost deafening verdict expressed in the spreading apathy and withdrawal of our times. We are being told that present-day civilization, morally speaking, is not one in which human beings can live and grow.

This fact throws into sharp relief a third feature of the modern crisis that is implicit in what has already been said: the revolution is entirely out of man’s control.

Nor is there any prospect that it can in some way be brought under human control. The history of the hundred years since Bahá’u’lláh declared His Mission provides whatever evidence is needed to support Shoghi Effendi’s judgment that

Humanity . . . has, alas, strayed too far and suffered too great a decline to be redeemed through the unaided efforts of the best among its recognized rulers and statesmen—however disinterested their [Page 13] motives, however concerted their action, however unsparing in their zeal and devotion to its cause. No scheme which the calculations of the highest statesmanship may yet devise; no doctrine which the most distinguished exponents of economic theory may hope to advance; no principle which the most ardent of moralists may strive to inculcate, can provide, in the last resort, adequate foundations upon which the future of a distracted world can be built.

FOR BAHÁ’ÍS, recognition that the process of social breakdown is irreversible is both a great burden and a real benefit. An incalculably large part of the suffering of our times is the result of men’s struggle somehow to avoid the realization pressed on them by their own experience. Only with the greatest reluctance do we let go our illusions. The greatest of modern illusions is that man can save himself. No one can be said to have dispassionately examined the record of the past several decades who still retains this belief. The process is irreversible because it is a part of nature itself:

All created things [‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said] are expressions of the affinity and cohesion of elementary substances, and non-existence is the absence of their attraction and agreement. Various elements unite harmoniously in composition but when these elements become discordant, repelling each other, decomposition and non-existence result.

Shoghi Effendi relates this basic principle of existence to the institutional and social life of mankind:

If long-cherished ideals and time-honored institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution?

The most important thing about the revolution is its direction. Humanity has been described as “evolution become conscious of itself.” For nearly six thousand years our world was the private preserve of a small leisured class. Now, almost overnight, in the wake of the universal Revelation of God promised in all the sacred scriptures of the past, people everywhere are awakening to the possibilities of human life. Something that can truly be called humanity is being born.

One thing only is lacking. “The whole of mankind,” Shoghi Effendi states, “is groaning, is dying to be led to unity. . . .” The achievement of such a unity involves the building of a society fit for human beings to live in. That is where the revolution is going. However long and bloody the process, mankind is struggling blindly toward the creation of a world community.

Bahá’ís believe that the “nucleus” and “pattern” of that community already exist, as the result of a hundred years of work by the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh. Slowly, over the past century, as the Bahá’í teachings have been carried to all parts of the world, people of every racial and national origin have embraced them. As they have done so, they have sought to give these teachings effect not only in their personal lives, but also in their social relationships.

Bahá’u’lláh’s conception of organic community has been summed up in these words:

In the human body, every cell, every organ, [Page 14] every nerve has its part to play. When all do so the body is healthy, vigorous, radiant, ready for every call made upon it. No cell, however humble, lives apart from the body, whether in serving it or receiving from it. This is . . . supremely true of the body of the Bahá’í world community, for this body is already an organism, united in its aspirations, unified in its methods, seeking assistance and confirmation from the same Source, and illumined with the conscious knowledge of its unity. . . . The Bahá’í world community, growing like a healthy new body, develops new cells, new organs, new functions and powers as it presses on to its maturity, when every soul, living for the Cause of God, will receive from that Cause, health, assurance, and the overflowing bounties of Bahá’u’lláh which are diffused through His divinely ordained order.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Community has now passed the first critical century of its evolution. In contrast to the deepening disorder of the world around it, its original unity remains unbroken, as both its expansion and diversification rapidly accelerate. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s vision of world unity emerging from worldwide revolution begins to take on form and substance:

In the contingent world there are many collective centers which are conducive to association and unity between the children of men. For example, patriotism is a collective center; nationalism is a collective center; identity of interests is a collective center; political alliance is a collective center; the union of ideals is a collective center, and the prosperity of the world of humanity is dependent upon the organization and promotion of the collective centers. Nevertheless, all the above institutions are in reality, the matter and not the substance, accidental and not eternal—temporary and not everlasting. With the appearance of great revolutions and upheavals, all these collective centers are swept away. But the Collective Center of the Kingdom, embodying the Institutions and Divine Teachings, is the eternal Collective Center. It establishes relationship between the East and the West, organizes the oneness of the world of humanity, and destroys the foundation of differences.

FROM THE FOREGOING it will be apparent why those who have recognized Bahá’u’lláh regard the well-beaten path of political action not merely as pointless, but as wasteful of urgently needed resources. That is not to denigrate the motivation of others. It relates solely to the inescapable priorities imposed by recognition of God’s Messenger to our age and of the Mission entrusted to Him. Again, in words written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi:

What we Bahá’ís must face is the fact that society is disintegrating so rapidly that moral issues which were clear a half century ago are now hopelessly confused and . . . mixed up with battling political interests. That is why the Bahá’ís must turn all their forces into the channel of building up the Bahá’í Cause and its administration. They can neither change nor help the world in any other way at present. If they become involved in the issues the governments of the world are struggling over, they will be lost. But if they build up the Bahá’í pattern they can offer it as a remedy when all else has failed.

That pattern itself includes service to the material as well as the spiritual needs of mankind. From whatever background an individual may enter the Bahá’í Cause, recognition of Bahá’u’lláh must inevitably and intensely sharpen his social conscience. So it is that around the world Bahá’ís are found working [Page 15] in a wide range of nonpartisan humanitarian programs. So it is, too, that Bahá’í youth are encouraged to pursue educational goals that will fit them to contribute practically to the relief of human suffering and want. Collectively the Bahá’í community itself devotes great energy to serving the aims of the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies. What the Bahá’í teachings deny is that political action of a national or other partisan nature holds answers for problems that are in their very essence universal. In the spreading public disillusionment with politically oriented agencies, Bahá’ís see a reflection of this fact of twentieth-century life.

The challenge that Bahá’u’lláh places before the individual who recognizes Him is to work for the realization of a new pattern of human life. As men of all backgrounds have responded in ever increasing numbers, the implications of the challenge to the individual have steadily become clearer. Shoghi Effendi, it is reported, has explained:

. . . the object of life to a Bahá’í is to promote the oneness of mankind. The whole object of our lives is bound up with the lives of all human beings; not a personal salvation we are seeking, but a universal one. . . . Our aim is to produce a world civilization which will in turn react on the character of the individual. It is, in a way, the inverse of Christianity which started with the individual unit and through it reached out to the conglomerate life of men.

The pursuit of such an objective requires a transformation in the individual’s order of moral priorities that is as revolutionary as any other aspect of the modern condition.

The human virtue to which Bahá’u’lláh assigns the highest place is justice. He says: “O Son of Spirit! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me. . . . By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor.” This central moral attribute Bahá’u’lláh sets in the context of community growth: “The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men.”

Intimately related to justice in building healthy social relationships is love. Going beyond “the golden rule” of past revelations, Bahá’u’lláh teaches that the creation of a human community that incarnates the principle of unity in diversity requires that men learn literally to prefer others to themselves. We do this when we focus on the good qualities of our fellowmen, and, as individuals, resolutely overlook those qualities we do not admire. The effect is to nourish the desirable attributes that are noticed and praised, just as the effect of censure and coldness is to blight individual sense of self-worth and inhibit spiritual growth.

Detachment becomes another moral attribute of prime importance in such a context. Freed from the ascetic connotations of the past, detachment serves a vital function in such areas as the process of consultation on which Bahá’í institutional life entirely depends. Attachment to the self includes attachment to ideas that are “mine,” to the ego that can be bruised, to the desire for one’s own wishes to be accepted. The central principle of consultation, however, is the struggle of the group to find a collective mind, through which the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh can communicate with them. As in all other areas of moral effort, the group reacts upon the individual by requiring a conscious effort at detachment, until this becomes a habit.

[Page 16] Moreover, it is only by living in a community that an individual can discover and gradually eradicate the universal disease of prejudice. The more one works with people of varying backgrounds, the more he finds his prejudices are groundless. This includes not mere racial differences, but the much-discussed “generation gap” between the ideals of youth and those of the adult, the vast differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” the division between the well-educated and the illiterate, the discrimination against women, and the host of other forms that this age-old enemy of social order assumes.

Honesty is a moral quality that assumes new significance in the deliberate attempt to build an organically united society. Man today lives in a hypocritical society wherein each person tends to develop a mask to hide his own feelings. We also tend to say those things that we think will please our listeners (and something else when we are away from them). This has become so much a pattern that we sometimes even learn to hide our true feelings from ourselves, because we seek acceptance and feel that we must conform to the generally accepted point of view. The whole basis of Bahá’í consultation is quite opposite to this. “. . . at the very root of the Cause lies the principle of the undoubted right of the individual to self-expression. . . .” “Truthfulness is the foundation of all the virtues of the world of humanity. Without truthfulness, progress and success in all the worlds of God are impossible for a soul.”

Similarly, the Bahá’í teachings strongly censure certain moral weaknesses that, in the past, have been viewed somewhat complaisantly by almost all religious systems. Backbiting, for example, Bahá’u’lláh tells us, “quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.” The only other human failing condemned in these particular terms is the use of narcotic and hallucinogenic drugs.

Justice, love, detachment, honesty, freedom from prejudice and backbiting—these are a few of the spiritual qualities that Bahá’u’lláh has redefined and emphasized as the focus for the individual’s inner battle. In laying particular stress on these and other human attributes that directly serve the development of community life, therefore, Bahá’u’lláh has created a new system of moral priorities. The ethical standards that man has inherited from past religions and cultures do not necessarily contribute equally, or in some cases at all, to the emergence of a universal civilization that represents the long-awaited establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. That Kingdom has its own integrity and its own processes of organic growth, and those who would serve it can do so only in harmony with this divinely ordained pattern.

“O friends! Be not careless of the virtues with which ye have been endowed, neither be neglectful of your high destiny.” “Beware lest the powers of the earth alarm you, or the might of the nations weaken you, or the tumult of the people of discord deter you, or the exponents of earthly glory sadden you.” “This Day a door is open wider than both heaven and earth. The eye of the mercy of Him Who is the Desire of the worlds is turned towards all men. An act, however infinitesimal, is, when viewed in the mirror of the knowledge of God, mightier than a mountain.” “One righteous act is endowed with a potency than can so elevate the dust as to cause it to pass beyond the heaven of heavens. It can tear every bond asunder, and hath the power to restore the force that hath spent itself and vanished.”

[Page 17] THE FORM of the global society toward which mankind is being impelled must match these ideals, must indeed arise from the same divine impulse. The age-old issue of authority in the organization of human affairs must find a solution that not only unites the diverse peoples of the world, but protects and nurtures their individual capacity.

The uniqueness of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh lies in its response to this challenge. Fundamental to its teachings is the assertion that the “age of human maturity” has dawned, and that mankind is capable of responding to divine order in its social life. The central thrust of Bahá’u’lláh’s mission, therefore, was the establishment of His “Covenant.” Through this Covenant, for the first time in history, a Manifestation of God has Himself founded the institutions for the organization of the community life of those who recognize Him. Acting on His assurance, democratically elected Bahá’í Spiritual Assemblies have been formed at both local and national levels. In all their essentials these institutions are faithful reflections of the Will of God as revealed in the comprehensive written statements of His Messenger. Today they form one organically united administrative system embracing the whole earth.

In 1963, on the hundredth anniversary of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His mission, the crowning unit of His embryonic World Order was successfully raised. In April of that year some elected representatives of Bahá’u’lláh’s followers in every part of the globe gathered at the Bahá’í World Center on the slopes of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. There they carried out the first democratic worldwide election in history. The international administrative body born that day had been conceived a century earlier by Bahá’u’lláh. It assumed the name given it by Him: “The Universal House of Justice.”

With the emergence of this central organ of Bahá’u’lláh’s Cause, the social model He conceived a century ago stands essentially complete. Separated entirely from the arena of political dispute it seeks to demonstrate conclusively the truth its members have discovered: that mankind can learn to live as one human family. As yet it represents no more than the “first shaping” of the community that will gradually be built by the growing numbers of people of every background who are entering it. To his House of Justice Bahá’u’lláh has assigned a wide range of discretion in adapting the institutions and ordinances of this community to the exigencies of an “ever-advancing civilization.” The essential pattern however has been set, and its viability clearly demonstrated.

Far ahead lies the ultimate objective of Bahá’u’lláh’s coming, the establishment of the global society toward which the universal revolution of our times is resistlessly impelling all mankind. The present generation of Bahá’u’lláh’s followers will not see the attainment of this goal. What they know is that it is attainable; that their individual and collective efforts bring it daily nearer; and that in this lies the real meaning of life.

The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, whose supreme mission is none other but the achievement of this organic and spiritual unity of the whole body of nations, should, if we be faithful to its implications, be regarded as signalizing through its advent the coming of age of the entire human race. It should be viewed not merely as yet another spiritual revival in the ever-changing fortunes of mankind, not only as a further stage in the chain of progressive Revelations, nor even as the culmination of one of a series of recurrent prophetic cycles, but rather as marking the last and highest stage in the stupendous evolution of man’s collective life on this planet. The emergence of a world community, the consciousness of world citizenship, the founding of a world civilization and culture. . . .

•

THROUGH REVOLUTION TO COMMUNITY

Excerpts from the Bahá’í Sacred Writings and Texts

[Page 18] THE BÁB: “God hath set all things free from one another that they may be sustained by Him alone, and nothing in the heavens or in the earth, but God, sustains them.”

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH: “[Jesus] said: ‘Come ye after Me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.’ In this day, however, We say: ‘Come ye after Me, and We may make you to become quickeners of mankind.’” “Verily, God loveth those who are working in His path in groups, for they are a solid foundation.”

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ: “Consider ye that He says ‘in groups,’ united and bound together . . . with sincere intentions, good designs, useful advices, divine moralities, beautiful actions, spiritual qualities. . . . When the holy souls, through the angelic power, will arise to show forth these celestial characteristics, establishing a band of harmony, each of these souls shall be regarded as one thousand persons. . . .

“O ye friends of God! Strive to attain to this high and sublime station and show forth such a brightness in these days that its radiance may appear from the eternal horizons. This is the real foundation of the Cause of God; this is the essence of the divine doctrine. . . .”

SHOGHI EFFENDI: “Who else can be the blissful if not the community of the Most Great Name, whose world-embracing, continually consolidating activities constitute the one integrating process in a world whose institutions, secular as well as religious, are for the most part, dissolving? . . .

“Conscious of their high calling, confident in the society-building power which their Faith possesses, they press forward, undeterred and undismayed, in their efforts to fashion and perfect the necessary instruments, wherein the embryonic World Order of Bahá’u’lláh can mature and develop. It is this building process, slow and unobtrusive, to which the life of the world-wide Bahá’í Community is wholly consecrated, that constitutes the one hope of a stricken society.”

THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE: “We should constantly be on our guard lest the glitter and tinsel of an affluent society should lead us to think that such superficial adjustments . . . as an extension to all members of the human race of the benefits of a high standard of living, of education, medical care, technological knowledge . . . will of themselves fulfill the glorious mission of Bahá’u’lláh. Far otherwise. . . . Far deeper and more fundamental was their [the Báb’s, Bahá’u’lláh’s, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s, and Shoghi Effendi’s] vision, penetrating to the very purpose of human life. . . . ‘The principle of the oneness of mankind,’ . . . [the Guardian] writes, ‘implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.’ . . .

“Dearly loved friends, this is the theme we must pursue in our efforts to deepen in the Cause. What is Bahá’u’lláh’s purpose for the human race? For what ends did He submit to the appalling cruelties and indignities heaped upon Him? What does He mean by ‘a new race of men’? What are the profound changes which He will bring about?”

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On the Quest for World Order

A SELECTION OF EDITORIALS

The Global Specter of Hunger

In this 1974 editorial, as indeed in the 1931 statement of Shoghi Effendi quoted in it, we find an anticipation of the principal message of The Promise of World Peace, a statement addressed by the Universal House of Justice to the peoples of the world (reprinted in our Winter 1985-86 issue). It is that neither good intentions nor patchwork nor the concentration on short-term goals will solve the world-threatening problems that beset us in our fin de siecle; nothing short of a total cleansing of our most fundamental attitudes will ensure peace, or a safe environment, or an effective social order. (Reprinted from WORLD ORDER 8.4 [Summer 1974]: 1-2, Copyright © 1974 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.)

ALMOST EVERYWHERE one turns these days, there is starvation. In Africa, in a band four thousand miles long and one thousand miles wide, man and beast brutally starve. Weather patterns have shifted, drought has come to fertile and semifertile areas, and millions are caught, with scarcely anyplace to go and less reason to stay. The band stretches to take in parts of India, China, and Central America. The repercussions are endless.

Starvation in less dramatic forms has also become part of the lives of millions of us throughout the world, so much a part that often we do not know we are starving. Yet we hunger too: for clean air, for safe streets and parks, for art with meaning, for days without violence, for government with integrity, and for intangibles—for a sense of personal worth and dignity, for friendship, for a sense of community, for education that develops all of man’s potential, physical, mental, spiritual. It is not shifting weather patterns that threaten us, but rather “A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects,” which is “sweeping the face of the earth” in such a way that none escapes.

One is tempted to step into the quicksand of short-range solutions. At least one staves off the hunger pangs and has the sense of doing something. Never [Page 21] mind the sinking feeling. Never mind that the plans are doomed, victims of changing interests and priorities, of impatience, of personal differences. One can always, while hunger grows (like an ulcer masked with alcohol), think that if he tries harder, if he cuts more red tape, if he gets the parties to agree that they agreed, if he hires more police and plants more street lights, if he arranges more centers to dispense fellowship, if he concocts a new philosophical base . . . So go the endless, fruitless attempts and disappointments.

Where, then, does one turn? Shoghi Effendi, explaining the oneness of mankind, the pivotal principle of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation, wrote:

Its appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and nations.

Such short-range goals, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has told us, will never bring the desired results; the parts must he added to the whole. Thus Shoghi Effendi continued, explaining that the implications of the principle of the oneness of mankind

are deeper . . . Its message is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family. It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced. . . . It calls for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized world—a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units.

These fundamental changes in human society—touching as they will the family, the city, the nation, and the world—are the answers to the starvation that threatens to engulf us. Therein lies the equitable distribution of food and resources, the balance for reestablishing decency, integrity, friendship, community, dignity—in short, for appeasing the hunger that increasingly erodes the substance of our lives. It rests with us, to bring ourselves “down to poverty” or to pluck “the choicest fruits” from “the tree of effulgent glory.”

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World Peace—Finding the Elemental Quality

At last the answer to the prayer implicit in this 1976 editorial has been made: “the signs of unification and of increasing dedication to justice” have been recently foreshadowed in the peace statement of the Universal House of Justice and are gradually being realized by startling new developments in international politics. This conjuncture of principle and policy holds much hope for the world and for increasing cooperation among forces that have been in conflict for nearly a century. (Reprinted from WORLD ORDER 10.4 [Summer 1976]: 2, Copyright © 1976 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.)

THE PROBLEMS confronting modern man are many and complex. The prevention of war, the production of quantities of food sufficient for mankind’s survival, the protection of the physical environment, the stabilization of the world’s economy, the elimination of poverty, are only a few of the pressing needs that cannot be ignored without imperiling the very existence of civilization. The most elaborate philosophical, political, economic, and sociological theories seem insufficient to the needs of a harassed and frightened humanity.

Yet the solutions, though they involve a complete reconstruction of society, are simple. The difficulty of implementing them lies basically in the recalcitrance of man’s will. It is the refusal to accept the unity of mankind and to place social justice at the head of all other virtues that constitutes the chief obstacle to the creation of a peaceful and decent world community.

Observing the crisis of civilization, Bahá’u’lláh pronounced a diagnosis and offered a remedy:

Behold the disturbances which, for many a long year, have afflicted the earth, and the perturbation that hath seized its peoples. It hath either been ravaged by war, or tormented by sudden and unforeseen calamities. Though the world is encompassed with misery and distress, yet no man hath paused to reflect what the cause or source of that may be. Whenever the True Counselor uttered word in admonishment, lo, they all denounced Him as a mover of mischief and rejected His claim. How bewildering, how confusing is such behavior! No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union. The Great Being saith: O well-beloved ones! The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. We cherish the hope that the light of justice may shine upon the world and sanctify it from tyranny. . . . Take heed, O concourse of the rulers of the world! There is no force on earth that can equal in its conquering power the force of justice and wisdom. . . . Blessed is the king who marcheth with the ensign of wisdom unfurled before him, and the battalions of justice massed in his rear. . . . There can be no doubt whatever that if the day star of justice, which clouds of tyranny have obscured, were to shed its light upon men, the face of the earth would be completely transformed.

Perhaps the prognosticators, the forecasters, the futurologists, should look for [Page 23] signs of unification and increasing dedication to justice. These rather than conventional yardsticks of material progress will be the harbingers of universal peace.

Summer’s Glory or Summer’s Gloom?

More than sixteen years have passed since this earnest plea in 1972 for the nondestructive use of humankind’s power to interfere with nature. Once again we can see that all the world’s problems are bound up in a unified view of the role of the human race on this planet. (Reprinted from WORLD ORDER 6.4 [Summer 1972]: 1, Copyright © 1972 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.)

SUMMER is nature’s glory: long hot days and sultry nights, dry spells and thunderstorms, fast growth and slow ripening, a riot of color and sound. On land, in the water, and in the air, myriads of creatures celebrate the fullness of life. For man, too, summer has always been like no other season. He cultivated his crops, herded his animals, worried about blight, weeds, and the weather. Even city dwellers, remote from seasonal rhythms, have felt the irresistible attraction of summer and, answering its magic call, have made their yearly pilgrimage to the prairies, the mountains, and the seashore.

Yet suddenly summer is threatened. Ribbons of concrete, like preternatural snakes, entwine the country in their coils, killing uncounted animals and tens of thousands of human beings. Oil slicks break on the shore, turning the beaches into infernal expanses where millions of birds die for man’s greed and folly. Fish die in poisoned rivers; insects die on poisoned plants and in their turn poison birds who lay eggs that will never hatch. One after another, cities disappear from sight, swallowed by sulfurous smog, and mountains grow invisible behind a yellow curtain. Baffled and frightened, man observes his awful handiwork but seems incapable of reversing the fatal trend his civilization has been following over the last hundred years. He talks of ecology, affirms the need to protect nature, yet continues to pollute and ruin the environment of which he too is part. Overcome with greed, immersed in materialism, hypnotized by technology and its promise of physical omnipotence, man fails to perceive the basic principles that ought to govern his relationship to the world.

Almost seventy years ago ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said that all beings “which inhabit the world, whether man, animal, vegetable, mineral—whatever they may be—” are part of one natural system, obeying one universal law and divine organization: “For all beings are connected together like a chain, and reciprocal help, assistance, and influence belonging to the properties of things, are the causes of the existence, development, and growth of created beings. . . . every being universally acts upon other beings. . . .”

[Page 24] Of all beings only man is endowed with reason. Only he has the power to interfere with nature: either to enhance its glory at to ravage it, and with it himself. Knowledge and power have made man the custodian of the world and have imposed upon him a heavy burden of universal responsibility. “And the proper exercise of this responsibility is the key to whether his inventive genius produces beneficial results, or creates havoc in the material world.”

Ethnicity—A Counsel of Despair

Unity in diversity, widely recommended in spite of its nearly paradoxical meaning, requires reexamination for each situation to which it can be applied. In this case, put forth in 1977, it has to do with the typical American dilemma of love of country and the reverent quest for one’s roots. But it also has to do with the broader commitment to the finding of the single, spiritual roots and home for all humankind, the only basis on which world order can be founded. (Reprinted from WORLD ORDER 11.4 [Summer 1977]: 2-3, Copyright © 1978 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.)

AMERICAN SOCIETY, founded on a base of sixteenth to eighteenth century British culture, still bearing the mark of that origin, has received a series of ethnic additions all of which have modified the flavor of life in the United States without annulling the characteristic mental, moral, and behavioral traits that render the American recognizable abroad, whatever the place of origin, the race, or the religion of his ancestors. In many important ways the Italian-American has more in common with his fellow citizen of East European Jewish extraction than has the former with his Neapolitan forebears or the latter with the Jewish inhabitant of prewar Vilna. This phenomenon is known as the American melting pot.

It is a process that, at its worst, tends to reduce American culture to a stultifying conformity, but that, at its best, results in a pluralistic society. Without a creative awareness of the cultural freedom inherent in the American tradition, the distinctiveness of the various ethnic strains is blurred; our diet consists of hamburgers and hot dogs. Pluralism offers to each individual his choice of many options: thus we have become appreciative eaters of pizza, sukiyaki, sauerkraut, and gefilte fish, and this without reference to the ethnic origins of the individual diner. In the same way, any person can choose his religious and political affiliations (unless he prefers to be unaffiliated), his music, and his games from the rich menu America offers him.

Both the secure but mindless conformity of the melting pot and the engaging but chaotic welter of choices offered by pluralism have given rise to disillusionment and to a quest for alternatives. Although the two stand at extremes, [Page 25] the one of uniformity, the other of variety, they have in common a distressing fuzzing of the line between manners and morals. While the one condemns even moderate departures from expected modes of dress, language, and manners, the other tends to a permissiveness bordering on toleration of antisocial, destructive behavior.

One alternative that has been gaining favor in the last fifteen years or so has been the return to the ethnic identity—if it can be found—of our ancestors. Many American Indians would like to forget that the European (and African and Asian) invasion of their land ever happened; if they could only return to the point at which the first European settlers found them, their troubles— alcoholism, malnutrition, loss of moral orientation—would be solved. Blacks want to return to African ways, without going back to Africa. They say, “The Italians have their heritage, their language, their practices, intact after several generations of living in America, and so do the Poles, and the Irish; we want to discover our African heritage and live in accordance with it.” The European ethnic groups, often unaware that they have been serving as models to stimulate the Black Power movement, say, “They have Black Power—how about (fill in the name of your favorite ethnic group) Power, too? We cannot have it by losing our identity in the American mass. The melting pot has left too many lumps— let us return to our true identity.

One American Indian leader has observed that tribalism is not the sole possession of nonwhite groups—it is as accurately represented in the ethnic structure of white America as it is in the “tribes” of the American Indians. Therefore, he says, we should recognize American tribalism as a fact and adapt to it, rather than to the myth of the melting pot.

We agree with his observation, to a certain degree, but not with his conclusion. A resort to tribalism would be based on graver misconceptions than that of the melting pot. And its consequences would be most dire. American Indian tribalism is not in the interests of American Indians: carried to its customary extreme, it sets one tribe against another and deprives them of the ability to unite in defense of Indian rights. Every Indian who reads this will remember some incident of discriminatory treatment in relations between Navajos and Hopis, between Oneidas and Menominees. As for black Americans, there is not one African race, there is not one African heritage, and certainly there is no African tradition that has survived intact in the culture of black Americans. African traits, detached from tribal context, have become part of the Great American Mix, in some instances more characteristic of black Americans than of others, but not exclusively so.

No; the tribal solution, whether for red, black, white, or yellow, is no solution at all. It is reactionary, repressive, disunifying, destructive of harmony and progress, and withering to the individual who seeks wider horizons. The insistence that a poet be a Black Poet, rather than a good poet, is destructive of competence and sensitivity in art; the demand that correct Standard English no longer be taught in elementary schools the majority of whose children speak Spanish at “Black English” should have come, not from the champions and representatives of those minorities, but from the most avid racists, intent on the destruction of all their civil liberties.

[Page 26] The Bahá’í community in the United States has consistently advocated unity rather than uniformity. While boldly proclaiming the principle of the unity of mankind, Bahá’ís welcome a cultural pluralism, allowing every American to enjoy the fruits of all the ethnic strains that make up his country. Committed to spiritual unity that transcends the accidents of culture, a spiritual unity in which all people of the world, grown too small to indulge tribalism, can find the moral imperatives of our time, Bahá’ís find inspiration in the teachings of their Faith and pray that God will “Unite and bring mankind into one shelter . . . so that they may become as waves of one sea, as leaves and branches of one tree. . . .”

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Science and Religion

BY WILLIAM S. HATCHER

Reprinted with revisions from World Order 3.3 (Spring 1969); 7-19. Copyright © 1969, 1989 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’í of the United States, and with revisions prepared for Bahá’í Studies 2 (April 1980): 1-13, Copyright © 1980 by the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith.

A brilliant demonstration of how religion can be scientific and, in the process, a clear description of scientific method. If science and religion seem ill-matched, it is because modern science has been most often compared with pre-modern religion.

“The Revelation proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh, His followers believe, is . . . scientific in its method . . . religious truth is not absolute but relative. . . .” —Shoghi Effendi

A CARDINAL PRINCIPLE of the Bahá’í Faith is that science and religion must be in agreement and harmony. In view of the conflict and confusion which have long existed on this subject, one might think that this principle would be a great rallying-point, attracting large numbers of scientists and religionists to examine deeply the tenets of the Bahá’í Faith. This has not yet proved to be the case, however. What has been true is that those people who already felt deeply the need for some reconciliation of science and religion and who chanced to examine the Bahá’í Faith were pleased to find this principle an essential part of the Bahá’í teachings.

The situation is, I feel, quite analogous to another age-long conflict, the conflict between established religious orthodoxies. The relevant Bahá’í principle here is the essential oneness of religion. Yet there has not been any marked tendency on the part of established religious authorities to look with favor on this basic Bahá’í teaching. Because each orthodoxy has been adamant in its claim to superiority over other orthodoxies, there has been no common willingness to accede to the “leveling” belief that a de facto unity underlies the various great religious systems. Of course, there is a contradiction between the various rites and rituals, dogmas and creeds to be found in the present form of these religious orthodoxies. What the Bahá’í Faith affirms is that these rites, creeds, and dogmas are largely irrelevant to the fundamental teachings, the essential purpose and meaning of religion. These teachings have, without exception, enjoined such qualities as humility, love, compassion, tolerance. Fanatics can find no sanction for their fanaticism in the recorded teachings of their founder. Present-day religious arrogance is thus seen to be a partly deliberate, partly unwitting perversion of the viewpoint which the venerated founder had originally hoped to engender in his followers. Add to this the further observation that these founders were largely venerated only after the fact and were the object of scorn, hatred, and rejection in their day, and we have a thumbnail sketch of religious history.

I have chosen the conflict between orthodoxies as an analogy to the religion-science conflict because I suspect that it is closer than either religionists or scientists would like to admit. Orthodox religionists would dislike [Page 30] the analogy because they have been forced to admit the value of science after an initial resistance, and the idea that they may one day be forced to capitulate in a similar manner before the pervasive value of another religion which they initially misjudged—this would be painful. Scientists would resist the analogy in that it tends to compare science to the dogma of a religious orthodoxy, a comparison which they would regard as invidious. For if anyone is “winning” the so-called religion-science conflict, it is clearly science. Yet, it is not a novel observation that scientists are increasingly assuming the function and role played by priests in earlier societies. They are the initiated, those who explain the great mysteries to the unwashed masses.

Anyone who has had the opportunity to work in a scientific field knows how often serious scientific achievement is embellished with a liberal amount of sham and wordplay. If these are not rituals designed to charm the masses (or one’s Dean or the National Science Foundation), they come uncomfortably close to it.

Of course, a scientist would object that all of this is not true science. This, he would say, is the concession the true seeker after scientific truth must make to the ultrapragmatic world-at-large. The many exigencies of life in the political and social market place force the scientist, as an individual, into compromises, subtle and not so subtle, with the basic principles of scientific inquiry. But, one might contend, this does not compromise science itself, for anyone can plainly see that its principles are pure and lead to excellent results when applied correctly.

Does not all this sound strangely like the well-worn apology for the failures of religious institutions? “Our institution is divine,” we are told, “but you must not judge it by the ‘human element’ within it or by the corruption of individual exponents who may be weak and unredeemed.”

The point is that both science and religion are human, social activities. As such, they cannot claim to be purer or more exalted than their ultimate influence on society. This does not mean that such activities do not draw on invisible sources of inspiration and power to produce their effect. It means only that the evidence for the existence of such hidden wellsprings of creativity can only be measured by the ultimate, realizable effect which these activities or institutions do indeed produce.

The outline of the Bahá’í approach to the religion-science conflict now heaves more clearly into view. It is that, when the true purpose and nature of science are understood and when the true purpose and nature of religion are understood, then there is, de facto, no conflict. An essential unity is discovered, a unity which had always been present but hidden by the aberrations in the articulation of the two viewpoints .Just as Bahá’ís make no attempt to reconcile the confusing and contradictory dogmas of different religious orthodoxies, so they make no attempt to reconcile narrow-minded pronouncements by dogmatic would-be apologists for either science or religion.

A notable feature of the religion-science controversy as it has actually existed in our recent history is this: new science came into conflict with old religion. This fact must be borne in mind by anyone honestly seeking to understand the dynamics of the problem. Modern science is, indeed, new in any historical sense of the term. Even to date it from the Renaissance is a mistake. The chief features of contemporary science appear only in the nineteenth century. Of course, its roots go deep into the past, indeed to the dawn of human intellectual endeavor. But this is true of everything. What is certain is that such a profound transformation of science was effected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that one can properly speak of a revolution, however revolutionary the original sixteenth-century advances may appear with respect to their prehistory.

Of course, even to date the “scientific revolution” from the Renaissance does not obscure the glaring fact that the religion with which it came into conflict was already past its prime, atrophied, and sterile. Even though it possessed strong political and social prerogatives, [Page 31] religion had long since assumed a position as champion of the status quo, a disbeliever in the possibility of genuine social evolution and progress in this life. No wonder that “religion” seems to have been so much on the defensive and so easy an adversary to discredit in the eyes of thinking men. Such men simply had no example of a religion which was a dynamic, creative, evolutionary force. There was nothing in their immediate experience, no analogy or example, which could easily allow them to view religion in any light other than that in which its most volatile exponents chose to present it: a reactionary social force.

But the new science also suffered from the decline of religion. Because man was socially and morally atrophied in so many respects, society tended to use science for prejudicial, unscientific, and irrational ends. Science tended to become a tool to obtain desired (but not necessarily justified) social ends, rather than an attitude toward life as a whole which, from the Bahá’í viewpoint, it should have been. Thus, we now see the specter of scientific achievements being used to destroy nations, render the earth uninhabitable, effect mass murder, disgorge a cornucopia of often useless gadgets, and even to bolster dogmatic and puerile political-social or philosophical points of view about life. As examples of the latter, one might cite the attempt by some modern-day Marxists to use science to establish a religion of “scientific atheism” complete with dogma, rituals, and the rest, or the pseudo-philosophy of logical positivism whose inadequacy has not lessened efforts to popularize it.

Scientific Method

WE NOW TURN to a more substantive task of elaborating just how the basic unity of science, and of science and religion, is viewed in the light of the Bahá’í teachings. Our theses are, quite simply: (1) that the basic unity of science lies in its method of inquiry or epistemology, and (2) that the Bahá’í Faith consciously accepts this epistemology as its own, accepting in its wake whatever redefinitions of the terms “religion” and “faith” are consequent to it.

What, in the final analysis, is science anyway? To begin with, science is a collection of statements or affirmations which are taken as truths about reality (or some portion thereof). To say that a statement is true means that the state of affairs it affirms to be the case is, in fact, the case. To say that the statements of our science are “taken” as truths means that we deliberately include in science only statements which we have judged to be true as a result of a certain process. We can thus see that science involves at least two aspects, namely the process or method by which we judge statements to be true, and the collection of statements which results from this process. We will begin our discussion with a consideration of the collection of statements and then turn to a consideration of the process by which the collection is generated.

The statements that comprise science (or any given scientific discipline) are subject to highly complex interrelationships. These interrelationships serve to make some statements in the collection much more important than others. The two statements “this paper is white” and the highly pregnant “e=mc²” are both equally true statements of physics, [Page 32] but these statements are not of equal importance. Let us try to make all of this a bit more precise.

The Abstract and the
Concrete in Science

THE STATEMENTS of science have two components, an experiential (or empirical) one and a logical or theoretical one. Statements may vary with regard to their empirical and theoretical components. The theoretical component of a statement results in part from the use of abstract terms. These are terms which refer to entities or qualities not directly accessible to human observation. “Energy” and “mass” are examples of abstract terms while “paper” and “white” are concrete terms, referring as they do to observable entities and qualities.

The theoretical component of a statement also results from the relative complexity of the linguistic structuring of the statement and of the terms which occur in it. For example, terms such as “velocity,” “light,” “mass,” and “energy” which occur in the statement “e= mc²” are complex when their mathematical definitions are spelled out.

In fact, the pregnant statement “e=mc²” has such a high theoretical component that it takes years of concentrated effort to assimilate its meaning. This statement is far removed from simple, direct physical observations like the whiteness of paper. On the other hand, “this paper is white” has such a simple linguistic structure involving the use of concrete terms that its meaning might even be conveyed by the one word “white” accompanied by appropriate gestures toward the physical object in question. It is inconceivable to think of conveying the meaning of a highly theoretical statement in this manner.

Of course, even a statement like “this paper is white” has some theoretical content. It involves abstractions which are not innately given to us and which develop in normal children only after several years of life experience. Also, a highly theoretical statement has some empirical component. When all of the abstractions and definitions hidden in “e=mc²” are spelled out, the result will be an affirmation which says something about human experience on some level. We should thus be careful to view the experiential and theoretical components of statements as being a matter of degree.

A statement with a high empirical component and a low theoretical component corresponds to the popular notion of a “fact.”

The Implication Relation
between Statements

OFTEN, but not always, the important statements of science are statements with a high theoretical component. However, what makes a statement important is not only its internal structure and meaning, but its relationship to other statements. The basic relationship between statements is that of “implication,” which means that if certain statements are admitted as true, then certain other statements must also be admitted as true, these latter being “logically implied” by the former. The nature of the necessity (the “must”) involved in implication has received detailed analysis. Avoiding such details as being beyond the scope of this article, let us say that the necessity results primarily from the way in which we use words. To take a traditional example, we say that the two statements “all men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man” together imply that “Socrates is mortal.” We mean by this that the very signification of the first two statements is such that the last statement is true if the first two are. Another way of expressing this would be to say that the single statement “if all men are mortal and if Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal” is logically valid. This statement has a sort of general form: “If all A is B and if X is an A, then X is a B.” We would call this a logically valid form meaning that no matter what names we might substitute for A, B, and X in the form, the resulting sentence would turn out to be true. For example, we would accept as true the statement “if all dogs are cats, and if Descartes is a dog, then Descartes is a cat.” Notice, dogs are not cats, and Descartes is neither a dog nor a cat, but rather what the [Page 33] statement asserts is that if certain conditions are fulfilled, then certain other conditions follow, and this total statement is true. The truth of this whole statement, then, depends essentially on the way we use words like “if. . . , then . . . ,” “and,” etc. The structure of a sentence in terms of these and other such logical words determines whether or not a sentence has a logically valid form.

Beyond this cursory analysis, we will have to trust the reader’s intuitive understanding of the notion that a statement or statements may logically imply another statement (or statements).

Now, the complex interrelationships between the statements of a science result precisely from the fact that the truth of a given statement may logically imply the truth of other statements. A given statement is thus related to many other statements, both statements which the given statement implies, and statements by which the given statement is implied. The totality of this relationship determines the “position” or “importance” of the statement in the total context of science.

We might try to define the weight of a statement in the following way: The weight of a given statement of our science is the number of other statements now accepted to be true but which would be in doubt if we ceased to accept our given statement as true. Thus, if we dropped “e=mc²” from our list of truths, many statements come into doubt; but if we drop “this paper is white” from our truths, then few statements, if any, are affected (depending, of course, on the reason for our initial misstatement concerning the color of the paper).

Generally speaking. statements with great weight are important statements of science.

There are two further points worth making here. The first concerns the way we have treated the individual statement as if it were an independent, meaning-bearing entity. Actually this is an oversimplification. A statement, just like a word or phrase, depends on the total context of its usage for its complete meaning. It is wrung to think of a statement as having a meaning in isolation from the context of its usage and its relationship to other statements.

The second point concerns the relationship between the statements of our science and the given phenomenon they seek to describe. It has become increasingly clear from observation of the practice of science that this relationship is often mediated via certain abstract structures or models. A model is an image or chart which we have conceived with our minds and whose structure reflects in part the way we expect the world (or that portion of the world which constitutes the phenomenon being investigated) to behave. We say that the model is abstracted from reality and that the phenomenon in question is an interpretation of the model. To say that such a model is abstract means, among other things, that it does not attempt to capture all of the phenomenon as we experience it. Whenever a model is involved in our study of a phenomenon, some of the statements of our science will be directly true not of reality but of the model. They become true of reality only when (and if) the model is properly interpreted in the phenomenon. Thus, whereas a given [Page 34] statement true of a model always remains so, it can be variously true or false of reality depending on the way the model is interpreted. Of course, relative to any model and/or any interpretation of that model, a given statement will be either true or false and not both. A given science may be conveniently thought of as the statements which make it up plus the model (or models) of reality they describe, but we do not insist on this as a comprehensive definition.

As sketchy as this analysis admittedly is, we have gotten some idea of why some statements of a science are much more important than others. Generally speaking, statements with a high theoretical component and statements with high weight are more important than statements with a low theoretical component and with low weight. (Nothing excludes the possibility that a statement could have a low theoretical component and still have high weight.)

Although it may seem surprising at first, it is quite possible for one statement to imply another statement without our being aware of it. This means that we actually discover relationships of implication by a process of examining the logical connections between statements. It also means that, contrary to popular conception, observation and experimentation are not the only processes involved in discovering scientific truth. We often discover new truths by discovering that a previously doubtful statement is implied by some of our known and accepted truths. Often this discovery takes place not as a result of any direct or immediate observation of the world but as a result of our intuition and subsequent proof of the existence of a relationship of implication.

It follows that it is wrong to consider that science is a “collection of facts,” though this is a frequently expressed popular view. We have already noted that “factual” statements are simply statements with a low theoretical component and these comprise only part of our scientific statements, and sometimes the least important part.

The Relativity of Knowledge

WE CAN also see from our preceding analysis that scientific knowledge is relative. Scientific inquiry brings into play a host of human faculties such as reason, intuition, and experience, and these on different levels of profundity and objectivity. One cannot, however, explain in any simple manner the way in which these faculties interact to produce a given statement of science. The statements of science are arrived at by a process of repeated application of these human facilities, and by many different human beings. Years of experimentation (organized experience), theorizing (conscious reasoning and intuition), and discussion lie behind the one statement “e=mc².”

It would be a mistake to say that we hold such a statement to be true because of reason, or because of intuition, or because of experience. In the final analysis, we hold something as true only because of everything else we accept as true—that is, because this something is consistent with our experience and understanding of life as a whole. No statement can be held absolutely to be true, for no statement is independent of other statements and facts that may come to our attention at some future date. Nor is it independent of the meaning of other statements, a meaning that may be altered either by subtle shifts in the way we use words or by a change in explicit conventions and definitions. A combination of such factors can result in a change in the implication relation and thus a change in the truth value of some statements. Our knowledge, then, is relative. It is relative not only to time but to the whole body of our present knowledge, which forms the context in which the statement has meaning in the first place.

In short, no scientific statement an ever [Page 35] be held to be immune from possible revision, forever beyond the possibility of modification. Insufficient appreciation by logical positivism of this fact has been one cause of the lack of acceptance by the scientific community of this pseudo-epistemology. A classic example is the case of Newton’s laws of mechanics and his theory of gravitation, which were in fact considerably modified in later centuries. One of the confirmations of the modification came as a result of experiences (experiments with subatomic particles) which Newton could not possibly have induced in his lifetime. This simple but dramatic example should serve as an object lesson to anyone disinclined to take seriously the relative nature of scientific knowledge which we have described above.

Because statements have meaning only in the total context of their usage, there is a residue of subjectivity inherent in any statement. Though parts of the total context of science may involve highly articulated objectifications, the ultimate roots of understanding are always collective human subjectivity and so there is always “room for argument.” Total objectivity is not possible. Suppose, for example, that we try to eliminate the subjective element of the notion “red” by agreeing that the term shall be applied only to those objects giving a reading of thus-and-so on a spectrosccpe. Once this agreement is made, we may still argue sometimes about whether or not the needle really is quite on thus-and-so, and the unbeliever will go away saying that the definition was all wrong in the first place.

Our analysis of the nature of science and scientific statements has allowed us to appreciate several aspects of scientific knowledge. We have seen that science is much more than a “collection of facts” or an amassing of factual statements. We have seen that scientific knowledge is relative. And we have seen that total objectivity is impossible since man, the subject, is after all the developer of science.

Knowledge, in short, is human knowledge, because it is human beings who are the knowers. All of our discussion should be understood with this in mind. I emphasize this seemingly trivial point here, because failure to understand it often leads to some unfortunate emotional reactions to the otherwise clear points which we have summarized above. Some people feel that to assert that knowledge is rooted in human subjectivity or that knowledge is relative is to argue that the world “out there” is unreal or perhaps a figment of our imagination. There is, however, no such implication. Nothing we have said implies that there is no reality which operates independently of our will and our subjectivity. We have pointed out only that our understanding of this objective reality (whatever it ultimately turns out to be) is relative because our relationship to it is relative.

The Process of Knowledge

“BUT HOW,” one might ask, “does a statement come to be accepted as true in view of this incredibly complex situation you have sketched out for us?” Let us say that something like the following is involved: our subjectivity is bombarded with stimuli. In order to make sense out of this experience, we begin to make certain simplifying assumptions. These assumptions, if they are made unconsciously and without reflection, become embodied in what we call “common sense.” The child “knows” that getting hit by a car will hurt, because he has fallen down before and experienced the effects of sudden acceleration. This is clearly a learned and not an innate response. But the child cannot articulate any principles of acceleration or velocity and “prove” that he will be hurt.

Now if, on the other hand, our simplifying assumptions are made explicitly and consciously (or if we make explicit those assumptions which were previously unconscious), then we have the beginnings of science. We continue to build the science by examining the logical relations between our assumptions and their consequences (mathematics, theorizing) and testing our assumptions (experimentation, i.e., the willful bringing about of experience). This leads us ultimately to a well-organized “body of knowledge” [Page 36] which describes a model of reality, or a portion thereof. The collection of statements which make up this body of knowledge are the statements of our science. As we have already stressed, this body of knowledge and the model (or models) it describes will be continually revised in the light of new experiences, new assumptions, and newly discovered logical relationships.

Simply put, it is the conscious, explicit organization of knowledge that makes it scientific. Science is organized knowledge, or, to paraphrase the words of W. V. Quine, “science is common sense which has become self-conscious.” When we begin to organize our experience (experimentation), rather than simply profiting from fortuitous experiences, to direct our reasoning (mathematics and logic), rather than being satisfied with common-sense deduction, and to train our intuition (reflection and meditation), rather than relying on occasional flashes of insight—then we are engaging in scientific inquiry as opposed to common sense or unscientific (or, perhaps, prescientific) inquiry.

Notice that it is this conscious direction and organization of our inquiry which alone enables us to generate truths of high weight— that is, important statements. Science is not just a matter of discovering true statements, for every human being knows an unbounded number of trivially true statements: grass is green, fire burns, etc. In sum, human thought is bound to go on in any case, and human thought is bound to evolve (change as a function of time). Science, as a positive value, intervenes by giving certain directional principles so that we may profit more effectively from this evolution.

At bottom, the criterion for truth in science is essentially pragmatic. “Does it work the way it says it will?” is the question to be answered. If the theory says that such and such a thing must happen, then does it happen? It is by repeated application of this pragmatic criterion, interlaced with intervening theory, that we gradually build up our model of reality, our collection of true statements.

In closing this discussion, we might try to formulate a general criterion of scientific truth in somewhat the following manner: We have a right to accept a statement as true when we have rendered that statement considerably more acceptable than its negation. Proof, in scientific terms, means nothing more than the total process by which we render a statement acceptable by this criterion. The possibility, even the notion, of “absolute proof” of anything is simply not within the domain of scientific method (again, contradictory to popular notion).

Similarly, we may formulate a summary definition of scientific method in the following terms: Scientific method is the systematic, organized, directed, and conscious use of our various mental faculties in an effort to arrive at a coherent model of whatever phenomenon is being investigated.

Knowledge and Conviction

THE READER who may be reflecting on these things for the first time might well have an immediate reaction of the following sort: “If knowledge really is relative, as you say, then where does the sense of certitude that I possess come from?” The fact is that we do have seemingly deep-seated “feelings” of certitude about many things. In particular, the sense of our own existence or self-identity, and the sense of the objective reality of the physical world are two feelings that seem to be quite universal. Yet, the mentally ill frequently lose their sense of identity and existence. Even normal people have moments in which they have a sense of “unreality” about things. After all, we really could be dreaming and the world may be a monstrous illusion. The belief in the unreality of our existence or of the physical world is unscientific since scientific inquiry has led us to feel that the assumption of the reality of these things is considerably more acceptable than the contrary. Yet, if we are honest, we cannot rule out the possibility [Page 37] of having to revise our assessment in the future. How far it is from our everyday common-sense experience of matter (from which our sense of physical reality is largely derived) to the rational and scientific view of matter as energy, protons, electrons, etc.!

Thus, the “feeling” of certitude which we have is a psychological state. Our convictions may not really be as deep as we perceive them to be, and we may lose them in the future even though such a thing be inconceivable to us at the present moment. The feeling of certitude is not equivalent to knowledge, for knowledge is the process we have described in some detail above, but a sense of certitude can be had even when there is no knowledge.

I think that we can say something like the following concerning the relationship between knowledge and conviction: If our intellect accepts a concept as true, then our emotions begin to organize themselves around the idea, focusing on it, and “depending” on it. When this happens, the concept ceases to be a mere intellectual hypothesis or assumption. It becomes part of the way we live and expect things to behave.

Of course, an intellectual concept may be new, or it may be an explication of a principle previously assumed on an unconscious level. Thus, there may already be considerable emotional orientation around a principle before we are able to make the principle explicit even to ourselves. Progress in knowledge frequently occurs when unconsciously assumed hypotheses are made explicit.

For example, from infancy our experience of the world leads us to expect unsupported objects to fall. This common expectation, which we make in a more or less unconscious way, can be explicitly formulated in the theory of gravitation. But the purely intellectual part of this theory does not express the emotional upset we would feel if suddenly it happened that an unsupported object did not fall. It would be only the most objective scientist who, observing an instance in which a dropped object did not fall to earth, could overcome his natural emotional reaction to the event and consider it merely as an intriguing counterexample to the present theory of gravitation.

There is nothing unscientific about this emotional and subjective dependence on our assumptions. Psychologists have shown this dependence to be so great that even a slight physical environmental change, such as being plunged into total darkness, can result in psychotic behavior in a short period of time. We are so constructed that dependence on our assumptions is an inextricable part of our makeup. Our freedom lies in being able, through independent inquiry, to obtain knowledge and thus modify our conceptions and ultimately our emotional orienntation. The very depth of this emotional attachment to our concepts serves as a pressure to force us to keep our concepts as close as possible to reality, because we are in for emotional shocks if our expectations are not fulfilled.

Knowledge and Faith

WE NEED A good word to sum up the process of organizing our emotions around our assumptions, and religion has provided us with the word: faith. We can define an individual’s faith to be his total emotional and psychological orientation resulting from the body of assumptions about reality that he has made (consciously or unconsciously). Of course, his faith may change with time as he has new experiences and modifies his concepts.

We can see from this analysis that faith is not some vague thing possessed only by a few religious mystics. Every humn being has faith just as surely as he has a mind and a body. We are not free to choose not to have a faith any more than we can choose whether to be born. However, the quality of people’s faiths differs considerably depending on the degree to which the basic assumptions on which a given faith is based are justified. Faith is the process of organizing our emotional life around our assumptions, and so the quality of faith is directly proportional to the validity of the assumptions (again, conscious or unconscious) on which faith is based. We can see, now, why the Bahá’í Faith enjoins a scientific outlook on life as being essential. The [Page 38] scientific approach does not guarantee us absolute knowledge, this being beyond the possibilities of man in any case, but it does guarantee that our concepts will be as functional and as close to reality as possible.

We have already indicated that change and reappraisal characterize knowledge and faith. But what is also true is that we seem to be more suited to gradual, smooth transitions than to sudden, violent, cataclysmic ones. The latter tend to overstimulate us to the point of shock, rendering a new and pragmatic response difficult. This is to say that living is basically a serious business, and that it behooves us always to maintain a certain alertness in order to be able to modify our conceptions gradually, thus avoiding rude awakenings where we find that our faith has been totally blind and misguided.

In short, when our concepts are grossly unscientific, our faith becomes blind and unreal. We come to expect the wrong things and to be upset when they do not happen as we wish. We become hardened and adamant in our faith. Even when presented with clear contradictions in our conceptions we resist change, for we sense that even though the purely intellectual effort necessary to reconstitute our thought may be small, the emotional reorientation necessary to assimilate the new truth will be great. Thus, we may be led, by our emotions, to act against our own interest. How scientifically did Jesus say, “As a man thinketh, so is he,” and how scientifically did Paul say, “The good I would do I do not.” The more we persist in our blind faith the greater the inertia against acceptance of a truer picture of reality, and the greater the pain when the larger conception forces itself upon us, and we can avoid it no longer.

Our discussion here touches upon yet another common misconception about science and its relationship to religion. This is the idea that there is an intrinsic opposition between faith and reason. Rather than being in opposition, the two are part of the same process of knowing and living, as we have seen. Faith must be rational, and reason always operates within the context of our basic assumptions —that is, our faith. Our assumptions, when made explicit, are the purely intellectual component of our total faith.

I wish to close this section with two brief comments. The first is for the philosophically minded individual who may feel he sees a contradiction in that I make an absolute principle of the relativity of truth. This, I do not do. The reason for accepting scientific method is that it works. The statement “the scientific method is a good one” is to be evaluated by the same pragmatic criterion as any other statement. I admit the possibility that later experience may force me to revise my evaluation even of that statement. I thus do not make an absolute out of relativity.

The second comment is this: Though the nature of knowledge and of man’s own limitations makes relativity an essential feature of knowledge, it may be that in practice most statements can be rendered either very acceptable or very unacceptable, thus reducing the existential component of “undecidability.” The theoretical uncertainty remains even with the surest of statements, but it is our explicit awareness of this uncertainty which is our greatest asset in adapting to our human situation. Once we accept humbly the limitations imposed on us, it becomes practically possible to resolve a good many issues and to make real progress in formulating a meaningful and practical understanding of reality.

The Phenomenon of Revelation

SUPPOSE that a certain phenomenon occurs in our corner of the universe precisely every two billion years. What is the chance that we will ever discover the rational basis for this phenomenon and the principles which govern its occurrence? Clearly the chance is small, almost nonexistent. If we happen to be the generation that observes the phenomenon, then it will appear to us as a miracle since we will have no record of its having occurred in the lifetime of any man in our recorded history. We will be able to do no more than record the phenomenon ourselves. If our record survives for two billion years until the next occurrence, then perhaps some scientific genius [Page 39] will begin to see some relationship and even intuit an answer to the question. But more than likely the tendency will be to doubt the validity of a two-billion-year-old record. Moreover, we ourselves, as observers of the phenomenon, will probably begin to doubt that it ever happened. Since the infrequency of the phenomenon will not allow us to incorporate it easily into our existing rational and scientific framework, our natural tendency will be to attempt to explain away or to discredit the phenomenon. Of course, if this recalcitrant phenomenon is itself the cause of other important phenomena, then we will have to find some way to integrate it into our model of reality or we will fail to be scientific in our approach.

There is one physical science which is actually in this position to some extent. This is astrophysics. Of all the physical sciences, astrophysics is perhaps the most dependent on records kept by scientists two or three hundred years ago, for the observations of the planetary motions which can be made within one generation or by one man may not suffice to observe certain important tendencies.

Though the original example of a periodic phenomenon having a period two billion years in length was hypothetical, it is quite possible that there are certain important phenomena which occur regularly at long intervals and whose pattern we have not succeeded in understanding.

If we consider the great religious systems of which there still exists some contemporary expression or some historical record, we will see that most have been founded by an historical figure, a unique personage. Islam was founded by Muḥammad, Buddhism by Buddha, Christianity by Christ, Judaism (in its definitive form) by Moses, Zoroastrianism by Zoroaster, and so on. These religious systems have all followed quite similar patterns of development. There is a nucleus of followers gathered around the founder during his lifetime. The founder lays down certain teachings that constitute the principles of the religion. Moreover, each of these founders has made the same claim, the claim that the inspiration for his teachings and his influence was due to God and not to human learning or human devices. Each of these founders claimed to be the exponent on earth of an invisible, superhuman reality of unlimited power, the creator of the universe. After the death of the founder, an early community is formed and the teachings of the founder are incorporated into a book (if no book was written by the founder). And finally a great civilization grows up based on the religious system, a civilization which lasts for many centuries.

All of the statements in the above paragraph are statements with high empirical content and low theoretical content. These are a few facts about religious history. Of course, these facts are based on records and observations of past generations. We can try to dispute these records if we choose, but we must be scientific in our approach. In particular, the records of the older religions are of validity equal to any other record of comparable date. If, for example, we refuse to believe that Jesus lived, we must also deny that Socrates lived for we have evidence of precisely the same validity for the existence of both men. The records of Muḥammad’s life are much more valid than these and are probably beyond serious dispute. Moreover, if we choose to posit the unreality of the figures whose names are recorded and to whom various teachings and influence are attributed, we must, at the same time, give an alternative explanation of the influence which these religious systems, elaborated in the name of these founders, have had. This is more difficult than one may be inclined at first to believe.

The major civilizations of history have been associated with the major prophetic religious systems. Zoroastrianism was the religion of the “glory of ancient Persia,” the Persia that conquered Babylon, Palestine, Egypt, and the Greek city-states. Judaism was the basis of the great Hebrew culture which some philosophers, such as Jaspers, regard as the greatest in history. Moreover, Jewish law has formed the basis of common law and jurisprudence [Page 40] in countries all over the world. (It seemed very herd for a Russian to answer when I asked why they closed some shops on Sunday. Certainly, I surmised they did not believe in the nomadic stutterer named Moses who proclaimed to a bunch of ignorant wanderers in a desert three thousand five hundred years ago the principle of a day of rest every seven days.) Western culture, until the rise of modern science, was dominated by Christianity. The great Muslim culture invented algebra and preserved and developed the Hellenistic heritage. It was the greatest culture the world had seen until the rise of the industrial revolution began to transform Western culture.

We are, however, very much in the same position with respect to past revelations as we would be with regard to our phenomenon having a period two billion years long. We were not there to observe Jesus or Muḥammad in action. The contemporaries of these people were certainly impressed by them, but these observations were made years ago and are liable, we feel, to embellishments. Even though it may be unscientific to try to explain away the influence of these religious figures, there is still a certain desire to do so. We are put off by certain obvious interpolations, and we are not sure just what to accept and what to reject.

The Bahá’í Faith offers the hypothesis that man’s social evolution is due to the periodic intervention in human affairs of the creative force of the universe. This intervention occurs by means of the religious founders or Manifestations. What is most significant is that the Bahá’í Faith offers fresh empirical evidence, in the person of its own founder, that such a phenomenon has occurred. Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892) claimed to be one of these Manifestations, and He reaffirmed the validity of the past revelations (though not necessarily the accuracy of all details recorded in the ancient books). Here is a figure who walked the earth in recent times and whose history is documented by thousands of records and witnesses. There are, at the time of this writing, persons living who knew Bahá’u’lláh. Of course, even the death of these people will not make the historicity of Bahá’u’lláh less certain. Moreover, the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh are preserved in His manuscripts and so we are faced with a record of recent date and one of which there can be no serious doubt.

The only way we can judge Bahá’u’lláh’s fascinating hypothesis that social evolution is due to the influence of the Manifestations is the way we judge any proposition: scientific method. This is the only way we can judge Bahá’u’lláh’s claim to be one of these Manifestations. We must see if these assumptions are consistent with our knowledge of life as a whole. We must see if we can render these assertions considerably more acceptable than their negations. In the case of Bahá’u’lláh, we have many things we can test empirically. Bahá’u’lláh made predictions. Did they come true? Bahá’u’lláh claimed Divine inspiration. Did He receive formal schooling, and did He exhibit power or knowledge not easily attributable to human sources? He insisted on moral purity. Did He lead a life of moral purity? In His teachings are found statements concerning the nature of the physical world. Has science validated these? He also makes assertions concerning human psychology and subjectivity and invites individuals to test these. Do they work? He engaged in extensive analysis of the nature of man’s organized social life. Does His analysis accord with our own scientific observations of the same phenomena? The possibilities are unlimited.

Of course, the same criteria can be applied to other Manifestations, but the known facts are so much less authenticated and so restricted in number that little direct testing is possible. This does not disturb Bahá’ís because they believe that, essentially, there is only one religion and that each of the successive revelations is a stage in the development of this one religion. The Bahá’í Faith is thus the contemporary form of religion, and [Page 41] we should not be surprised that it is so accessible to the method of contemporary science. Christianity and Islam were probably just as accessible to the scientific methods of their day as the Bahá’í Faith is to modern scientific method.

Each religious system has been founded on faith in the reality of the phenomenon of revelation, and those people associated with the phenomenon felt fully justified in their faith. But as the influence of religion declined and the facts of revelation receded into history, the sense of conviction of the truth of the phenomenon subsided, and this was only natural, as we have seen. It is, therefore, important to realize that the Bahá’í Faith offers much more than new arguments about the old evidence for the phenomenon of revelation. It offers empirical evidence for the phenomenon, and it is frank to base itself on this evidence and to apply the scientific method in understanding this evidence. So much is this so, that I would unhesitatingly say that the residue of subjectivity in the faith of a Bahá’í is no greater than the residue of subjectivity in the faith one has in any well-validated scientific theory.

Exponents of traditional religions have tried to coexist with modern science not by admitting the validity of scientific method in the approach to religion, but rather by contending that religious experience is so subjective, mystic, private, and incommunicable as to be “beyond” scientific method. The philosophy of religion based on these views is known as existentialism. In its modern form, existentialism was partly formulated in reaction to logical positivism. This latter philosophy insisted on “public verifiability” as an essential feature of scientific method. Without much thought, religionists accepted the positivistic analysis of scientific method, while applying existentialism to religion, and thus helped popularize the view that religion was hopelessly immersed in subjectivity, forever beyond the reach of scientific method. This has, in turn, led to a wide-scale rejeetion of religion by thinking people from all backgrounds. In closing my own discussion of these questions, I would like to correct this unfortunate view of religion.

Let us begin with an example. A biologist looks through a microscope in his laboratory, sees a certain configuration, and exclaims: “Aha, at last I have the evidence that my theory is correct!” Question: How many people in the world are capable of looking at the configuration and verifying the findings of the biologist? Answer: Very few, almost none, probably only a few specialists in his field. The fact is that the biologist will publish his findings, and a few other qualified individuals will test his results, and if they seem confirmed, the scientific world at large will accept the theory as verified. The positivist might concede this but say: “But if an individual did go through the years of training necessary to understand everything the biologist knows, then the individual could verify the statement. Thus, I admit the statement is not practically verifiable by the public, but it is theoretically verifiable.” But even this is not enough. The fact is that the positivist will be constrained to admit that a great many people may be unable, through lack of intelligence or mental proclivity, ever, in theory, to validate the result. The fact is that the findings are not immediately accessible to the public at all. The findings can be verified only by individuals capable of assuming and willing to assume the point of view of the researcher.

Of course, statements with high empirical content are those most directly accessible to the public. But we have already seen that a science comprises many statements with a high theoretical component, and these are not so accessible to the public. Moreover, many important statements of a science are to be found among these theoretical statements.

The moral of all of this is that the objectivity of science does not reside in the public accessibility of the majority of scientific statements. Science is not primarily a collection of facts or factual statements. Such statements [Page 42] taken in isolation are useless. Empirical statements are useful primarily for the relationships and models about reality that they suggest —i.e., for the theories that they tend to affirm or deny. The objectivity of science resides in the method we have described, for this method is what allows for the continual reassessment of our faith (our assumptions) which is so necessary to maintaining a functional view of reality.

Thus when I say that the Bahá’í Faith accepts the scientific method and that the faith of a Bahá’í has no greater residue of subjectivity than any other scientific theory, I mean just that. The empirical facts concerning the Bahá’í Faith are just as publicly verifiable as any empirical facts. And the deeper, theoretical truths are subject to the same degree of verification: Any individual capable of assuming and willing to assume the point of view of a Bahá’í can verify the findings of a Bahá’í.

Conclusions

WORKING SCIENTISTS have tended to be skeptical of religion because they have examined only the older religions where, as I have suggested, facts are few, and theory is perverted by years of unscientific thinking. Few such scientists have undertaken an objective study of the Bahá’í Faith. They cannot, therefore, presume that they would not validate the finding of Bahá’ís until they have examined this most recent evidence for the phenomenon of revelation. A modern scientist would ridicule someone who judged modern science by studying the science of five hundred or two thousand years ago. Yet these same scientists judge all religions without examining the modern form of religion that is the counterpart of modern science.

The truth is that scientists are human and that human beings, even scientists, can suffer from subtle but disastrous prejudices. When great scientists such as Albert Einstein and Julian Huxley have undertaken to write about scientific religion, they have been scorned by the scientific community. Most biologists began to regard Huxley as a senile old man when he undertook to write in this vein. Yet Huxley’s thoughts on the subject are not only profound, but they also constitute the true culmination of his scientific career. We, as individuals, can do nothing more than to apply the scientific method in our own life and to maintain a scientific faith. We must not allow false conceptions about science to mar the beauty of scientific method any more than we let false conceptions of religion mar the beauty of religion.

[Page 43]

[Page 44]

On Persecution and
Martyrdom

A SELECTION OF EDITORIALS

How do lovers of peace respond to persecution? The following editorials, written in 1978, 1981, 1982, and 1983, chronicle the history of the persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran since the Islamic Revolution, and in so doing provide an answer to that dilemma. But by themselves these editorials do not tell the whole story. We recommend reading those numbers of WORLD ORDER that report on the various inquiries held by the Congress of the United States—Spring 1982, pp. 3-45, a hearing on the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran held by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives; Summer 1982, pp. 9-13, “A Senate Resolution: Holding Iran Responsible,” and Winter 1982-83, pp. 9-24, “A Congressional Resolution: Protesting Iran’s Bigotry.” Further reading in WORLD ORDER on the subject of persecution and martyrdom includes Spring 1982, pp., 46-47, a review of William Sears’ A Cry from the Heart: The Bahá’ís in Iran by Firuz Kazemzadeh; Fall 1982, pp. 9-34, “Three Accounts of Love Sacrificed”; Fall 1983, pp. 9-16, “An Open Letter to Iran’s Rulers” by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran; Fall 1984/Winter 1984-85, pp. 51-57, “The Persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í Community and the Emergence of a Universal Moral Order” by Will. C. van den Hoonaard; Fall 1985, pp. 53-56, “The Continuity of Persecution,” a review of Muhammad Labib’s The Seven Martyrs of Hurmuzak by Howard Garey; and Spring/Summer 1986, pp. 5-25. “A Psychological Theory of Martyrdom” by Fereshteh Taheri Bethel. (Reprinted from WORLD ORDER 13.2 [Winter 1978-79]: 1-4; 16.1 [Fall 1981]: 2; 17.2 [Winter 1982-83]: 2; and 17.4 [Summer 1983]: 2, Copyright © 1979, 1982, 1983, and 1984 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.)

Attacks on the Bahá’ís in Iran

THE RECENT MOB ATIACKS on Bahá’ís in Iran have once again called attention to the status of the Bahá’í Faith in the land of its origin. In cities, towns, and villages—among them Iṣfahán, Fathábád, Arák, Sangsar, Nayríz, Sarvistán— over three hundred private homes and dozens of shops and business enterprises have been looted, burned down, or otherwise destroyed. In Iṣfahán a clinic that [Page 45] belonged to Bahá’ís was dynamited. Elsewhere, orchards were seized, and farmers deprived of their means of livelihood. A number of Bahá’í centers have been demolished or burned to the ground. Bahá’í communities have been terrorized, individuals and families beaten, and, in some instances, driven to the mosques and forced to recant their faith.

Many find it difficult to understand why members of a religious minority dedicated to tolerance, peace, and universal brotherhood arouse hatred in those among whom they live. The reasons for the persecutions, the hatred, and the violence lie deep in the sociopsychological structure of Persian society and go back more than a century to the year 1844, when a young merchant of Shiraz, later known as the Báb, founded a new religion whose followers rejected the literal interpretation of the Koran and held that soon “He Whom God shall make manifest” would appear on earth to bring a new Law and to inaugurate a new era in the history of mankind. In nineteenth-century Iran, where even the notion of religious liberty did not exist, the teachings of the Báb were bound to produce a violent reaction. Accused of heresy, the Báb was imprisoned for several years and finally executed in 1850. This did not stop the spread of the Báb’s teachings, nor did it stop the resistance of His disciples who defended themselves with great valor against attacks by the united forces of the clergy and the government. There ensued a campaign of extermination in which some twenty thousand Bábís were killed. The cruelty of the suppression, the indiscriminate massacre of women and children, the tortures inflicted upon masses of innocent people have been eloquently described both by participants and outside observers, among the latter Comte de Gobineau and Edward G. Browne. The bloodshed left a legacy of suspicion, fear, and pain.

Thirteen years after the martyrdom of the Báb, One of His leading disciples Who had been exiled to Baghdad by the Persian government proclaimed Himself to be the One Whose advent the Báb had prophesied. He became known as Bahá’u’lláh. Most of the Báb’s followers accepted Bahá’u’lláh’s claim and became known as Bahá’ís. Over the next forty years Bahá’u’lláh produced a vast number of works that today constitute the scripture of the religion He founded. He taught the unity of mankind and the equality of races and nations. [Page 46] He taught the unity of religions and universal peace. He proclaimed the harmony of religion and science, the need for universal education, and the equality of sexes. He also established the essential principles for the life and operation of a worldwide community of His followers who would govern themselves through elective bodies, would have no clergy, and would be dedicated to the common interests of all mankind.

The authorities, both religious and secular, kept Bahá’u’lláh in confinement and exile for forty years. Feeling threatened by ideas that challenged the outworn formulas they had mouthed for hundreds of years, Muslim clergy continued to demand the extermination of the Bahá’ís, whom they always called “heretics” and “harmful misleaders.” The Bahá’ís were turned into the scapegoats of Iranian society. As their numbers increased, they became an even more attractive target for demagogic attacks by those who wanted to distract the public or create turmoil. Since the Bahá’ís emphasized education and placed high value on work, they achieved a relatively high standard of living, which made them promising targets of pogroms. Last but not least, the tolerant and peaceful nature of the Bahá’í community made it possible to attack Bahá’ís without fear of violent retaliation.

In moments of national stress, during famines, revolutions, and invasions of the country, Bahá’ís could be blamed for the nation’s miseries. If one did not wish to pay a debt, one could accuse the creditor of being a Bahá’í. If an epidemic spread through a province, one could blame the Bahá’ís. Bahá’í ideals of world unity could be twisted to appear as a lack of patriotism. Bahá’í acceptance of the truth inherent in all great religions of mankind could be interpreted as a betrayal of Islam.

When in 1896 Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh was assassinated by a Pan-Islamic terrorist, the Bahá’ís were immediately accused of that deed. In the brief but violent persecution that followed, several Bahá’ís lost their lives. In 1903 more than a hundred Bahá’ís were massacred in Yazd. “In that city,” history records, “Ḥájí Mírzá-i-Ḥalabí-Sáz was so mercilessly flogged that his wife flung herself upon his body, and was in her turn severely beaten, after which his skull was lacerated by the cleaver of a butcher. His eleven-year-old son was pitilessly thrashed, stabbed with penknives and tortured to death . . . A crowd of about six thousand people, of both sexes, vented their fury upon the helpless victims, a few going so far as to drink their blood.”

The outbreak of the revolution in 1906 precipitated new attacks on the Bahá’ís all over Iran, with particularly bloody episodes taking place in Sirján, Dúghábád, Tabriz, Qum, Najafábád, Sangsar, Shahmírzád, Iṣfahán, Jahrum, Mashhad, Kirmánsháh, and Hamadan. As the constitutional movement developed, “the reactionaries brought groundless accusations against the Bahá’ís, and publicly denounced them as supporters and inspirers of the nationalist cause.” In the chaotic conditions of World War I and its aftermath, Bahá’ís once again suffered scattered attacks in various parts of the country.

During the 1930s attacks on the Bahá’ís were less numerous and less violent. However, the pressure against them was never entirely relaxed. Bahá’í schools were closed; Bahá’í marriages were refused recognition; Bahá’í literature was banned; gatherings were prohibited; Bahá’ís in government service were frequently [Page 47] dismissed from their jobs; nurses and doctors were fired from hospitals; teachers were refused employment. Occasionally, here and there, a Bahá’í was murdered. This pattern continued through World War II and the immediate post-war period.

A large-scale attack on the Bahá’í community was launched in the month of Ramaḍán, 1955. At one of Tehran’s mosques, Shaykh Muḥammad Taqí Falsafí, a fanatical mullah, daily urged his flock to rise up against the “false religion.” He accused the Bahá’ís of being enemies of Islam and called for severe measures against them. The mullah was permitted to preach his incendiary sermons over government radio. The effect of the broadcasts was immediate. Old suspicions were revived. Every invention ever made to discredit a religious minority was now thrown at the Bahá’ís.

On May 2 the police locked the gates of the Bahá’í National Headquarters in Tehran, and five days later the building was taken over by the army. On May 17 the Minister of the Interior proclaimed in the Parliament that the “Bahá’í sect” had been banned. A contemporary report describes what ensued:

This was followed by an orgy of senseless murder, rape, pillage, and destruction the like of which has not been recorded in modern times. The dome of the Ḥáẓíratu’l-Quds (National Center) in Tehran was demolished; the House of the Báb was twice desecrated and severely damaged; Bahá’u’lláh’s ancestral home in Tákur was occupied; the house of the Báb’s uncle was razed to the ground; shops and farms were plundered; crops burned; livestock destroyed; bodies of the Bahá’ís disinterred in the cemeteries and mutilated; private homes broken into, damaged and looted; adults execrated and beaten; young women abducted and forced to marry Muslims; children mocked, reviled, beaten and expelled from schools; boycott by butchers and bakers was imposed on hapless villagers; young girls were raped; families murdered; government employees dismissed and all manner of pressure brought upon the believers to recent their Faith.

A worldwide campaign of publicity, expression of sympathy for the Bahá’ís on the part of outstanding individuals in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and appeals to the United Nations resulted in some relief to the Bahá’ís of Iran. However, it took several years for passions to abate and for normalcy to return. Since then Bahá’ís have continued to live under pressure in the way forced upon them by the circumstances of history.

Though the Bahá’ís are the largest religious minority in Iran, their existence is not officially recognized and, unlike other minorities such as the Christians, the Jews, and the Zoroastrians, they enjoy no specific human rights. Being in their vast majority ethnic Iranians, speaking Persian or Ádhirbáyjání, they are no foreign element, but a part of the Iranian nation to which they have always been loyal. It is only the medieval intolerance of certain fanatical elements that strives to set them apart from their Muslim brothers and fellow citizens. Being nonpolitical, law abiding, and opposed to all violence, they constitute no threat to anyone; yet they have been the most frequently persecuted group in the nation. The current outbreaks of persecutions are only an episode in the long history of cruel and senseless oppression with which the Bahá’ís have been afflicted.

[Page 48] History Repeating Itself in Iran

FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS history has been repeating itself in Iran. All over the country a fanatical and ruthless religious establishment launched a campaign of extermination against the Bahá’í community reminiscent of the persecutions of 1848-53, 1896, 1903, 1906-11, and 1955. Once again are heard the voices demanding the punishment of the innocent. Once again self-proclaimed guardians of religion are leading an ignorant populace in attacking their fellow-citizens, burning houses, raping, looting, murdering.

Government officials either stand aside, leaving the mobs free to do their will, or actively cooperate with the bigots. Last year the nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran vanished without a trace. More recently, revolutionary tribunals have pronounced death sentences, and firing squads have executed the members of the Local Spiritual Assemblies of Tabriz, Hamadan, and Yazd. In many instances, the condemned were tortured before being put to death.

The charges against the Bahá’ís are old and tired, and some—corruption on earth and warring against God—are so outlandish that no enlightened human being could take them seriously. The trials and executions have nothing to do with the administration of justice. They are rather a fiendish drama whose purpose is to shatter, to intimidate, and to force “the heretics” to recant their faith.

Observing these events one feels transported into earlier ages and imagines oneself a contemporary of Christians in pagan Rome or of the Bábís in nineteenth-century Iran. Instinctively, one knows the outcome of events: the cause of the victims will triumph; the persecutors will earn eternal shame.

When the Incredible Must Be Believed

WHAT MORE can be said about martyrdom? What bears repeating—or requires it? When the incredible takes place day after day, something must give—either the facts or one’s standards of credibility. But the facts won’t go away. The joyful peace that descends upon the Bahá’í martyrs and their families at the moment of truth tells us that martyrdom is more than the material fact of suffering torture and death for one’s convictions; part of its definition must be the state of mind or soul that makes martyrdom recognizable and possible. This special grace comes to “ordinary” people who had been as subject to worry, fear, tension, anxiety as anyone else. A Bahá’í who has not faced this supreme test finds it perhaps not as incredible as would his average, religiously unawakened neighbor; but, with the heroism of these martyrs filling his consciousness, he finds it in himself to wonder how he would bear the torture and the killing undergone by his Iranian coreligionists. Such self-doubts are allayed by the clear evidence that these “ordinary” people are bathed in a power that [Page 49] makes pain irrelevant or perhaps even unfelt and infuses them with joy and energy that must come from their belief in a glorious future. This is not the end! Their own words testify to their happy anticipation of being reunited with relatives and friends who have preceded them on this road. That much we mere mortals can glimpse. As for the greater joy, that of being united with God, the understanding of it is probably reserved to those who have been allowed, by their love and merit, to stand, before death, at the opening gates.

A Season of Infamy in Iran

FOR IRAN the summer of 1983 has been a season of infamy. The world has watched in stunned disbelief as the mullahs continued their genocidal campaign against the Bahá’í community. They first hanged eight men in Shiraz, and later ten women, three of them teenagers.

The Revolutionary prosecutor, Siyyid Ḥusayn Músaví, defying truth and ordinary decency, announced the official banning of all Bahá’í institutions and proclaimed membership in them a criminal act. The charges were either specific and patently false—spying and sabatage—or abstract and ridiculuus—warring against God.

Though the mullahs have always maintained that there was a mere handful of Bahá’ís in the Islamic Republic, the prosecutor now claimed that “there are many Bahá’ís in Iran. But some of these people are spies. . . .” Those who are not spies, the prosecutor said, will be free to practice their beliefs provided they do so privately, and provided they do not invite others to participate, do not spread the Faith, are not active, do not form Assemblies, do not give information to others, and do not cooperate with Bahá’í institutions. Those who consent to live in silence, to see their community die a slow death will be permitted to do so. This is the extent of the humanitarianism of Iran’s Shiite clergy.

Iranian Bahá’ís, obedient to their religious commandment not to violate the law, have disbanded all their institutions. There no longer exists an organized community. By a definition contained in a charter to which Iran is signatory, an act of genocide has been committed. Is this another step on the gruesome path toward the physical extermination of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children?

[Page 50]

And all the atoms cry aloud

BY ROBERT HAYDEN

In artistic form, in a work firs published in WORLD ORDER, Robert Hayden, the much-loved poetry editor of the magazine for eleven years and its poetic muse and conscience, captures the majesty, scope, and transformative power of a new world religion.

I bear Him witness now

Who by the light of suns beyond the suns beyond

the sun with shrill pen

Revealed renewal of

the covenant of timelessness with time, proclaimed

advent of splendor

Ecstasy alone

can comprehend and the imperious evils of an age

could not withstand

And stars and stones and seas

acclaimed—His life, His words its crystal image and

magnetic field.

I bear Him witness now—

mystery Whose major clues are the heart of man,

the mystery of God:

[Page 51]

Bahá’u’lláh:

logos, cosmic poet, cosmic architect

of unity and peace,

Wronged, exiled One,

chosen to endure what agonies of knowledge,

what dazzling, dread

Bestowals of truth,

of vision, power, heartbreak for our future’s sake.

“O King! I was but a man

“Like others, asleep upon

My couch, when lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious

were wafted over Me. . . .”

Called, as in dead

of dark a dreamer is roused to help the helpless flee

a burning house.

I bear Him witness now:

toward Him all history moves, toward Him our history

in its disastrous rage for order is impelled.

—Roben Hayden

Reprinted from World Order 2.2 (Winter 1967): 8-9, Copyright © 1968 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

[Page 52]

[Page 53]

Women— Attaining Their Birthright

BY CONSTANCE CONRADER

Reprinted with revisions from World Order 6.4 (Summer 1972): 643-59. Copyright © 1972, 1989 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

This article, which recounts the history of woman through her centuries of subjugation up to the dawn of her full participation in a world to be largely transformed by that fact, is an impassioned appeal to the human species to remove one of the barriers to peace and to fulfill its highest destiny through sexual equality.

ONE of the most puzzling aspects of the human condition is the unnatural relationship that has existed between men and women throughout recorded history. The human species, like all higher forms of life, was created with a differentiation of reproductive function. But alone of all creation mankind has distorted reality by constructing a vast body of myth that has made the natural sex difference a cause of frustration, confusion, dissension, and, far too often, incredible cruelty and injustice. Moreover, the division by sex into clearly defined dichotomous roles and statuses has been a persistent feature in nearly every human society, whether primitive or civilized, ancient or modern, and has been a major factor in the spiritual retardation of humanity.

The unnaturalness of man’s attitude toward woman was emphasized again and again by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, in His talks in America. He told a Chicago audience in 1912 that equality is the rule in the animal and vegetable kingdoms and that when inequality exists the female may in fact be superior. He continued:

Inasmuch as we find no ground for distinction or superiority according to the creative wisdom in the lower kingdoms, is it logical or becoming of man to make such distinction in regard to himself? The male of the animal kingdom does not glory in its being male and superior to the female. In fact equality exists and is recognized. Why should man, a higher and more intelligent creature, deny and deprive himself of this equality the animals enjoy? His surest index and guide as to the creative intention concerning himself are the conditions and analogies of the kingdoms below him where equality of the sexes is fundamental.

The truth is that all mankind are the creatures and servants of one God, and in His estimate all are human. “Man” is a generic term applying to all humanity. The biblical statement “Let us make man in our image; after our likeness” does [Page 54] not mean that woman was not created. The “image” and “likeness” of God applies to her as well. In Persian and Arabic there are two distinct words translated “man” into English; one meaning man and woman collectively, the other distinguishing man as male from woman the female. The first word and its pronoun are generic, collective; the other is restricted to the male. This is the same in Hebrew.

To accept and observe a distinction which God has not intended in creation, is ignorance and superstition. . . . Until the reality of equality between man and woman is fully established and attained, the highest social development of mankind is not possible. . . .

In the earliest human groups men and women probably lived in biological ignorance, as innocent as animals in their sexual relations; only the mother-offspring relationship was clear, and mother-right was the rule. The discovery of man’s role in the fathering of children gave a new kind of authority to men beyond their superior physical strength. In the transition from the hunting to the agricultural stage, it became advantageous to men for the control of family property to be centered in the patriarchal line. Then the double standard of sexual morality was born, and mankind turned down the gloomy trail of female subjugation on which it has continued to this day. No matter where one looks in history, with but a few exceptions, the same sad drama of suppression of women appears.

In ancient times woman was an object of superstitious taboo, feared for supposed magical powers, and blamed as the source of dark and evil forces in the world. Similar attitudes were carried into more enlightened cultures. According to the Code of Manu (a system of laws composed by Hindu Brahmans in India), people were taught that “‘The source of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman. . . .’” In Judaic and Christian traditions woman was held accountable for man’s descent into sin. For this reason, among others, the birth of a son was greeted with rejoicing, while the birth of a daughter was looked upon as a calamity, and in unnumbered instances the unfortunate girl-child was allowed no more than a few moments or days of life. A Chinese poet lamenting the female condition, wrote, “How sad it is to be a woman! / Nothing on earth is held so cheap. . . .”

In nearly all societies before the Christian era, and in many post-Christian cultures up to the present day, women have been regarded as the property of men, to be bought and sold or stolen as part of the spoils of war. Because women were negotiable property, often men were permitted and indeed encouraged to have as many wives as they could afford. But a wife was bound to remain faithful to a single husband, even after his demise; and her fidelity was often enforced on pain of death. In ancient [Page 55] China and in India until recent times the widow was expected to sacrifice herself in the barbaric practice of self-immolation.

The obligatory seclusion of women and children in a harem can be traced back to Ur of the Chaldees and may have been an outgrowth of certain primitive cruelties designed to insure the premarital virginity of women. Later the custom spread to China after Confucius and to Persia after the reign of Darius. Thence it was adopted by the Arabs; and, through human perversion of the social laws of Muḥammad, became firmly stablished in the culture of all Islam, together with its concomitant veiling and restrictions that amounted to virtual imprisonment. Regarding this oppressive system ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said:

All women in Persia are enveloped in veils in public. So completely covered are they that even the hand is not visible. This rigid veiling is unspeakable. . . . So excessive and compulsory is the requirement for veiling in the east that the people in the west have no idea of the excitement and indignation produced by the appearance of an unveiled woman.

Even though woman apparently first advanced humanity in the arts of agriculture, building, textiles, weaving, and pottery and gave grace and beauty to life, both in the home and in public places (through her skill in the arts of dress and interior design, and in the production of delicate fabrics and elaborate tapestries), nevertheless she was not honored for any qualities of mind or spirit that such talents manifested. She was honored only for her fecundity, her obedience to her men, and her industriousness on their behalf. Only in the higher classes of some societies were women permitted any kind of education save in the skills of the home and family.

It would be a serious error, however, to assume that men laid all these oppressions upon women wholly against their will, or that the systems that evolved around their relationships had no value in maintaining an ordered society and in advancing humanity along the road of civilization. In the beginning, women undoubtedly welcomed and fostered those taboos that freed them from unwanted male attention. Polygamy and the institution of the harem relieved them of incessant pregnancy and gave them protection and security for the rearing of their children. Even those practices that now seem to us most cruel and unjust evolved gradually as a matter of convenience or necessity; and, when they had become firmly established in the culture, they were accepted with equanimity, very often with pride and preference, by the women involved. Such attitudes are echoed today by some women who object to present movements toward liberation, preferring the comfort of accustomed ways and the security of subordination to a protecting male.

Human beings, among the most adaptable of all creatures, are skillful at building societies with defective blocks, and woman has been remarkably pliant in adjusting to her social condition. Yet the adaptations have not always been in the best interests of humanity, nor the social structures harmonious and lasting.

If left to its own devices, mankind would sink to a level lower than animal. But “God has ever dealt with man in mercy and kindness” and has sent His Divine [Page 56] Messengers from age to age as Educators “to dispel the darkness of the animal or physical nature of man, to purify him from his imperfections in order that his heavenly and spiritual nature may become quickened.” In the course of his education, “Man must walk in many paths and be subjected to various processes in his evolution upward.”

With the appearance of revealed religion, the infant human spirit passed from the innocence of spiritual ignorance and developed the capacity to recognize and choose between good and evil—between love and hate, selflessness and egotism, generosity and greed, trust and jealousy, compassion and cruelty, justice and tyranny. The conflict between opposing traits has been the cause of both humanity’s advancement and its retrogression.

Cyclic motion is a law of the universe. Stars move in their orbits, planets turn on their axes, seasons wax and wane. The evolution of mankind’s spiritual nature is also cyclic. Civilizations rise and fall on a wheel of spiritual progress that carries mankind ever forward toward its destiny. Within the great cycle of human development from spiritual infancy to maturity, many civilizations have risen on the foundation of the Revelation of a divine Educator and have fallen when society turned away from the light of guidance and allowed the truths of pure religion to become clouded or distorted by faulty human interpretation. But God has been patient with His children. Because “mortal man is prone to err, and is ignorant of the mysteries that lie enfolded within him,” God’s Messengers have come successively to lead humanity back from error and to help the human spirit to probe ever more deeply into its potentialities. Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, said, “Know of a certainty that in every Dispensation the light of Divine Revelation hath been vouchsafed unto men in direct proportion to their spiritual capacity.”

Whenever a Messenger came, the knowledge He brought helped for a while to elevate the station of woman, for He reestablished the eternal human virtues of love and mercy toward all mankind. Unfortunately, the benefit to women was never total or lasting, because men could not overcome the old prejudice that for so long had labeled woman as an inferior being. After a respite following a new Revelation, women’s position in society tended to fall back to the customary subjugation.

Still, there was a leaven working in the human spirit with a transforming power that was preparing mankind for a metamorphosis of its collective life. A century ago, Bahá’u’lláh wrote, “A new life is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth; and yet none hath discovered its cause or perceived its motive.” Long before Bahá’u’lláh uttered those words many women had begun to strain at their bonds; and a few were even making overt claim to recognition as free, rational, autonomous human beings.

Early stirrings of a worldwide movement destined to revolutionize the traditional concept of woman’s status were felt on the American continent during the seventeenth century. Emboldened perhaps by the breeze of freedom blowing from a new and as-yet-uncorrupted [Page 57] land, an occasional daring colonial woman managed a partial escape from her subservience to men. But there was little to gain and much to lose for those brave women—women like Ann Hutchinson, who suffered excommunication and banishment in 1638 for daring to challenge the loveless oligarchy of the Massachusetts Bay leaders and assert her right to think and speak for herself. No matter how just the cause those women proclaimed or how courageously they upheld it, theirs were lonely voices calling toward a day that was still far off.

As the nineteenth century neared, the dissent grew louder and more frequent and at last found a voice in England’s Mary Wollstonecraft. Her book, Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1790, shouted a message that reverberated on both sides of the Atlantic. Thereafter the winds of change gathered strength. A sense of freedom was expanding the human heart, and a scent of spring was in the air. The history of the nineteenth century is brightened with the names of the many women who, with great hardship and danger to themselves, championed the right of their sex to be educated, to be permitted to put their minds to use, and to enter public affairs. Like spring showers that help to thaw the frozen earth, these women were helping to prepare the body of society, frozen by centuries of tradition, to receive new seeds of truth.

But the time for sowing had not yet come, for Bahá’u’lláh explains:

How manifold are the truths which must remain unuttered until the appointed time is come! Even as it hath been said: “Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can everything that he can disclose be regarded as timely, nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the capacity of those who hear it.”

The sun that was about to break above the horizon could not have risen in an earlier age because humanity had needed to be trained, tested, and tempered until it had acquired the spiritual capacity to receive the light of a new Day.

BY THE YEAR 1844 the “appointed time” had come. In that year, on the night of May 22 when the Báb declared His Prophethood to His first disciple in Shiraz, Persia, the old cycles of limitation ended and the new cycle of fulfillment began. His brief six-year ministry released “the creative energies which . . . were to instill into the entire human race the capacity to achieve its organic unification, attain maturity and thereby reach the final stage in its age-long evolution.” The Báb turned the human spirit away from the darkness of the past toward that Light destined to appear a few years later in the Person of Bahá’u’lláh. From the moment of the Báb’s announcement, the forces of the metamorphosis of mankind were set in motion. The long winter of woman’s enslavement was about to end.

The first momentous events took place in Persia and Iraq. There the Báb’s zealous and vocal disciples clashed with the influential and hostile ecclesiastical leaders of Islam. As increasing numbers of people responded to the call of the new voices, there began one of the bloodiest and most vicious persecutions ever recorded.

Events moved with great speed, demonstrating by their transmuting effects the assertion of Bahá’u’lláh that “The world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the [Page 58] vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind’s ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System— the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed.” And mankind began to witness the fulfillment of Bahá’u’lláh’s promise, “The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that is therein, and spread out a new order in its stead.”

Of the first eighteen people to recognize the truth of the Báb’s Cause and joyously embrace His Faith, one was a woman. Her role as a disciple of the new Manifestation was played with such brilliance, dedication, and effectiveness that her name will be forever glorified in the record of human progress. Her accomplishments were to prove of vital consequence to all women. To have done what she did in any society would have been remarkable enough, but to have done it in Persia during its darkest and most degenerate period makes her achievement well nigh unbelievable.

This woman—born into a family whose men were renowned for scholarship and high position in the Muslim ecclesiastical hierarchy—is known to history, not by the names given her by her kindred, but rather by the simple, beautiful name Ṭáhirih, “the Pure One,” bestowed upon her by Bahá’u’lláh at the most dramatic point in her career.

Ṭáhirih was in her late twenties, long since married and the mother of three children, when she ranged herself with the Bábís. She had been allowed an education of a depth that was unusual for women of her day; and ever since childhood she had distinguished herself by her knowledge of poetry and other literary arts as well as of Muslim traditions. Her father is said to have lamented, “‘Would that she had been a boy, for he would have shed illumination upon my household, and would have succeeded me!’” She had ample opportunity to learn theology and become familiar with the complexities of the ecclesiastical thought of her day; for her father was a doctor of Muslim law, her husband was a theologian, her uncle (who was also her father-in-law) was the chief priest who led the prayers in the mosque, and their home was in Qazvin, a city noted for its great number of high-ranking ecclesiastics. So keen were her understanding and insight that she confounded the most learned doctors and theologians with her lucid arguments and expositions on abstruse subjects.

Ṭáhirih’s thirst for truth led her to the city of Karbilá, on the banks of the Euphrates, in Iraq. There she met with the spirit of the Báb in a dream. A little later, when she came upon the first of His Writings, she recognized Him as the truth she was seeking and sent a message to Him saying, “‘The effulgence of Thy face flashed forth, and the rays of Thy visage arose on high. Then speak the word. “Am I not your Lord?” and “Thou art, Thou art!” we will all reply.’” She pledged devotion to a Lord whose Word she recognized as superseding all manmade laws, rituals, and traditions. And immediately she turned her extraordinary talents to serving her newfound Faith with a fervor and eloquence that swept her into the vortex of the tumultuous events that marked the birth of the Bahá’í Era.

[Page 59] With a freedom that astonished even her admirers, Ṭáhirih moved among the people, teaching and guiding them to a new awareness. The beauty and grace of her person, which even the black chador could not obscure, charmed their eyes; the purity of her character attracted their love; the eloquence of her words drew many to accept the truth of the Báb’s message.

After three years of relative freedom in Karbilá, while the ranks of believers grew, Ṭáhirih’s fortune changed. Her fearless denunciation of the outmoded and restrictive customs of Muslim society and her audacious challenge to religious orthodoxy, together with the evidences of her influence among the people, evoked such anger among the theologians that they denounced her as a heretic and issued a judgment that led to her vilification, physical abuse, imprisonment, and ultimate expulsion from the city. From Karbilá to Baghdad—and thence in a series of journeys back to her home in Qazvin—wherever she went, like a design of repeated motifs, a similar pattern of events ensued.

In Qazvin, during a period of particularly vicious persecution of the Bábís, Ṭáhirih found herself imprisoned under close guard and in peril of her life. Nevertheless, she was so confident of her safety that she sent a message to her captors, saying,

“Fain would they put out God’s light with their mouths: but God only desireth to perfect His light, albeit the infidels abhor it.” If my Cause be the Cause of Truth, if the Lord whom I worship be none other than the one true God, He will, ere nine days have elapsed, deliver me from the yoke of your tyranny. Should He fail to achieve my deliverance, you are free to act as you desire. You will have irrevocably established the falsity of my belief.

To the consternation of her enemies and the bewilderment of her friends, before the specified nine days had elapsed, her delivery had indeed been accomplished, through a plan carefully laid by a fellow Bábí, Bahá’u’lláh. While her enemies searched for her, Ṭáhirih was sheltered in His house in Tehran.

The confidence that had emboldened her to send such a daring message to her captors while she was helpless in their hands came from her awareness of the divine power that Bahá’u’lláh possessed and her faith in His ability to effect her release. The Bahá’í historian, Nabíl, writes:

She knew full well into whose presence she had been admitted; she was profoundly aware of the sacredness of the hospitality she had been so graciously accorded. As it was with her acceptance of the Faith proclaimed by the Báb when she, unwarned and unsummoned, had hailed His Message and recognised its truth, so did she perceive through her own intuitive knowledge the future glory of Bahá’u’lláh. It was in the year ’60, while in Karbilá, that she alluded in her odes to her recognition of the Truth He was to reveal. I have myself been shown in Ṭihrán . . . the verses which she, in her own handwriting, had penned, every letter of which bore eloquent testimony to her faith in the exalted Missions of both the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. In that ode the following verse occurs: “The effulgence of the Abhá Beauty hath pierced the veil of night; behold the souls of His lovers dancing, moth-like, in the light that has flashed from His face!”

While under Bahá’u’lláh’s roof, through the ardor of her love for truth, she continued [Page 60] to move the hearts of those who came to visit her. One day, while she spoke to a prominent guest, her voice rang out from behind the curtain that shielded her from the eyes of her male visitor:

O Yaḥyá! Let deeds, not words, testify to thy faith, if thou art a man of true learning. Cease idly repeating the traditions of the past, for the day of service, of steadfast action, is come. Now is the time to show forth the true signs of God, to rend asunder the veils of idle fancy, to promote the Word of God, and to sacrifice ourselves in His path. Let deeds, not words, be our adorning!

Soon after Ṭáhirih’s rescue from Qazvin, at the beginning of summer in 1848, Bahá’u’lláh made arrangements for a conference of the Báb’s followers. Since the spring of 1847, as a result of the intrigue of ecclesiastical and civil enemies of His Cause, the Báb had been imprisoned in mountain fortresses in Ádhirbáyján, in northwestern Persia. There He had revealed the laws of His Dispensation, and from there He had maintained continuous correspondence with Bahá’u’lláh about the Cause. It was Bahá’u’lláh, in complete unity with the Báb, Who guided the activities of the disciples in the Báb’s absence. Now His primary purpose in gathering the believers from all parts of Persia was to make a complete and dramatic break with the past and to proclaim publicly the laws of the new Dispensation.

The scene of the twenty-two-day conference was the small hamlet of Badasht on the border of Mázindarán, where the tents of the eighty-one assembled believers were pitched in a large field bordered on three sides by gardens. In one garden, the pavilion of Bahá’u’lláh was raised; the other two gardens were reserved for Quddús (the eighteenth disciple of the Báb) and Ṭáhirih, who were to play prominent parts in the proceedings and who met with Bahá’u’lláh to consult on their roles.

Already highly charged with drama by its very nature, the conference moved to its spectacular climax. On one of the last days, Ṭáhirih stepped from her garden and walked with serene dignity toward the gathering, her radiant face unveiled. In an exultant tone she called, “‘The Trumpet is sounding! The great Trump is blown! The universal Advent is now proclaimed!’”

The effect was instantaneous. The meeting was thrown into upheaval. None of the proceedings of the past days had prepared the gathering for this. No man, uttering the same resounding words in an equally convincing voice, could have had so powerful an impact as their revered Ṭáhirih appearing before them unveiled. That this woman, the very essence of virtue, the embodiment of all that was beautiful and pure, should have shown her face in the presence of men outside of her immediate family was inconceivable, scandalous, blasphemous. Some of the men found Ṭáhirih’s action so repugnant that they left the assembly, and a few of them, disillusioned, disclaimed the Faith. All the rest stood amazed, in varying degrees of wonder or consternation.

By contrast, Ṭáhirih remained poised, confident, and joyous, as with ringing words she tore through the veils of tradition and announced. “‘This day is the day of festivity and universal rejoicing, the day on which the fetters of the past are burst asunder.’”

[Page 61] From that moment a new dynamic entered the world. All that had gone before was a prelude. By casting off the veil that symbolized not only women’s age-old subservience to men but all of humanity’s subjection to debilitating traditions, Ṭáhirih manifested the liberation of mankind from the bondage of the past. She announced that the new Faith was not merely a purification of the old, as most had believed, but that its purpose was to set the entire human race on a luminous new path.

Although her own path led her to captivity and martyrdom, she never wavered in her faith in the ultimate victory of the truths she upheld. At her martyrdom, in August 1852, she told her executioners, “‘You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.’”

And indeed they could not, for the power to accomplish the liberation of womankind had been released into the world on the plain of Badasht in the early summer of 1848. It only remained for women themselves to arise to the challenge.

THE DUST from the hoofbeats of the horses that carried Ṭáhirih away from Badasht and toward renewed Captivity had scarcely settled before the call that she had raised there echoed back from the American continent. In the state of New York, on July 14, 1848, a notice placed in the Seneca County Courier by five nervous but determined women announced a “Woman’s Rights Convention . . . to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of woman. . . .” Five days later, on July 19, in a small chapel at Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton arose before an audience of three hundred men and women to say:

I should feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time, having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty, did I not feel that the time had come for the question of woman’s wrongs to be laid before the public, did I not believe that woman herself must do this work; for woman alone can understand the height, the depth, the length and the breadth of her degradation.

From that two-day meeting came a Declaration of Principles that would guide American women for decades in their struggle for freedom and equality.

Meanwhile on the other side of the earth, the same ferment of change was working to free China from the stagnation of its ancient traditionalism. Even while Ṭáhirih at her death was declaring her conviction in the inevitable emancipation of her sex, the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion were instituting reforms that greatly improved the condition of Chinese women. Although the Taiping government collapsed in 1864, and the old Manchu dynasty regained a temporary hold, the course of history had been altered. One of the principal issues in the revolutionary changes in China since 1850 has been the liberation of women from the yoke of patriarchal tyranny.

[Page 62] However, it was eighty-seven years before Ṭáhirih’s own countrywomen, and women in other countries bound by the principle of female seclusion, could enjoy the victory she had foreshadowed. Even through the first quarter of this century, among all but the most privileged classes, a girl in Persia was obliged to envelop herself in the black chador from the age of five or six, was segregated from all but her own sex and virtually imprisoned within the women’s quarters of the house, was entirely secluded from the eyes of men after the age of eight or nine, was married before her teens, and was forbidden to walk or ride with a man, even her own husband.

Like a cleansing wind driving across the face of the earth, the movement for civil and political recognition of women has swept around the world. As early as 1848 the ancient prejudices against the property rights of married women, carried to America from old cultures, began their slow disintegration. By 1870 free secondary education was available to American young women and would soon become the norm in other nations; by 1890 a number of institutions of higher learning were open to women, and all the states had granted them the right to practice law.

With education and greater freedom of movement, women were able to agitate successfully for their enfranchisement. New Zealand was the first to extend the franchise in 1893. By 1920 women had won the right to vote in national elections in fifteen countries. Women in America were enfranchised in 1920, and women in Sweden and in all of Great Britain later in the same decade. In Thailand, Turkey, and Burma women gained a similar victory in the thirties, and in France, China, Japan, and India in the forties. By the late sixties most of the Arab States had granted women either limited or full suffrage. Only a handful of nations continues to deny women the right to vote.

With the franchise, women, in principle, gained the right to hold public office. Though, in fact, they are infrequently found in such positions, they are permitted to serve as legislators, cabinet members, and as ministerial and executive officers. These achievements, moreover, have extended to the international level. The United Nations, in its Charter, dedicated itself to “promoting . . . respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,” and in 1946 it established a permanent Commission on the Status of Women.

In a letter to a Bahá’í woman, written in 1913, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá foretold all the accomplishments of recent years and pictured beyond them a future stirring challenge and fulfillment for women. He said:

In no movement will they be left behind. Their rights with men are equal in degree. They will enter all the administrative branches of politics. They will attain in all such a degree as will be considered the very highest station of the world of humanity and will take part in all affairs. Rest ye assured. Do ye not look upon the present conditions; in the not far distant future the world of women will become all-refulgent and all-glorious, For His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh Hath Willed It so! At the time of elections the right to vote is the inalienable right of women, and the entrance of women into all human departments is an irrefutable and incontrovertible question. No soul can retard or prevent it. . . .

[Page 63]

. . . When the women attain to the ultimate degree of progress, then, according to the exigency of the time and place and their great capacity, they shall obtain extraordinary privileges. Be ye confident on these accounts. His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh has greatly strengthened the cause of women, and the rights and privileges of women is one of the greatest principles of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Rest ye assured! Ere long the days shall come when the men addressing the women, shall say: “Blessed are ye! Blessed are ye! Verily ye are worthy of every gift. Verily ye deserve to adorn your heads with the crown of everlasting glory, because in sciences and arts, in virtues and perfections ye shall become equal to man, and as regards tenderness of heart and the abundance of mercy and sympathy ye are supetior.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s dedication to the cause of “the rights and privileges of women” was clearly displayed both by His own treatment of women and in His talks and tablets. In 1912, in American cities from coast to coast, to audiences of all descriptions, He expounded this theme, so that no one could be left in doubt that the equality of men and women was one of the foundation stones of the new World Order.

To an audience in Washington, D.C., He said:

The teachings of Bahá’u’lláh embody many principles; I am giving you a synopsis only. One of these principles concerns the equality between men and women. He declared that as all are created in the image and likeness of the one God, there is no distinction as to sex in the estimation of God. He who is purest in heart, whose knowledge exceeds and who excels in kindness to the servants of God, is nearest and dearest to the Lord our creator, irrespective of sex.

In New York:

Today, questions of the utmost importance are facing humanity; questions peculiar to this radiant century. In former centuries there was not even mention of them. Inasmuch as this is the century of illumination, the century of humanity, the century of divine bestowals, these questions are being presented for the expression of public opinion and in all the countries of the world, discussion is taking place looking to their solution.

One of these questions concerns the rights of woman and her equality with man. In past ages it was held that woman and man were not equal; that is to say, woman was considered inferior to man from the standpoint of her anatomy and creation. She was considered especially inferior in intelligence and the idea prevailed universally that it was not allowable for her to step into the arena of important affairs. In some countries man went so far as to believe and teach that woman belonged to a sphere lower than human. But in this century which is the century of light and the revelation of mysteries God is proving to the satisfaction of humanity that all this is ignorance and error; nay, rather, it is well established that mankind and womankind as factors of composite humanity are co-equal and that no difference in estimate is allowable; for all are human. . . .

Again, it is well established in history that where woman has not participated in human affairs the outcomes have never attained a state of completion and perfection. On the other hand, every influential undertaking of the human world wherein woman has been a participant has attained importance. This is historically [Page 64] true and beyond disproof even in religion. His Holiness Jesus Christ had twelve disciples and among his followers a woman known as Mary Magdalene. Judas Iscariot had become a traitor and hypocrite, and after the crucifixion the remaining eleven disciples were wavering and undecided. It is certain from the evidence of the Gospels that the one who comforted them and re-established their faith was Mary Magdalene.

The world of humanity consists of two factors, 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. . . . It is not natural that either should remain undeveloped; and until both are perfected the happiness of the human world will not be realized. . . .

. . . if woman be fully educated and granted her rights, she will attain the capacity for wonderful accomplishments and prove herself the equal of man. She is the coadjutor of man; his complement and helpmeet. Both are human, both are endowed with potentialities of intelligence and embody the virtues of humanity. In all human powers and functions they are partners and co-equals. At present in spheres of human activity woman does not manifest her natal prerogatives owing to lack of education and opportunity. . . .

In Boston:

In ancient times and mediaeval ages woman was completely subordinated to man. The cause of this estimate of her inferiority was her lack of education. A woman’s life and intellect were limited to the household. Glimpses of this may be found even in the epistles of St. Paul. In later centuries the scope and opportunities of a woman’s life broadened and increased. Her mind unfolded and developed, her perceptions awakened and deepened. The question concerning her was “Why should a woman be left mentally undeveloped?” Science is praiseworthy whether investigated by the intellect of man or woman. So, little by little, woman advanced, giving increasing evidence of equal capabilities with man whether in scientific research, political ability or any other sphere of human activity. The conclusion is evident that woman has been outdistanced through lack of education and intellectual facilities. If given the same educational opportunities or course of study, she would develop the same capacity and abilities. . . .

The realities of things have been revealed in this radiant century and that which is true must come to the surface. Among these realities is the principle of the equality of man and woman; equal rights and prerogatives in all things appertaining to humanity. His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh declared this reality. . . . But while this principle of equality is true, it is likewise true that woman must prove her capacity and aptitude, must show forth the evidences of equality. She must become proficient in the arts and sciences and prove by her accomplishments that her abilities and powers have merely been latent. Demonstrations of force . . . are neither becoming nor effective in the cause of womanhood and equality. Woman must especially devote her energies and abilities toward the industrial and agricultural sciences, seeking to assist mankind in that which is most needful. By this means she will demonstrate capability and insure recognition of equality in the social and economic equation. Undoubtedly God will confirm her in her efforts [Page 65] and endeavors, for in this century of radiance His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh has proclaimed the reality of the oneness of the world of humanity and announced that all nations, peoples and races are one. He has shown that although individuals may differ in development and capacity, they are essentially and intrinsically equal as human beings, just as the waves of the sea are innumerable and different but the reality of the sea is one. The plurality of humanity may be likened to the waves but the reality of humankind is like the sea itself. All the waves are of the same water; all are waves of one ocean.

Therefore strive to show in the human world that women are most capable and efficient; that their hearts are more tender and susceptible than the hearts of men; that they are more philanthropic and responsive toward the needy and suffering; that they are inflexibly opposed to war and lovers of peace. Strive that the ideal of international peace may become realized through the efforts of womankind, for man is more inclined to war than woman, and a real evidence of woman’s superiority will be her service and efficiency in the establishment of Universal Peace.

In Pittsburgh:

Why should a man who is endowed with the sense of justice and sensibilities of conscience be willing that one of the members of the human family should be rated and considered as subordinate? Such differentiation is neither intelligent nor conscientious; therefore the principle of religion has been revealed by Bahá’u’lláh that woman must be given the privilege of equal education with man and full right to his prerogatives. That is to say, there must be no difference in the education of male and female, in order that womankind may develop equal capacity and importance with man in the social and economic equation. Then the world will attain unity and harmony. In past ages humanity has been defective and inefficient because incomplete. War and its ravages have blighted the world. The education of woman will be a mighty step toward its abolition and ending for she will use her whole influence against war. Woman rears the child and educates the youth to maturity. She will refuse to give her sons for sacrifice upon the field of battle. In truth she will he the greatest factor in establishing Universal Peace and international arbitration. Assuredly woman will abolish warfare among mankind.

In Philadelphia:

In this day there are women among the Bahá’ís who far outshine men. They are wise, talented, well-informed, progressive, most intelligent and the light of men. They surpass men in courage. When they speak in meetings, the men listen with great respect. Furthermore, the education of women is of greater importance than the education of men, for they are the mothers of the race and mothers rear the children. The first teachers of children are the mothers. Therefore they must be capably trained in order to educate both sons and daughters. There are many provisions in the words of Bahá’u’lláh in regard to this.

He promulgated the adoption of the same course of education for man and woman. Daughters and sons must follow the same curriculum of study, thereby promoting unity of the sexes. When all mankind shall receive the same opportunity of education and the equality of men and women be realized, the foundations of war will be [Page 66] utterly destroyed. Without equality this will be impossible because all differences and distinction are conducive to discord and strife. . . .

In Sacramento:

The world of humanity is possessed of two wings—the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength the bird will not fly. Until womankind reaches the same degree as man, until she enjoys the same arena of activity, extraordinary attainment for humanity will not be realized; humanity cannot wing its way to heights of real attainment. When the two wings or factors become equivalent in strength, enjoying the same prerogatives, the flight of man will be exceedingly lofty and extraordinary. Therefore woman must receive the same education as man and all inequality be adjusted. Thus imbued with the same virtues as man, rising through all the degrees of human attainment, women will become the peers of men and until this equality is established, true progress and attainment for the human race will not be facilitated.

WOMEN have now achieved many of the social and political freedoms that appeared dimly on the horizon when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke these encouraging words. In most parts of the world, women are prevented from enjoying full freedom and fulfillment less by legal restrictions than by the residuum of prejudices that still affects both men and women, the failure of women themselves to take strong initiative on their own behalf, and the absence of the kind of education that takes into account the spiritual as well as the physical and intellectual nature of the human reality. All these hindrances will vanish when people everywhere recognize the message of God for this day. In His Tablet of the World, Bahá’u’lláh wrote:

In this day every knowing one testifies that the utterances, which are revealed from the Pen of this oppressed One, are the greatest cause for the elevation of the world and the development of nations. Say: O people! Arise to assist yourselves through the heavenly power, that perchance the earth may be purified and purged from the idols of superstitions and imaginations which are, forsooth, the cause of the failure and humiliation of the helpless people. These idols intervene and withhold the people from progress and loftiness. It is hoped that the hand of power will assist, and will deliver the creatures from the great baseness.

Among the many idols still hindering humanity’s progress are the old stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. In this day of unity proclaimed by God’s Messenger, the old patterns of sexual dichotomization are, for the most part, no longer useful or valid. If men and women alike have been endowed with the same human attributes, then virtues and faults apply equally to either sex. The virtues of gentleness, chastity, and compassion are as essential for men as for women, while the qualities of strength, courage, and enterprise are as much to be cultivated by women as by men. And deceit, lust, vanity, apathy, and cowardice are unworthy of men and women alike.

For centuries women have accepted the double standard of morality and behavior as normal and have been taught that weakness, passivity, and compliance were feminine [Page 67] attributes; now they must learn a whole new set of values. Not until a woman shatters the traditional mold and steps free into her own reality can she begin to discover all the strengths that are latent within her. And not until men as well as women approve this new freedom can women’s latent strengths be fully developed.

People respond—as flowers to sunshine—to the warmth of approval. Modern psychology affirms the truth of this principle. Recent carefully controlled experiments have demonstrated that the expectation of one person with respect to another can noticeably affect the performance of the other; and so subtle is this effect that reaction occurs even in the absence of any verbal communication or outward evidence of bias. What is true between individuals is profoundly true in the larger social context; therefore society in this new age bears a great responsibility for creating a psychological atmosphere that will foster the development of woman’s potential. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasized the importance of attitude and expectation when He said:

. . . the assumption of superiority by man will continue to be depressing to the ambition of woman, as if her attainment to equality was creationally impossible; woman’s aspiration toward advancement will be checked by it and she will gradually become hopeless. On the contrary, we must declare that her capacity is equal, even greater than man’s. This will inspire her with hope and ambition and her susceptibilities for advancement will continually increase.

Women must not only be encouraged by society in general, but they must expect achievement and nobility of one another; and each woman must be confident of her own individual potentialities. A firm base for confidence has been laid in the assurances that have flowed from the Pen of Bahá’u’lláh. Among countless promises, He has written:

O My servants! Could ye apprehend with what wonders of My munificence and bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth, rid yourselves of attachment to all created things, and would gain a true knowledge of your own selves—a knowledge which is the same as the comprehension of Mine own Being. Ye would find yourselves independent of all else but Me, and would perceive, with your inner and outer eye, and as manifest as the revelation of My effulgent Name, the seas of My loving-kindness and bounty moving within you.

With the promise also goes a challenge, for He has written:

Upon the inmost reality of each and every created thing He [God] hath shed the light of one of His names, and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes. Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes, and made it a mirror of His own Self. Alone of all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty.

These energies with which the Day Star of Divine bounty and Source of heavenly guidance hath endowed the reality of man lie, however, latent within him, even as the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are potentially present in the lamp. . . .

[Page 68] The qualification that is coupled with this assurance places a responsibility on the human soul to be aware and active on its own behalf. Through His Manifestation, God has revealed the means by which these latent energies can be released. Bahá’u’lláh says:

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.

Knowledge is like unto wings for the being, and is as a ladder for ascending. . . .

Indeed, the real treasury of man is his knowledge. Knowledge is the means of honor, prosperity, joy, gladness, happiness and exultation. . . .

The importance of universal education has been stressed repeatedly by both Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It is a law of the new Age, and is no longer optional or the special privilege of a class or sex. In one of His tablets ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote:

. . . in this New Cycle, education and training are recorded in the Book of God as obligatory and not voluntary. That is, it is enjoined upon the father and mother, as a duty, to strive with all effort to train the daughter and the son, to nurse them from the breast of knowledge and to rear them in the bosom of sciences and arts. Should they neglect this matter, they shall be held responsible and worthy of reproach in the presence of the stern Lord.

This is a sin unpardonable, for they have made that poor babe a wanderer in the Sahara of ignorance, unfortunate and tormented; to remain during a lifetime a captive of ignorance and pride, negligent and without discernment. . . .

‘Abdu’l-Bahá placed special emphasis on the education of women, saying “. . . the education of woman is more necessary and important than that of man . . . The mothers are the first educators of mankind; if they be imperfect, alas for the condition and future of the race.”

In one of His Tablets, He wrote:

O maid-servants of the Merciful! It is incumbent upon you to train the children from their earliest babyhood! It is incumbent upon you to beautify their morals! It is incumbent upon you to attend to them under all aspects and circumstances, inasmuch as God—glorified and exalted is He!—hath ordained mothers to be the primary trainers of children and infants. This is a great and important affair and a high and exalted position, and it is not allowable to slacken therein at all!

Unfortunately, the kind of education we give our children today tends to develop the reasoning powers but repress sensitivity and intuition, to teach science without faith, to encourage an individualistic sharpening of the intellect without relating the learning to the whole fabric of reality, to urge discipline without spontaneity and joy. Such education can produce only a defective, materialistic humanity.

To an American audience, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said:

No matter how far the material world advances it cannot establish the happiness of mankind. Only when material and spiritual civilization are linked and coordinated [Page 69] will happiness be assured. Then material civilization will not contribute its energies to the forces of evil in destroying the oneness of humanity, for in material civilization good and evil advance together and maintain the same pace. . . .

. . . If the moral precepts and foundations of divine civilization become united with the material advancement of man . . . humankind will achieve extraordinary progress, the sphere of human intelligence will be immeasurably enlarged, wonderful inventions will appear and the spirit of God will reveal itself. . . . Then will the power of the divine make itself effective and the breath of the Holy Spirit penetrate the essence of all things. Therefore the material and the divine or merciful civilizations must progress together until the highest aspirations and desires of humanity shall become realized.

The role of women in this undertaking is awesome in its implications. In His talks and tablets to women, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá endeavored to instill an awareness of the supreme role they must play in the new human drama. If, as He declared, women possess the full range of human capabilities, with an added measure of tenderness, sympathy, and susceptibility to the needs of others, then their activity in lifting society above its present materialistic plane is cardinal.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá has made it clear that all women have the capacity to become spiritual mothers to humanity, whether or not they ever bear children of their own. He has also polished the tarnished station of motherhood, causing it to shine with new luster. In this day, the bearing of children cannot be regarded as merely a physical female function imposed as a necessity of sex. It has been elevated to the level of a spiritual act, shared by both wife and husband, yielding the fruit of love to the end that another soul may live to praise God and mirror His attributes. But the importance of women’s role beyond physical motherhood should by no means be diminished. For, as active participants in every walk of life, they share the vital task of helping to nurture humanity toward higher intellectual and spiritual development, furthering that divine civilization in which the full potential of the human mind and spirit can be manifested.

Only when women become totally involved in its processes and committed to its noble ends can civilization advance to maturity. And only then can humanity as a whole reach the Garden that Bahá’u’lláh invites each soul to enter:

Hear Me ye mortal birds! In the Rose Garden of changeless splendor a Flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither. Arise, therefore, and, with the whole enthusiasm of your hearts, with all the eagerness of your souls, the full fervor of your will, and the concentrated efforts of your entire being, strive to attain the paradise of His presence, and endeavor to inhale the fragrance of the incorruptible Flower, to breathe the sweet savors of holiness, and to obtain a portion of this perfume of celestial glory. Whose followeth this counsel will break his chains asunder, will taste the abandonment of enraptured love, will attain unto his heart’s desire, and will surrender his soul into the hands of his Beloved. . . .

[Page 70]

Two Hundred Years
of Imperishable Hope

AN EDITORIAL

In 1976 WORLD ORDER, with the rest of the nation, marked the two hundredth birthday of the United States, with a special issue. This editorial provides a unique historical perspective and shows that America has a challenging spiritual mission yet to complete. (Reprinted from WORLD ORDER 10.2 [Winter 1975-76]: 2-6, Copyright © 1976 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.)

WHEN TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO a New England farmer in Massachusetts fired his musket at a soldier of the King, the shot, all legend to the contrary notwithstanding, was heard only by a few. Most of humanity—China, India, Russia, the lands of Islam, Africa—remained unaware of a rebellion destined to result in the birth of a nation that would one day affect the life of every man, woman, and child in the world.

From its very inception the United States was unlike other nations. The country had been settled by pilgrims who sought to build in the wilderness of a virtually unknown continent a new Jerusalem. Yet their pursuit of the Kingdom quickly revealed paradoxes that would plague their descendants ever after. Professing Christianity, they nevertheless dispossessed and massacred the original inhabitants of a land to which they themselves had come in quest of refuge. Victims of religious intolerance, they established a puritan tyranny in their new home. Vociferous champions of human dignity and freedom, they imported hundreds of thousands of slaves whose toil helped clear the woods, drain the swamps, and raise the crops. Fearful of a stern God and wishing to do His will, they produced a government of laws and much lawlessness. Above all they were dominated by a sense of destiny and mission.

Through forests, over prairies and mountains, across forbidding deserts spread the American people, perpetually replenished by millions of immigrants from the old world, hacking, plowing, building, destroying, shedding blood. As America struggled to conquer the continent, the dream of the Kingdom receded before the commitment to the pursuit of happiness that was frequently equated with the striving for private gain and the right of the strong. The old paradoxes remained unresolved. Even a civil war would not suffice to establish in fact the [Page 71] textbook proposition that all men were created equal.

Yet America’s pursuit of wealth and power had an odd quality about it. Below the surface of the struggle for existence, of selfishness and of greed, which were often elevated into principle, there survived the conviction that the country had a historical task to perform, that America was an experiment that would demonstrate that the brotherhood of man was not an illusion, that justice for all was not an idle dream, and that man was not a beast condemned forever to live at war with his own kind. Perhaps it was this inner convictlon that impelled the educated to create in this country the world’s first and largest system of mass education, the whites to struggle for the rights of the blacks, and the rich to engage in philanthropy on a scale unparalleled elsewhere.

HOW would America discover her true self? Through what mysterious process would she give up racism, national arrogance, and notions of imperialist manifest destiny? What words would she inscribe on her banners? What ideals would she serve?

In a cynical age of shattered hopes and abandoned ideals the Bahá’ís reaffirm their faith in the destiny of America. They are confident that the history of this nation has a meaning that America’s people, her thinkers, her artists, her poets have always instinctively felt. “The continent of America,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said more than sixty years ago, “is in the eyes of the one true God the land wherein the splendors of His light shall be revealed, where the mysteries of His Faith shall be unveiled, where the righteous will abide and the free assemble.”

While visiting the United States, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was asked by a high government official how he could best serve his country. “You can best serve your country,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá replied, “if you strive, in your capacity as a citizen of the world, to assist in the eventual application of the principle of federalism, underlying the government of your own country, to the relationships now existing between the peoples and nations of the world.”

On another occasion ‘Abdu’l-Bahá thus defined America’s supreme task: “May this American democracy be the first nation to establish the foundation of international [Page 72] agreement. May it be the first nation to proclaim the unity of mankind. May it be the first to unfurl the standard of the ‘Most Great Peace.’ . . . May America become the distributing center of spiritual enlightenment and all the world receive this heavenly blessing. For America has developed powers and capacities greater and more wonderful than other nations. . . . This American nation is equipped and empowered to accomplish that which will adorn the pages of history, to become the envy of the world and be blessed in both the East and the West for the triumph of its people. . . . The American continent gives signs and evidences of very great advancement. Its future is even more promising, for its influence and illumination are far-reaching. It will lead all nations spiritually.”

THE BAHÁ’ÍS, therefore, see in America a potential unifier of mankind. The wealth, the energy, the idealism of this nation will find their proper outlet whenever they are applied to this crucial task. Only as a champion of universal peace and unity can America ultimately resolve the paradoxes and contradictions of the past and cure the ills of the present. The longer she neglects her world-historical obligation, the deeper she will sink in the mire of moral and spiritual degeneration.

In a letter penned over twenty years ago, Shoghi Effendi analyzed America’s predicament and indicated its eventual outcome. His words deserve to be quoted at length:

“. . . the country . . . is passing through a crisis which, in its spiritual, moral, social and political aspects, is of extreme seriousness—a seriousness which to a superficial observer is liable to be dangerously underestimated.

“The steady and alarming deterioration in the standard of morality as exemplified by the appalling increase of crime, by political corruption in ever widening and ever higher circles, by the loosening of the sacred ties of marriage, by the inordinate craving for pleasure and diversion, and by the marked and progressive slackening of parental control, is no doubt the most arresting and distressing aspect of the decline that has set in, and can be clearly perceived, in the fortunes of the entire nation.

“Parallel with this, and pervading all departments of life—an evil which the nation, and indeed all those within the capitalist system, though to a lesser degree, share with that state and its satellites regarded as the sworn enemies of that system—is the crass materialism, which lays excessive and ever-increasing emphasis on material well-being, forgetful of those things of the spirit on which alone a sure and stable foundation can be laid for human society. It is that same cancerous materialism, born originally in Europe, carried to excess in the North America continent, contaminating the Asiatic peoples and nations, spreading its ominous tentacles to the borders of Africa, and now invading its very heart, which Bahá’u’lláh in unequivocal and emphatic language denounced in His Writings, comparing it to a devouring flame and regarding it as the chief factor in precipitating the dire ordeals and world-shaking crises that must necessarily involve the burning of cities and the spread of terror and consternation in the hearts of men. . . .

“Collateral with this ominous laxity in morals, and this progressive stress [Page 73] laid on man’s material pursuits and well-being, is the darkening of the political horizon, as witnessed by the widening of the gulf separating the protagonists of the two antagonistic schools of thought which, however divergent in their ideologies, are to be commonly condemned . . . for their materialistic philosophies and their neglect of those spiritual values and eternal verities on which alone a stable and flourishing civilization can be ultimately established. . . .

“No less serious is the stress and strain imposed on the fabric of American society through the fundamental and persistent neglect, by the governed and governors alike, of the supreme, the inescapable and urgent duty—so repeatedly and graphically represented and stressed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His arraignment of the basic weaknesses in the social fabric of the nation—of remedying, while there is yet time, through a revolutionary change in the concept and attitude of the average white American toward his Negro fellow citizen, a situation which, if allowed to drift, will, in the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, cause the streets of American cities to run with blood. . . .” The woes and tribulations which threaten America, Shoghi Effendi has further stated, are “mostly inevitable and God-sent, for by reason of them a government and people clinging tenaciously to the obsolescent doctrine of absolute sovereignty and upholding a political system, manifestly at variance with the needs of a world already contracted into a neighborhood and crying out for unity, will find itself purged of its anachronistic conceptions, and prepared to play a preponderating role . . . in the hoisting of the standard of the Lesser Peace, in the unification of mankind, and in the establishment of a world federal govemment on this planet. These same fiery tribulations will not only firmly weld the American nation to its sister nations in both hemispheres, but will through their cleansing effect, purge it thoroughly of the accumulated dross which ingrained racial prejudice, rampant materialism, widespread ungodliness and moral laxity have combined, in the course of successive generations, to produce, and which have prevented her thus far from assuming the role of world spiritual leadership forecast by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s unerring pen—a role which she is bound to fulfill through travail and sorrow.”

TWO HUNDRED YEARS is but a short span in the life of a nation. America’s achievement in government, commerce, industry, science, and culture staggers the imagination. No less staggering are the evils which have grown in her soil. These, however, must not blind one to the vast potential she possesses to serve the highest interests of all mankind. Clearly recognizing their nation’s shortcomings, working and praying for its purification and spiritual growth, America’s Bahá’ís of all races, national origins, and religious backgrounds are confident that “Whatever the Hand of a beneficent and inscrutable Destiny has reserved for this youthful, this virile, this idealistic, this spiritually blessed and enviable nation, however severe the storms which may buffet it in the days to come . . . however sweeping the changes” in its structure and life, that great republic “will continue to evolve, undivided and undefeatable, until the sum total of its contributions to the birth, the rise and the fruition of that world civilization, the child of the Most Great Peace . . . will have been made, and its last task discharged.”

[Page 74]

[Page 75]

World Education in Quest
of a Paradigm

BY S. PATTABI RAMAN

Copyright © 1987, 1989 by S. Pattabi Raman. This essay is dedicated to the memory of the late Professor Daniel C. Jordan, Dean of the School of Education at National University, San Diego, California. Reprinted with revisions from World Order, 19.3-4 (Spring/Summer 1985): 53-64.

Again, by scrupulous reasoning, the spiritual dimension of reality is demonstrated to be the component of science, largely missing until now, without which the effort to solve the world’s problems not only fails but often accelerates disaster. In this article, Hatcher’s explanation of scientific thinking (see pages 29-42) finds its practical demonstration.

Introduction

THE MOST common battle cry of reform movements in education throughout history has centered around the irrelevance of educational goals and practices to the needs and exigencies of the day. Never before has the cry been more desperate and heartrending than it is today.

Humankind Stands poised with a feeling of impotent perplexity at the “Great Divide” where it can make a conscious choice to turn in the right direction and enter a new world of justice, peace, and tranquillity or to continue downward along the old way of injustice, war, and turmoil, a course that leads inescapably to the extinction of the human race.

Two generations ago H. G. Wells, acutely conscious of the potentially calamitous fissures in our culture, wrote that humanity was engaged in a race between education and catastrophe. The race was almost lost in the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But in the aftermath of that nuclear holocaust the idea took shape in the minds of some farsighted persons that it would be possible to prevent a repetition of a similar catastrophe by working together for the emergence of a new and universal fraternity of humankind through education. This was to be achieved by acting on men and women themselves, the cause of the catastrophe, by appealing to what is most noble in them.

As an embodiment 0f the idea of using educational, scientific, and cultural instruments for humanitarian ends on an international scale, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) took shape in [Page 76] 1946 under the auspices of the United Nations. It was the first attempt to create a public institution in which ideas, rather than individual or political power, were to be the acknowledged instruments for achieving the intellectual and moral solidarity of humankind. With a clear mandate to revamp education and educate the human race for a world community, UNESCO, with its specialized agencies and committees and all the financial and intellectual resources it could muster, began its work under its first director general, Julian Huxley, who brought to the task his great intellectual and cultural prestige, his energy, and his humor. This unprecedentedly gigantic international undertaking in educational planning and reform created a new awareness, triggered a spectacular educational explosion, and ushered in a highly dynamic decade for education all over the world. Long-muted human rights came to be openly declared and vigorously pursued, including the right to education. Education became accepted by economic policymakers not merely as a desirable social service but as an essential component of national development. UNESCO declared educational planning one of its top priorities, established regional and international training and research centers, and supplied educational planning experts to more than eighty countries. What, then, have been the results of the unprecedented educational experiment—both in the world at large and in the United States? And what are the implications and prospects for the future?

World Crisis in Education

DBPITE the initial spectacular educational expansion fostered by the UNESCO projects, there were many disappointments worldwide. A 1970 survey by UNESCO itself of problems and prospects in educational planning reports:

There was as it remains today, a great gap between words and deeds—between policies proclaimed by ministers attending conferences and the actions taken in their countries, between methodologies prepared by theoreticians and their application in the actual planning process. The many educational planning units often remained understaffed without effective links—isolated from the main stream of educational decision making. Meanwhile in the absence of overall integrated planning, basic educational priorities vacillated—jumping from primary education at first to vocational training, teacher training, secondary general education, higher education and finally to adult literacy training. The inevitable result was the emergence of wasteful imbalances both within the education system and its environment. (emphasis mine)

Recognizing the inadequacies of earlier piecemeal, short-range, and unintegrated educational planning, many countries, the UNESCO survey reported, had begun to write new prescriptions demanding, among other things, that educational planning should have “a comprehensive coverage, embracing all levels and parts of the educational system in a single view including qualitative [Page 77] and quantitative aspects.” For if one sought dispassionately for reasons why education was not more successfully planned and implemented to meet the immediate and future needs of the world’s peoples, the explanation could be found in a combination of external and internal constraints of the planning operation. It had become evident to the UNESCO planners that

without a clear idea of its objectives, an educational system is as a ship at sea with no destination; it cannot plan its course and can end up simply turning circles. A nation’s educational objectives, reflecting society’s idea of its own future, must be decided by the society as a whole and its chosen leaders. The idea of the future should embrace basic human values, ethical, cultural and aesthetic, and also the various roles the individual will be required to play in society, as a citizen, worker and member of a family. In translating these overall goals into educational objectives those responsible for educational planning can help by insisting that there be reasonable consistency and an order of priority among various objectives, since not all of them can be pursued at full speed simultaneously. They must make sure that the definition of objectives and their priority rating is understood as a continuing process that should be periodically reviewed.

Education in the United States

UNESCO’S evaluation of its own efforts to meet the educational needs of a global community underscores the disparity between expectation and achievement in the international sphere. In the United States one can see the same disparity and the same lack of objectives as education passes from crisis to disaster in its quest for relevance. “Until now,” remarks Paul Copperman, a noted analyst, “each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

Indeed, few undertakings in contemporary American life have provoked such continuing controversy as education and its institutional operations. A plethora of articles, countless speeches and books, and numerous conference reports lament, with endless variations, the built-in inertia of the educational system that insulates it from change and self-renewal. The tone of this lament is reflected in the following analysis:

At every level of education professions the pressure is felt and the complaints registered. Jacques Barzun documents how “drudgery, discipline, and conformity” constitute the basic syndrome of traditional education. George Leonard condenses a complex diagnosis into one simple statement: “The ecstasy has gone out of education.” Paul Goodman, in Compulsory Miseducation, [Page 78] describes education as a system of brainwashing which leads to “spiritual destruction.” Carl Rogers views the educational system as a kind of prison where the person is not free to learn; John Holt describes the many ways in which the system programs a guaranteed failure for significant numbers of children. Kozol details how education mediates “death at an early age.” Weinstein and those interested in humanistic education view the current system as one which often punishes an expression of feeling and renders the process of acquiring knowledge a sterile, mostly irrelevant, and even destructive experience. Silberman’s efforts at diagnosis indicate that education is in a period of serious crises. As a system, it does not address the development of the whole person; rather it fragments, compartmentalizes, and precipitates self-alienation. Herbert Kohl points to the authoritarian atmosphere of the traditional school and how it snuffs out the life of learning. Caleb Gattegno argues that learning is the life of education and in order to sustain that life, teaching must be “subordinated to learning.” Yet, in many schools learning is subordinate to everything else. William Glasser, in Schools Without Failure, illustrates how education’s ill health is directly correlated with “a philosophy of noninvolvement, non-relevance, and a limited emphasis on thinking.”

Leaders on every level of American society, from the president of the United States to the president of the local Parent-Teacher Association, concur on the desperate need for educational reform.

From the vantage point of the year 2000, if not sooner, the last decade of this century will undoubtedly appear the most bizarre decade in terms of the educational methods used in the United States when compared to other human intellectual endeavors. Education is passing from crisis to crisis because as a discipline it neither begins its endeavors with tested principles nor proposes any plan to test the principles on which the endeavors might be launched. There is a great deal of what is called “experimentation” going on in American education, but most of it can hardly be called experimentation in the scientific sense, since it is not conducted with any set of controls. The fact that something is simply new does not make it experimental. Those concerned with education are confronted today with a body of beliefs and attitudes about education that, although they are the determining influence in our educational system, have not been subjected to careful analysis. The American Educational Research Association has identified two significant characteristics of the condition of research in education: disorganization and lack of orientation to other behavioral sciences. It goes on to say that “by disorganization we mean the condition in which, at present, research too often proceeds without explicit theoretical framework, in intellectual disarray, to the testing of myriads of arbitrary, unrationalized hypotheses.” Educational research must eventually come to mean more [Page 79] than an endless testing of hypotheses that are unconnected and trivial. It must include an inquiry into educational objectives and a questioning of assumptions underlying them in an attempt to find a unifying frame of reference from which explicit criteria for determining the relevance of objectives and their priority can be formulated.

Compounding the shortcomings in educational research methodology is the knowledge explosion of this century. Until recently the main task of education has been the transmission of traditions and information to new generations. In a relatively static world this has meant that teachers have but to communicate their own knowledge and experience acquired in turn from their own teachers. In a world dominated by change, with the reservoir of human knowledge spectacularly swelling beyond imagination within the lifetime of the teacher, nay, even within the educational cycle of the student, and with the growing aspirations of societies in the light of modern technology, much of the knowledge and many of the methods and attitudes of the past have become obsolete.

Need for New Directions

WITHOUT belaboring the obvious it will suffice to say that there is an imperative need for new goals, new purposes, new methods, and new directions in education on all levels: local, national, and international. There is a growing recognition of the need for a distillation of the thinking of the past half century and for an understanding of the direction being taken by education. To chart a rational course in order to achieve new educational objectives, educators need to know how the present educational system originated and what discernible forces in the past and present are likely to affect its future. For such a diagnosis they must use all the instruments at their disposal, for lack of information about the educational system will seriously impede plotting a reliable future course.

The conclusion seems inescapable that, if education is to make its proper contribution to the growth of the individual and to the development of society, educational systems everywhere must apply the methods of science and undergo revolutionary changes, as medicine, engineering, technology, and the hard sciences have already done and are still doing. A dynamic transformation of the educational system that will enable it to cultivate adjustment to change and make innovation fruitful can come only when education adopts the methods of science, which has opened to modern man worlds of inconceivable dimensions —submicroscopic to supergalactic.

Applying scientific methods to education requires the articulation of a comprehensive body of theory that will address the fundamental problems and issues facing education and, at the same time, serve as a definitive guide to practice. The effectiveness of the application can and should then be tested over long periods of time and in many different environments. Theories enable one to subsume, under a few principles, a vast array of what may at first appear to be unrelated facts. René Dubos, the well-known microbiologist at the Rockefeller Institute, once wrote that after a review of all the important scientific discoveries of the last two centuries—such as those of Darwin, Freud, and Einstein —he found that not one of them was a result of piling fact upon fact. The discoveries resulted, rather, from the scientist’s perception of the significance [Page 80] of the relationships and the emergence of meaningful pattern among facts, which then gave rise to the theories. Education has yet to find a way of becoming a scientific enterprise carried on by a self-governing community of inquirers who conduct themselves in accordance with an unwritten but binding code, bowing to the constraints of theory and yet having infinite scope for original and innovative research to refine the theory. In such an enterprise theories must be built in as a basic element, a self-correcting device or internal guardianship. Unless education has such a corrective instrument, it can never emerge as a science in its own right.

The need to establish a science of education is confirmed by the following statement of Leon M. Lessinger, a farmer Associate U.S. Commissioner of Education:

In principle, the American educational commitment has always been that every child should be educated to his full potential, but this commitment has been voiced in terms of resources such as teachers, books, space, and equipment. When a child has failed to learn, school personnel have assigned him a label—slow, or unmotivated, or retarded. Our schools must assume a revised commitment that every child shall learn. Such a commitment must include a willingness to change a system which does not work and define one which does, to seek causes of failure in a system and its personnel instead of focusing solely on students.

In his search for a relevant educational theory, F. J. McDonald, an educational theorist and developmental psychologist, has enumerated the characteristics any theory must have to win a significant place as an educational theory and practice:

In the first place, its scientific character must be impeccable.

Secondly, since education is a social enterprise, the theory must be social in character or must treat social problems in a significant way.

Third, the theory must account for developmental phenomena.

Fourth, the theory must promise same form of control, i.e., it has systems that lead to procedures with predictable effects.

Fifth, the theory must somehow evidence its concern for the individual.

McDonald goes on to argue that “There seems to be no good reason for educational theory to be committed to any single theory short of a comprehensive science of man.”

The history of American educational practices during the past fifty years shows that there have, indeed, been repeated attempts made to formulate a theory of education. But what seems to be lacking is a “science of man” on [Page 81] which to build a theory. Such a science was initially sought from psychology. Because of the characteristic relationship between psychology and education— an applied science—psychological theories have always intrigued educators; indeed, most educational theories are spin-offs of major theoretical developments in psychology. For example, Gestalt psychology, field theory, psychoanalytic theory, and stimulus response theory, which were formulated to explain some aspects of behavior and learning, have been tried out in educational contexts and continue to be explored by educators. Moreover, the contributions of James, Watson, Dewey, Thorndyke, Freud, Piaget, and Skinner have conferred an air of scientific respectability on educational practice. However, Joseph J. Schwab, a curriculum specialist at the University of Chicago, observes that the weaknesses of the theories

arise from two sources: the inevitable incompleteness of the subject matters of theories and the partiality of the view each takes of its already incomplete subject. Incompleteness of the subject is easily seen in the entirely cognitive theory which takes no account of the emotional needs and satisfactions. . . . Incompleteness of the subject is also visible in personality theories which reduce the whole society to an appendage of personality and in sociological theories which reduce personality to an artifact of society. Partiality of view is exemplified by the Freudian treatment of personality after the analogue of a developing, differentiating organism, a treatment which makes it extremely difficult to deal directly with problems of interpersonal relations.

It is evident that the coherence and efficacy of any educational program designed to promote the total development of man lie in the comprehensiveness of its theory of the development of man—how he comes to be what he should be. Philip Phenix, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College, states succinctly that

The problem of man and his becoming is particularly urgent for parents, teachers, school officials and citizens concerned with the conduct of education. To choose soundly what to teach and how to teach it, to judge what educational goals are practicable and what ones are not—such wisdom requires the best possible understanding of human nature and its transformation.

Marc Belth, a famous educator and author of Education as a Discipline, adds that

The level of cultural maturity of a society can be determined by the theory it holds about education of its rising generations. For any educational theory entails a concept of the relationship between man and the world he must cope with and learn to organize and direct. It contains, too, an interpretation of the effect which one has upon the potentialities of the other and explains how this effect comes about. Such interpretative concepts suggest the procedures [Page 82] which should accomplish the goals implicit in a particular theory of education.

In short, any new conceptualization articulating a broad-based theory of development—man’s being and becoming—will have to be the first order of business.

But where is this knowledge of man and his becoming to be obtained? More than twenty-five years ago the distinguished biologist Julian Huxley wrote: “I would go so far as to say that the lack of a common frame of reference, the absence of any unifying set of concepts and principles, is now, if not the world’s major disease, at least its most serious symptom.” More than thirty years ago Alexis Carrel, a renowned biologist, wrote that man has been unable to organize himself because he does not understand his own nature. Unfortunately, there is no single brand of specialists to whom one can turn for authoritative answers about man as a total entity. As Archie J. Bahm, a noted scholar specializing in religious philosophy, observes, each science or other area of specialty discovers something essential to the nature of man and then tries to reduce the significance of other essentials to its own. A chemist may depict the reality of human beings as the replication of macromolecules. A physicist may explain them primarily as complicated electrical mechanisms. A biologist may claim them as solely creatures of evolution. A physiologist may view them entirely as products of their organs, glands, diets, diseases, and development. An anthropologist may depict them as only a product of their culture. A social psychologist may describe them as victims of their social environment. A linguist may believe them to be completely molded by their language. An artist or musician may see them as primarily aesthetic beings. Each of these specialists has a contribution to make to human beings’ understanding of themselves, but as Bahm concludes, “whenever a specialist of any kind tries to reduce the whole of man to any one part of him he makes him somewhat antihumanistic.”

A New Paradigm Based on a Science of Reality

SORTING OUT the problem of articulating a broad-based theory of development requires a conceptual framework huge enough to integrate purposefully all that is known about human growth and development. This framework is to be found in a concept of reality that contains a comprehensive view of the world and the nature of human beings. To be comprehensive in scope a theory of development must emerge from a science of reality that explicates the nature of human beings, their purpose and potentialities, and how they come to know, feel, and act.

One thing that has become obvious is that human beings do not live in a world of brute facts; they live in a world of interpretation. They see the world [Page 83] (including themselves and their ways of knowing) as they construe it. Hence it is imperative that a unified view of the world and all that is therein, no matter how arbitrary it may be, be an essential prerequisite for organized thinking, planning, and action in any human enterprise. It is the purpose of educational philosophy to provide such a unified view that will serve to interpret in a coherent and logical way every facet of educational experience.

Even though present-day education is generally based on the concept of analytic isolation, which has led to the present era of incredible specialization, there are indications of a move toward integration. All empirical scientists share two basic presuppositions—(1) that the world exists and (2) that the world is, at least in some respects, ordered intelligibly, and that order is open to rational inquiry. The Cartesian axiom contributes to a secondary presupposition or corollary: “that the world is intelligibly ordered in special domains.” Now a contemporary field of philosophical inquiry, as exemplified in Ervin Laszlo’s “systems view of the world,” has ushered in yet another secondary presupposition— namely, that “the world is also intelligibly ordered as a whole”—thus returning philosophy from its analytical isolation to an integrative dialogue with the empirical sciences.

Such a new conception of the world, which is holistic rather than analytic (organismic rather than analytic), has launched a new era in the physical, biological, and social sciences. Einstein’s contributions to physics, C. H. Waddington’s work in biology, Laszlo’s work in systems theory applied to social phenomena, and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy are expressions of such a holistic conception in these sciences. Holism, which represents the very antithesis of the analytic reductionism characterized in the methods of present-day hard sciences, is a way of comprehending whole organisms and systems as entities greater than and different from the sum of their parts. The power of holistic thinking in educational planning lies in the perspective it brings to men’s and women’s conception of who they are as human beings. The current shift in contemporary philosophical and scientific thinking toward holism is virtually irreversible, for the shift is a part of a much larger and wider change in how human beings view themselves. As Rupert Sheldrake, a controversial biologist, succinctly observes:

the organismic or holistic philosophy provides a context for what could be a yet more radical revision of the mechanistic theory. This philosophy denies that everything in the universe can be explained from the bottom up, as it were, in terms of the properties of atoms, or indeed of any hypothetical ultimate particles of matter. Rather, it recognizes the existence of hierarchically organized systems which, at each level of complexity, possess properties which cannot be fully understood in terms of the properties exhibited by their parts in isolation from each other; at each level the whole is more [Page 84] than the sum of its parts. These wholes can be thought of as organisms, using this term in a deliberately wide sense to include not only animals and plants, organs, tissues and cells, but also crystals, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. In effect this philosophy proposes a change from the paradigm of the machine to the paradigm of the organism in the biological and in the physical sciences.

Nothing short of a holistic or organismic view of creation and of the development of human beings as the first organizing principle of an educational philosophy can ever hope to achieve the long-delayed revamping of the present-day educational system. Its application to education is an aspect of a much more comprehensive paradigm shift. Early signs of such a shift in the conception of the world and humankind’s place in it can be traced to educational philosophers like William James and John Dewey, who, while not being fully conscious of the movement they were presaging, articulated a holistic, rather than an analytic, conception of reality. Post-Dewey philosophies of education, with their implications for epistemology, axiology, and even school curriculum and discipline, gave fuller expression to the new way of thinking about the world that James and Dewey helped initiate.

The systems (or organismic) view of the world has emerged as the most plausible theory with the best possible integrative power in the present era of information explosion. It has, therefore, profound implications for the redefinition of education and its role in the social and cultural evolution of civilized life. Whitehead has observed that

Any serious fundamental change in the intellectual outlook of human society must necessarily be followed by an educational revolution. It may be delayed for a generation by vested interests or by the passionate attachment of some leaders of thought to the cycle of ideas within which they received their own mental stimulus at an impressionable age. But the law is inexorable that education to be living and effective must be directed to informing pupils with those ideas, and to creating for them those capacities which will enable them to appreciate the current thought of their epoch.

Such a fundamental change in the premises and such a total transformation in ways of knowing, when viewed from a systems approach, have given education an unsuspected and profound social dimension. It is the most opportune time for educators and philosophers of education to move away from the narrow mechanistic and analytic ways of looking at reality into the broader and more inclusive paradigm of holistic thought. The deep insights present in scientific discovery spring from the same intuitive, nonlinear inspiration at work in art, in poetry, and in the perception of an ethical vision. A fundamental unity joins scientific insight, artistic insight, and moral insight. Herein lies the possibility of a unified cross-fertilizing curriculum that promises to go well beyond the vagaries of so-called interdisciplinary courses without losing the conceptual power [Page 85] of the individual disciplines.

Indeed, current holistic concepts of knowledge and ways of knowing have already significantly altered many hitherto dual relationships, among them

mind vs. body

fact vs. values

reason vs. intuition

being vs. becoming

efficient cause vs. teleological (final) cause

freedom vs. discipline

immanence vs. transcendence

nature vs. nurture

The implications for the educational responsibilities of the media, the family, political groups, business, and a variety of other institutions and agencies are myriad. As the new paradigm that is upon us deepens and grows, its full and detailed educational implications will become even clearer. The potential of this transformation is well expressed by Peter Abbs, a contemporary social analyst, in his reflections:

It would seem that in the Western World we have reached a historic moment of transition from an exhausted paradigm to a new broader paradigm now in the making, with all the confusion and uncertainty and turmoil that attend such making. The new paradigm is, in part, a creative response to all the ethical, existential and ecological dilemmas which have accumulated largely because of the defensive narrowness of the traditional epistemology. We have arrived at that volatile moment when the significant intellectual minority (both in the West and in the Soviet Union—in Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn) cannot only see through limitations of the post-Renaissance world-picture, but can also begin to formulate and defend what has been for so long excluded. What we see, in fact, is not a denial of the previous intellectual commitments (for, yes, we need both inductive and deductive methods) but rather a remarkable expansion of our understanding of the kinds of knowledge open to human beings; an expansion which gives due appreciation to deeper forms of knowing—ethical knowing, aesthetic knowing, personal knowing, imaginable knowing. This sudden reclaiming of lost forms of knowing is on such a momentous scale that it does not merely modify the traditional paradigm, it transforms it. We are taken into new philosophical ground—and the ground is so rich and so prolific it will take decades to harvest the fruit or, to put it conceptually, to explicate for education and society, and not least, our own personal lives, the innumerable implications.

[Page 86] The basic features of the new holistic paradigm, which can be referred to as the science of reality, can be described in some detail. At its core is the principle that reality has two forms: material and nonmaterial (or actual and nonactual). The material form of reality is subject to the various laws of material existence such as those dealing with gravitation, radiation, and chemico-electric phenomena. The nonmaterial form of reality concerns a category of items not subject to such laws. This category includes such “things” as ideas, ideals, virtues, abstract form, purpose, plans, objectives, the future, and so on. None of these things can be weighed, burned, or propelled through three-dimensional space, because they are nonmaterial. Yet they have consequences or effects in the material world (to be sure, largely through the minds of human beings), but they cannot be explained by the laws of chemistry or physics.

Up to the present time modern science has concentrated entirely on understanding material reality, the assumption being that this is the only reality. Hence scientific attempts to understand man have reflected the same assumption, with limited and catastrophic results. There has arisen in the modern world an increasingly dominant view that we can know only what we can count, measure, weigh, and evaluate. In this view—and it often dominates modern education in primary and secondary schools, in universities, and in the media— feeling, imagination, the will, intuitive insight are all regarded as having little or nothing to do with knowledge and are even disparaged as sources of irrationality. In such a view of knowledge and knowing there is no place for purpose, mind, meaning, and values as constituents of reality. Present-day western medicine, for example, is now confronting the evidence of successful forms of healing not dependent on the cause-and-effect relationships explicable by the laws of chemistry and physics. It is becoming increasingly evident that belief, faith, trust, and hope have an effect on body chemistry, just as the body chemistry can have an effect on them. Until western medical philosophy rests firmly on a new science that accounts for both actual and nonactual forms of reality, western medicine will remain out of touch with many essential realities that are nonmaterial in human nature and are germane to the healing process.

Throughout history human beings have felt compelled to accept what has been intuitively self-evident about themselves—namely, that the phenomenon of life includes far more than a mere collection of chemical compounds. The “far more” part of life has been and is variously referred to as the soul or spirit, and the likes. Such acceptance gave rise to religion, philosophy, and the arts. Science, however, having adopted a more limited assumption about the nature [Page 87] of the reality of humankind, has made its major achievement in understanding the lower ontological levels of being that are primarily dominated by the physical laws of physics and chemistry. It is for this reason that human beings have made incredible technological advancements but have made barely discernible progress in moral and social development.

The science of reality, here proposed for a core curriculum in a world educational system for the future, recognizes various ontological levels in creation— mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and, ultimately, unknowable essences—and sets forth the proposition that man is at the pinnacle of material existence and at the beginning of nonmatetial existence or spirituality. Religion and science must in a future age somehow come together, since both presumably are interested in reality and truth. Accomplishing this union will require a reorganization of traditional thought in both religion and science.

To illustrate a point, the science of reality that is suggested here adds to the three dimensions of physical space and the fourth dimension of time a fifth dimension, which is purpose. This is a nonmaterial dimension that nonetheless has effects in the material world. Only such a new paradigm is capable of reconciling permanence with flux, unity with diversity, the internal with the external, the causal with the teleological, process with purpose.

Such a science of reality, so briefly presented here, is not only compatible with the fundamental intuition of historical and contemporary religions; it also has an aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific respectability that has the potential for engaging the interest and support of scholars in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts, as well as those in applied fields, such as engineering, medicine, law, and government.

If in the decades ahead world education is to be based on an integrated, holistic philosophy of education, it clearly behooves educators to deliberate on such a philosophy. It is suggested that at its core should be a universal curriculum —a science of reality—that will put human beings in touch with all dimensions of existence, including the most elusive yet most fascinating and essential nonmaterial reality of man, his spirituality.

[Page 88]

[Page 89]

Awakening to Universal Manhood

A REVIEW OF The Autobiography of Malcolm X, WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF ALEX HALEY (NEW YORK, GROVE PRESS, INC., 1965) 453 PAGES

BY GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Reprinted from World Order 1.2 (Winter 1966): 34-38. Copyright © 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of thc Bahá’ís of the United States.

In 1966, while noting that The Autobiography of Malcolm X had, by virtue of our prejudiced society, not appeared on the best-seller list, we predicted it would become a sociological classic. By the mid-1970s it was being referred to as “one of the most widely read and influential books in contemporary American literature.” It is at once an indictment of racism— a major barrier to peace—and the triumph of one man’s odyssey from the corruption and blight 'of a baneful and persistent evil to the acceptance of the oneness of God and the oneness of humankind.

TO Malcolm X, death was a menacing but acceptable companion slightly out of step but always almost falling in. Having been born in a climate of violence and having lived a life of either absorbing violence or perpetrating it, he anticipated death by violence. It came decisively on February 21, 1965, in a burst of pistol shots as he addressed an audience in Harlem. His life story looms larger than the thirty-nine years that contained it; and it is a gift of remarkable good fortune that Alex Haley undertook to bring out this monumental chronology. It is no ordinary book; its place among American sociological classics is assured.

The Malcolm X the public knew was largely an abhorrent figment of mass media fantasy. One often heard or read the incendiary assertion carefully edited out of context, or was confronted with a figure whose humanity had succumbed to distortions of violent hatred for the “white devils.” Malcolm himself excoriated this fantasy: “The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. . . . If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” In the turbulent awakening occasioned by his crude demise, one is moved, autobiography in hand, to contemplate the crucial realities of his edifying experiences. These experiences began, as the autobiography properly begins, with the circumstances of his birth.

Malcolm was born to a fair-skinned West Indian woman and a black Baptist preacher, whose discipleship to Marcus Garvey, founder of the militant back-to-Africa movement in the 1920s, made him a fugitive from Ku Klux Klan justice in Omaha, Nebraska. The Little family settled down as far away as Lansing, Michigan, the locale of Rev. Little’s mysterious death. “Negroes in Lansing always whispered that he was attacked,” the autobiography recalls, “and then laid across some tracks for a streetcar to run over him. His body was cut almost in half.” Unscrupulously deprived of the major provisions of her husband’s insurance policies, Mrs. Little [Page 90] sought employment to support her eight children. Job prospects were too bleak for a Negro woman, especially one widowed to a Garveyite; and need drove her into the clutches of unconscionable state welfare agents. Then, observed Malcolm, “some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride.” Mrs. Little ended up in a mental institution, and the remainder of the family was scattered about Lansing, partially provided for by welfare and good friends. Shortly afterward. Malcolm was sent to reform school for placing a tack on his teacher’s chair seat; however, he made it through the eighth grade as a superior student.

Abandoning his hopes for a legal career (his white English teacher advised him to learn carpentry), Malcolm went to his half-sistes Ella in Boston, where his life underwent a profound change at fourteen. Here the sordid attributes of a metropolitan ghetto engulfed his adolescent susceptibilities. Anxious and bright, he was quickly absorbed into the serried echelons of the hustlers, an ambitious class condemned by skin color but woefully redeemed by their animal ability to prey on the depraved and the dejected toward some sort of affluence. Pimps, pickpockets, prostitutes, dope peddlers, numbers racketeers, burglars, and unproclaimed artists—all came within the range of this ugly affluence, and Malcolm was involved with them all. He worked for them, with them, and against them, learning and observing the furtive forms of protocol by which affluent life in the ghetto is facilitated and preserved. Boston prepared him for Harlem, the ultimate hunting ground of hustlers. Never before has the inner core of Harlem’s hustlers been opened so widely to public scrutiny as in the Autobiography of Malcolm X. The firsthand expatiation of the despicable alternatives to which talented but frustrated Negroes are subjected in Harlem is an invaluable increment to our sociological catalog of ghetto life.

Malcolm’s hustling landed him in jail for ten years on a burglary charge, and it was in the Norfolk Prison Colony that the future dramatic course of his life was shaped. There he responded to two decisive influences: an introduction by his brother Reginald to the Nation of Islam, commonly called the Black Muslim movement, led by Elijah Muhammad; and the titillating discourses of his scholarly cell mate, “Bimbi.” Of his encounter with Bimbi, Malcolm said: “Bimbi was the first Negro convict I’d known who didn’t respond to ‘What’cha know, Daddy?’ Often after we had done our day’s license plate quota, we would sit around, perhaps fifteen of us, and listen to Bimbi. Normally, white prisoners wouldn’t think of listening to Negro prisoners’ opinions on anything, but guards, even, would wander close to hear Bimbi on any subject. He would have a cluster of people riveted, often on odd subjects you never would think of. . . . What fascinated me with him most of all was that he was the first man I had ever seen command total respect . . . with his words.”

Adulation for Bimbi and promptings from his sister Ella impelled Malcolm to pursue correspondence courses in English and Latin and subsequently to an unrelenting engrossment in history, philosophy, and philology. His reference to these pursuits reveals an ironic but exhilarating discovery: “in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”

Malcolm left prison reformed, educated, and dedicated to the preachments of Elijah Muhammad. His zeal, organizational versatility, and newly nurtured oratorical ability were a boon to a movement still encumbered by obscurity. Malcolm’s meteoric elevation to the Muslim ministry effected equally meteoric expansion and development within the movement—among them: large increases in membership (from four hundred to four thousand), a multiplication of mosques in [Page 91] large cities, and the founding by Malcolm himself of the movement’s chief organ, Muhammad Speaks. Minister Malcolm X (the “X” symbolizes rejection of the Christian name and the anonymity of the preslavery ancestral name) returned to the ghettos to find converts. His appeal was simple and direct: Black people abandoned to privation and humiliation in a predominantly white racist society were forced to separate themselves from their white oppressors (“devils”), who were incapable of fraternal sentiments toward their black brothers; salvation could be found only within the oppressed themselves and, especially, through adherence to a black man’s religion —in this instance, the Nation of Islam as developed by Elijah Muhammad, “Allah’s Messenger” in Chicago.

Followers of the Nation of Islam uphold a strict moral code and discipline, often antipathetic to potential converts. They are forbidden to eat pork or any unhealthful foods; they do not use tobacco, alcohol, or narcotics; nor are they petmitted to gamble, dance, date, or attend movies and sports; they must not steal, lie, engage in domestic quarrels, act discourteously —especially toward women, or be insubordinate to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation. They are instructed to defend themselves physically, but never to initiate violence against others. Their moral laws are policed by an able, dedicated, and well-trained group of Muslims known as the Fruit of Islam. Those guilty of infractions can be suspended by Eijah Muhammad, or expelled “from the only group that really cares about you.” Malcolm X alleviated this aversion to Muslim ordinances with cogent assertions: “The white man wants black men to stay immoral, unclean, and ignorant. As long as we stay in these conditions we will keep on begging him and he will control us. We never can win freedom and justice and equality until we are doing something for ourselves.” This made common sense to ambitious and troubled blacks, and coming from the mouth of a former hustler, it made capital sense.

No contemporary Negro leader outside of himself was endowed with Malcolm’s ability to attract the attention of ghetto hustlers; his unique experience among them weighed heavily in his favor. His concern with them arose from a conviction that “actually the most dangerous black man in America is the ghetto hustler. Why do I say this? The hustler, out there in the ghetto jungles, has less respect for the white power structure than any other Negro in America. The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing. He has no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear—nothing. To survive, he is out there constantly preying upon others, probing for any human weakness like a ferret. The ghetto hustler is forever frustrated, restless, and anxious for some ‘action.’ Whatever he undertakes, he commits himself to it fully, absolutely.” Deserving as it is of condemnation for its flagrant racial distortions of orthodox Islamic teachings, the Nation of Islam has demonstrated an ability to rehabilitate ghetto hustlers and to restore pride to a dejected minority to an extent hardly matched by any other organization. It is an observation that craves the serious attention of sociologists and religionists.

Ironically enough. Malcolm X was felled from prominence in the Nation of Islam by the same bullets that felled the late President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Heedless of the ban on comments imposed on all Muslim ministers, Malcolm X, the foremost exponent of the Nation of Islam, expressed his opinion of the assassination in response to a direct question. He viewed the assassination as a case of the “chickens coming home to roost”—an inflammatory summation that seared the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast. The truth is that Malcolm X was not unique in his opinion; he was unique only in having voiced it so openly, so tersely, and so soon after the President’s death. The whispered understanding among Negroes throughout the country during the mournful aftermath was that the white man’s hatred for nonwhites had wreaked vengeance on a chief executive bent upon reducing racial injustices. To this day many Negroes think this is the real reason for [Page 92] Kennedy’s assassination, whatever the conclusions of the Warren Commission.

Elijah Muhammad silenced Malcolm X for the next ninety days—“so that the Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder”; but the ostensible purpose had a subterranean design. Malcolm was being isolated from the movement for reasons that only his autobiography makes clear: jealousy among his brother ministers and, particularly, his newly discovered knowledge of his leader’s covert acts of immorality. Elijah Muhammad admitted to Malcolm the truth of a newspaper report that the “Messenger” had fathered four illegitimate children. And even then, Malcolm’s faith in the man was not shaken, since it was skillfully rationalized that the “Messenger,” exempt as such, could or should fulfill prophecy by imitating the sinful behavior of biblical figures—such as David, Lot, and Moses—because their good deeds outshone the bad. Malcolm’s efforts to prepare his brother ministers to defend their leader against accusatory press reports were deflected by their jealousy of him and the consequent insinuation that Malcolm himself was spreading damaging rumors about the “Messenger.”

Such insinuation belied two qualities of Malcolm X’s affiliation with the Nation of Islam, namely, the ardor of his fidelity to Elijah Muhammad and a deliberate self-effacement in the public performance of his ministry. He attributed all that was worthwhile in his public expressions and accomplishments to “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” So careful was he to subdue his own personality to that of his leader that he refused to be featured in Life and Newsweek or to appear on “Meet the Press” when the opportunities were opened to him. The measure of his intellectual and spiritual surrender to the Nation of Islam and its leader is reflected in reminiscences of the occasion on which he addressed the Harvard Law School Forum within sight of his own former burglary-gang hideout: “Awareness came surging up in me—how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave, or, if still alive, as flint-hard, bitter, thirty-seven-year-old convict in some penitentiary, or insane asylum. Or, at best, I would have been an old, fading Detroit Red, hustling or stealing enough for food and narcotics, and myself being stalked as prey by cruelly ambitious younger hustlers such as Detroit Red had been. . . . Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten . . . not for one second.”

Now that he had been silenced, Malcolm took some time for retrospection, which led to the faith-shattering conclusion that “Instead of facing what he had done before his followers, as a human weakness or as a fulfillment of prophecy—which I sincerely believe that Muslims would have understood, or at least they would have aceepted—Mr. Muhammad had, instead, been willing to hide, to cover up what he had done.” Malcolm came to realize for the first time that “I had believed in Mr. Muhammad more than he had believed in himself. And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength to start facing the facts, to think for myself.” By then, too, he had learned that he was to be assassinated by brother Muslims.

With the assistance of an orthodox Muslim scholar in New York, Malcolm decided to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, during which he experienced another radial transformation in the pattern of his life. As he himself explained: “The color-blindness of the Muslim world’s religious society and the color-blindness of the Muslim world’s human society: these two influences had each day been making a greater impact, and an increasing persuasion against my previous way of thinking . . . I had been blessed by Allah with a new insight into the true religion of Islam, and a better understanding of America’s entire racial dilemma.” After an extended post-pilgrimage tour of Middle Eastern and African countries, [Page 93] Malcolm returned to the United States determined to establish an organization that “would embrace all faiths of black men” and “help to challenge the American black man to gain his human rights, and to cure his mental, spiritual, economic, and political sicknesses.” Muslim Mosque, Inc., was organized in Harlem to “give us a religious base, and the spiritual force necessary to rid our people of the vices that destroy the moral fiber of our community.”

Malcolm’s new attitude toward race was as startling as the new name he had adopted on pilgrimage. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, indicating an extraordinary human flexibility, of Which he noted: “I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”

Throughout his years with the Nation of Islam, his harsh truth fell hard on ears accustomed to the sleep-inducing rhetoric of self-deception; it terrified the conscience and raked at the indolence of the privileged. One of his more attractive qualities was his incorruptibility in a society notorious for immoral compromises. He was trusted by black people when other black leaders were held in suspicion. Once in Harlem when he was convinced that his having been invited to a meeting sponsored by civil rights leaders was merely a means to attract a large audience, he said so; and the crowd became angry and riotous. He persuaded the crowd to quiet down and go home. Afterward, the press described him as the only man in America who could start or stop a race riot. The evil workings of prejudice justified his anger, although his solutions were often unjust and impracticable. His oratory, recognized as unique in this century by the Oxford Union Society during a December 1964 debate, was born out of necessity to censure the dangerous obsessions of racialism and to arouse the dormant sensibilities of a heedless white majority.

By more than one criterion, Malcolm X was an outstanding product of twentieth-century America, part of a rare species produced by that mysterious social alchemy through which qualities of greatness are upraised from environments of debasement. He was cut down at a time when the country was in dire need of a public figure of his uniquely persuasive talents, integrity, and experiences. There is no telling now how long America will have to wait for the appearance of his like; for he had, in fact, just matured to universal manhood. As he put it: “it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest light can come; it is only after extreme grief that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.”

Malcolm’s light, joy, and freedom fused themselves into a quest for the “oneness of mankind” among the variegated American populace. He had come to believe that “if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man—and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their ‘differences’ in color. . . . But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth—the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.” Viewed through the haze of hatred associated with his name, this expression of belief was paradoxical. But paradox, as we often accept it, is a potent spice of history and Malcolm’s life is certainly a matter of American historical, as well as sociological, cognizance. One may attempt to unravel this paradox by following closely and reflectively the titanic personal episodes of his brief life from the abyss of the Negro condition in America to the ascensive pathway of greatness, relating them to the broader social backcloth against which they were spun, noting their immense variety, referring their moral implications to one’s own conscience, and coming to one’s own inevitable conclusions. But the clue to it is more immediately [Page 94] perceived by searching Malcolm’s own testimony contained in these words: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

Alex Haley’s remarkable restraint from involving himself in the autobiography dictated to him releases the dynamic spirit of its author, entrusting his memory, rightfully, to the world’s archives. It is an indictment of the prejudiced society in which we now live that The Autobiography of Malcolm X has not appeared on the best-seller list. Fortunately, the lessons to be derived from it are available— thanks to Alex Haley—for those who are unfettered in their pursuit of truth.

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Authors & Artists

CONSTANCE CONRADER is a retired librarian, a writer, and an artist specializing in biological illustration and naturalistic portrayals of plants and animals. She has collaborated with her husband in writing and illustrating many magazine articles on natural history as well as in publishing Northwoods Wildlife Region. With him she also compiled and illustrated Tokens from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. For young people Mrs. Conrader has published Blue Wampum, a historical novel.

WILLIAM S. HATCHER is a professor of mathematics in the faculty of sciences and engineering at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. After receiving Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University he received his doctorate from the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland in 1963. He has since published numerous articles and research monographs in the mathematical sciences, logic, and philosophy. His most recent book on mathematics is The Logical Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982); he co-authored with Douglas Martin The Bahá’í Faith: The Emerging Global Religion (Harper & Row, 1985), which received mention as one of the year’s best one hundred books by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Dr. Hatcher, a member of the Executive Board of the Association for Bahá’í Studies, is an active member of a number of scientific organizations and is serving a three-year term on the Council for Symbolic Logic.

ROBERT HAYDEN won first prize at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1962. In 1971 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him the Russell Loines Award for poetry. In 1975 he was elected to the American Academy of Poets and appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position he held for two terms. In 1979 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. From 1969 until his death in 1980 he was a professor of English at the University of Michigan and from 1968 until 1980, poetry editor of World Order. Robert Hayden’s books of poetry include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), The lion and the archer (1948), Figure of Time (1955), A ballad of remembrance (1962), Selected Poems (1966), Words in the mourning time (1970), The nigh-blooming cereus (1973), Angle of Ascent (1975), American Journal (1978), and American Journal (1982).

[Page 97] DOUGLAS MARTIN, who holds degrees in history and business administration, has been for the last thirty-five years a student of the intellectual origins and institutional development of the Bahá’í Faith. During the last fifteen years he has written and lectured extensively on the subject, most recently on the events and implications of the persecution of the Bahá’í community in Iran. For many years Mr. Martin was the secretary of the governing body of the Bahá’í Faith in Canada. Since 1985 he has been the director of the Office of Public Information of the Bahá’í International Community, supervising offices in Haifa, New York, Paris, London, and Hong Kong.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL, who holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, served for four years as Assistant Editor of Africa Report. He has taught English at Howard University and Indiana State University. For many years Mr. Mitchell was the Managing Editor of World Order and the secretary general of the governing body of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States. Since 1982 Mr. Mitchell has made his home in Haifa, Israel, where he serves on the international governing body of the Bahá’í Faith.

S. PATTABI RAMAN, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Calcutta and an Ed.D. in education from the University of Massachusetts, has held a number of appointments in several colleges and universities—professor of education at National University in California, assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Hawaii, and assistant professor of education in the Center for the Study of Human Potential at the University of Massachusetts —as well as in a number of public and private schools. He is presently the director of technical and educational services for HealthComm, in Gig Harbor, Washington.

ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz; photograph by Mark Sadan; pp. 1, 3, 9, 10, photographs by Steve Garrigues; p. 19, photograph by Mark Sadan; pp. 27, 28, photographs by Steve Garrigues; p. 43, photograph by Gerhard Gross; pp. 52, 74, photographs by Steve Garrigues; p 88, photograph by David Trautman; p. 95 photograph by Harry Taylor, Sr.

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