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Summer 2001

World Order

PERSPECTIVES ON
THE PROMISE OF WORLD PEACE

BIRTH PANGS OF GLOBAL JUSTICE:
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT
EDITORIAL

WOMEN AS DECISION MAKERS:
A CASE FOR INCLUSION
LEILA RASSEKH MILANI

THE MOVEMENT TOWARD A
WORLD LANGUAGE: INDIGENIZATION
AND UNIVERSALIZATION
JEFFREY S. GRUBER

INTERRACIAL AND MULTIRACIAL UNITY
MOVEMENTS IN THE U.S.: MODELS OF
WORLD PEACE
RICHARD W. THOMAS

GRASPING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY: A REVIEW OF
CENTURY OF LIGHT
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

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World Order

VOLUME 32, NUMBER 4

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

Editorial Board:
BETTY J. FISHER
ARASH ABIZADEH
MONIREH KAZEMZADEH
DIANNE LOTFI
KEVIN A MORRISON
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JIM STOKES

Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Manuscripts and editorial correspondence: Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end and not attached electronically to the text. The contributor should retain a copy. Return postage should be included. Send editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 4516 Randolph Road, Apt. 99, Charlotte, NC 28211. E-mail: <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

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

Copyright © 2002, 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   Birth Pangs of Global Justice:

The International Criminal Court

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

8   Perspectives on The Promise of World Peace

11   Women as Decision Makers: A Case for Inclusion

by Leila Rassekh Milani

18   Untitled Haiki

poem by Janet Tomkins

19   Universe & The Point

poems by William P. Collins

21   The Movement Toward a World Language:

Indigenization and Universalization

by Jeffrey S. Gruber

29   Interracial and Multiracial Unity Movements

in the U.S.: Models for World Peace

by Richard W. Thomas

36   o god weep gently for me

poem by Florence DiPasquale Kindel

37   No Longer Tending the Machine of Civilization

poem by Michael Fitzgerald

39   Grasping the Significance of the Twentieth Century:

A Review of Century of Light

by Firuz Kazemzadeh

47   feast

poem by Diane Huff

48   Authors & Artists in This Issue

Inside back cover: Forthcoming

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Birth Pangs of Global Justice:
The International Criminal Court

IN THE aftermath of World War II the newly formed United Nations established ad hoc courts in Nürnberg and Tokyo to bring to justice the perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities against humankind that the world had ever seen. The judgment of the Nürnberg Tribunal observed that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.” Recognizing the validity of that statement, the United Nations’ General Assembly began to consider the creation of a permanent international tribunal to adjudicate crimes of particular gravity such as genocide, war crimes, and other unlawful acts against humanity.

Despite the determination of the overwhelming majority of the member countries of the United Nations to ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust would never happen again, widespread killings and abuse of civilian populations did recur. But not until the “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia—and the creation by the Security Council of an ad hoc court for the trial of war crimes committed in former Yugoslav states—did the United Nations determine to complete plans for the implementation of an international criminal court. In 1988 the international community met in Rome to sign an historic treaty calling for the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

The International Criminal Court will have jurisdiction over a limited number of defined crimes, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, such as widespread or systematic extermination of civilians; enslavement; torture; rape; forced pregnancy; persecution on political, racial, ethnic or religious grounds; and enforced disappearances. It is empowered to act only when the member country in which a crime has taken place is unable or unwilling to act to bring the perpetrators to justice. But unlike the existing International Court of Justice at The Hague, which deals only with disputes between member countries, the International Criminal Court will have jurisdiction over individuals who commit specified criminal acts.

The need for such a tribunal is clear. Unlike ad hoc courts set up after crimes have already occurred, a permanent court would be able to act more quickly to punish—perhaps even to prevent—genocide [Page 3] and war crimes and would serve as a stronger deterrent to those contemplating large-scale violations of international law and human rights. In the words of Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations: “In the prospect of an international criminal court lies the promise of universal justice.”

More than 130 countries signed the Rome Treaty, but under its terms the International Criminal Court will enter into force only after 60 of the signing countries have actually ratified the treaty. History has shown that the process from signing to ratification can be long and arduous—in the United States, for example, some forty years elapsed between signing and ratification of the Genocide Convention. While the United States has signed the Rome Treaty, many legislators have expressed reservations that may prevent its ratification. The United States should move quickly to ratification and lead the move toward establishing the International Criminal Court. But whatever obstacles may appear on the road to a universal acceptance of the jurisdiction of this Court, the very fact of its creation is an enormous step forward in the direction of an international order that would protect humanity from horrors that the twentieth century witnessed in great abundance.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

The Promise of World Peace (see box on pages 8-9 for more information about this publication) invites the world to study the experience of the international Bahá’í community, a community that, because it is drawn from “many nations, cultures, classes and creeds” might be seen as a social laboratory in which methodologies and theories on building a just society may be tested. Some fifteen years after the publication of the statement and its invitation to examine the Bahá’í community, the editors of World Order take a brief look at some organizations founded by members of the international Bahá’í community that are actively seeking to establish a lasting and universal peace.

Health for Humanity chose as its sphere of action the promotion of public health services in areas around the world where such services are either deficient or nonexistent. Founded in 1992 by a group of health professionals who donate their services, Health for Humanity works with governments and local organizations to identify and fulfill local health care needs. As the scope of its work increases, Health for Humanity (<Health@usbnc.org>) has expanded its services to offer management and leadership training to ensure that new initiatives can continue to thrive under firm local support. Health for Humanity’s commitment to its core principles of

• respect for all participants as members of one global family with emphasis on gender equality;
• recognition of the essential nobility of all human beings best manifested through service to humanity;
• search for and application of truth through collective decision making and consensus building;
• continuous improvement of systems by focusing on evaluation and flexibility

have allowed the organization to achieve remarkable gains in health care, including:

• assisting in providing health services to some thirty-eight Amerindian villages that, before this effort, had no access to health care;
• assisting the development of capacity in six centers in Albania for modern cataract surgery as well as great improvements in the ophthalmology residency training program at the University Eye Center in Tirana;
• playing a major role in the fight against river blindness in Africa and being able to affect policy on blindness prevention at supranational levels.

Women for International Peace and Arbitration (WIPA, <www.wipa.org>) was incorporated in 1985 as a nongovernmental organization affiliated with the Department of Information of the United Nations, [Page 5] with active chapters in Africa, Canada, and the United States, and members in Europe, Japan, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Asia. The primary purpose of this organization, which includes both men and women, is to promote the settlement of international disputes by means of mediation and arbitration and to promote the equality of men and women as a prerequisite to peace. With a focus on educating women and achieving gender equality as prerequisites to peace, WIPA has established and cosponsored scholarships for Chinese women at the high school and university level, arranged exchange programs for high-level Chinese women government officials, and participated in numerous conferences addressing domestic violence, social and economic development, gender equality, and other issues that must be resolved as part of the struggle for peace.

The Bahá’í Justice Society, founded in 1986 (<info.bahaijusticesociety.org>), is a professional organization dedicated to promoting justice in a manner consistent with the principles of the Bahá’í Faith. The Society has members throughout the United States and affiliate members in Albania, Australia, Canada, El Salvador, England, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Germany, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Panama, Ukraine, the Virgin Islands, and Zambia. Open to Bahá’ís and non-Bahá’ís of all occupations who are interested in promoting justice, the Society has established a legal referral system, an annual conferences on justice-related topics, and a summer internship program for a law student interested in helping an organization with goals compatible with the Justice Society’s own. Current plans are to host a forty-hour training session on “Conflict Resolution and Mediation Training.”

* * *

In a note to the editors of World Order, William E. Davis, a lawyer who has worked as a consultant on judicial reform in several countries throughout Latin America and elsewhere, points out the importance of the rule of law in combating the growing disparity between the world’s rich and poor. Reflecting on the statements in The Promise of World Peace, Davis writes:

“. . . The reduction of the extremes between rich and poor remains among the central Bahá’í principles. The Faith focuses on development as an organic process in which the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material.

“According to the World Bank, during the last decade the number of poor people has risen by 100 million (outside China). [Page 6] There are hundreds of millions of people whose lives can only be characterized as surviving from day to day. The World Bank report cites the failure of international institutions to address these disparities effectively. The protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 2000 focused on the growing recognition of the effect that free trade has on those sectors of the world community experiencing the most displacement as a result of the expansion of neo-liberal economic policies. The International Monetary Fund has announced a change in its policies regarding the formulas it has been applying to developing economies. At the Economic Summit of the Group of 7 in August 2000 the major creditor nations were discussing the problem of granting debtor relief to those nations struggling to meet their expenses and serve their populations. In September 2000 these same nations announced the adoption of policies to forgive loans to the debtor nations.

“Bahá’u’lláh’s admonition that the recognition of the oneness of humankind must become the central principle around which all human affairs should be organized is the cornerstone for measuring progress toward the goal discussed by the Universal House of Justice. The recent action to forgive the loans of debtor nations may be seen to reflect, in part, this very principle. The leaders of these nations must see the staggering consequence on the populations of these developing nations of the cost of repayment of these loans.

“The elimination of poverty within and among nations will require moderating consumption, the establishment of justice and equity, creating a balance in trade relations policy, and lifting the burdens of national debt. The international donor community now recognizes the need for the rule of law to be firmly established as a means of ensuring that there can be justice for all the citizens. In addition to the rule-of-law reform efforts, one can point to the development of new legal institutions such as the War Crimes Tribunal as evidence of a growing recognition of this principle of oneness, thus making all citizens of the world subject to the rule of law.

“The traditional means of counting wealth must also be reformed. While the traditional measures have focused on quantitative indicators, there is now emerging a recognition of the need to include human, institutional, and natural capital. According to Hernando De Soto, the president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy and the author of The Mystery of Capital, the undercounting of the assets of the poor and the concomitant denial of access to credit creates elaborate networks of extralegal processes for the poor to survive. For the poor to participate in the growth process there will need to be greater reinforcement in the rule of law.”

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Perspectives on
The Promise of World Peace

In late 1999 at one of the World Order Editorial Board meetings in which we were finalizing themes for issues over the next several years, the topic of peace came up. The year 2000 would mark the fifteenth anniversary of The Promise of World Peace, a statement by the Universal House of Justice, and the Editors felt that the occasion necessitated a fresh look at this seminal document. As is often the case in the industry, we found it necessary to adjust our publishing schedule, and the hoped-for Fall 2000 issue was moved forward to Summer 2001. The Editors could never have anticipated in the closing days of summer what would happen on 11 September 2001. As a quarterly, World Order rarely finds itself in a position to comment on world events as they unfold. While the authors in this issue do not speak directly to those events, the general principles that they articulate, drawn from The Promise of World Peace, are more timely than ever. Indeed so, too, is commemorating the 1985 publication of The Promise of World Peace.

Addressed to “the Peoples of the World,” The Promise of World Peace presents a Bahá’í perspective on the future of world society, one in which we are all challenged to be active participants in carrying forward “an ever-advancing civilization.” Rather than focusing narrowly on the reduction of political strife and particular conflicts as they may arise, The Promise of World Peace calls for the construction of a radically different social order in which the scope of peace is such that that “all the communities of the world, whether religious, political or ethical, ancient or modern, find in . . . [it] the expression of their highest wish.”

The Promise of World Peace defines the major obstacles on the road to peace: the pernicious effects of racial, gender, and religious prejudices; the failure to recognize the relevance of religion as a potentially positive social force and the singular glorification of material pursuits; the inordinate disparity of means between the rich and the poor; the rise of unbridled nationalism; the lack of access by many in the world to education, leading to a dearth of independent thinking and critical reasoning capacities; and a fundamental failure in communication between peoples of various nations. This list of weighty ills can seem daunting and the view that society as a whole must come together to solve them can lead to paralysis. Yet the impartial observer can also see signs of hope—evidences that the human spirit seeks compassion and forbearance over contentiousness and hatred. It is this transcendent power of the human [Page 9] spirit and human understanding, The Promise of World Peace explains, beyond a mere political settlement, that will be the means of achieving true and lasting peace on earth.

In “Women as Decision Makers: A Case for Inclusion,” Leila Rassekh Milani argues that lasting and universal peace cannot be achieved unless and until women are admitted as full participants in peacemaking efforts. In “The Movement Toward a World Language: Indigenization and Universalization,” Jeffrey S. Gruber notes that language has often been a basis of distinction and, therefore, division among peoples; he then advocates the creation or adoption of a universal auxiliary language (the solution offered by the Bahá’í writings) as a means of increasing global communication and fostering world peace. In “Interracial and Multiracial Unity Movements in the U.S.: Models for World Peace,” Richard W. Thomas discusses the successes that result from cooperation among racial and ethnic groups, and the indisputable link between the elimination of racism and the advent of peace, and suggests that the interracial and multiracial movements launched in the United States over the past century and a half could serve as a model for the elimination of racism worldwide, thus bringing the world one step closer to the achievement of universal peace. Finally, Firuz Kazemzadeh reviews the latest publication by the Universal House of Justice: Century of Light, which he says is not so much a history of the twentieth century as a review of profound changes to the world that have occurred in the last hundred years and of the relationship between those changes and the emergence of the Bahá’í Faith from obscurity.

—THE EDITORS

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[Page 11]

Women as Decision Makers:
A Case for Inclusion

BY LEILA RASSEKH MILANI

Copyright © 2002 by Leila Rassekh Milani. Footnotes appear at the end of the essay.

MORE THAN a century ago Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, advanced the spiritual principle of equality between women and men. More than a decade ago this principle was reintroduced to the peoples of the world as one of the prerequisites to achieving world peace. On 31 October 2000, in an unprecedented measure, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution entitled Women, Peace and Security, urging member States “to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict.” The resolution further recognizes that the “full participation of women in the peace process can significantly contribute to the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security.” Although there is a great deal that must be accomplished before the leaders of the world put into action the commitment to which they have agreed, the unprecedented nature of this unanimous UN resolution, with its implications for the peace and prosperity of the human race, must be applauded, acknowledged, and examined. It is also essential to look closely at the UN resolution because the decision to increase women's access to decision-making levels was reached after practical and common-sense findings that had first to be presented, argued, and then proven.

Before the United Nations passed the resolution on Women, Peace and Security, the Convention On the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 and entered into force in 1981, was the only international instrument that addressed women’s rights comprehensively in terms of political, cultural, economic, social, and family life. It drew on the principles of human rights and human dignity as the foundation for equality and called for the inclusion of women at all decision-making levels. However, the factors that have compelled the leaders of the world to begin to accept the role of women at decision-making levels are based less on the principles in CEDAW or the fact that women’s lack of access to all decision-making levels perpetuates an injustice to half the human race and more on common-sense findings and pragmatic strategies. The three main factors that have informed the arguments for including women in decision-making processes are that “women and girls are particularly effected [sic] by the consequences of armed conflict”; that women play a critical role as activists, caretakers, providers, and survivors in times of conflict; and that women have made great contributions to the peace process as peace educators and bridge builders.

Women as Weapons of War

ONE OF the forces of change that has strengthened the international resolve to increase women’s participation in decision making has been a long overdue recognition of the targeting [Page 12] of women as weapons of war. However, the catalyst for this international resolve has been the voice of women leaders, activists, and women’s nongovernmental organizations. Over the past decade the face of conflict has changed from that of superpowers evading the threat of imminent nuclear war to that of intrastate conflicts fueled by differences of ethnicity, language, and religion. According to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, “militias have multiplied and small arms have proliferated. Civilians not only make up [the] majority of victims; they are increasingly the targets of conflict.” While violence against women in war and conflict situations has been accepted as an anticipated by-product of war, modern-day conflict has not only seen an increase in the deliberate rape, killing, maiming, forced displacement, abduction, and torture of women and girls but has also targeted women and girls as a special form of attack and as a strategy of contemporary armed conflicts. As a strategic weapon of war, violence against women has been used “for the purpose of spreading terror, destabilizing societies and breaking resistance, rewarding soldiers and extracting information.” More than ever before, these acts have been used as a method of ethnic cleansing and as an element of genocide.

A series of events and conferences such as the United Nations Decade for Women 1976-85, the 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria, and the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing propelled a movement around women’s human rights and “focused particularly on violence against women as a prime example of the bias against women in human rights practice and theory.” These events and developments in the arena of women’s human rights triggered the breaking of centuries of silence. Today women are speaking out against crimes that result from their being used as weapons of war. The same stories that women once tried to forget they are now telling in international tribunals in their own voices and with their own demands for justice. For the first time in the history of warfare, gender-based crimes, including acts of rape, sexual violence, and enforced prostitution, have been tried and prosecuted as war crimes and as crimes against humanity. To date, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established to try war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, has indicted eight people on specific charges of rape and sexual assault. On 22 February 2001 the ICTY convicted three former Bosnian Serb commanders —Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, and Zoran Vukovic—of rape and torture. For the first time a case before the UN high court focused exclusively on sexual assault with no other accompanying crimes and equated sexual violence with slavery. The case establishes rape as a crime against humanity.

While women’s speaking out against their treatment during war, and trials and convictions for assaults on women, are the beginning steps toward ending impunity for using women as weapons of war, the fact that there were only eight indictments for the Bosnian atrocities, despite estimates of up to twenty thousand victims, underscores the difficulties of applying existing international human-rights and humanitarian law to rape. These statistics, experts say, are the reasons why “a gender balance must be sought when nominating or promoting candidates for judicial and all relevant international bodies, including the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, the International Court of Justice and other bodies related to the peaceful settlement of disputes.” Informed by such data, experts taking part in the recent UN Security Council debates on Women, Peace and Security called for gender expertise to inform the planning of peace support operations. As maintained by the [Page 13] Executive Director of UNIFEM, Noeleen Heyzer:

[D]isarmament, demobilization and reintegration have not been designed to meet the special needs of women combatants, of girls who have been abducted into armed groups, or of the families of former soldiers who are trying to return to civilian life. Electoral systems have not been designed to take women into account—as voters or as candidates. Civilian police have not addressed the issues of trafficking and sexual violence which are associated with conflict. In fact, they have at times been complicit.

In essence, the first argument for including women in decision-making processes is that women are their own best advocates and that, unless they reach the decision-making tables, efforts to diminish the impact of war on them will be inadequate. It would seem that governments (power holders) are beginning to recognize that women’s access to decision making will increase awareness of the issues and contribute to the development of solutions. A clear example of this recognition is set forth in the United Nations Security Council resolution of October 2000:

[The United Nations Security Council] [r]eaffirm[s] the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace-building, and stress[es] the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regards to conflict prevention and resolution.

Women as Activists, Caretakers,
and Survivors

A SECOND factor informing the argument for including women in decision making is the nature of contemporary warfare and the innovative means by which women have dealt with its scourge. As with women being targets in wars, it is not a new phenomenon that women in war-torn towns and villages continuously pick up the pieces; care for the young, the old, and the sick in their communities; and often, single-handedly, shoulder the burdens of their families. What has made it significant to the consideration of women as decision makers is that the experts studying war zones have realized that the nature of today’s wars demands a new and innovative approach. They have found that modern warfare is increasingly conducted within, rather than between, States and that more and more non-State actors, including children, engage in armed conflict. The distinguishing feature of modern warfare—the unbridled attacks on civilians and rural communities —has led to the exodus and consequent displacement of entire populations fleeing conflicts in search of safe havens within or outside their national borders. The casualties of modern warfare include “the structures that give meaning to social and cultural life. The entire fabric of societies—homes, schools, health systems and religious institutions —are torn to pieces.” Accordingly, women activists and leaders have proposed that the process of bringing about peace has to focus on the socioeconomic fabric of war-ridden countries and to rely on societal dynamics as a key guide to finding entry points into resolving disputes. In the UN Security Council debates that resulted in the declaration on Women, Peace and Security, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) working group effectively identified women’s increased access to decision making at all levels of society as the entry point for resolving disputes. During the debates, Helen Jackson, a British parliamentarian who has worked closely with women’s organizations in Northern Ireland, maintained that women at the peace table focus on housing, education, and child care as opposed to abstract and old historical issues or political debates. In Northern Ireland, women succeeded in showing [Page 14] that “living and the quality of life in Northern Ireland were the issues that mattered.” These women gave a human face to the conflict and addressed the personal consequences of the violence. Their vision of peace and resolution to conflict eventually gained widespread public acceptance.

The Bahá’í writings call upon women to “enter confidently and capably the great arena of laws and politics” and directly link their full and equal participation in the affairs of the world to the elimination of war. The rationale supporting this sentiment is based on a notion of complementarity and mutual interdependence between men and women. While the stereotypical notions of women as nurturers and lovers of peace have been debated for many years, women have stressed that they do bring different perspectives to peace negotiations, citing differences in socialization, women’s long years as grass-roots activists or as family caretakers, and gender awareness. It is only recently that women’s contributions have been recognized as possible means for rebuilding societies emerging from warfare, and it is gradually becoming evident that these approaches cannot be discounted as “optional extras” in the world.

Until now women’s contributions have, nevertheless, been confined to grass-roots and civic organizations. U.N. Secretary-General Annan has maintained that women are “grossly under-represented at the decision-making level, from conflict prevention to conflict resolution to post-conflict reconciliation.” In Bosnia, although women actively supported the war effort by caring for soldiers and becoming the primary income earners for their families, they were excluded once the peace process began in 1995 because they had little understanding of how to strategize politically. Despite an estimated four hundred women’s groups working on peace building and reconciliation in Ireland, women still participate in a limited way in political power structures. The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition barely had sufficient funds to publish a manifesto and campaign effectively during the 1996 election. Such obstacles limit women’s access to resources, experience, and opportunities to develop political skills.

Women’s Contributions to Peace
as a Protest

A THIRD and final factor informing debates about including women in the decision-making process is the notion that women have made great contributions to the peace process as peace educators and bridge builders and, therefore, are indispensable to any peace-making effort. Following the October 2000 debates on the role of the Security Council in preventing armed conflict, the Security Council recognized that peace “requires a positive, dynamic, participatory process where dialogue is encouraged and conflicts are solved in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation.” Yet again the work that women in war-torn countries have taken on serves as the application of principles of mutual understanding and cooperation. NGOs’ grass-roots experience and work with women from a large number of countries provided the following examples of how women reached across racial, religious, and ethnic divides to work together and bridge the gaps, and to seek resolutions and common ground:

In South Africa, women from all parts of society joined together to fight against apartheid. In Latin America, mothers, wives and sisters dared to question the military juntas about their “disappeared” relatives. In Mali and Liberia, women rallied together to call for disarmament. In the Philippines, women run peace zones around villages protecting their children. In Bosnia women from across ethnic lines are working in parliament to rebuild their communities. In Burundi the women’s coalition is struggling to bring the voices of those most affected by war to the peace table. In [Page 15] Sudan, women from both sides have opened new avenues for peace talks. In the Middle East, Israeli and Palestinian women have been working for years at the grassroots not only building the trust needed for sustainable peace, but also warning of the dangers of excluding all sectors of society, including civil society from the implementation of the peace process.

Given the most recent conflicts between the Palestinians and Israelis, it is poignant to point out that as recently as June 2000 Palestinian and Israeli women came together and engaged in dialogue (one that had continued since the 1980s) and were determined to tackle the thorniest issues facing their communities. They felt a sense of urgency about the delays in implementing signed agreements and were worried that any further delays would lead “to a dangerous erosion of public trust in the leadership of both sides and the potential outbreak of violence.” Their fears were real, and it has now become more evident that the partnerships these women have built must be brought into the peace negotiations.

Further examples of how women have used cooperation, consultation, and reciprocity can be found in other UN-funded studies. Five peace operations in Bosnia Herzegovina, Cambodia, El Salvador, Namibia, and South Africa have provided empirical evidence on how the equal and full participation of women with men improved the efficiency of UN peacekeeping and peace building. The study came to the following conclusions:

• Women’s participation has the capacity to expand the debate a little further, so that it may encompass more diverse subjects, including those that may be more relevant to what is happening to women, children and communities;
• Women are frequently less hierarchical in dealing with local communities and listen more, thereby having better insights into the root causes of conflict;
• The presence of a critical mass of women appears to foster confidence and trust among the local population that is critical to successful operations (El Salvador, South Africa).

Finally, a review of the activities of women at the informal level and in several countries further illustrated women’s commitment to peace and their successive results:

Grassroots women’s organizations in several countries have sponsored peace education, encouraged child soldiers, boys and girls, to lay down arms (Liberia), organized groups advocating peace across party and ethnic lines (Cyprus, Sri Lanka, former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland), organized campaigns against small arms (African Women’s Committee for Peace and Development), influenced repatriation processes and established services for returning exiles and refugees (Guatemala), and established legal support groups to get recognition for women’s rights to land and household property which may have been in the name of a spouse killed or “disappeared” in the conflict (Burundi, Nicaragua, Rwanda.)

Women’s demonstrable ability to respond to the events around them and their corresponding solutions as a continuum strengthened the UN Security Council’s resolve to increase women’s access to decision making and, therefore, tap into a newly acknowledged resource.

Conclusion

THE UNPRECEDENTED unanimous United Nations Security Council Resolution Women, Peace and Security, calling on all member States to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels, was a historic act that must be applauded and celebrated. However, what must be remembered is that this decision was not reached by a unanimous realization that limiting women’s access to the peace table is an act of injustice [Page 16] toward half of humanity. Instead, the debates that informed the decision were based on practical and common-sense findings that had first to be presented, argued, and proven. The advocates of women’s participation at all decision-making levels had to prove that women are now more than ever the targets of warfare and with their children account for the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict, that women play an important role in preventing and resolving conflicts, and that restructuring a war-torn society needs the equal participation and full involvement of women.

It appears that the decision to treat women as equals and include them in the decision-making levels of society came as a result of a socially and strategically responsible decision that will benefit humanity rather than as a decision based on an incontrovertible finding that denying women equal access at all the decision-making levels is also denying them equal rights and opportunities. Regardless of the rationale, with the United Nations’ passing the resolution Women, Peace and Security, the process of including women in making decisions moved forward and must be augmented for the results to bear fruits of peace.

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I don’t have to grope

with despairing womanhood.

I am given hope.

—Janet Tomkins

Copyright © 2002 by Janet Tomkins

[Page 19]

Universe

Sun, earth and star—

weights pressing on the arch of the sky

curved like the back of a turtle.

—William P. Collins

Copyright © 2001 by William P. Collins

The Point

He rushes in,

kicks the ball through a forest of legs,

lifts and delivers the orb

in tranquil arc over the field

—a goooooooooal!—

to gladden the crowd

and give him

time

to breathe.

—William P. Collins

Copyright © 2002 by William P. Collins

[Page 20]

[Page 21]

The Movement Toward a World
Language: Indigenization and
Universalization

BY JEFFREY S. GRUBER

Copyright © 2002 by Jeffrey S. Gruber. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to postings on the Bahá’í Interlanguage listserve <interlang-x@bcca.org>, especially those of Donald Z. Osborn, and to the LINGUIST List <www.linguistlist.org>, which have aided me in this research.

IN ITS 1985 statement The Promise of World Peace addressed to the peoples of the world, the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing and legislative body of the Bahá’í Faith, highlights the need for a universal auxiliary language, calling it an “urgent,” necessity, the lack of which “seriously undermines efforts towards world peace.” In the years since the publication of the peace statement, the importance of a universal auxiliary language has become increasingly clear as world civilization evolves through a process of concomitant indigenization and universalization in which grass-roots empowerment movements are juxtaposed with the pursuit of world peace. One can see the process clearly in the realm of language and communication. Here there is an increasing emphasis on the use of local languages, often with a corresponding rejection of regionally dominant languages (frequently categorized, with some justification, as the “oppressor” languages). Simultaneously, this insistence on the importance of local languages brings to the fore the need for adopting a single, truly universal auxiliary language, since by this means, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states, “it would be needful to know two languages only, the mother tongue and the universal speech. . . . A third language would not be needed.”

At the same time, advances in the field of electronic communications have allowed us to engage in a sort of global conversation over morning coffee, facilitating individual and collective, terse and elaborate, immediate and mutual expression throughout the global village. As the world interacts through various media (spoken, written, and electronic word), communication and language develop a world character. Thus the movement toward the indigenization of language, [Page 22] spurred by pride of heritage and the age-old human desire to identify with a group, accompanies and reinforces a paradoxical movement toward universalization, fueled by an equally human urge to communicate.

Local and Indigenous Languages:
Conflict in Ascent

IN recent years a growing awareness of the importance of the world’s linguistic heritage has led international institutions to promote the importance and preservation of local indigenous languages. In 1996 the World Conference of Linguistic Rights, with ninety nations and sixty-six nongovernmental organizations represented, produced the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. The declaration focused on the rights of language communities worldwide, historically established in their own territory, to study, develop, and use their mother tongue.

In 1998 the status of minority languages and their rights was the theme of a congress entitled “Minority Languages in Context: Diversity and Standardization” held in Chur, Switzerland, by the Swiss Association of Applied Linguistics. A main theme of the congress was the status of minority languages in relation to majority languages and their rights, such as standardization, often felt as a means of securing legitimacy or equal status with majority languages. In January 2000 another international conference, held in Asmara, Eritrea, by Pennsylvania State University, concerned itself particularly with the languages of Africa. The declaration framed at the conference—“Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the 21st Century”—declared that “African languages must take on the duty, the responsibility, and the challenge of speaking for the continent,” citing the hindrances that international colonial languages have imposed in this process.

Despite their importance, local languages, if they are to thrive, face many problems. Often they lack standardization or a written script. Moreover, they can become political issues, used as weapons in power struggles. Over time, complications arise from the fact that people move, or are moved, around, and geographical areas become quite linguistically complex, leading to further language confrontations and confusions.

For example, the break-up of the Soviet Union brought into play rivalries between previously suppressed local languages now seeking “official” language status. Efforts to promote and develop the use of Kyrgyz, a Turkic language, in Kyrgystan have been hindered by pressures to use Russian there, as well as by the widespread use of Uzbek, a closely related language. However, as large numbers of rural Kyrgyz flood the workforce and schools, the teaching of Kyrgyz has become mandatory.

In Kosovo, in April 2000, the Serbian language, along with the Serbs themselves, had, except in island enclaves and international institutions, all but disappeared as more and more Albanians moved into the area. But the Albanian language has also faced internal pressures. Language rivalries and political collusion based on language have appeared between speakers of the Albanian dialects of [Page 23] Tosk (a southern minority that, nevertheless, has formed the basis of Serbian-supported language standardization) and Gheg (spoken by the northern majority).

Romani (Gypsy) has, through forcible assimilation, deliberate government policies, and social pressures, become almost lost to the present generation of Roma. The language is further hampered by the existence of numerous mutually unintelligible dialects and by conflicts in achieving language standardization, which, in turn, have contributed to the ethnic group’s own disunity and difficulty in attaining minority rights in Europe. Slovak Romani, the most common dialect among Roma in the Czech Republic, which has been passed down successfully for centuries, preserves many features of ancient Sanskrit; its disappearance would serve to underscore what the world loses when a language ceases to be used. Although the survival of Romani no doubt depends to a large extent on efforts by the Roma themselves, the injustice of needing to learn a less than universal language (in this case Czech) other than their own, constitutes pressure against such a will. Surely in this case, as in so many others, the existence of a universal auxiliary language would have removed some of the pressures, inequalities, and misunderstandings that have brought about this state of affairs.

The two-language principle, realized in a fully universal auxiliary language, could do much to ensure the survival of local languages and support their fight for existence. Local languages would no longer be stigmatized as odd or backward; if people learned only two languages—the single universally used language and the native tongue—the playing field would be leveled in almost every dimension.

National and Regional Languages:
Dilemmas of Choice

THE European Union (EU), with its eleven working languages, provides an excellent example of the difficulties faced by multilingualism. In practice, and in public, all the languages of the EU are to be regarded as equal; in private, nations are concerned about the representation of their national languages in the Union, linguistic loss, and the loss of national prominence, so closely tied to language. The plurality of languages sustained by this rivalry among national and regional languages adds tremendously to the cost of doing business in the EU, and the possibilities that are created for misunderstandings are great. The EU’s translation facilities are enormous and expensive. In 1998 the EU employed nineteen hundred translators and interpreters and produced 1.2 million pages of translations. Suggestions have even been made that different Internets are needed to accommodate different languages.

If the European Union is an experiment in multilingualism, there are nations that in themselves are multilingual. These nations must deal with the pressures of the resurgent movement to reinstate the use of their local [Page 24] languages, while, at the same time, they experience the urgent need for a regional lingua franca. In many cases this need produces an additional dilemma. The regional lingua franca is, with great frequency, the erstwhile “language of empire,” such as French in West Africa, English in India, and Russian in former Soviet states. This quandary is excellently expressed by Seth Mydans, writing about East Timor in the New York Times:

Will [the national language] . . . be the language of the international marketplace, English? Will it be the dominant local language, Tetun, with its broad usage but limited vocabulary? Will it be the colonial language, Portuguese, the sentimental favorite of the older generation? Or will it be Indonesian, the common language of the young and the educated?

Consider how the situation would be resolved by the principle of two languages. The dilemma of choice between the rival national, regional, or international languages then becomes moot: Regional or international languages that are less than universal need not be considered. Even if nations should resolve, by adopting a merely national or regional lingua franca, the conflicts between regional and national needs for integration and the desire of local groups to see their own language flourish, inevitably the need for communication with the rest of the world will arise, to be satisfied only by adopting a fully worldwide auxiliary language.

Local Languages and the
Universal Language

AS IDEOLOGY wanes as the main motivation for war, many of the world’s conflicts appear to arise primarily from long-smoldering grass-roots separatist movements and animosities. These attitudes and prejudices are often sustained by local differences in language. Moreover, just as the attainment of universal peace now seems largely dependent on ethnic groups achieving grass-roots unity, so the solution to worldwide linguistic conflicts resides in the promotion by speakers of indigenous languages of a linguistic environment in which local languages directly interface with a worldwide one.

Recent developments in the former Soviet Union again provide poignant examples. Proponents of the use of Belarus, repressed in favor of Russian by the Soviet regime, and persistently so by Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukasenka, resort to advocating national independence as the only means of preserving their language and culture. In Macedonia, development of an Albanian-language university raises the possibility of that language’s being recognized officially alongside Macedonian and the question of whether it contributes to feelings of separatism. Thus the legitimate desire to preserve one’s linguistic heritage leads to nationalistic animosities and separatism. Nevertheless, if the principle of two languages is applied— the local and the global—linguistic interests without nationalistic provocations can be satisfied.

Technology and World Communication

THE Internet also functions on both a local and a universal level. The Internet’s impact on language may be as great as that of the innovations of writing and movable type. [Page 25] To some it has appeared that a new lingua franca is developing on the Internet itself. One effect is to produce both language simplification in certain situations and to facilitate greater complexity in composition in others. Moreover, the Internet has the capacity to accommodate both global and local usages; in effect, it serves as an interface between the two. It simultaneously encourages the promotion of a single common world language and worldwide multilingual expression. For example, English as a world language is promoted worldwide by the increasing efficacy of its usage on the Internet; at the same time more and more local and national languages are entering the Internet, interfacing with each other in de facto multilingualism through more and more users worldwide.

The Internet is also altering the character of international communications. While continuing to promote the use of international languages, information and communication technology (such as online local-language translators and spell-checkers, textual and terminological databases in a growing number of languages, and 16-byte character sets able to accommodate the world’s orthographies) are empowering the use of indigenous local languages at an accelerating pace. A “Universal Networking Language” program developed at the United Nations University, Tokyo, aims to provide an intermediate language for translation software to facilitate global communication. In a similar vein, Esperanto has been adopted as the single intermediate language (interlingua) in the machine-translation technique of “Distributed Language Translation,” a technology that has been of interest to the European Union. These developments can be seen as another reflection of the desire to maintain the integrity of local languages while solving the problem of international communication through a universal linguistic facility—namely, one for translation.

English as the Auxiliary Language

ENGLISH has often been postulated as a potential world auxiliary language. However, English, or any other of the world’s principal languages, may suffer from the taint of an imperial past. From a social perspective, since Bahá’u’lláh postulates that the world language will be chosen by a gathering convened by the world’s governments, one would expect this open and democratic process to free it from any possible accrued resentments. Moreover, from a linguistic and ethnological perspective, if English is selected, then, rather than triumphing as a linguistic form bound by a particular cultural and historic past, it will become, as is now the case in some quarters, a new language expressive of a new world culture.

At present, English is the language of international commerce, and, although it does not possess the largest number of native speakers, the ranks of English-speakers swell considerably when speakers of English as a second language are included.

As English develops today as a global language, it reveals more and more how it could be molded into a new universal character. Barbara Wallraff, senior editor and columnist for the Atlantic Monthly, discussed certain parameters by which this is already happening: First, there are far more, and an ever-increasing percentage of, speakers of English [Page 26] as a second and foreign language than there are native speakers of the language: 372 million first-language English speakers (6 percent of the world’s population), but with as high as 518 million second-language English speakers in 1995 (approximately 8 percent of the world’s population or 40 percent more); Nigeria and India are second only to the United States and United Kingdom in English speakers, but most Nigerians and Indians have other languages as their mother tongues. The character of English is thus acquiring a larger base of influence from its international usage than from its original speakers. Second, English has a long history of incorporating vocabulary and forms adopted from cultures and languages with which it has been in contact. Finally, as commonly observed by teachers and researchers of language, it is especially easy to gain a working, albeit crude, knowledge of English, although relatively difficult to attain a refined knowledge of its standard form. These factors will encourage varieties as well as melding of dialects of English in its interface with the world’s languages, transforming it through stages of mutual unintelligibility, such as we already have among varieties of English in India, Africa, Oceania, and so on, into a rich multifaceted global whole. The mutual influences are exhibited in the complex interplay of “Englishization” of native languages and nativization of English.

The recognition in academia of the future of English as a worldwide yet vastly diversified language was tacitly indicated in an announcement recently in the LINGUIST List of the completion and availability of three components of the International Corpus of English, comprising studies of the “Englishes” of East Africa, Great Britain, and New Zealand. The author states that this is “the first large-scale effort to study the development of English as a world language . . . collecting comparable samples of spoken and written English representing the regional variety of English found in the country the group is affiliated with.” A teacher of English as a foreign language in China, posting to the LINGUIST List, observed that “English no longer belongs to any particular country, but is truly internationalized” and asked if there could not, therefore, be recognized a “Chinese English,” just as there are Indian and West African Englishes.

The English 2000 projects of the British Council, an educational and cultural service organization established in Great Britain, have had as their goal promoting English language and culture throughout the world and maintaining the language’s preeminence by reaching 1 billion speakers by the end of the second millennium C.E. Whether this has succeeded, since most of these speakers will have English as their second language, the irony is that success must result in a greatly varied and modified international language. As cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has observed, English “will not drive other languages to extinction, and may not even survive as the world’s lingua franca.” But if it does, it will change “beyond recognition.”

[Page 27] Language and Peace

INDIGENIZATION goes hand in hand with universalization. If peace is to arise from unity, true unity must entail the ability of all peoples to express their diverse character and culture for their own sakes and for the sake of the enrichment of all humanity. This includes their “language rights” to use and develop their mother tongue. Indeed, local languages are necessary as a vehicle of thought for peoples, essential to enable them to make their due contribution to world civilization. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, stressing the importance of the native language of a people, is reported to have called it “the most profound characteristic of a people,” referring to the common world language as a bridge to the rest of the world.

Empowerment of people to use and develop their native languages by the adoption of a universal auxiliary parallels their empowerment, by the establishment of the structures and behaviors of world civilization and unity, to be heard at the grass-roots level and to effect world peace. According to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, it is the people, not the nation-states, who will bring about peace:

O ye individuals of humanity, find ye means for the stoppage of this wholesale murder and bloodshed. Now is the appointed time! Now is the opportune time! Arise ye, show ye an effort, put ye forward an extraordinary force, and unfurl ye the Flag of Universal Peace and dam the irresistible fury of this raging torrent which is wreaking havoc and ruin everywhere.

We may reflect that the world order of Bahá’u’lláh will strongly emphasize the local and the universal, sometimes at the expense of the purely national or regional. Local identities, linguistic or otherwise, may take precedence over national identities. Thus the movement toward supporting and encouraging the resurgence of local languages, rather than being looked upon as a lamentable splintering of nationhood, could be considered another way of increasing the rich store of world diversity. A truly universal language would provide the means for worldwide communication and, at the same time, help bring about a state of global justice that would encourage local languages to flourish. The principle of the juxtaposition of the indigenous with the universal, as is now becoming apparent in the realm of language, brings fresh illumination to the manner in which the concept of unity in diversity will be manifested in the new world order of Bahá’u’lláh.

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Interracial and Multiracial Unity
Movements in the U.S.:
Models for World Peace

BY RICHARD W THOMAS

Copyright © 2002 by Richard W. Thomas.

AS THE United States prepares for expanded involvement in efforts to promote world peace in the twenty-first century, how ready is it, given its present state of race relations, to address racism, which is one of the obstacles to world peace? There can be no question that racial conflicts and tensions have been major deterrents to both domestic and world peace. The 1985 statement of the Universal House of Justice, the international legislative and governing body of the worldwide Bahá’í community, calls racism (which it refers to as “one of the most baneful and persistent evils”) “a major barrier to peace”:

Its practice perpetrates too outrageous a violation of the dignity of human beings to be countenanced under any pretext. Racism retards the unfoldment of the boundless potentialities of its victims, corrupts its perpetrators, and blights human progress. Recognition of the oneness of mankind, implemented by appropriate legal measures, must be universally upheld if this problems is to be overcome.

If one focuses on the state of race relations in the United States from the perspective of some scholars and journalists, one will surely despair, for the domestic scenario does not provide much hope or moral authority for the United States’ playing a significant role in eliminating racism throughout the world. Fortunately there is another scenario, more hopeful and promising, yet no less accurate than the first one. It is part of “the other tradition of race relations” historically concerned with promoting racial justice and interracial and multiracial unity. It is these social movements that have focused on building bridges across racial divides during and after countless racial crises and have kept faith with the vision of a multiracial society based on justice, love, and cooperation. These movements for interracial and multiracial unity are among the best hopes for eliminating racism in the United States and provide [Page 30] models that can be used to eliminate racism worldwide.

Selected Movements for Interracial and
Multiracial Unity in the United States

DURING the last two decades several interracial and multiracial movements have emerged around specific issues and concerns. Among these movements three stand out: multicultural education, interracial and multiracial coalitions, and faith-based community organizations. Each of these movements has developed perspectives, strategies, and techniques potentially useful for eliminating racism.

Multicultural Education Movements. The multicultural education movement in the United States evolved out of the civil-rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Most scholars, researchers, and practitioners define multicultural education as an idea or concept, an educational movement, and a process. According to James A. Banks, a leading scholar-practitioner in the field, multicultural education “espouses the notion that male and female students, students from diverse racial, ethnic, and social-class groups, and students with disabilities should have an equal opportunity to learn in schools, colleges, and universities.” He goes on to explain that the multicultural education movement is considered a “process whose major aim is to change the social structure and culture of schools and other educational institutions, so that students from all cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, and social-class groups will have an equal opportunity to experience academic success.”

During the civil-rights movement, African Americans began the process of multicultural education by demanding that schools and universities hire African American teachers and administrators and that the “curricula incorporate the experiences of blacks in the making of world and U.S. history.” Soon other racial and ethnic groups including Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans joined the movement and expanded its multiracial character and vitality. This expansion furthered the institutionalization of ethnic and cultural diversity at many universities and colleges. For example, some education departments integrated multicultural education into their teacher-education programs, thus implementing the primary goals of the multicultural movement, which were to “help all students to develop more positive attitudes toward people from various racial, gender, and cultural groups . . . and to help members of victimized groups, . . . to develop more positive self-concepts and feelings about themselves and their groups.”

The influence of the multicultural education [Page 31] movement has continued up to the present time in various forms. Among other research topics, scholars and classroom teachers are studying and learning more about such related topics as “Developmental Processes and Their Influence on Interethnic and Interracial Relations”; “Ethnic Identity and Multicultural Competence”; “Multicultural Education and the Modification of Students’ Racial Attitudes”; and “Preparing Educators for Cross-Cultural Teaching.” These studies published during the 1990s reflected the intellectual and programmatic vitality of the movement, which is still in evidence today.

As racial and ethnic diversity increases, accompanied by racial polarization and conflicts in public schools, multicultural education will have to play an increasingly vital role in preparing the present generation to interact positively in a racially and culturally diverse world. This is why one of the recommendations of the Advisory Board for the President’s Initiative on Race, established in 1997, focused on “The benefits of diversity in K-12 and higher education”:

Emerging evidence shows that diversity in the education context, including racial diversity, is essential to providing all students with a complete educational experience. . . . Diversity can promote many benefits that accrue to all students and society. . . . To realize these benefits, we need to promote diversity in our academic institutions and create environments that offer opportunities for students to learn from and about persons who are different than [sic] themselves. . . . The Federal Government should work with the education community to articulate and publicize these benefits of diversity.

Interracial and Multicultural Coalitions. Manifestations of the other positive tradition of race relations can also be seen in interracial and multiracial coalitions, which have been in the forefront of promoting unity among racially diverse groups by focusing on common political, economic, and social issues. Some of these coalitions have been short term and vulnerable to the pressures of interracial and multiracial conflicts and tensions associated with limited group interests and identity politics. Others have been long term. A good example of a short-term interracial coalition occurred during the period of Radical Reconstruction (1865-77) when former slaves, pre-Civil War free blacks, ex-Confederates, and Northern whites joined to set up new state constitutions and to legislate reforms such as universal education. According to one historian:

Never before—never since had there been assemblies like these . . . Confederates, Unionists, poor men, rich men, black men, white men . . . elected by a poor white and black constituency and composed of Northern-born and Southern-born blacks, the Reconstruction conventions represented the first democratic assemblies in America.

Equal political rights and equality before the law were often too much to ask of many whites who were forced by circumstances to engage in interracial political coalitions with blacks. Gradually they turned to white supremacy, overthrew Reconstruction, and abandoned the interracial political coalitions [Page 32] with blacks. Notwithstanding the failure of this first experiment in interracial democracy founded upon the hopes of a fragile short-term interracial coalition, long-term coalitions would soon emerge.

The black-Jewish coalition is one of the oldest long-term interracial coalitions in the twentieth century. Rooted in the early days of the NAACP and Urban League, it reached its apex during the Civil Rights Movement. During the post-civil-rights era, conflicts over affirmative action, antisemitic statements by Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, and some black leaders’ criticisms of Israel severely strained the coalition. These conflicts and tensions within the black-Jewish coalitions prompted several black and Jewish organizations to launch a campaign of reconciliation and unity to heal the breach.

One such effort took place in April 1989 at the first black-Jewish conference at Dillard University—an historically African American college in Louisiana. This led to the founding of the National Center for Black-Jewish Relations. A similar effort took place in 1996 at Howard University—another historically African American college in Washington, D.C.—in partnership with the American Jewish Committee with the founding of Common Quest: The Magazine of Black Jewish Relations. Both of these efforts represented the revitalization of a major interracial coalition within the larger movement of interracial and multiracial unity in the United States.

In the 1980s and 1990s the need for coalitions among people of color began to receive more attention, partially as a result of changes in immigration laws in 1965 and 1990 that increased the numbers of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and the “many instances of conflict and division between communities of color. . . .” Leaders of poor and working-class communities of color have come to realize that coalitions in the larger cities are the only way to maintain social stability and develop social agendas that “benefit all groups including working-class whites.” Blacks, Latinos, and Asians took part in coalitions around common political agendas during the mayoral campaigns of Harold Washington in Chicago in 1983, Mel King in Boston in 1983, and David [Page 33] Dinkins in New York City in 1989. That same year the Chinatown-Harlem Initiative in New York emerged out of the need to improve relationships between the African-American and Asian-American communities. Notwithstanding some limited successes in coalitions among people of color, there is still much to be done.

Faith-Based Community Organizations. Racially diverse religious communities and faith-based community organizations provide yet another example of the other, positive tradition of race relations. They have contributed much to the interracial and multiracial movement in the United States and provided some excellent models for eliminating racism and for building community around common problems. During the 1940s the San Francisco-based Church for the Fellowship of All People was one of the first interracial churches of its kind and a beacon of interracial fellowship. Under the leadership of Howard Thurman, its famous black minister who was also a philosopher and an educator, the Fellowship Church put into practice the vision of interracial cooperation. The basic creed of membership in the church in part said: “‘I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and creedal heritage united in a religious fellowship’”

The American Bahá’í community has been actively involved in promoting interracial unity in the United States since 1921 when it started racial-amity conferences to help promote unity between black and white Americans. These race-amity conferences brought together influential black and white Americans to discuss a variety of topics related to interracial cooperation and harmony. This work was gradually expanded to include other races and cultures and is considered the hallmark of the American Bahá’í contribution to unifying racially diverse people.

Faith-based community organizations such as Vision Chicago, “a ministry partnership of World Vision and the MidAmerica Leadership Foundation,” focus on “common problems, while intentionally crossing racial and ethnic lines.” In the early 1990s Vision Chicago helped organize a coalition of fifteen local churches in the northern and southern parts of Lawndale, called the Lawndale Coalition for Christian Leadership, thus building a bridge between the predominantly African-American residents in the northern part of the town and the predominantly Latino population in the southern part of the community. Vision Chicago has also built bridges “linking urban ministries—and people—with Christians in the suburb.”

[Page 34] Implications for World Peace

WHAT can the world learn from the interracial and multiracial unity movements in the United States that can contribute to the elimination of racism, which is one of the barriers to world peace? One of the most valuable lessons is that they all share a basic belief in racial justice and the equality of all people. They also share a vision that their work will ultimately result in a multiracial nation established on the firm foundation of justice, love, and harmony, what Martin Luther King called “The Beloved Community.”

Another important lesson is the historical role the United States has played as a social laboratory for experimenting with various organizational and institutional strategies and methods for achieving racial justice and interracial and multiracial cooperation in the midst of racial polarization and conflict. While other multiracial countries, such as South Africa and England, have had somewhat similar racial problems, the United States has the oldest and most consistent tradition of antiracist struggles and some of the most enduring practices of interracial and multiracial coalition building of any racially stratified society in the world.

The United States developed and refined many of the strategies and techniques for successful interracial and multiracial movements with the greatest potential for eliminating racism and building coalitions across race. Many of these strategies and techniques, with slight modifications for national and cultural variations, have been used in other parts of the world. For example, there can be no doubt that the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia launched in July 1989 by the Australian government was in some small way influenced by the multicultural education movement in the United States that began two decades earlier.

The fact that the United States has pioneered many techniques should not be interpreted to mean that other countries have not or cannot develop their own unique strategies and techniques for building successful interracial and multiracial movements that can serve as models for eliminating racism. The nonviolence teachings of Mahatma Gandhi inspired several generations of African-American educators and civil-rights leaders. Howard Thurman and several other black Americans met Gandhi in 1935 in India. During that historically and spiritually eventful meeting, Gandhi told them that “it could be through the Afro-American that the unadulterated message of nonviolence would be delivered to all men everywhere.” Several decades later, during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which placed Martin Luther King, Jr., on the world stage and transformed his nonviolence movement into [Page 35] one model for achieving racial justice, the inspiration of Gandhi emerged as the core method of the movement. As King explained it: “As the days unfolded, . . . the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.” This Gandhian method of nonviolence in the hands of a multiracial civil-rights movement striving to build “The Beloved Community” became another lesson for promoting world peace.

Although the multiracial and multicultural history created the tensions and conflicts that still require resolution, this same history has created great promise for building one of the first multiracial and multicultural nations based on the principle of the organic oneness of the human race. As a Bahá’í statement on race points out: “In no other country is the promise of organic unity more immediately demonstrable than in the United States because this country is a microcosm of the diverse populations of the earth.”

As a microcosm of the world, the United States’ experience with interracial and multiracial movements provides vital examples that can he tried elsewhere in the quest for world peace. Many cities in the United States, such as Detroit, are becoming social laboratories in which people from around the world are learning to work together for the first time in the history of their racial and cultural groups. These local “cultural collaborations” can contribute to our understanding of what principles, strategies, and techniques are most effective in contributing to world peace by eliminating racism. Much more is needed, however: a spiritual bond that transcends racial barriers.

The recognition of the organic unity of the human family has to be the core spiritual principle of the interracial and multiracial movements. Education in this principle is essential in antiracism and multicultural education work and provides the only sound foundation for combating racism and assuring peace on all levels. According to the Bahá’í statement on world peace, “Acceptance of the oneness of mankind is the first fundamental prerequisite for reorganization and administration of the world as one country, the home of humankind. Universal acceptance of this spiritual principle is essential to any successful attempt to establish world peace? The first step in this process, as one can see in the discussion of multicultural education, interracial and multiracial coalitions, and faith-based community organizations, is to educate people to appreciate how much they are connected. “Universal acceptance of this spiritual principle,” the peace statement goes on to say, “is essential to any successful attempt to establish world peace. It should therefore be universally proclaimed, taught in schools, and constantly asserted in every nation as preparation for the organic [Page 36] change in the structure of society which it implies.”

There can be no world peace without the elimination of racism, and humankind cannot eliminate racism on the local and national levels without also eliminating it on the international level. Only then can humanity be assured of world peace. In one of his last messages on the subject, Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded the world that, “Among the moral imperatives of our time, we are challenged to work all over the world with unshakable determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism.” Interracial and multiracial movements in the United States have provided us with the principles, strategies, and techniques to accomplish this goal.

o god weep gently for me

o god weep gently for me

i whose eyes are clouded

whose arms are tired of holding in but emptiness

whose belief is like the wind

whose faith is like the calligraphic scamper of a squirrel

i cannot i cannot

catch my breath

find the balance

receive the blessing

—Florence DiPasquale Kindel

Copyright © 2002 by Florence DiPasquale Kindel

[Page 37]

No Longer Tending the Machine
of Civilization

Pared down, a hefty tree

branch, whittled down

to a dowel—Thoreau’s

middle-aged man who is

delighted to build his

simple wood hut, instead

of his youthful visions

of grandiose palaces

and temples—a sliver

of his former notions—

selflessness too grand

an idea to aspire to—

no longer tending

the machine of civilization

as we know it—out

the window, evergreens

planted by his father—

a block away, two

white-tailed deer—

sunset over the Alleghenies—

—Michael Fitzgerald

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Fitzgerald

[Page 38]

[Page 39]

Grasping the Significance of the
Twentieth Century

A REVIEW OF Century of Light, ([WILMETTE, IL]: BAHÁ’Í WORLD CENTRE, 2001), 157 PAGES WITH FOREWORD, 162 NOTES

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

Copyright © 2002 by Firuz Kazemzadeh.

Century of Light is not a history of the last one hundred years. It is, in the words of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the Bahá’í Faith, a review of the changes “far more profound than any” the world has undergone “in its preceding history” and of the relationship between such changes and the emergence of the Faith from obscurity, a process whereby it has demonstrated “on a global scale the unifying power with which its Divine origin has endowed it.” Prepared under the supervision of the Universal House of Justice, Century of Light provides perspectives that “will prove both spiritually enriching and of practical help in sharing with others the challenging implications of the Revelation brought by Bahá’u’lláh.” Although intended primarily for Bahá’ís, Century of Light offers readers who are not Bahá’ís an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the Bahá’í interpretation of the history of the last century and the Bahá’í understanding of its meaning.

Throughout the twelve brief chapters into which the book is divided, Century of Light, in a manner reminiscent of the writings of Shoghi Effendi, throws the bright light of the Bahá’í teachings on the events, the movements, and the ideologies of the twentieth century and unveils a majestic panorama of the spread and evolution of a world religion. Lest anyone take the very title of this book as evidence of an optimistic misunderstanding of a century replete with suffering, saturated with blood, and marked with death, Century of Light acknowledges at the outset “the magnitude of the ruin that the human race has brought upon itself during the period of history under review.” It speaks of the

disintegration of basic institutions of social order, the violation—indeed, the abandonment—of standards of decency, the betrayal of the life of the mind through surrender to ideologies as squalid as they have been empty, the invention and deployment of monstrous weapons of mass annihilation, the bankrupting of entire nations and the reduction of masses of human beings to hopeless poverty, the reckless destruction of the environment of the planet

as “only the most obvious in a catalogue of horrors unknown to even the darkest of ages past.” It reminds the Bahá’í reader of the dire warnings issued to humanity by Bahá’u’lláh in the mid-nineteenth century and adumbrated in the next century by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi—warnings that were not heeded and predictions of disasters that came to pass.

Century of Light attests to the dominance exercised by the West and its civilization at [Page 40] the opening of the twentieth century and to the blindness of its leaders, political, intellectual, and spiritual, to the catastrophes that lay ahead. The progress and relative prosperity of Europe and North America stood in striking contrast to the misery and backwardness of most of the rest of the world, the vast majority of the population of which had fallen victim to European imperialism. The positive aspects of Western culture, however, are generously acknowledged:

It was a culture which nurtured constitutional government, prized the rule of law and respect for the rights of all of society’s members, and held up to the eyes of all it reached a vision of a coming age of social justice. If the boasts of liberty and equality that inflated patriotic rhetoric in Western lands were a far cry from conditions actually prevailing, Westerners could justly celebrate the advances toward those ideals that had been accomplished in the nineteenth century.

Yet the negative aspects of that culture are not concealed. The age of science and progress had its dark side. Materialism and secularism undermined the inherited weltanschauungen and religious certainties that, Century of Light points out, were “often replaced by the blight of an aggressive secularism that called into doubt both the spiritual nature of humankind and the authority of moral values themselves.” Here the reader is confronted with an apparent paradox: that the secularization of elites

seemed to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism among the general population. At the deepest level—because religious influence reaches far into the human psyche and claims for itself a unique kind of authority—religious prejudices in all lands had kept alive in successive generations smouldering fires of bitter animosity that would fuel the horrors of the coming decades.

To such a world, tottering on the brink of disaster, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá proclaimed “the establishment on earth of that promised reign of universal peace and justice that had sustained human hope throughout the centuries.” This was not an outburst of pious enthusiasm but an inspired conclusion dictated by the facts understood in the light of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings:

In this day [‘Abdu’l-Bahá declared] . . . means of communication have multiplied, and the five continents of the earth have virtually merged into one. . . . In like manner all the members of the human family, whether peoples or governments, cities or villages, have become increasingly interdependent. . . . Hence the unity of all mankind can in this day be achieved. Verily this is none other but one of the wonders of this wondrous age, this glorious century.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá called on His Father’s followers and on all humanity to use their powers of spirit and reason and to open their hearts to the love of God that would make of them builders of a new world order. The immense task of building such an order had already begun. Century of Light tells of the Iranian Bahá’ís who, guided and nurtured by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, had, in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, created a distinctive culture “unlike anything humanity had ever known”:

Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself.

In a backward country the population of which was largely illiterate, where women were excluded from public life, where a despotic Shah, corrupt officialdom, and arrogant clergy oppressed the voiceless masses, Bahá’ís were the first to open schools for the education of girls, medical clinics, and even [Page 41] a rudimentary postal service. Their most stunning achievement, however, was the establishment of a network of democratically elected institutions for governing the Bahá’í community, a feat that their countrymen have to this date been unable to duplicate in their political life.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá's travels in the West in 1911 and 1912 and the establishment of the Faith in the Western hemisphere have been characterized by Shoghi Effendi as “the most outstanding achievement that will forever be associated with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ministry.” Century of Light stresses the fact that, while ‘Abdu’l-Bahá propagated the principles of the Faith, warned of the approaching worldwide conflagration, and guided the fledgling American Bahá’í community, He “did not hesitate to introduce into His relations with Western believers actions that summoned them to a level of consciousness far above mere social liberalism and tolerance.” Thus He encouraged the marriage of a white woman, Louisa Mathew, to a black man, Louis Gregory. This initiative, Century of Light points out, “set a standard for the American Bahá’í community as to the real meaning of racial integration, however timid and slow its members were in responding to the core implications of the challenge.”

Two years after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s unheeded warnings, the Great War, so named by the generation of its victims, broke out in Europe, rapidly engulfing much of the world. In a mere seven pages Century of Light offers a remarkable overview of the causes and outcomes of the conflict that literally changed the face of the world, overthrowing monarchies, bringing into being new nations, undermining traditional norms of political and religious life, and hatching movements of unprecedented virulence and barbarity. And yet, out of the muddy trenches, the death-dealing shards, the clouds of poison gas, and the blood of millions of young men, there emerged President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a new international order, a League of Nations that would, millions prayed, guard against war and ensure peace on earth.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá welcomed and praised Wilson’s initiative without placing hope in the efficacy of the League, which was abandoned at birth by the United States and emasculated in childhood by the great powers in pursuit of their national interests. “‘Peace, Peace . . . the lips of potentates and peoples unceasingly proclaim,’” He said, “‘whereas the fire of unquenched hatreds still smoulders in their hearts.’” And again, “‘The ills from which the world now suffers will multiply; the gloom which envelops it will deepen. . . . The vanquished powers will continue to agitate. They will resort to every measure that may rekindle the flame of war.’”

The final mission of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s life was the creation of a design for the worldwide expansion of the Cause, spelled out in fourteen tablets, or letters, addressed to the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada. These became the strategic map and the spiritual inspiration of Bahá’í institutions and individuals who, over the next eighty years, took the Faith to every corner of the earth, making it geographically the second most widespread of existing religions.

Century of Light pays a glowing tribute to the life and mission of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá who, together with the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, is counted a Central Figure of the Bahá’í Faith and the Perfect Exemplar of its teachings. It then proceeds to an elucidation and appreciation of the institution of the Guardianship created by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His Will and Testament. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s appointment of His grandson, Shoghi Effendi, as the Guardian [Page 42] of the Cause of God, endowed with the exclusive authority of interpreting Bahá’í sacred writings, ensured the unity of the community through the difficult times after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing and beyond.

There now stood at the head of the Faith a young man of extraordinary powers of perception and organization, a man of indomitable will, inexhaustible energy, enormous capacity for work, and total dedication to principle. It lies beyond the scope of this review to give even a cursory summary of the accomplishments of Shoghi Effendi as interpreter and translator of the Bahá’í scriptures; unifier, organizer, and inspirer of the Bahá’í community; thinker, author, historian, and continuator of the work of his Grandfather.

Century of Light recounts the accomplishments of Shoghi Effendi against the background of the turmoil that engulfed the world shortly after the end of World War I and the erosion of hopes raised by the allied victory, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and the creation of the League of Nations. Much of the globe fell victim to nationalism, racialism, and communism, ideologies and movements that were characterized by Shoghi Effendi as the three false gods and the chief idols in the desecrated temple of humanity “at whose altars governments and people, whether democratic or totalitarian, at peace or at war, of the East or of the West, Christian or Islamic, are, in various forms and in different degrees, now worshiping.” Shoghi Effendi, like ‘Abdu’l-Bahá before him, was a master of relating emerging political and philosophical trends to the unfolding destinies of the Cause. His letters, book-length in size and scope— The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, The Advent of Divine Justice, The Promised Day Is Come— taught the Bahá’í community to see its position, development, and tasks as closely intertwined with events that affected the lives of the earth’s peoples and nations.

Equally important was Shoghi Effendi’s contribution to the proper understanding of the fundamental spiritual teachings of the Faith: God, revelation, the station of His Messengers, the unique station of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the spiritual nature of the Bahá’í administrative order. While every principle that Shoghi Effendi elucidated in his works was derived directly from the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, he reaffirmed these principles and restated them in a language that permitted neither ambiguity nor misunderstanding.

Pursuing the tasks laid upon him by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi labored to raise the Bahá’í administrative order, a network of Local and National Spiritual Assemblies, and to implement ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s plan for the expansion of the Cause. Century of Light describes Shoghi Effendi’s careful and systematic endeavors that began with the Seven Year Plan (1937-44) and culminated in the last of his Plans (1953-63), the one he termed a Spiritual Crusade and the one he did not live to see completed. The plans elaborated by Shoghi Effendi called for the dispersion of Bahá’ís over most of the globe, the proclamation of the Faith to ever larger segments of humanity, the establishment of Bahá’í communities, and the translation of Bahá’í literature into hundreds of languages. The mobilization of the worldwide Bahá’í community amidst the great depression of the 1930s that engulfed much of the world, the settling of Bahá’í pioneers in distant lands during and immediately after World War II, the victories [Page 43] won, and the horizons conquered added magnificent chapters to Bahá’í history, much of which was recorded by Shoghi Effendi’s own pen in God Passes By.

Century of Light tells of the devastating blow dealt to the Bahá’í community by Shoghi Effendi’s sudden passing in November 1957 and the realization that, as he left no heir, the Faith, in the absence of a Universal House of Justice, was left without a legitimate head. It is at this point that the institution of the Hands of the Cause, created by Bahá’u’lláh and given a formal structure by Shoghi Effendi, performed its greatest service to the Faith. Ordained originally by Bahá’u’lláh, and continued by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the institution of the Hands of the Cause was charged with the twin functions of propagation and protection of the Faith. Shoghi Effendi gave the institution a formal structure and referred to the Hands of the Cause as the chief stewards of the Faith. When he passed away, the Hands, with the unanimous consent of every National Spiritual Assembly, assumed the uncontested leadership of the Bahá’í community, bringing it through many reefs and shoals to safe harbor in 1963 when the Bahá’í world elected, in accordance with procedures established by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the first Universal House of Justice, its supreme governing body.

The election of the Universal House of Justice opened a new stage in the evolution of the Bahá’í Faith. While the world was in the grip of the Cold War, the Bahá’í community continued to expand and extend its influence in India, Africa, Latin America, and the islands of the Pacific. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the last great empire of the modern world, opened Russia and the lands formerly under its sway to the wider world from which it had been isolated for seventy years, permitting surviving Bahá’í communities, suppressed for some sixty years, to revive and expand beyond their pre-Soviet limits. Yet both in the former Soviet sphere and in the Western world the Faith was confronted with the same deadly phenomenon —a pervasive materialism that threatened to overwhelm every inherited spiritual value and to reduce humanity to the status of mere consumers. The diagnosis presented in Century of Light deserves to be quoted in full:

Fathered by nineteenth[-]century European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality—including human reality and the process by which it evolves—is essentially material in nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of material needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its assigned task.

Echoing the words of Shoghi Effendi, Century of Light condemns individualism “that increasingly admits of no restraint and that elevates acquisition and personal advancement to the status of major cultural values” and that finds “the root cause of such apparently unrelated problems as the pollution of the environment, economic dislocation, ethnic violence, spreading public apathy, the massive increase in crime, and epidemics that ravage whole populations” in the deterioration [Page 44] of the moral fabric of society. “Without a fundamental change of moral consciousness and behaviour,” Century of Light declares, it would be unrealistic to expect recovery from these patent evils.

Yet the picture is not totally dark. Century of Light points out that the physical unification of the planet has already occurred and that conditions for its political unification are present. The United Nations with all its defects is a welcome positive development, although it is still no more than an organization of sovereign states: “Somewhere ahead lie the further great changes that will eventually impel acceptance of the principle of world government itself.”

Turning again to the Bahá’í community, Century of Light recounts the activities of Bahá’í institutions and individuals: the creation by the Universal House of Justice of Continental Boards of Counselors charged with the propagation of the Faith and protection of the community, the launching and completion of a series of plans derived from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablets of the Divine Plan for the expansion and consolidation of the Cause, the large growth in the numbers of believers and of Spiritual Assemblies and the consequent increase in the diversity that has become an unmistakable hallmark of the Bahá’í community.

Rapid expansion and the inclusion in the Bahá’í community of millions of men and women belonging to various cultures created its own problems. The methods of community building learned in Iran and in the West were not always applicable in areas where large and sometimes illiterate populations entered the Faith on the strength of spiritual insight unaccompanied by a study of the Bahá’í teachings. At times, unrealistic expectations of some overenthusiastic Bahá’ís led to discouragement that was eventually overcome by the process of continuous experimentation and learning. Yet “It is safe to say that during these years there was virtually no type of teaching activity, no combination of expansion, consolidation and proclamation, no administrative option, no effort at cultural adaptation that was not being energetically tried in some part of the Bahá’í world.” In response to the needs of the Bahá’í communities in Africa, India, Latin America, and the Pacific, Bahá’ís initiated social- and economic-development projects that were based, not on prevailing models used by government agencies and by many private organizations the efforts of which frequently resulted in costly failures, but on “development paradigms that could assimilate what they [the Bahá’ís] were observing in the larger society to the Faith’s unique conception of human potentialities.”

As an outstanding example of the success of such efforts, Century of Light cites India where the world’s largest Bahá’í community— numbering well over one million members— resides. The “Lotus Temple” near New Delhi, visited on the average by ten thousand people a day, stands as a visible symbol of remarkable achievements: the integration of believers from many religions, classes, and castes; the raising up of thousands of local Spiritual Assemblies; the establishment of Regional Councils that share with the National Spiritual Assembly the burdens of administering the affairs of the Cause over the whole subcontinent; and the multiplication of projects of economic and social development. Smaller-scale but equally impressive successes have been achieved in Malaysia, Thailand, Colombia, and several countries in Africa.

The unity in diversity was strikingly evident at the 1992 Bahá’í World Congress commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the ascension of Bahá’u’lláh. More than twenty-seven thousand people from the four corners of the earth gathered in New York to demonstrate their devotion to the Founder of their Faith and the unity of the human family achieved through adherence to His soul-transforming teachings. They were [Page 45] greeted by the mayor of the city and welcomed in a letter from the President of the United States. The event at New York’s Javits Center was linked by satellite with smaller conferences in Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Panama City, Singapore, Sydney, and Western Samoa, making it possible for the members of the Universal House of Justice to address all of them simultaneously.

Century of light discusses the evolving relations between the Bahá’í community and the governments and institutions of the larger world. At the direction of Shoghi Effendi himself, a Bahá’í delegation was present at the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. He instructed the then existing National Spiritual Assemblies to create an entity, the Bahá’í International Community, that would in time be recognized as a nongovernmental organization and granted consultative status with the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council. The persecution that befell the Iranian Bahá’í community at the hands of the Islamic regime that came to power in Iran as a result of the 1979 revolution provided a strong stimulus for the further development of contacts with the UN and a number of governments.

Century of light acknowledges “the suffering of countless victims of oppression” but points out the uniqueness of the attitude of Bahá’ís who suffered death, imprisonment, confiscation of property, loss of jobs, exclusion from institutions of higher learning, and much more. They refused to “accept the all too familiar role of victims”:

Like the Founders of their Faith before them, they took moral charge of the great issue between them and their adversaries. It was they, not revolutionary courts or revolutionary guards, who quickly set the terms of the encounter, and this extraordinary achievement affected not only the hearts but the minds of those who observed the situation from outside the Bahá’í Faith. The persecuted community neither attacked its oppressors, nor sought political advantage from the crisis. Nor did the Bahá’í defenders in other lands call for the dismantling of the Iranian constitution, much less for revenge. All demanded only justice—the recognition of the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by the community of nations, ratified by the Iranian government, and many of them embodied even in clauses of the Islamic constitution.

The United Nations and many national governments responded to the appeals of the Bahá’í International Community and the National Spiritual Assemblies by passing resolutions condemning the Islamic regime’s treatment of religious minorities and most particularly of the Bahá’ís.

It was in this context that in 1985 the Universal House of Justice issued its statement The Promise of World Peace, expressing confidence in the advent of universal peace and setting out “elements of the form that this long-awaited development must take, many of which went far beyond the political terms in which the subject is commonly discussed.” The Promise of World Peace, Century of Light asserts, “set the agenda for Bahá’í interaction with the United Nations and its attendant organizations in the years since 1985.” Soon the Bahá’í International Community became one of the influential nongovernmental organizations at the UN, its representatives being elected to the Executive Committee of Non-Governmental Organizations and frequently consulted on matters of social progress. Bahá’í delegates actively participated in the World Congress on Education for All (Thailand, 1990), the World Summit for Children (New York, 1990), the UN Conference on the Environment (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993), the International Conference on Population (Cairo, [Page 46] 1994), the World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen, 1995), and the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995).

The closing years of the twentieth century witnessed the acceleration of the process of globalization with both its positive and negative aspects. The economic unification of the world is an inevitable consequence of the scientific, technological, economic, and political evolution of human society. Globalization encompasses the cultural and social spheres, lessens the traditional role of nation states, removes barriers among peoples, and leads to the emergence of “the global society envisioned in Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings.” The process of globalization, however, has thrown into lurid relief the disparity between the benefits it is bringing to technologically and economically advanced nations and the continuing impoverishment of a majority of humankind. The violent protests against exploitative aspects of globalization highlight the dangers inherent in excluding from economic activity moral and spiritual principles indispensable for the construction of a just global society.

In the end it is precisely the spiritual bankruptcy of what passes for “Western civilization” that obstructs and delays the transition from the world of nation states to a world in which all humanity would be citizens. Personal freedom, prosperity, and scientific progress have been the West’s great contributions to civilization, but now it “is impotent to deal with the needs of a world never imagined by the eighteenth[-]century prophets who conceived most of its component elements.” Modern society, with all its material advantages, technological know-how, and infinite capacity to create power, power that can transform the world or end it, lacks the animating spirit that would stop its social and moral decay and give it the requisite strength to build a peaceful and prosperous world society.

Bahá’u’lláh’s mission was to breathe a new spirit into the body of humankind: “‘Every body calleth aloud for a soul. Heavenly souls must needs quicken, with the breath of the Word of God, the dead bodies with a fresh spirit.’” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá points out that the same applies to the collective life of humankind: “‘Material civilization is like the body. No matter how infinitely graceful, elegant and beautiful it may be, it is dead. Divine civilization is like the spirit, and the body gets its life from the spirit. . . .’” Bahá’ís see in the advances humanity has achieved in the last hundred years the unfolding of God’s own plan:

But this Body of humanity’s material civilization calls aloud, yearns more desperately with each passing day, for its Soul. As with every great civilization in history, until it is so animated, and its spiritual faculties awakened, it will find neither peace, nor justice, nor a unity that rises above the level of negotiation and compromise. Addressing the “elected representatives of the people in every land”, Bahá’u’lláh wrote: “That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one common Faith.”

Eloquently, candidly, and concisely Century of Light illumines the twin processes of the disintegration of the old order and the painful and slow emergence of the new. Readers of this book who are not Bahá’ís will better understand the Bahá’í view of that mighty historical process. Its Bahá’í readers will gain fresh inspiration and a renewed vision of their role and the role of their community in the divine drama that is being played out on the world’s stage. It will remind them of what they have already achieved and inspire them to new and mightier efforts in the struggle for the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth.

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feast

—Perfection is supplying what is needed at the time
to the best of your ability.

each grain of rice

was shaped by hand,

plumped carefully

with microscopic increments of water,

the spices added according

to designed pattern,

the yellow lentils sized,

the greens in determined shapes

arranged on the whitest

of plate north northwest,

and the rest by compass point.

the silver! warm and

heavy in the hand,

the stemmed glass

i have been content

with the broken bits

from your table,

your matching what was needed

with what was to be had

with both open hands.

—Diane Huff

Copyright © 2002 by Diane Huff

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Authors & Artists

WILLIAM P. COLLINS, author and poet, is the Policy and Planning Program Manager of the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress.

MICHAEL FITZGERALD has published twelve books of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His interests include jazz, classical music, and public policy.

JEFFREY S. GRUBER received an S.B. in life sciences and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is widely known for his book on linguistics theory Lexical Structures in Syntax and Semantics. He has been involved in theoretical linguistics research for many years in the private sector and in academia, done field research on a Khoisan language in Botswana, and taught at two universities in Nigeria.

DIANE HUFF, who has just completed an M.B.A. at Golden Gate University, is a poet and an editor.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH, from World Order’s launch in 1966 until his retirement with the Winter 1998-99 issue, served as Editor-in-Chief. In addition to his many years of service to the Bahá’í community as a member of the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly, he has served the nation with distinction as a professor of Russian history at Yale University and as a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, on which he has just begun a second term.

FLORENCE DIPASQUALE KINDEL is a poet and a painter with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

LEILA RASSEKH MILANI is NGO Liaison for Women’s Issues for the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly’s Office of External Affairs in Washington, D.C. She holds a B.S. in criminology from Auburn University, a J.D. from the Wake Forest University School of Law, and an M.A. in bioethics from the University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, School of Religion. Milani has been working with a U.S. coalition of human rights and development organizations to draft legislation entitled the “Access for Afghan Women Act 2001.”

RICHARD W. THOMAS, a professor of history and urban affairs at Michigan State University, is the author of four books and numerous articles. In 1995 he was awarded the Wesley-Logan Prize by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History for Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building the Black Community in Detroit, 1915-1945, a work on intolerance in North America.

JANET TOMKINS, a poet and a homemaker, makes her first appearance in World Order.

ART CREDITS: Cover design, John Solarz, cover photograph, Stan Phillips; p. 1, Steve Garrigues; p. 7, Hans J. Knospe; pp. 10, 20, Steve Garrigues; p. 28, Stan Phillips; p. 38, Steve Garrigues.

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FORTHCOMING

• June Manning Thomas looks at the relationship between urban planning and racism
• Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine scopes out Dangerous Intersections
• M. Eric Horton looks at individuals and family in Gregory Nava’s El Norte
• Erin Murphy-Graham on rags, petrol, matches and Virginia Woolf
• And what do aliens-in-batik and animal theology have in common? They are part of a new section of mini-reviews appearing soon!

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