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World Order

SPRING 1971

TWO INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF THE BÁB

Kazem Kazemzadeh

A PORTFOLIO OF RECENT AMERICAN POEMS

Selected by Robert Hayden

ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Zdenek Salzmann

THE FUTURE ACROSS THE GENERATION GAP

Arthur L. Dahl

EPISODES

Marzieh Gail

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 5 NUMBER 3 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER is intended to stimulate, inspire and serve thinking people in their search to find relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

GAYLE MORRISON

Subscriber Service:

VIRGINIA FINCH

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 112 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

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

Subscription: Regular mail USA, $3.50; Foreign, $4.00. Single copy, $1.00.

Copyright © 1971, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

IN THIS ISSUE

1 Coming to Terms with Death

Editorial

3 Interchange: Letters to and from the Editor

6 Episodes

by Marzieh Gail

21 Two Incidents in the Life of the Báb

by Kazem Kazemzadeh

25 Anthropology and Education

by Zdenek Salzmann

33 A Portfolio of Recent American Poems

selected by Robert Hayden

63 The Future Across the Generation Gap

a book review by Arthur L. Dahl

67 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Coming to Teems with Death

EDITORIAL

THIS DECADE, the 1970’s, has had something unsettling and inauspicious about it from the start. Its realities would be terrifying if we had not become so accustomed to them—to war and the threat of wider war, to earthquakes and other disasters, to worldwide economic problems, to overpopulation and loss of privacy. But our worst fears have neither been realized nor dispelled. We live with them day by day, taking death in small doses, drinking it in our polluted water, breathing it in our poisoned air, eating it in our contaminated food. We are inured. We feel, at most, moments of terror, or perhaps just vague uneasiness at the thought of the many means by which we might be destroyed.

Even in the most stable of times, man must accommodate the thought of suffering and death. Historically this has been done through belief in some form of life after death for the human soul. Today religious faith in immortality is wavering, if not already extinguished, throughout the world. This loss of belief in eternal life leaves doubting man with one major psychic defense—the knowledge that earthly life goes on, that new entities will be formed from our dust, and that succeeding generations of human beings will continue the struggle. Yet even this means of coming to terms with pain and death is threatened by the real possibilities of mass degeneration or extinction in our own time.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes the failure to come to terms with death as a sickness in itself. This societal neurosis makes us impotent to deal with the grim realities which cause our despair; and the unchecked evils breed, in turn, still more despair.

The conception of annihilation is a factor in human degradation, a cause of human debasement and lowliness, a source of human fear and abjection. It has been conducive to the dispersion and weakening of human thought whereas the realization of existence and continuity has upraised man to sublimity of ideals, established the foundations of human progress and stimulated the development of heavenly virtues; therefore it behooves men to abandon thoughts of non-existence and death which are absolutely imaginary and see himself ever living, everlasting in the divine purpose of his creation. He must turn away from ideas which degrade the human soul, so that day by day and hour by hour he may advance upward and higher to spiritual perception of the continuity of the human reality. If he dwells upon the thought of non-existence he will become utterly incompetent; with weakened will-power his ambition for progress will he lessened and the acquisition of human virtues will cease.

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For those who accept ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s insight it is possible to hold great hope for this embattled age. “Death,” He states, “. . . is applicable to change or transference from one degree or condition to another.” Therefore our century of death may be seen as a century of change—from old ways and conceptions to new ones, from separation to unity, from oppression to liberation. “Be as lights of the world,” He implores us, “Which cannot he hid and which have no setting in horizons of darkness. Ascend to the zenith of an existence which is never beclouded by the fears and forebodings of non-existence.” Upon this zenith we may accept the urgent task of working to assure “the continuity of the human reality” in this world, and from this horizon of light we may proceed to illuminate the world with justice and with peace.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THE BELIEF that revelation is progressive and religion evolutionary creates in Bahá’ís an acute awareness of the past. They see history not merely as a record but as a vital part of the present and a determinant of the future. Experiencing life as an organic whole, they feel at one with the generations gone by and those yet unborn.

The tradition of Bahá’í historiography goes back to the earliest days of the Faith. Bahá’u’lláh devoted many pages of His Writings to praise of the Báb and celebration of the deeds of the first Bábís and Bahá’ís. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá made magnificent contributions to history in A Traveller’s Narrative and Memorials of the Faithful. Shoghi Effendi devoted a major portion of his writing to history, translating Nabíl’s immortal work, The Dawn-Breakers, and producing God Passes By, Lawh-i-Qarn, and The Promised Day Is Come, a historiosophic work of prime importance.

Historians, Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í alike, have gathered documents; described, edited, and published manuscripts; and written specialized monographs and large-scale histories. Yet much of the vast available material relating to the Bahá’í Faith remains unknown.

Over the years WORLD ORDER has attempted to explore the history of the Bahá’í Faith and to relate it to the history of a crisis-ridden world. We have from time to time published original documents as well as articles and book reviews on the subject. In this issue we offer two pieces dealing with history. One—Marzieh Gail’s “Episodes”—is a highly imaginative and poetic, though entirely faithful, reconstruction of seemingly disconnected events that fall into a natural pattern because they all relate to the appearance of the Báb. The other—Kazem Kazemzadeh’s “Two Incidents in the Life of the Báb”— is a matter-of-fact communication about the discovery of documentary evidence that provides new information on already well-known but complex events relating to the incarceration of the Báb. Mr. Kazernzadeh’s research has led to the rediscovery of two religious teachers in the Russian Caucasus who actively proclaimed the coming of the Promised One.

Readers who are interested in millennial movements within Islám and Christianity and who have noted the parallel between the teachings of Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Ahsá’í and Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí and those of William Miller will recognize Mullá Sadiq and Siyyid ‘Abdu’l-Karím as part of that same tradition, even though the latter two are virtually unknown today. The entire history of what could be termed “comparative millenarianism” obviously deserves much study.

Though our editorial addresses itself to the present and the future, it too has to do with history, for the present disasters reflect [Page 4] the past in which mankind dedicated itself to a crass materialism, an unbridled industrialism, a selfish pursuit of private and national gain that are turning the earth into a wasteland, threatening the very survival of man. Bahá’ís find in their history the inspiration and power provided by Bahá’u’lláh for the regeneration of mankind. To them the last hundred years reveal not only the accelerating process of the disintegration of a moribund civilization but also the birth of a new civilization destined to embrace the whole earth and usher in the age of the unity of mankind.

* * *

To the Editor

FUTURISTICS

Daniel Jordan’s article in the Fall, 1970, issue of World Order seems to me to be almost a word by word refutation of Billy Rojas’ vision of the future contained in the same issue, for the latter is primarily a projection into the future of certain technological developments independent of any consideration of the spiritual desirability or necessity. Lewis Mumford has already elaborated instructively on the theme that current attitudes towards technology lead people to accept uncritically the notion that what can be done must be done and should be done. Thus, the possibility of effecting a proposed change becomes its own necessity, and man’s freedom to choose not to institute such a change evaporates. Mumford is convinced, as am I and is apparently Jordan, that such a capitulation to religionless (Mumford would say “inhuman”) technology is a major contributing factor to mankind’s current crisis. For what it may be worth, let me add that I speak as one who, professionally, has contributed in however small degree to the elaboration of the technology (mathematics and computers) with which Rojas seems so impressed.

Rojas points out that much of the Bradbury-Asimov vision has already come to pass. I would point out that much of the considerably grimmer Huxley-Orwell vision has also come to pass. Indeed, some aspects of Rojas’ vision (pill-taking for learning, direct machine-brain information transfer) seem much closer to Brave New World than anything else. One should question whether such manipulations of our minds are worth the goal achieved, and one should be quite clear in what sense, if any, such techniques contribute to the spiritual and social evolution of man.

Rojas refers to the current youth disaffection with education and goes on to project a future super-professionalism in education with great emphasis on technical expertise in subject matter and method, coupled with impersonal, manipulative educational technology. My own experience with today’s youth leads me to believe that an overwhelming cause (though not the only cause) of their rebellion against modern education is the latter’s total lack of a spiritual, emotional, and human atmosphere in which to learn. Modern science is not intellectually boring and, in universities at least, science is probably better taught and on a wider scale than ever before in history. But the greatest reaction of bright, sensitive students today is precisely against the slick “in group” professionalism and the impersonal atmosphere in which they must work, not against any presumed technical incompetence on the part of their teachers. Without saying it in so many words, they are reacting precisely to the unspiritualization of culture (including science) of which Jordan speaks so well.

It is therefore at least reasonable to suspect that spiritual and social constraints may ultimately lead us not towards greater mechanization and depersonalization of learning (though, again, we certainly possess the techniques for doing so) but towards an intensely personal, spiritual, and value-charged learning—perhaps even a tutorial system of some sort in which teachers, even of science, would be expected to exhibit certain spiritual qualities. Since, as Jordan cites from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the practice of science apart from the love of God can lead to insanity (cf. World Order, Fall, 1970, p. 18), perhaps the only safe way to learn science is from some person who has already learned to integrate spiritually his scientific knowledge and who can, by precept and example, teach others how to do so. Let everyone who thinks he would be qualified to teach under such requirements please raise his hand.

[Page 5] Of course, I offer this only as a possibility. The fact is that technical competence is certainly important but it is not alone sufficient to be socially productive. What is needed is the balance between spirituality and technical competence, a balance which is totally lacking in the world today. While not denying to others the right to predict the future, I feel that it is probably impossible for us to conceive, at the present stage of affairs, and in any cogent way, what form this balance will ultimately take. Shoghi Effendi speaks of the future world civilization as having “. . . a fullness of life such as the world has never seen nor can as yet conceive.” (The Promised Day Is Come, p. 128).

What we can know, as Jordan affirms, is that spirituality is the missing ingredient and that it is to the task of rectifying this that we must bend our efforts. Thus, if, as Rojas says, it is “economic man” who is dying, it is certainly not “electric man,” “eclectic man,” or even “ethical man” (cf. World Order, Fall, 1970, p. 29) who can effectively take his place. It is only spiritual man—man spiritualized beyond anything history has yet seen. Man must exceed the past norms of spirituality to the same degree that our technology exceeds the past norms of technological achievement.

My knowledge of futuristics is limited to Rojas’ article whose purpose was to explain it to me. So enthusiastic is he for his vision that one fears that anyone finding fault with it may be labelled “unprogressive,” “defensive,” “afraid,” or even “immoral.” Yet if, as Rojas insists, “we can create whatever future we want” (World Order, Fall, 1970, p. 29), then we must insist on the freedom to choose a future which, if we so desire, excludes even the most cherished features of whatever vision anyone might try to impose upon us in the name of whatever notion of “progress.”

Huxley and Orwell, by extrapolating existing trends to their logical limits, produced a vision which has troubled the conscience and stimulated the thought of many a sensitive individual. Perhaps, in a paradoxically similar way, the ultimate value of futuristics will have been to contribute, by the very excesses and single-mindedness of its vision, to that awakening of conscience which is necessary to bring about the spiritual transformation we so desperately need.

WILLIAM S. HATCHER

Département de Mathématiques

Université Laval

Quebec, Canada

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Episodes

By MARZIEH GAIL

MOZART was not yet born, and the world —showing how man suffers from deprivation without knowing it—went its way without him. George Washington was twenty-one years old; two years from this time he was to fight under Braddock in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, and later on to write his brother: “I have heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound.” Samuel Johnson was working on the second volume of his Dictionary. He began this year of 1733 in prayer, asking that the recent loss of his wife would dispose him to live out the rest of his own days in the fear of God. Franklin’s works on electricity, praised by Buffon, were attracting the attention of France, and the American’s experiment to “draw lightning from the clouds” had been performed at Marly, before Louis “the Well-Beloved.” This year Britain’s Royal Society presented Franklin with a gold medal. Boucher was painting cherubs on the ceiling. Voltaire had abruptly departed from San-Souci, vacating the room whose walls were exuberant with monkeys, leaves, and fruits, leaving his host, Frederick the Great, to write his verse alone. Newton had died in 1727. Darwin, Freud, and Einstein were far into the future. A few years more and the Universal History would be published in London, fixing the date of Creation as September 21, 4,004 B.C.

In this year, 1753, in a remote corner of the Arabian Peninsula, a child was born who grew up to become what the West would call a saint. His name was Shaykh Aḥmad. Through dreams and intimations he fell so much in love with God that this world, not the next, was the unseen world to him, and he could hardly remember to dress himself or even to eat. Guided by his inward light, he began to show the people how their religion of Islám had been hopelessly betrayed and perverted until it was now beyond reform. He called on all the followers of Muḥammad, of whatever sect, to prepare the way for a Savior, the Qá’im, soon to be made manifest.

He gave up home, family, and possessions and went away to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbilá, where he became a famous mujtahid, an authorized expounder of Islám and doctor of the law. He had thousands upon thousands of devoted followers. Clergy and people alike revered him but he could remember nothing but his mission, and he despised the honors they tried to lavish upon him.

After a time his light guided him to Persia. He passed through Shíráz and told the people: “Among you there shall be a number who will live to behold the glory of a Day which the prophets of old have yearned to witness.” He settled down in Yazd, where he wrote most of his books; historians credit him with ninety-six volumes. By then his fame had become such that the Shah of Persia wrote him a letter. Whatever land the holy one’s feet should consent to touch was a blessed land, the Shah wrote. He, the King of Kings, ought rightfully to visit the saint in Yazd; but the Shah was held in the capital by high affairs of state, and should he travel he would have to be escorted by an army of 10,000 men. Yazd was too small to contain them, and the fields about the town too poor to feed them; a famine would be the result. “I feel sure,” the monarch wrote, “that although [Page 7]

[Page 8] in comparison with you I am of small account, you will consent to come and see me.” The saint replied that he must first go on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Imám-Ridá in Khurásán.

Ever more loudly, Shaykh Aḥmad’s heart informed him that the longed-for dawn was breaking. There were two Muslim traditions which he continually repeated: “Ere long shall ye behold the countenance of your Lord resplendent as the moon in its full glory. . . .” And: “One of the most mighty signs that shall signalise the advent of the promised Hour is this: ‘a woman shall give birth to One who shall be her Lord.’”

After his pilgrimage he went on to Ṭihrán and was royally welcomed by the Shah, dignitaries and officials coming out of the gate to meet him. It was then November, 1817; on the twelfth day of the month the wife of a favored minister of the Crown had a son. The saint’s heart recognized this Child: it was Bahá’u’lláh.

Now the Shah’s eldest son, governor of Kirmánsháh, begged for Shaykh Aḥmad, and the king surrendered him. Sadly, Shaykh Aḥmad left the city that lies in wide, gold plains, at the foot of a glittering, cone-shaped mountain. As he went, he prayed “that this hidden Treasure of God, now born amongst his countrymen, might be preserved and cherished by them, that they might recognize the full measure of His blessedness and glory, and might be enabled to proclaim His excellence to all nations and peoples.” When the saint drew near to Kirmánsháh, the prince sent the whole town out to meet him.

Inevitably, disciples crowded to his lectures and eagerly shared his writings. Then one day the prince died, and Shaykh Aḥmad was free to leave Persia for Karbilá, for Mecca and Medina. Toward the close of his life he wrote: “The mystery of this Cause must needs be made manifest, and the secret of this Message must needs be divulged. I can say no more, I can appoint no time. His Cause will be made known after Hín.” Hín is an Arabic word that means time. As the saint’s followers were aware, each Arabic letter has a numerical value; they knew that the letters in this word Hín totalled 68, and they therefore looked ahead to the year 1268 of the Muslim calendar. (In that year Bahá’u’lláh was chained in the Black Pit of Ṭihrán, and there He received the first intimations of His world mission.)

When he was eighty-one, Shaykh Aḥmad died and was buried near the Prophet Muḥammad in the holy city of Medina. A picture shows him wearing the robe and turban of his day, kneeling on a flowered carpet, his hands clasped, his whole body immobilized in contemplation. His nose is aquiline, and he has a white beard flowing down. The eyes look upward, showing the whites, seeing the unseen; his whole presence diffuses gentleness and peace.

Thousands listened to Shaykh Aḥmad, the founder of the Shaykhí School; few heard him. He left his disciples in the hands of the one individual who understood him, Siyyid Káẓim of Rasht.

When Siyyid Káẓim was a boy of eleven, he had memorized the entire Qur’án. When he was twelve, he dreamed that he must become the disciple of Shaykh Aḥmad. At twenty-two, when he had given up his home and family and friends and gone to Shaykh Aḥmad, he became the Saint’s most trusted follower; later on, he became his successor. When the Shaykh left him for the last time, he confided his secret to the younger man, saying: “the Hour is drawing nigh, the Hour I have besought God to spare me from witnessing, for the earthquake of the Last Hour will be tremendous. . . . neither of us is capable of withstanding its sweeping force.” To his followers, the Shaykh said: “Seek for knowledge after me, from Siyyid Káẓim of Rasht, who received it directly from me, who have it from the Imáms, who learned it from [Page 9] the Prophet [Muḥammad] to Whom God gave it.”

Often and often, the Siyyid repeated his master’s doctrines: that the prophetic signs of the coming Judgment Day were allegorical; that Muḥammad did not make His Night Journey to Heaven in His physical form; that the physical bodies of men would not rise out of their graves at the Resurrection; that the Promised One was even now alive and in their midst.

Millions of Christians believe that Christ rose into the sky after the crucifixion and will in the last days appear to all the world, descending from the sky on a cloud. In spite of all that is now known about the sky, they believe this. Millions of Muslims think that the Twelfth Imám disappeared into an underground passage at Samarra a thousand years ago and is waiting in one of the mysterious cities of Jábulqá and Jábulsá (reminiscent of that Jewish city of Baní Músá, that lies at the ends of the earth, cut off by a round river of flowing sand)—to come forth at the end of time and fill the earth with justice. No geographer can convince them that these cities are not on the map.

Where his master had been cherished by royalty and clergy alike, the disciple was left to bear alone the massive batteries of hate. Harassed, lonely, a target because of his unorthodox views, he nevertheless knew how to find consolation. Once he got up at dawn and went out through the streets of Karbilá in the cool shadows, until he came to a house where a young man in a green turban stood waiting at the door. This Youth embraced him tenderly, and led him into a upper, flower-filled room; here the young Host filled and handed him a silver cup, repeating as He did so a verse from the Qur’án: “A drink of a pure beverage shall their Lord give them” (76:21). Gold and silver vessels are forbidden to the faithful in Islám; still, the Siyyid took this cup in both his hands, raised it to his lips and drank.” Nothing more was said; the guest returned whence he had come. Some days later this same Youth entered the Siyyid’s class and sat in a darkened corner; a spear of light shot across Him in the Shadows. The Siyyid fell silent. Urged to resume his talk, he answered, “What more shall I say? Lo, the Truth is more manifest than [that] ray of light. . . .”

His enemies were those entrenched powers who were determined to maintain their stranglehold on the minds of the people. Light creates shadow; this is a law. Light speaks, and the shadow arises to silence it. The Qur’án says: “Fain would they put out God’s light with their mouths; but God desireth to perfect His light, albeit the infidels abhor it” (9:33). Merely by living and teaching, he was a threat to them, because he set the people free by showing them the truth. The Bible tells us, “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

A great number of his enemies in their attempts to destroy him ultimately destroyed themselves. It happened in this way: they banded together and began to stir up the city. The mischief spread until they evicted the envoy of the Ottoman Government and took over his revenues. The Sublime Porte duly responded by despatching a force to pacify the town, and Karbilá was besieged. The Turkish commander who was conducting the siege then chose a mediator—out of all the inhabitants of Karbilá he chose Siyyid Káẓim. The Siyyid called in the ringleaders of the disturbance and persuaded them to surrender in exchange for amnesty. Peace seemed assured, but then the ‘ulamá stepped in; to them the honor that had been shown Siyyid Káẓim by the Ottoman Government was an unbearable thing, and so they went among the populace, shrieked for a holy war, and demanded an attack on the Turks by night. Informed of this, the commander announced that he was going to force the gates of the citadel and take the town, and [Page 10] that he would consider only one place as a sanctuary: the house of Siyyid Káẓim. Whipped to a frenzy by the clergy, the mob only laughed; but when dawn came, the Turks attacked, bombarded the ramparts of the citadel, tore down its walls, entered Karbilá, plundered its rich mosques and killed thousands of people. So many now ran in panic to the house of Siyyid Káẓim that he had to take over his neighbors’ houses to make room for them all; they crowded in so fast that twenty-two of them were battered and stamped to death. Others ran to the Shrine of Imám Husayn and the mausoleum of ‘Abbás, places inviolate since time out of mind, but they were hacked and butchered till the holy precincts were slippery with blood. True to his promise, the Turkish commander recognized only one sanctuary in Karbilá: the house of Siyyid Káẓim. This happened on January 10, 1843.

Siyyid Káẓim continued to herald the Promised One. Among his prophecies was this, that the Promised One would be put to death. As with Shaykh Aḥmad, many listened, but few heard. “I am spellbound by the vision,” he said; “I am mute with wonder, and behold the world bereft of the power of hearing.” He knew that many of his disciples would in the future deny the Truth. They were false lovers, he said, and added: “By the tears which he sheds for his loved One can the true lover be distinguished from the false.”

As he felt his days closing, he gave his followers one of the strangest assignments in history: they were to leave their families and possessions, to scatter, to discover the Promised One wherever He might be, and if possible to die for His Cause. He repeated the words of Shaykh Aḥmad, that a double revelation was imminent, one to follow the other in rapid succession. This, he revealed, was what was meant by the “Mystery” and the “Secret.” And again he told them: “after the Qá’im the Qayyúm will be made manifest.”

It chanced that he went on a short journey to visit a shrine. On the way, as he finished his noonday prayer under a palm tree by the side of the road, a shepherd came up and called him by his name. While his disciples listened in consternation the shepherd delivered a message—words which he said Muḥammad had, through him, addressed to the Siyyid in a dream. “Tell him from Me,” Muḥammad had said in the dream, “‘Rejoice, for the hour of your departure is at hand. . . . On the day of ‘Arafih, you will wing your flight to Me. Soon after shall He who is the Truth be made manifest. Then shall the world be illuminated by the light of His face.’” The Siyyid smiled. He turned to his terrified friends and consoled them. “Would you not wish me to die,” he asked them, “that the promised One may be revealed?” He serenely completed the pilgrimage, returned home and took to his bed. On the day of ‘Arafih, which was the very last day of the year 1843, his heart stopped. Then, from the house which only the year before had been a place of refuge from death, there rose the sound of loud weeping.

MESSIANISM has been a factor in all religions, since each promises a Return. In the Christian world the claim to be the return of Christ has been met with so often as to be commonplace; and in fulfillment of Matthew’s prophetic words many false Christs have arisen. That imitations are present in quantity does not prove the absence of the rare Original nor excuse the failure to seek Him; each mind and heart must decide among them all, human life being in this, as in everything, a sequence of choices.

Sporadically down the centuries among the followers of this or that faith the messianic claim would be raised, but never had the messianic interest been at white heat around the world as it was in 1844. Not only in Shíráz was the Promised One awaited, but in New England as well, among Christians [Page 11] who knew nothing of their Muslim counterparts across the globe.

William Miller of New England was a man of ordinary education who had been an army captain and a justice of the peace. Prolonged study of dates in the Bible had convinced him that all prophetic time except the Millennium would inevitably run out by 1844, perhaps as late in that year as October 22. A shy, unassuming man, he felt no urge to spread this belief until one day a voice within him said: “Go and tell it to the world.” He struggled against the voice but was defeated; by the end of 1843 he had delivered 3,200 lectures on the coming of the Lord. Tens of thousands of Millerites were, in that year, proclaiming that the Lord would come in a cloud, that every eye would see Him, and that He would come as a thief in the night; the fact that these prophecies were contradictory bothered no one.

Miller was not certain of the season, only of the year, of the Return. His followers waited, often in small groups in the night, watching for the Lord to come from Heaven as He had the other time (forgetting that He had been born the other time), riding on a cloud, to catch up the righteous, purify the earth with fire, and then reign there with the saints for a thousand years. Each time they prepared themselves as if for death; each time they bore public laughter and their own doubt. The poet Whittier once happened on a Millerite camp meeting in the New England woods and found over a thousand people sitting on logs and singing a hymn at fever pitch. The pulpit of rough boards was carpeted with leaves; sheets of canvas hung from it, showing dragons out of the Apocalypse. Afterward Whittier recalled “the white circle of tents—the dim wood arches— the upturned, earnest faces—the loud voices of the speakers, burdened with the awful symbolic language of the Bible—the smoke from the fires . . .”

Suddenly those great days were over. Miller was old, sick, and blind; the nation had mocked him, but worse was his feeling that he had misled a multitude of believers. Still, he never renounced. His final message to his people, before he died in 1849, was this: “I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the Day of the Lord is near, even at the door.” When he closed his blind eyes, the last word he breathed was “Victory!”

Shoghi Effendi refers to the chosen disciples of Siyyid Káẓim as a “handful of students, belonging to the Shaykhí school, sprung from the Ithná-‘Asharíyyih sect of Shí’ih Islám. . . .” This reference is to the Islámic “Sect of the Twelve,” that section of Islám which believes in the Twelve Imáms —divinely-ordained and inspired successors of Muḥammad—as differentiated from the Sunnites, who believe the successorship of the Prophet to be an elective matter, not particularly connected with divine grace. The Caliph of the Sunnites was “merely the outward and visible Defender of the Faith,” while the Imám of the Shí’ihs was one endowed with all perfections, whom the faithful were bound to obey. The Shí’ih Muslims had long awaited the return of the Twelfth Imám, and they called Him the Qá’im-i-Al-i-Muḥammad—He Who arises out of the family of Muḥammad.

The western world still, in the middle of the twentieth century, is reluctant to learn that an independent Faith has again appeared, a Faith as authoritative in the West as in the East. The West still tries to describe this Cause of God as a sect of Islám—a description that applies to the Shaykhí school but ceases to have validity after 1844 when the phenomenon of the Prophet, the Personage qualitatively different from the rest of mankind, the One who has three planes of being while the rest have only two, re-entered [Page 12] history in the person of ‘Alí—Muḥammad, the Báb. To maintain that such a world figure is only for Persians would be like saying that Mozart is only for Austrians.

On January 22, 1844, Mullá Ḥusayn, the departed Siyyid’s leading disciple, who had long been absent on a mission, returned to Karbilá. As the mourners gathered around him, he asked them what the Siyyid’s last instructions had been. To disperse, they answered, “to seek out the Promised One.” “Why, then,” he asked them, “have you chosen to tarry in Karbilá?” He approached their leaders, begging these to set the example and go. One answered, “We must remain in this city and guard the vacant seat of our departed chief.” Another said, “It is incumbent upon me to stay and care for the children whom the Siyyid has left behind.” Mullá Ḥusayn left them then and went out of the city, and prepared himself to search by retiring to a mosque for forty days; he spent this time in fasts and vigils, contemplation and prayer. When he was ready, he went to Búshihr on the Persian Gulf. Probably he chose Persia because of the prophecy: “The ministers and upholders of His Faith shall be of the people of Persia.” Down the centuries, hidden in a mass of sacred traditions, had come other specific references to the Promised One: the date of His arising, which was to be the year 60 (1260 of the Muslim calendar, or 1844); His lineage; His age; His personal appearance; even His name, for the prophecy stated: “In His name, the name of the Guardian [‘Alí] precedeth that of the Prophet [Muḥammad].”

The Persian chronicler Nabíl writes that when Mullá Ḥusayn was in Búshihr he smelled the fragrance of the Promised One, and that he was drawn as if by a magnet towards the north, to the city of Shíráz. It was May, and the city is one which surpasses the descriptive powers even of Persian poets. Ḥáfiz, “Tongue of the Invisible,” says that not in Paradise itself will you find the edges of its brooks nor its flowering plants. It lies in a long green plain, a city of sky-blue domes and long gardens. Snow mountains hem it round; it is crisscrossed by lines of purple judas-trees and black cypresses, and in May its mild air is a blend of orange blossoms and roses.

Mullá Ḥusayn was walking outside the gate of this city when a stranger approached and greeted him. The Mullá, who in spite of his youth in a country that favors age, was widely known and honored, took Him for some disciple of Siyyid Káẓim’s. The stranger was a descendant of the Prophet—He wore a green turban. There was a special, luminous quality about Him; perhaps it was His young, manly beauty or the immaculacy of His clothing. In any case He seemed to shine in the slanting afternoon sun.

The stranger invited Mullá Ḥusayn to His home. The Mullá demurred, saying that his traveling companions were waiting for him at the mosque, but the stranger as courteously insisted. His presence, His gait, His vibrant tones exerted a powerful influence on Mullá Ḥusayn who could not but follow Him. They went through a lane and came to a wooden door set in a wall of sunbaked brick. An Ethiopian attendant opened the door. As they crossed the threshold the young Host repeated some words from the Qur’án: “Enter therein,” He said, “in peace, secure” (15:46). The Mullá’s spirits lifted; he could not tell why.

They climbed to an upper room, where the Ethiopian brought a ewer and basin for the guest’s ablutions. A cool drink was given him; then the samovar was carried in, and tea was made. After that the Mullá rose to go, saying it was time for the evening prayer and he must rejoin his companions at the mosque. Gently, his Host urged that he remain and pray where he was, in the upper room, and according to the Muslim fashion they stood together and prayed. Mulla Ḥusayn was now deeply troubled, not only [Page 13] because of this strange encounter, but because he was exhausted from his unsuccessful journey; during the prayer, however, he reaffirmed his faith in God’s promise and his own mission. It was twilight now and the darkness drifted in with the smell of evening flowers.

About an hour after sundown the young Host asked: “Whom, after Siyyid Káẓim, do you regard as his successor and your leader?” Mullá Ḥusayn described the Siyyid’s last instructions. No successor had been appointed, he said; the disciples one and all had been bidden to disperse, to seek, until they should at last discover the Qá’im. “Has your teacher,” the Host resumed, “given you any detailed indications as to the distinguishing features of the promised One?” Earnestly setting them forth, Mullá Ḥusayn named over the signs, which he knew by heart: he knew the lineage of the promised One, knew His age, His innate knowledge, His qualities, His physical appearance. There was a long silence in the room. Suddenly it was broken by the Host. “Behold,” He cried, “all these signs are manifest in Me!”

Courteously, Mullá Ḥusayn began to explain; he was looking, he said, for One unsurpassed, One transcendent, wise, holy, filled with power. But his own words choked him off. Brooding, he went over the prophetic signs, testing them out. Then he considered the secrets tests he had stored up in his own mind. One of these had been confided to him by Siyyid Káẓim: without being asked, the true promised One would reveal a commentary on the “Best of Stories,” the súrih of Joseph in the Qur’án.

Again his young Host said: “Might not the Person intended by Siyyid Káẓim be none other than I?” The signs were enumerated again; the questions and answers began; and then, abruptly, the Host said: “Now is the time to reveal the commentary on the Súrih of Joseph.” He took up His pen and, unbelievably fast, began to write, His voice gently rising and falling, His pen flashing, and He did not pause until the entire first chapter of this work which was to become known as the Qur’án of the Bábís, “the first, the greatest, and mightiest” of their books, was finished.

Outside, the night had fallen; the smell of blossoms was as insistent as drums. Mullá Ḥusayn could neither speak nor move. At last, in the silence, he slowly got up and, not wanting to, asked permission to go. His Host smilingly refused: “If you leave in such a state, whoever sees you will assuredly say: ‘This poor youth has lost his mind.’” Then He added: “This night, this very hour will, in the days to come, be celebrated as one of the greatest and most significant of all festivals.”

Soon after, the Ethiopian brought them food. The special love of the Host, the reverence of the attendant, were qualities Mullá Ḥusayn had never met with before. He lost all track of time. He was in the Heaven he had read about in the Qur’án: “Therein no toil shall reach us, and therein no weariness shall touch us. . . . Their cry therein shall be, ‘Glory be to Thee, O God!’ and their salutation therein, ‘Peace!’ And the close of their cry, ‘Praise be to God, Lord of all creatures!’”

“O thou who art the first to believe in Me!” the Youth told him. “Verily I say, I am the Báb, the Gate of God, and thou art the Bábu’l-Báb, the gate of that Gate.”

Mullá Ḥusayn now felt such power rising in him that, if all men in their massed force had come against him, he could have withstood their attack. Afterward he said of that night: “The universe seemed but a handful of dust in my grasp.” It was dawn, and over the gardens of Shíráz floated the muezzin’s thin, tremulous cry. Mullá Ḥusayn rose to leave the One whom he would never leave again, not even in death. He went down the steep stairway leading from the upper room; since he had climbed it a few short hours [Page 14] before, his life and the world’s life had changed forever.

TWO YEARS from the declaration night, the Báb’s death warrant would be sealed by seventy of the leading clerics and notables of Persia. In three years, He would be imprisoned in the towered fortress of Máh-Kú; in four, transferred to the desolate mountain castle of Chihríq; in six, hanged on a wall in Tabríz and shot.

Shaykh Aḥmad, first of the “Twin Luminous Lights,” had referred his disciples to Siyyid Káẓim, the second light. Siyyid Káẓim, dying, has told them to disperse and find the One Whom Islám had been seeking a thousand years. They had no sooner discovered the Báb than He, too, referred them onward; He was not only the Qá’im, He was also the Báb, the Gate to One greater than He, One Whom He named “Him Whom God Shall Manifest.” The term Báb had been used in Islám to mean an intermediary between the faithful and the “Hidden” Imám—that Twelfth Imám who had died as a child (after succeeding his father in A.H. 260). Publicly, from the pulpit in Shíráz, the Báb declared to the people of His city that He was neither a representative of the Imám nor a Gate to Him; even so, many misunderstood the purport of this name, the Báb—His choice of which shows that among all His titles, He wished to emphasize His heraldship of Bahá’u’lláh.

In all eighteen persons, “unwarned and uninvited,” now discovered the Manifestation. He called them the Letters of the Living and sent them out across Persia to inform the people that the Gate to the Promised One of all the ages had been opened. Mullá Ḥusayn was given a special mission to the capital. “. . . direct your steps,” the Báb told him, “to that city which enshrines a Mystery of such transcendent holiness as neither Hijáz nor Shíráz can hope to rival.” In Ṭihrán, to a young nobleman known as Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alí, Mullá Ḥusayn sent some pages from the commentary on the súrih of Joseph. Beginning to read them aloud as the messenger waited, Bahá’u’lláh declared them to be endowed with the same regenerating power as the Qur’án itself. For Mullá Ḥusayn He gave the messenger gifts rare in Persia at that time, a loaf of Russian sugar and a package of tea. From that day forward, He arose to champion the “obscure and proscribed” Cause of the Báb. It could be said that at one time the tangible link between the two Dispensations, of the Báb and of Bahá’u’lláh, was this sugar loaf and this tea.

As part of His mission, the Báb now left Persia and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina to the tombs of His ancestors. Performing all the pilgrimage rites, He circumambulated the Ka‘bih and kissed the Black Stone that was sealed in its outer wall and had borne the imprint of Muḥammad’s lips long before. Standing before the Black Stone, in fulfillment of prophecy He declared His mission.

In Medina where the tombs are, He thought long of His Forbear, Muḥammad, and of His herald, Shaykh Aḥmad, and of all the company of saints and martyrs who are buried there. The chronicler says it was as if they awakened under His feet, and warned Him away from Persia—as if they communed and pleaded with Him. “Their sacred dust seemed as if reanimated by the gentle tread of His feet. Their shades seemed to have been stirred by the reviving breath of His presence. They looked to Him as if they had arisen at His approach, were hastening towards Him, and were voicing their welcome. They seemed to be addressing to Him this fervent plea: ‘Repair not unto Thy native land, we beseech Thee, O Thou Beloved of our hearts! Abide Thou in our midst . . . far from the tumult of Thine enemies who are lying in wait for Thee. . . .’” And the Báb’s spirit answered them: “I am come into this world to bear witness to the glory of sacrifice. . . . Nay, beseech the Lord your God to hasten the hour of My martyrdom. . . . [Page 15] The drops of this consecrated blood will be the seed out of which will arise the mighty Tree of God, the Tree that will gather beneath its all-embracing shadow the peoples and kindreds of the earth. . . .”

SHOGHI EFFENDI tells us of Bahá’u’lláh that He was “preeminent in holiness, awesome in the majesty of His strength and power, unapproachable in the transcendent brightness of His glory.” His life was passed in four stages: His first twenty-seven years as a carefree young noble; His nine years of “discipleship in the service of the Báb”; His four months in the Black Pit of Ṭihrán; and His forty years as the Manifestation of God, the beginning coinciding with the royal edict that banished Him from Persia.

During the time of His youth, two men held this conversation about Him: “. . . He has proved Himself a noble descendant of a noble father.” “What is His occupation?” “He cheers the disconsolate and feeds the hungry.” “What of His rank and position?” “He had none, apart from befriending the poor and the stranger.” “How does He spend His time?” “He roams the woods and delights in the beauties of the countryside.”

When word of Bahá’u’lláh’s acceptance of His message reached the Báb, He knew that His Cause would live. From that time on, He feared no danger to Himself; whatever should happen to Him, His Cause was safe.

Powerful friends now sought out the Báb. The Sháh dispatched the most learned of his subjects to determine the Báb’s claims. This was Siyyid Yaḥyáy-i-Dárabí, a scholar so valuable that he could stand at ease in the presence of the sovereign, who with a gesture could send him or anyone else in Persia to his death. In the presence of the Báb this man, Siyyid Yaḥyá, almost swooned away. He never went back to the Sháh to give his report. He chose instead to die for the new Faith. His head, one of the highest in Persia, was cut off, stuffed with straw, and sent as a trophy to a Muslim prince.

The great Governor of Iṣfahán made the Báb his heir. Wishing to spread the Faith to all the kings of the earth, he planned a meeting between the Báb and the Sháh. This meeting was never allowed to take place. For Persia was ruled in those days by her Prime Minister, a sort of Rasputin or clown-magician who held the king and people in his withered hands, and this man prevented the meeting that might have changed the face of the earth (as had Zoroaster’s meeting with Vishtaspa, long before). The Báb was already on His way to Ṭihrán when a letter came to Him from the Sháh, consigning Him to the distant fortress of Máh-Kú. Once this deed was accomplished, the Prime Minister went out and took his ease in a garden near Ṭihrán. As he wandered among the flowers, he was approached by a young prince. “Why did you do it?” the youth asked. “Why did you send the Báb to Máh-Kú?” “You are young yet,” he answered, “and there are certain things that you cannot understand. But be sure that if He had come to Ṭihrán, you and I would not be walking now, free and at peace in these cool shadows.”

Persia now leapt and writhed like a fish on a steel hook. The inert nation came alive and gathered all its strength to expel this thing that had fastened onto it.

Everywhere, followers of the Báb sprang up, and everywhere they were legal prey. Where they were few, they were robbed and cut down; where they were many, they banded together in self defense; for the revolutionary words of Bahá’u’lláh, “It is better for you to be killed than to kill,” had not been uttered then. In the forests of Mázindarán, at Fort Ṭabarsí, three hundred and thirteen of them withstood the armies of Persia for eleven months. It was here that the flower of the Báb’s disciples, and half the Letters of the Living, lost their lives. It was here that Mullá Ḥusayn rode out against the [Page 16] enemy by the light of the morning star, and crying the Báb’s name, broke through their seven barricades; here that in victory a sniper’s bullet caught him in the breast. Here that the thirty-six who fell with him that dawn were buried in one grave, as over their bodies the young commander spoke these words: “Let the loved ones of God take heed of the example of these martyrs of our Faith. Let them in life be . . . as united as these are now in death.” Here the believers, living in the mud and water of their underground tunnels, ate shoe leather and boiled grass, until at last they had to dig up the horse of Mullá Ḥusayn, devour the rotted flesh, and grind the bones for flour.

The besieging armies of Persia never defeated this handful of untrained men. At last the enemy general, smarting under the wrath of the Sháh, sent them an amnesty. He wrote his pledge in the margin of his Qur’án, swearing by the Book and by his honor to give each man in the Fort a safe conduct home. Only then did the remnant come out of Ṭabarsí. Once they were disarmed and beyond the walls, the general killed some of them with slow, unspeakable tortures and sold the rest as slaves. He tore down the Fort and worked it into the ground, thinking to stamp its memory away. It was then that Quddús, the young leader named by Bahá’u’lláh as second in rank to none except the Báb Himself—was thrown to the mob in his home city of Bárfurúsh and they with their axes and knives chopped and slashed him to death. When word of this reached the Báb, a prisoner by then in the mountain castle of Chihríq, His pen was silenced for six months.

AMONG the Letters of the Living was a woman, Ṭáhirih. Perhaps the best way to begin her story is to describe the murder of a Muslim by a Muslim that took place in a mosque at Qazvín.

Once it was over, the murderer hid on the mosque roof. He had waited inside the building all night long. Toward morning he had seen an old woman come in, carrying a prayer rug; she moved painfully over to the prayer niche and spread out the rug. Then the victim entered alone. He strutted a little, taking his time. He was a man in his own house: he was the priest. In the daylight thousands bowed before him, and he could send every one of them to Hell or Heaven as he chose; but now it was dark and he was alone. There was no sound except the splash of the fountain in the mosque pool. The victim crossed to the prayer niche; he kneeled, and bowed his forehead to the floor. It was then that he must have heard the sudden thud of feet behind him. He half rose, but at once the hot steel split into the back of his neck and he screamed his last scream. As he was thrown backward to the floor, the dagger came between his lips, came down to the hilt so that he strangled on the blade.

There were a hundred leading divines in Qazvín and the murdered man was the second in rank. His heirs determined to avenge him by getting rid of whomever they despised. They asked for so many victims that the Sháh himself commented on their greed. He reminded them that when ‘Alí, the first Imám, was struck down in the mosque, he asked as he died that only the murderer be executed, and he with only one stroke. “Let them produce one murderer,” the Sháh said. So the heirs handed over a Bábí, a member of the new Faith that for four years now had disrupted Persia. This innocent man, Shaykh Sáliḥ, was the first of unnumbered thousands to be killed in Persia for the new religion. He died eagerly, crying as he went: “I discarded the hopes and the beliefs of men from the moment I recognised Thee, Thou Who art my Hope and my Belief!” And Bahá’u’lláh because He sent food and clothing to a crowd of victims who, at the heirs’ insistence, had been held in Ṭihrán, was charged with collusion and detained some days by the authorities, suffering the first of what would be a lifelong series of imprisonments. The [Page 17] captives He befriended were herded back to Qazvín, where the entire population, gone mad from the needlings of the clergy, awaited them. In the city streets, they fell on the prisoners with every weapon they had; when they were finished, there was nothing left to bury.

The real murderer had long since confessed, hoping to spare the others. But the authorities, with so many other supposed perpetrators on their hands, doubtless found his presence embarrassing, and set him free.

Not even the massacre in the streets of Qazvín, or the stealthy murder, by night, of yet another innocent man, could satisfy the heirs. With each new outrage they inflicted, their hatred grew.

Now it was the unbearable loveliness and excellence of a certain woman, which the dead priest’s heirs refused to put up with any more. They had tried to destroy her for some years; and the murder was their weapon, ready to hand. If this woman had only been beautiful and nothing else, the men at least could have accepted her. But she had committed the unforgivable sin: she was mentally superior to the men; she had dared to compete with them in their age-old province, the life of the mind, and she had been brazen enough to outdistance them. The thing could not be kept secret; it was too obvious; you could not hide her, any more than you could hold back the sun. In a city of a hundred leading divines, jurists, doctors of Muslim law, this woman was the most learned.

If she had only used her learning to agree with the others, it could perhaps have been borne. But she rejected the others, the leaders of public opinion. She refuted their views, documenting her own in the most alarming way. She exposed their behavior. She flouted the ceremonials which were their main excuse for being; she broke their taboos, cunningly imposed through the centuries to keep the people manageable, which was a way of saying undeveloped and enslaved. Worst of all, she had become a disciple of the imprisoned Báb, and learning from Him, she had begun to teach that men and women are equal, when the Qur’án says “Men are superior to women” and “the men are a degree above them” (4:38; 2:228). There was even more than this: she was married to the murdered man’s son and principal heir. Her husband, the father of her three children, was the new chief priest. And she had put this husband out of her life.

The affront was something he could not forgive. Here she was, a woman in nineteenth-century Qazvín; she lived secluded like other women, heavily veiled; she walked in the shady mud-walled courtyard or sat on a rug in a whitewashed room of the women’s house. But she had a collection of books. She would listen from behind a curtain, when her father, who was also a priest, taught the hundreds of men students who filled his classes. For some reason she was not content like other women to embroider a spray of pearls on velvet or to gossip over melon seeds and candied cherries. But she was only a woman, which meant an inferior order of being, a kind of second-class creation, of interest only during a short season when she could produce more men. The divines of Qazvín, their stand reminiscent of some of the early Christians, maintained that women have no souls. It was this creature who had dared to drive away her husband, the chief of the divines. He should have beaten her. He would kill her instead.

Her husband and the other heirs now accused Ṭáhirih of murdering the priest. He gave orders that she should be imprisoned in a room in her father’s house and kept under guard twenty-four hours a day. Most of the town sided with him; he was their spiritual guide, and he knew what was right.

Ṭáhirih, from prison, threw down a challenge to her husband: “If my Faith is really of God, I shall escape from here within nine days.” Somehow she would be rescued from these walls within walls—from this room, courtyard, and city, from these men and women waiting to see her die. It was then that Bahá’u’lláh, the nobleman of Núr, [Page 18] watching from the capital, made certain plans.

Out in the street, by night, a beggar woman whined for charity at Ṭáhirih’s door. Ṭáhirih opened the door to give her alms. In that one unguarded moment the two women slipped away and were absorbed into the dark. Down the uneven street they passed, close to the walls, swift as flickering shadows. They went unchallenged through the city gate. Horses Were tethered here for them; friends were waiting to help. All night long, as Ṭáhirih and her fellow-believers rode under the open sky, heading for the house of Bahá’u’lláh in Ṭihrán, enraged searchers ransacked Qazvín.

The Báb’s disciples were gathering now for a great conference at Badasht, and Ṭáhirih accordingly joined one of the convoys to Khurásán. Eighty-one persons attended the conference, all of them guests of Bahá’u’lláh. The first purpose of this gathering, bound to succeed, was to break with age-old laws and long-honored traditions, and practices that had been sacred to Muslims time out of mind. The other purpose, doomed to fail, was to free the Báb from the mountain-castle of Chihríq.

It was not easy, what they did at Badasht. Islám is young for a religion, only thirteen hundred years old, and it has a Book, the oldest intact scripture in the world, the same for all Muslims around the globe. Besides the Book it has a great body of sacred traditions, derived where Persia is concerned not only from Muḥammad Himself but from the Holy Imáms. In addition it then had everyday customs and beliefs as important, and as much taken for granted, as bread and water. Ṭáhirih had already flouted, by her very existence, many of these concepts and customs. Never meek or subdued, she had openly confronted the divines. In Karbilá, the Shí‘ih stronghold that grew up on the plain where Imám Ḥusayn was martyred, she had done worse: The anniversary of the martyrdom coincided that year with the birthday of the Báb; when the whole town garbed itself in traditional black, Ṭáhirih had appeared in her brightest dress. A western equivalent would be something like dishonoring the flag or uttering blasphemy in the streets. It was not that Ṭáhirih wished to abrogate the Book, but to fulfill it; not that she did not love Ḥusayn, but that she wished to alert her people to the coming of the Lord.

The conference in Khurásán began with the summer and lasted twenty-two days. On a certain day Bahá’u’lláh lay ill in His tent with the disciples grouped around Him. Suddenly Ṭáhirih’s messenger appeared and asked the young Quddús to visit her in the adjoining walled garden. Quddús refused. The messenger returned with a second invitation. When Quddús refused again, the messenger said: “Then she herself will come to you.” After which the man knelt, laid his sword before Quddús and told him: “Either come with me to my mistress or else strike off my head.” The crowd watched, astonished. Angrily, Quddús refused again. He had taken up the sword when all eyes were drawn away from him. There, before the crowd of men, stood Ṭáhirih—in glowing colors, jewelled, lightly made up, and without her veil.

This was indecency, desecration, and shock not to be borne; this was something not to be seen and survived. It was like the inversion of a sacred rite. For she was Ṭáhirih, the Pure One; she was to those men the incarnation of Fáṭimih, immaculate daughter of Muḥammad—Fáṭimih, Our Lady of Light. To them it was wrong even to watch her faint shadow as it drifted past.

Some buried their faces in their hands. Some drew their clothing across their faces; others fell to their knees. There were cries of “Harlot!” and “Mad!” Impervious, untroubled, Ṭáhirih walked through the crowd and took her place by Quddús. Suddenly a man slashed at his throat and ran from the tent shrieking and pouring out blood. Others followed; they left the village and abandoned their Faith. Still others waited dumbly, [Page 19] while a few murmured: "Well done!”

Perhaps it was typical of the masculine mind that up to then most of those present, scholars and intellectuals though many of them were, had not grasped the real meaning of their conference. They had noted the cancellation of old laws and obsolete conventions, but had not sensed that their own way of life would be affected as well; that it was not enough to preach the birth of the new day, rather, they must be new born themselves. By the single act of baring her face, Ṭáhirih had shown those present what they were about. Her unveiling there symbolized the equality of men and women, but meant, beyond that, the return to man of God’s beauty, long unknown. It was to ease the shock of revelation that she and Quddús had staged the small drama with the sword.

Ṭáhirih rose and addressed the ones who were left. She had a great look of joy; that day was, except for her last, the high point of her life. Her language was like that of the Qur’án; and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá tells us in the Memorials of the Faithful that when she had finished, Bahá’u’lláh (Who, unknown to the disciples, for the time of His declaration had not yet come, was the source of all that happened at Badasht) directed someone to recite the Súrih of the Inevitable, the fifty-sixth:

When the day that must come

shall have come suddenly,

None shall treat that sudden coming as a lie:

Day that shall abase! Day that shall exalt! . . .

Such tidings as these will ye disdain? . . .

But as to him who shall enjoy

near access to God,

His shall be repose, and pleasure,

and a garden of delights.

After the dispersion in Khurásán, Ṭáhirih rode away in a covered litter to Núr, and later was delivered up to the Government authorities. It is said that when the Sháh saw her, he told them: “I like her looks: Leave her and let her be.” Accordingly she was imprisoned at the capital in the Mayor’s house. Here the Mayor’s wife brought her the leading women of Ṭihrán. To them she disclosed new horizons of equality and freedom, and they were not slow to repeat the dangerous doctrine in their homes. Meanwhile she continued to upbraid the priests, telling them that the Báb was their Promised One, and that if He had come from Shíráz instead of from Jábulqá or Jábulsá, it was only because the latter cities never existed at all.

On an August night in 1852, the Mayor’s wife unlocked her prisoner’s door. The room was filled with perfume, and the captive was lustrous in a pearl-white dress. She had dressed herself for a party, although no guests were due. “I am going to release you from the cares of my imprisonment,” Ṭáhirih said. They would be coming for her soon; they would be killing her in a few brief hours; the Mayor’s son must go with her, to keep them from ripping off her dress; they would throw her body in a hole, and pack dirt around it, and stones. She was going to fast and pray now; she needed to be alone during the time that was left.

Dazedly, the Mayor’s wife went out. “Lord, Lord,” she prayed, “turn from her . . . the cup which her lips desire to drink.” She stood and listened, hour after hour, at Ṭáhirih’s door. She could hear from inside the room a strange, sweet chant. After a while it was morning. A day passed and part of a night. Then they came.

The Mayor’s wife fumbled at the lock on Ṭáhirih’s door. She found her prisoner already veiled and waiting to be off, the chant still on her lips. Ṭáhirih kissed her and gave her the key to a chest. “Remember me when you open it,” she said, “and rejoice in my gladness.” Then she went down out of prison to the street and mounted a horse for the last time.

[Page 20] Afterward, the Mayor’s wife heard how it had been. Ṭáhirih had seemed to know the story in advance. They had led her to a garden outside the city. She dismounted there. She gave a silken headscarf to the Mayor’s son. “They apparently wish to strangle me,” she told him. “I set aside, long ago, a silken handkerchief which I hoped would be used for this purpose.” She refused to approach the general who sat there in the lamplit garden, waiting to give the order that would end her life. He and his fellow-officers around him were drunk and at their wine. When the Mayor’s son raised his voice, trying to speak out, the general brushed him aside. “Let that miserable witch be strangled,” he shouted, “and her body be thrown into a pit!” They killed her, swiftly and quietly, in the dark.

The mayor’s wife opened her prisoner’s chest. In it were Ṭáhirih’s wordly goods: a rosary; a small bottle of perfume; a coral necklace; three rings, set with ruby, cornelian, and turquoise. The Mayor’s wife was afraid to weep. She knew that her husband would tell the Sháh, and they would send her after Ṭáhirih in death. He would denounce her if he saw the tears.

THINKING OF ṬÁHIRIH across these hundred years, trying to recapture what she was, we remember the title that had been given her, and by which she became known in the West—Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, Solace of the Eyes. We remember that she spent eight years in continual danger of death, without ever relinquishing what Abdu’l-Bahá has called “the invariability of her inner state.” We think of the unexpectedness of her mind, her unconventional behavior in a crystallized world, her immovable conviction of triumph. We note that she championed the rights of women without ever becoming mannish herself, that she was no harsh reformer or strident suffragette, but lightness and grace. When her writings are finally collected, it will probably be seen that she was—in her own words—a thrall to yearning love. Her love was for the Báb, Whom she never saw, and for Bahá’u’lláh, Whom her heart knew long before He declared His mission to the world. As Their disciple, she lost her home and children, her future, her good name, and at last her life. But we cannot say she was despoiled, since she received her Lord, the world’s one gift. And we cannot say that she is dead, since she joined that company of whom Ḥáfiẓ has written:

Never shall he die, whose heart

Has come alive through love.

They have entered in the Book of Time

Our length of days.

[Page 21]

Two Incidents in the Life of the Báb

By KAZEM KAZEMZADEH

THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH is only a little more than a century old, yet it has already produced a vast historical literature of unique value. Of course, the task of reconstructing the past is only beginning since much of the source material remains unexplored or even uncollected. One may confidently expect that fresh discoveries will throw light on now obscure episodes, will increase our knowledge of events and their causes, and will lead to a fuller appreciation of the heroic age of the Faith.

Among the insufficiently documented events of the opening years of the Bábí Dispensation is Muḥammad Sháh’s decision [Page 22] not to permit the Báb to come to Ṭihrán. The general outline of the story has long been known and the Sháh’s motives have been accurately reported. New evidence, however, provides corroboration for the interpretations advanced by Nabíl and Other Bahá’í historians.

Upon the death of Manúchihr Khán Mu‘tamidu’d-Dawlih, his cousin and temporary successor as governor of Iṣfahán, Gurgín Khán, reported to Muḥammad Sháh that the Báb was living in the palace of the late governor. Gurgín Khán requested instructions regarding the disposition of his Prisoner. Muḥammad Sháh, who had full confidence in Manúchihr Khán’s loyalty to the throne, had no reason to mistrust the Báb. He therefore commanded Gurgín Khán to have the Báb brought incognito to Ṭihrán, showing him every honor.

In early spring 1847 the Báb, accompanied by an armed mounted escort, set out toward the capital. He had reached the fortress of Kinár-Gird, twenty-eight miles distant from Ṭihrán, when unexpectedly there arrived a courier with a written order from the Prime Minister, Hájí Mírzá Áqásí, the Muḥammad Big, commander of the escort, to transport the Báb to the nearby village of Kulayn, there to await further instructions. A few days later the Báb received a letter from the Sháh who in a very polite form stated that, due to his impending departure from the capital, he could not befittingly receive the Báb, and that he was therefore issuing an order to take the Báb to the fortress of Máh-Kú. The Sháh expressed the hope that the Báb might be brought to Ṭihrán after the Sháh’s return to the capital.

Shoghi Effendi has pointed out that the Sháh’s letter, “though couched in courteous terms, clearly indicated the extent of the baneful influence exercised by the Grand Vizir on his sovereign.” Indeed the influence of this semi-literate, rapacious, and arrogant minister upon the sickly and superstitious Sháh was unusually strong. Hájí Mírzá Áqásí, however, like most royal favorites, lived in constant dread of losing his high status. He was afraid that on meeting the Báb the Sháh might fall under His spell and become impervious to Hájí Mírzá Áqásí’s influence. This interpretation of events and motives is confirmed by evidence contained in the memoirs of one Mírzá ‘Alí Asghar-i-Bahá’í, who was well acquainted with Farhád Mírzá, a prominent member of the royal family.

Mírzá ‘Alí Asghar reports that on several occasions he heard Farhád Mírzá tell that when the news of the forthcoming arrival of the Báb spread through Ṭihrán, princes and other persons of importance were delighted. They looked forward to meeting the Báb and investigating His claim. Should He prove the truth of His claim, so much better for them who had the privilege of attaining the presence of the Promised One. If, on the contrary, He could not prove His claim to being the expected Imám, they would expose His pretentions and thereby protect the people from a dangerous situation. With this in mind, Farhád Mírzá continued, the clergy, the ‘ulamá, and the representatives of other estates began to prepare questions with which to test the claims of the Báb to ascertain the truth of His mission. When Hájí Mírzá Áqásí became aware of all this and realized that he would be unable to control the course of events, he persuaded the Sháh to change his decision and to cancel his invitation to the Báb to come to Ṭihrán.

[Page 23] ANOTHER EPISODE in the life of the Báb that has not been fully clarified is His transfer from the fortress of Máh-Kú on the Russo-Persian border to Chihríq near Urúmíyyih. Historians have adduced a number of reasons for this move. Until recently, however, the role of the Russian minister in Ṭihrán, Price Dimitrii Ivanovich Dolgorukov, has been unknown, though there exists ample evidence, some of it published, that he was largely responsible for the Báb’s transfer.

When he exiled the Báb to Máh-Kú, Hájí Mírzá Áqásí hoped that once the Teacher had been separated from His disciples and isolated among a hostile Sunní population who did not even speak His language, His Cause would languish and die. Contrary to the Prime Minister’s expectations, the gentle and noble personality of the Prophet quickly won the hearts of His jailers. His disciples began to visit Máh-Kú and were admitted to the fortress by its commander, ‘Alí Khán. Thus the Báb maintained contact with His followers; and His Cause, far from being extinguished, continued to spread throughout Persia.

Hájí Mírzá Áqásí was alarmed by these developments. It was at this point that Prince Dolgorukov complained to the Persian government about the incarceration of the Báb in the vicinity of the Russian border and demanded His transfer to some more distant point. Dolgorukov’s intervention encourage Hájí Mírzá Áqásí to order the Báb’s transfer to even harsher imprisonment in the fortress of Chihríq. In April 1848 the transfer took place.

Dolgorukov’s intervention was caused by a chain of events which began prior to the Báb’s declaration of His mission in April 1844. A certain Mullá Ṣadíq, an inhabitant of the Caucasus, preached the coming of the Lord of the Age. Soon he had thousands of followers, and his success disturbed the more traditional elements of the Shí’ih clergy who aroused popular resentment against Mullá Ṣadíq and his disciples. Russian authorities, afraid of strife in an area which had only recently been annexed to the Empire and had not yet been properly “pacified,” arrested Mullá Ṣadíq and exiled him to Warsaw where he soon died. His place was immediately taken by an able disciple, Siyyid ‘Abdu’l-Karím, who was even more dynamic in his preaching and even more specific in his predictions of the imminent advent of the Imám. The authorities felt compelled to act against the new leader. He was jailed in Baku but was released because of the demonstrations of protest staged by his followers. His renewed preaching, however, led to fresh disturbances; Siyyid ‘Abdu’l-Karím was rearrested and this time exiled to Smolensk, west of Moscow.

The incarceration of the Báb in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border could not have passed unnoticed by the Russian authorities in the Caucasus. Mullá Aḥmad-i-Ibdál-i-Marághi’í, one of the Letters of the Living, or the Báb’s first disciples, wrote to the Báb’s maternal uncle, Hájí Mírzá Siyyid ‘Alí, that the Russian minister in Ṭihrán was alarmed at the Báb’s presence close to the Caucasus, where a few years earlier a certain Ṣadíq had proclaimed himself the deputy of the Hidden Imám and had acquired thirty thousand supporters. Therefore, Mullá Aḥmad wrote, the Russian minister demanded of Hájí Mírzá Áqásí that the Báb be transferred from Máh-Kú to some other place.

[Page 24] Additional evidence in regard to the role of the Russian minister is supplied by the famous Russian orientalist, Valentin Alekseevich Zhukovskii, whose article on F. A. Bakulin’s role in the study of the Bábí movement contains a brief description of materials gathered by Bakulin:

. . . concerning the Báb [Zhukovskii writes] there is in the papers the beginning of a note . . . The note is of no interest, except perhaps for the concluding words: ‘At the command of Hájí Mírzá Áqásí, ‘Alí Muḥammad Báb was seized and sent to Máh-Kú, a small town located on the Russian border. The proximity of a person such as Muḥammad ‘Alí [sic] to the frontiers of the Russian realm could not but attract the attention of our government, while the Báb’s growing popularity and the vast number of new followers whom he acquired made his presence in Máh-Kú undesirable as well for the tranquility of Persia herself. At the insistence of the Russian government the Báb was transferred from Máh-Kú to Urúmiyyíh in the province of Adhirbáyján.’

Thus a part of a note in the papers of F. A. Bakulin, who had served as Russian consul in Astarábád and was familiar with the policies pursued by Prince Dolgorukov, confirms Mullá Aḥmad-i-Ibdál’s statement in his letter to Hájí Mírzá Siyyid ‘Alí.

Finally there is the testimony of Dolgorukov himself. In his dispatch of February 3, 1848, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count K. V. Nesselrode, Dolgorukov wrote of the Siyyid known as the Báb “who last year on my demand was removed from the vicinity of our borders, where he had been banished by the Persian government . . .” In his dispatch of December 24, 1848, he reported: “I have already several times informed the Imperial Ministry about the Muslim sectary who is called the Báb. This fanatic . . . who has been removed from the Russian borders on my demand, now resides under strict surveillance in a village not far from Urúmiyyíh.”

[Page 25]

Anthropology and Education

By ZDENEK SALZMANN

ACCORDING to available figures, the growth of education during the sixties was unprecedented in both quantity and quality. In this country schools and universities were expanding at a faster rate than ever before, the training and certification of teachers were subjected to lively discussion, the teaching of science and mathematics and of foreign languages was either completely overhauled or decidedly strengthened, and substantial funds became available for educational research. Even that perennial underdog, the American teacher, moved a step or two up the pyramid of professional respectability.

While this breathless pace of change provided may opportunities for experimentation and innovation, it certainly was not conducive to a long and considered look at education. The result has been that many a concerned educator feels rather like the driver who finds himself on an unfamiliar metropolitan freeway—forced to move ahead in the rapid stream of traffic with little chance to ascertain his course or to relate his position to the kaleidoscopic landscape around him. And yet, since the school is a principal socializing agency—second only to the family in an overwhelming majority of the world’s societies—and since what is learned there affects much of the spectrum of the adult’s behavior, from the economic to the religious, it should be obvious that a periodic review of educational goals is indispensable to man’s well-being, if not to his survival. I will limit myself here to the discussion of only one of the several salient aspects of educational change—one, however, which I consider particularly important.

LET ME BEGIN, by way of example, with a reminder of the obvious—the tremendous explosion of technical knowledge in recent years. The broad concept of the atom as the ultimate particle of matter goes back at least two and a half thousand years to the Greek philosophers. This atomistic viewpoint, dormant during much of the Middle Ages, stood firm until the beginning of the nineteenth century when John Dalton laid the foundation for modern atomic theory. Even then, one of his postulates continued to be the indivisibility of the atom. It was not until the year of my father’s birth, 1897, that this notion of the ultimate nature of the atom was shattered by Thomson’s experimental discovery of the electron. By the time I was born, in 1925, three fundamental particles had come to be recognized—the electron, the proton, and the photon. Within the next ten years the number of particles doubled to six with the addition of the neutron, the positron, and the neutrino. By 1955 the list of particles totaled no less than fifteen, and today, sixteen year later, at [Page 26] least a hundred subatomic particles are recognized.

One might well wonder how the physicist can deal with such a profusion of particles, but the fad is that much of the experimental data is already beginning to fit a relatively simple scheme or pattern. When the basic order which underlies the structure of the atom is still better understood, we may expect further startling simplification. There are good precedents for such a development—for example, the successful formulation in the mid-twenties of modern quantum mechanics, which introduced order and predictability into an unwieldy body of data concerning spectroscopic phenomena.

This exponential growth of factual information in so many vital areas of knowledge points unmistakably in the direction already taken by the physical scientists: that of teaching patterns rather than facts, or, to put it differently, of dealing with facts for no other reason than to discover the underlying patterns. Short of such a course, much of our teaching is bound to suffer from what might be termed a double anachronism: first, our textbooks, even in their most up-to-date editions, will give the students an obsolescent view of the fast-changing frontiers of the subject they cover; and second, by the time the students begin actively and creatively applying what they have learned, this obsolescent frame of reference will have become obsolete.

I have used the word “pattern” in order to indicate that the emphasis is not on the numerous individual elements of a whole but rather on their interrelationship and mutual dependence. Moreover, once the patterns are properly identified, they should be expected to account for a host of detailed data, economically and with wide-ranging relevance. To be sure, patterns themselves change just as the data which they reflect change. But, to appreciate fully the dynamics of complex phenomena, they must be looked at in terms of changing patterns.

Let us briefly consider, for example, the interdependence among several aspects of man’s development and some of the dynamics of this interdependence. Any one man is born of the union of two biological parents and into a particular cultural setting. From his parents he inherits a specific genetic makeup including a set of hereditary predispositions. He also derives initial values and basic expectations from his parents. During the process of socialization or enculturation to which any man is subject, individualized situations of stress are generated that may give rise to organic dysfunctions whenever genetic predisposition for them is present. To the extent that these so-called psychosomatic disorders have a selective effect upon a population, they may even become significant microevolutionary factors. Now it goes without saying that the nature of these interdependencies is very complex, but the point I wish to make should be clear: a complete view of man, of society, and of mankind cannot be gained without the consideration of all of the social, biological, psychological, and other factors that are involved.

Such a comprehensive view of humanity is the express goal of anthropology: the study of man both as an animal and as a possessor of culture—in all places, at all times, and under all the varying circumstances which he has managed to create as a member of a society. If the approach urged by the physical scientists—to appreciate the universe for its arrangement rather than to consider it piecemeal—is to be [Page 27] extended into the domain of the social sciences, I wish to suggest that the most hospitable auspices for so doing are those of anthropology.

It would be foolish to try to claim that the many different questions anthropologists today are pursuing have all been equally well explored, and even more presumptuous to pretend that in anthropology the state of the art has reached a level which would permit a satisfactory synthesis. However, if the range of research interests should in any way be a measure of viability and of relevance, then prospects for anthropology seem bright indeed. Having concerned itself in its infancy with the curious and exotic customs of mankind’s fringes, and in its youth with small or remote nonliterate societies, anthropology is now coming of age by studying men wherever they happen to live, whether in an American city or the Australian bush. Limp generalizations have been replaced by increasingly rigorous characterizations or by quantitative statements that are becoming more and more sophisticated. And parochial and compartmentalized treatments of mankind have given way to psychocultural, biocultural, or ecological approaches.

TODAY ONE HEARS a great deal about “relevance”—the social usefulness of the educational experience in particular. I strongly suspect that what most of those who advocate this unquestionably desirable objective have in mind is the relevance of action. But what the young members of our society should be exposed to is relevant knowledge. For, after all, the possession of relevant knowledge is logically prior to the commitment to relevant action. Much of such relevant knowledge I believe can come from the teaching of anthropology. What are some of the topics which merit serious consideration?

In the first place a thorough discussion should be accorded to the concept of race and to racism—subjects on which a great majority of biology and social science textbooks unfortunately have little if anything to say. As is well known, the concept of race is fundamentally a biological one. Among anthropologists it has traditionally been used to refer to a subdivision of mankind that is distinguishable from other population groups by virtue of a common physical inheritance. Less well known are some of the serious reconsiderations which are being given to the classification of human variation. To begin with, most anthropologists have become convinced that, with our increasing knowledge of human genetics, classifications should be based on genotypes, or the genetic constitutions, of individuals or groups rather than on observable physical traits of unknown inheritance. More recently still, some anthropologists have begun moving toward a conception of races as breeding populations more or less isolated from each other genetically. This concept of race rests on the simple fact that there is always a natural tendency toward interbreeding for any population sharing a particular environment and a common history and culture. Such populations thus tend to maintain a common genetic heritage.

But even this more flexible, functional view of race is now being questioned. There is a noticeable increase in the mobility of individuals the world over, marriage patterns are rapidly changing, and large-scale migrations of population groups occur, whether occasioned by wars, economic pressures, or other factors. As a result, the concept of a geographically defined race may be more and more difficult to apply. [Page 28] The question inevitably arises as to whether the concept of race as such has any intrinsic validity—meaning, is it useful to classify and reclassify mankind in the first place?

If one accepts the claim that the utility of the race concept is diminishing, does it mean that the sources of racism themselves are shifting? In early anthropological studies racism was dealt with almost exclusively from a biological point of view. This was so largely to counter two widespread misbeliefs—that race mixture is deleterious and that human races differ in their mental capacity.

Not a single shred of scientific evidence has been found to support the first contention. In fact one could argue on theoretical grounds that genetic crossing may have real biological merit. If we assume that any established isolated population represents a time-tested selection of particularly well-adapted individuals, then the crossing of two such populations may well increase the fitness of the resulting generation, provided that the particular circumstances under which the hybrid population is to live are compatible with its genetic constitution. Or, to state it the other way around, extended and consistent inbreeding may in time reduce the genetic variability of a population, lessening both its ability to adapt to a changing environment and its opportunity for evolution.

The question of differential mental endowment has been discussed by social scientists for some decades now, and with increased vigor again during the past year (provoked by an article by Arthur R. Jensen in the Harvard Educational Review). The focus of the controversy which ensued has been the relative importance of genetic as against environmental influences in molding intelligence quotient. The points raised on both sides of the argument are far too complex to go into here, and, broad as they are, they transcend the bounds of anthropological inquiry. Most educational psychologists today doubt the validity of intelligence tests except as rough indicators of the lower boundaries of an individual’s range of intellectual performance. Their grounds for skepticism have to do not only with the cultural or social bias of the instrument but also with the effect on the score of the subject’s attitude at the time of testing and his reaction to the person serving as tester. To these reservations the physical anthropologist would add that, while it is legitimate to pursue the hypothesis that intelligence is in part due to heredity, he knows of no acceptable scientific findings which would permit him to link race with intellect. As we study the cultural record of mankind, time and again we are reminded that Western civilization is a product of innumerable inventions contributed over many millennia by peoples from every quarter of the earth. Moreover, one can easily show that the nature and complexity of any civilization relates to historical and environmental circumstances rather than to some inborn endowment which a population may claim to possess. Thus, the Aztecs, the Hopis, and the Utes came to differ markedly in their cultural achievement, although they descended from the same parent group and later migrated to their historical locations. For example, the Aztec people developed such a highly advanced civilization that Cortés termed their capital in the Valley of Mexico “the Venice of the New World,” while in their Southwestern pueblos the Hopis developed a peaceful and unassuming sedentary culture, and the Utes, under the stimulus of the adjacent Plains Indians, changed [Page 29] from simple hunters and gatherers to skillful horsemen who hunted buffalo and raided their neighbors. Moving to the contemporary scene, it is well known that any group of people can bridge the cultural distance from the bush to the jet age within the short span of one generation, provided only that the necessary educational and economic means are available.

The consensus of the anthropological profession on the question of differential mental endowment may best be represented by quoting from a resolution passed at the 1969 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and subsequently ratified in the spring of 1970 by the Council membership in a mail referendum:

. . . we reassert the 1961 conclusion reached that:

There is no scientifically etrablished evidence to justify the exclusion of any race from the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. The basic principles of equality of opportunity and equality before the law are compatible with all that is known about human biology. All races possess the abilities needed to participate fully in the democratic way of life and modern technological civilization.

And add that we specifically repudiate any suggestion that the failure of an educational program could be attributed to genetic differences between large populations.

One inevitably concludes that an understanding of racist practices, both in this country and abroad, can come only from a thoroughgoing analysis of the cultural system which helps perpetuate them. Once again the pattern of racist attitudes and practices cannot be adequately perceived and appropriate corrective measures instituted until one fully identifies the contributing factors of education, economy, religion, and the like. In short it is not race that ultimately shapes the course and destiny of human societies, but culture.

There should be no need for a parade of definitions of the term “culture” as anthropologists use it. Put very simply, “culture” refers to the complex whole of mankind’s learned behavior, “a culture” to the total way of life of a community or population. The last two million years have seen an unbroken series of changes which brought man’s culture from the simplicity of pebble tools and hammerstones to the awe-inspiring complexity of modern megalopolises. To be sure, in early prehistoric times changes were slow to occur. Then, some ten thousand years ago, the first major revolution in the history of human culture took place: the domestication of plants and animals and the subsequent rise of the first cities. About five thousand years later came the second revolutionary breakthrough in man’s cultural development —the invention of writing. Since then the pace of change has been steadily quickening; today it is proceeding at a staggering rate. And because modern communications and transportation have brought all parts of the globe into virtually instant contact, changes occurring anywhere become subject to potential adoption everywhere. Kenneth E. Boulding has suggested that civilization is giving way to a new order of culture—post-civilization, characterized by the emergence of a world style which is evident, for example, in the world’s airports. Were it not for the [Page 30] linguistic clues, one would have no way of knowing in just what part of the world he had arrived.

But this enormous scope and rate of culture contact and change quite frequently extract a heavy price—an increasing amount of friction or conflict of interest that develops not only between societies but also among the various segments of a single society. Here in the United States we recognize this conflict whenever we speak of the generation gap or the failure of our various population groups to share fairly in the country’s wealth. The problems are just as pressing on the international scene, particularly in those countries which are attempting to compress into just a few years the intricate tasks of industrializing, introducing universal education, and the like.

The understanding of this process of sociocultural change involves three major considerations: What are the chances of an innovation’s being accepted by a community? What is the nature of the forces that are likely to act as barriers to change in order for the existing state of affairs to be maintained? And what effects may the acceptance of an innovation be expected to have on the culture as an integrated system? In recent decades anthropologists have been able to observe the process of culture change—directed or otherwise—in hundreds of field situations. Yet, for a variety of reasons, this cumulative experience has not thus far been adequately applied in bringing about change with the least expenditure of human anxiety.

It is unlikely that we should soon be able to predict consistently and accurately what the effects of unplanned changes will be in any given situation. But neither can we afford the luxury of waiting for the consequences of such changes. The theory and methods of anthropology are sufficiently developed today to give us understanding of the overall behavior pattern of any population group, and therefore they permit us to anticipate with some degree of confidence those points which under changing conditions will bear the heaviest stress. The all-too-frequent instances of disorientation, anxiety, and isolation of individuals and human groups—or anomie—as evidenced by some of the American Indian populations, are the crosses on the highways of changing societies, reminding us of the narrowness of our vision and the shallowness of our understanding of man’s ways. There is no better time or place for salvage operations on past neglects and for charting a humanity-centered course of action for the future than in today’s schools. For every single child now alive will have his part in the shaping of tomorrow’s culture.

BRIDGING our considerations of human biology and of culture is the subject of the nature of human nature. This topic, too, has been receiving much attention of late, largely as a result of several stimulating and widely influential books (especially those of Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz). The cornerstone thesis of these books is that man is instinctively—that is, innately—an aggressive creature, one for whom violence is by nature an unalterable way of life. Leaving aside the selective use of data concerning subhuman animals, with which the authors marshal their main argument, and their cavalier extrapolation from the behavior of other animals to man, let us come directly to the problem of human nature. Is man indeed doomed to the indiscriminate killing of his own kind and to constant warring? Hearing some of [Page 31] the political leaders and opinion molders here and elsewhere who urge preparations for the next war, one is tempted to throw up his hands in the face of what could very likely become self-fulfilling prophecy. But the evidence from anthropology points to the contrary. As against the claim that man is subject to inborn instinctive forces, the anthropologist feels justified in operating on the assumption that all of adult human behavior is thoroughly controlled by custom. This is not to deny that some of our habits are annoyingly deep-seated, unfortunately the less desirable ones in particular. Nor does this assumption obviate the fact that humans engage in personal acts of violence and, in behalf of their national collectivities, in bloody and protracted wars. But what the assumption allows, and indeed invites, is the search for the sources of man’s aggressive behavior—be they in the frustrations induced by a particular society, in the teaching of the doctrine of manifest destiny to a society’s youth, or elsewhere. Thus the anthropologist’s point of departure not only reflects more adequately what knowledge we possess of man’s behavior but—and herein lies a substantive difference in approach—it keeps paths open to inquiry, the results of which may help to alleviate man’s aggressiveness.

Change is an all-pervading process to which the methods of those who study societies are no less subject than the societies themselves. What do modern anthropologists mean when they speak of adequate understanding of a group’s lifeway? In the context of today’s anthropology it would include the specification of all behavior codes of a particular group to such an extent that an outsider acquainted with these codes could select from among the culturally available alternatives the appropriate behavior for any potential genuine social context. To put it another way, the task which the modern anthropologist sets for himself is to discover what the significant features of a particular cultural universe are and how its members have mapped it for their common traffic. And in order to write such a “cultural grammar” the anthropologist finds it necessary to “get inside the heads” or “skin” of the people he studies.

Now there are some important implications in this approach. Largely by analogy from the natural sciences, successfully operating with a universal grid in which to locate what is already known or what is to be discovered, students tend to think in terms of a categorical outline of human culture. For example, one may easily be led to assume that the various kinds of diseases identified by modern medicine have the same objective existence and hold the same meaning for a Navaho Indian. However, such a view does not fundamentally differ from old-fashioned ethnocentrism. Each culture has its own pattern of coordinates—or basic values, if you wish—and we must be careful when discussing mankind not to endow it with prejudices of one particular culture.

TO SUM UP: Today, as the degree of specialization among both teachers and learners is rapidly reaching the proverbial point of knowing nearly everything about almost nothing, anthropology has a unique opportunity. While the anthropologist naturally cannot be expected to command the specialized knowledge and skills of the student of comparative religion, the economist, the psychologist, the musicologist, the art historian, and the many Others concerned with disciplines of primarily cultural [Page 32] character, he amply compensates by his own commitment, which is to study the whole man. Thus, for example, to comprehend the complex of Navaho religious practices and beliefs concerning the supernatural necessarily calls for an understanding of Navaho economic life as well as of Navaho psychological needs. And again, the study of Navaho religious ceremonialism cannot be divorced from the study of their music, their elaborate sand painting, and their poetry. Such an intersecting of various domains is no less true of our own culture and its various subcultures; it is simply more difficult to detect because of the greater complexity of our society. In his insistence on the holistic approach, the anthropologist helps to counteract such limiting concepts as those of the “economic man,” “man as inveterate killer,” “man as a product of his repressions,” and the like. While these rather overwhelming generalizations concerning man may not be without some insight and provocativeness, they are nevertheless just as partial as would be a description of an elephant which specified only a muscular trunk or two long tusks. Man is the product of a great many vectors, and all of these must be taken into account if we are to come closer to the understanding of the sources of his social behavior. I cannot think of anything more important for young students to be exposed to than the implications of the premise just stated. The teaching of broadly conceived anthropology courses at the precollege level should therefore perform a crucial function at that point in a student’s intellectual development when his curiosity is still unchanneled and his sight untrammeled.

If I have unwittingly given the impression that the anthropologist has a special claim on wisdom or a smaller margin of error than his colleagues from other disciplines, chalk it up to the sincerity of my commitment. What I do claim, though, is that anthropologists as a whole have traditionally taken the side of man—the whole of humanity—and that such bias, if indeed it can be termed a bias, is more urgent today than ever before. Nations have become accustomed to undertakings involving increasingly greater risks, often at vast material costs. Education for better understanding mankind is not a risk; it is the only sure path toward survival. As Camus put it, “We have nothing to lose—except everything.”

[Page 33]

A Portfolio of Recent American Poems

THE MAKING OF A POEM, like all other creative endeavors, is in the Bahá’í view a spiritual act, a form of worship. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written: “. . . . . the acquisition of sciences and the perfection of arts is considered as acts of worship. If a man engages with all his power in the acquisition of a science or in the perfection of an art, it is as if he has been worshipping God in the churches and temples. . . . What bounty greater than this that science should be considered as an act of worship and art as service to the Kingdom of God.”

It seems especially significant that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes no distinction between “secular” and “religious” art. And we may infer from this that poetry, for example, need not be limited to religious themes (in the usual sense of the term) in order to serve “the Kingdom of God.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sees the creative act as essentially a religious act. The serious artist is involved in a spiritual enterprise. The poet’s efforts to master form and technique are in themselves a kind of prayer.

The destructive forces at work in the twentieth century, the crises and obsessions of a world in violent transition, account for much that is negative in poetry and the other arts today. Chauvinism, the frenetic quest for novelty, the subordination of the aesthetic to the politically utilitarian—these are, clearly, manifestations of decadence. They are now, however, the only elements discernible. If there is catabolism, there is also anabolism. If there exists a “poetry of despair” and rejection, there is also a poetry that affirms the humane and spiritual. Our attempts at the present time to achieve a new, a larger vision of God, man, civilization give substance to the wor of many outstanding poets.

The selections offered our readers in this portfolio attest to the vitality of contemporary American poetry. Several schools or styles are represented. Here are poems that express the malaise and disjunctions of our times as well as poems that reflect personal experience or honor transcendental values. Together, the indicate the variety of modes and voices enriching poetry today.

ROBERT HAYDEN

Poetry Editor

[Page 34]

Pilgrimage

By a stone in that most holy place,

Where the water runs and the white birds fly,

The Mystery stands revealed.

See! The abiding lake! How it trembles

To hold reflected for an ecstatic moment

A vision beyond time.

—Olive V. Applegate

[Page 35]

Near the End of a Savage Winter

In the beginning

winter came disguised in hesitation

and hung back from the blaze of autumn

into the mild year’s end

when we celebrated an arbitrary birthday

still needing something not there

and impatient children

went sledding down the pure white hills

imagined on livingroom carpets.

Their redemption came with the first snow

and ours

when the temperature dropped

and the cold

separated us from memory,

probing white fingers

into our bellies and minds

and finding them full

and suitably lulled

by the ways of the world.

Now in the midst of our hungers

we wait in perfect faith

for spring believing

its coming is inevitable

every year, every year. Every year.

But what lies under the snow

proves that what we have done

is not to be done

for each year the wounds deepen

the channels thicken with waste

and healing becomes more difficult.

We could not survive such cold.

The one eye of the sun.

The one eye of the moon.

The one eye of winter.

: these malignant Cyclops have watched us

make the easy acceptances between lion and lamb

too long.

[Page 36]

We wait for March and transition

salvation in the lamb

but we can not survive the cold

and ice hangs under the rocky hillsides

as opaque as frozen salt

smooth as bands of muscle in a giant’s thigh

and curbed by the sidewalks

lies uncoiled in black humps along the gutters.

—Gerald W. Barrax

Apollo on Tour

The men we are:

gods in ruin Ralph said.

And now among the ruins we’ve made.

The uses we make of myth

prove that it’s more than

a matter of perspective:

the thing that went around the moon

godfathered by Apollo

is now on tour,

but went the distance needed

to trap us here together

and see the way the atmosphere of our breeding

hangs around us.

It’s a matter of more than perspective:

we haven’t gone deep enough into space

or ourselves

to see the Man in the Earth.

What we see looking both ways now

is a gargoyle’s grin.

What we need is to reconsider the myths—

to send a JOHN HENRY out there and back

to remind us what a man can be.

When the crowds touch it in passing

perhaps the crowds will remember

for whom the fire was stolen.

—Gerald W. Barrax

[Page 37]

All Saint’s Day

After last night, candy wrappers

litter the lawn, gnarled leaves,

relics not so much of

ghoulish ceremony, but

a sign that Americans

love their children. Ghosts, witches,

pirates hold out their brown bags,

and we fill them the way we

stuff turkeys, or the witch

fattens Hansel and Gretel.

Even my neighbor, who says,

“Hitler had the right idea!”

accompanies his twin ghosts,

urging them from the walk, “Go

on, say trick or treat.” “You’ll get

a gun whether you want one

or not,” he yelled at his wife,

last summer. I made myself

invisible on the

patio, clutching my towel,

and sneaked into the house,

avoiding the veiled eyes of

my yarmulka’d great uncle,

dispassionate in his photo.

My daughter, wicked in sheets,

scared one of his little girls,

who ran away crying. Mine

was triumphant: “Boy, I really

scared Kelly.” For one night

even the smallest can frighten.

After Mass on Sunday, my

neighbor does target-practice,

or replaces the fence; he’s

making it higher. His

and my blue-eyed kids can’t tell

one yard from the other.

—Beth Bentley

[Page 38]

Vision in the Orangerie

It was light

that lynx-eye seized and light it swept

upon the world, as it landscaped

a vision mirrored in water:

the moted air, clouds, drifting willows,

lotus cups. The cult of shapes

yielded as the percipient paw sought to master

what the eye allows.

He subdued the immobile in a garden,

his lair, as, halfway through his journey,

after Argenteuil and Vethueil,

came Giverny

where the pond,

a “flowering aquarium”

oval universe showed him

motion he had never dreamed;

and space, tremulous as wings,

tickled the wrist of this pleinairiste.

Only in water could light be as it seemed,

minute flickerings

waylaid by a sable stab,

multivarious, evanescent.

“Now to catch grasses swaying

beneath water,” he wrote.

Les Nymphéas

quivered to life: great, sculptured

petals imaging what green pads mirrored:

form married to hue,

merged in the ‘truth of atmosphere.’

A gift of eyes dedicated the frieze.

But Monet’s engrossing vision grew

to the pure

distinct: the glazing film

crept only over eye, blacked-

out no dazzle nor dimmed

light’s cataract.

—Beth Bentley

[Page 39]

On Hearing at Christmas That Our Elm House Has Been Torn Down

Among bookcases stood the tree

Hung with our battered ornaments.

Each face knew felicity.

Snow turned Elm Woods into tents.

Hung with our battered ornaments,

Mike slept on the oriental rug.

Snow turned Elm Woods into tents.

My sisters sugared date and fig.

Mike slept on the oriental rug,

Paws moving in an airedale dream.

My sisters sugared date and fig.

Mozart watched from an old brown frame.

Paws moving in an airedale dream,

Mice were running in the walls.

Mozart watched from an old brown frame.

My father made long distance calls.

Mice were running in the walls.

Shouting into the goose-necked phone,

My father made long distance calls.

Owls hooted in the oak and pine.

Shouting into the goose-necked phone,

He called a friend in the Irish Hills.

Owls hooted in the oak and pine.

I sat reading “Rip Van Winkle”.

He called a friend in the Irish Hills.

My mother played “Silent Night, Holy Night”.

I sat reading “Rip Van Winkle”,

Beside the china cabinet.

My mother played “Silent Night, Holy Night”,

Slowly on the yellowing keyboard.

Beside the china cabinet,

The faulty ceiling fixture flickered.

Slowly on the yellowing keyboard

Her faith defined the old white house.

The faulty ceiling fixture flickered.

Christ hung on wallpaper white and rose.

[Page 40]

Her faith defined the old white house.

Each face knew felicity.

Christ hung on wallpaper white and rose.

Among bookcases stood the tree.

—Nelson Bentley

The Boat to Put-In-Bay

The present is the fragrance of the past.

One day last summer, in my fiftieth year,

Crossing to Kitsap on the Illahee,

I knew the fullness of time. Our children,

My wife and I, brimmed with joy’s innocence,

Watching seagulls soar by the white rail

Against the mystical blue of the distant Brothers,

Sailed toward the high silence of Hurricane Ridge

Where we climbed through clouds to watch the deer

And walk in mountain flowers near Olympus:

And then I saw, in faith’s eccentric circles,

Myself at twenty five by a boat’s rail

On the Strait of Mackinac, watching gulls,

Messengers from childhood, glide beside me.

It was the end of a month’s pilgrimage

To the magic locks of Sault Sainte Marie,

Where I watched in the summer of my eleventh year

The freighters lift from Huron to Superior.

And there, at the crisis of my life,

I wrestled with God like Jacob by the Jabbok.

My childhood voyages sailed from the mist

And I walked the deck in a joy of destination,

Remembering boundless days in the 1920’s,

My parents with their serious, total love,

The smokestacks, pennants, gull-woven horizons

On tarry, finny Erie as we crossed

Past Perry’s ghost to picnic at Put-In-Bay,

Sandusky or Cedar Point. We three children,

Awed by hope, played games beside the lifeboats

And solemnly absorbed the occasional swells.

[Page 41]

On the Strait of Mackinac I crossed through light

Into my life’s ultimate definition,

Going back to Ann Arbor with Auden in my pocket

And Four Quartets going through my head,

Only a month before I met my love.

Belief, as in the Letter to the Hebrews,

Put us and our children on the Illahee

Between White Horse Mountain and Mount Constance,

Surprised by joy, as always, as I had known

It would be, on Lake Erie by the lifeboats.

—Nelson Bentley

Today Requires a Lace of Truths

Today requires a stronger lace

than the Vienna cord with which Mrs. Walgreen

blessed my birth in Chicago.

Our modern scene demands

(even of femininity) a cup

less fragile than the Copeland-Spode of my earlier desire.

It must be as harp-like in sound and form

as the lace of steel

that wings the Varrazzano bridge.

As eclectic as the lace that Truths form

in the stone of the temple of Bahá’í,

as forever enduring in grace

as the intermolding of

the Benin Bronze.

—Margaret Danner

[Page 42]

From Words in the Mourning Time

I

For King, for Robert Kennedy,

destroyed by those they could not save,

for King for Kennedy I mourn.

And for America, self-destructive, self-betrayed.

I grieve. Yet know the vanity

of grief—through power of

The Blessed Exile’s

transilluminating word

aware of how these deaths, how all

the agonies of our deathbed childbed age

are process, major means whereby,

oh dreadfully, our humanness must be achieved.

V

Oh, what a world we make,

oppressor and oppressed.

Our world—

this violent ghetto, slum

of the spirit raging against itself.

We hate kill destroy

in the name of human good

our killing and our hate destroy.

[Page 43]

IX

As the gook woman howls

for her boy in the smouldering,

as the expendable Clean-Cut Boys

From Decent American Homes

are slashing off enemy ears for keepsakes;

as the victories are tallied up

with flag-draped coffins, plastic bodybags,

what can I say

but this, this:

We must not be frightened nor cajoled

into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.

We must go on struggling to be human,

though monsters of abstraction

police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of

a human world where godliness

is possible and man

is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.

—Robert Hayden

[Page 44]

The Yankee Pantheon

The solution should be valued,

percolating through successive

revolutions and reactions,

Of the rare catalyst that made

one plausible: humanity’s

love of river’s dark, prevailing

Flow! In its roiled tributaries

draining the vast, teeming basin,

lowered by earth washed towards the sea

Layer by layer, shall I dip

my soul armed with a nimbus of

prayer to the creating Force

That blesses and uproots at will?

On the height of a bluff green and

flat I’ll build a temple of stone,

Wood and glass, high above

the steep riverbank.

Good and long the procession I

Will lead to attend dedication

and receive the miraculous

stillness of the laurel crowning,

Staring at the great monolith

of granite inlaid with jade script,

caring to pause before each scene

Shown in glass-mosaic windows

slanting in the exploding light:

blown-up Colombo and his men

Claiming Guanahani for Spain;

translucent panes of the British

maiming the French and Indians;

The Liberty Bell from cannons

cast in times of independence;

pea-soup-gray Atlantic surging

While the dense smoke of crimson war

attests the burning of Washington!

I’ll bring in Russians selling Fort

Ross to Sutter, ending nightmares

for California; the Texans’

loss on land claimed by Mexico;

Seething with exotic motifs,

frescoes will show our far campaigns!

Breathing idols of rough-cast bronze

To have their assignation there

will portray Mayflower people

who bequeathed us the Yankee soul,

[Page 45]

Bradford, Standish, Roger Williams,

Thomas Hooker, Edward Taylor,

Edwards, Emerson and Thoreau,

And a plethora of founding

fathers of the state and culture,

bland gods of the Yankee Pantheon!

When required, empty pedestals

will recall heroes once raised up,

then crushed to dust by the fickle

Velleities of the idle press,

which deified and ran through. . . .,

well as it might have, had it dealt

With Christ, whose risen likeness shall,

despite the current fashion, on

His God- or manhood, stand alone

Upon a lucid spiral staircase

leading from the temple’s bright dome

down to a central pit, praying

Above the demons, the cruel stream

of Hell, Pontius Pilate crushed by snakes,

a love of power for itself!

—Jean Kuusenjuuri

[Page 46]

For My Father

With sorrow, a way-station toward mutual understanding,

went home that drastic April to meet my self, my father,

being part of his temper, joy, and griefs—

a man of slipping masks and too straightforward heart.

Dad unlearned self-pity from a hard working life:

gathering coal from the railroad yard,

collecting soda bottles to see how Bligh

five times was done in by mutinous men,

cutting grass, shining shoes, shoveling snow,

bakery boy, hawking the Baltimore News at ten,

working six years through Virginia State,

clerking in the Probation Department,

spending hours late on delinquent income taxes,

summer school night school back to back,

teaching Business Ed. while keeping close track

on the lives of his “kids” at Carver High.

Weekends, college degree guys like him

“made it” on the waiter’s tip.

By no means an easy trip.

But not waiting now. Not even for a pension.

Happy administrator. Nice home. Wife secure. Sons grown.

On the six o’clock news our house watches the riot of Baltimore.

Greenmount Avenue a shambles of glass and refuse.

The Wilson Street warehouse leaping with flames.

Curfew at four.

What’s all this violence? Reverend King’s death

is a downright shame, but I can’t see people

tearing up their own neighborhoods. Got to work

for what you want. You can’t blame . . .

[Page 47]

We joked, called him a “Tom” and he was hurt.

(Pride, but not blind to the dirt pent up in the grand hustle)

Aging, he tarries in instructing his sons any longer.

He will not repent whatever pain made him his own man.

His dream of the good life is even stronger at fifty.

Dad turns from TV and stares out at the garden he raised in accustomed toil.

Mamma look, look out here at those squirrels!

(His only vice we’ve learned to suffer—

a clumsy grace in feighning innocence

when things burst in upon his hard-earned world)

—Charles Lynch

Poem

A girl moves to the window to shut out the rain and wind.

The wind, which whistles like a singular old man

On some dead street corner, pushes the clouds.

Nothing, except wind and rain, hurries.

Off in the distance

I can see where the sun is out,

Where no thunder rolls through the sky

As if civilization were falling

Or lovers calling it quits.

Lightning breaks the sky the color of rain.

—Herbert W. Martin

[Page 48]

*Frost Moon

1.

The mountains reveal the river ghosts,

red-cedared fishermen too ancient

as the ferns to settle a field of poetry,

too forgotten to be reached with a watch.

The November night air carries a light

meditation over the pines, the path

zig-zagging its way toward the town.

2.

At the edge of the Olympics, he thinks

of nothing more than how a passing cloud

blackens the branches of the willow moon,

empties out the mind’s wasted images,

raising the wind’s pitch one green octave

above the crow confronting autumn,

the stranger growing mute as his tracks,

as if snow had pierced the darkest

regions of his soul.

—Duane McGinnis

*Frost Moon is what the Assiniboine Indian Tribe of Montana calls the month of November.

[Page 49]

Indian Rock, Bainbridge Island, Washington

(for Mary Randlett)

1.

When you reach to touch the markings

on my face, step from the shadow

of patience; now listen to the order

of sand and cedar, totem and fishnet,

blossom and oyster,

gulls diving into surfaces,

green journeys of the salmon,

time, sapping the seasons

of the red-breasted woodpecker.

2.

When you are as motionless as the crane

in the cattails, a quiet body,

breathing like the tide,

then I will chant the legend

to help you hear the paddles thrust,

the rattling bones, the chattering masks,

your dead ancestors dancing down the beach.

3.

When the long-leaf rains have chilled

your bones like the morning gale,

numbed your walk back to the cottage,

your drive to the city, I will then end

the whaler’s song, and leave you

alone to bend like the reed.

—Duane McGinnis

[Page 50]

Maximus

Not light, for light is

darkness divided.

Not darkness, which is only

the absence of light.

Neither sound

nor silence, time

nor the god-like

absence of time, place

or nowhere, something

or nothing at all.

But knowing—

Yes—

through union

to being.

—Donald McQuaid

Agape

I am the stone-cutter finding

The right stone,

Sorting the colors, sifting

Texture and weight.

The plum-colored cornelian

Piece meets my eye.

It will do, to perfection,

I decide. All night,

I manifest my love for the

Bright stone, carving

Clusters of loving fruit,

Choosing to carve on

Both sides of what will be your stone.

—Arthur Oberg

[Page 51]

Fable

You tell me it is a tale of hearts.

But there are no hearts.

And, so I do again what I resent,

And you exact—to bear

My own heart to the telling,

To bring my own heart to bear the facts.

—Arthur Oberg

Tree

The evergreen tree is best.

It is the closest to God of all trees,

The most nearly eternal.

Life lives in it through the winter,

Not bared by snow or cold.

Winter wets me to my bones.

I hear the wind,

The singing contest of the boughs,

Rubbing and rubbing each other

Like a violin and its bow.

Each plays in competition with the rest,

Yet in harmony.

Music . . . like angels singing

The birth of God.

Music dies. I hear the silent

Surging of sap like the sea

Through the trunk. I used to walk

On dead trees. They got me across the gorge.

From the high mountainside

I could look down and see thousands of trees

Peopling the earth.

The willow tree in our backyard

Was part of the family, like the cat,

Until it grew sick and died.

The weeping willow dies young.

God is kind.

[Page 52]

A tree upon his leg,

A man lies screaming in a lonely wood,

Ripped by the timber that he tried to fell,—

The tree’s revenge.

Eve was tempted by a tree;

Eve is dead, and mankind dying.

Tree, like religion, refuses to die,

Drags out its old age.

I have seen trees five hundred years old,

Their stumps as big as boulders.

Men labor vehemently

Cutting down trees with axes, saws, and wedges.

The trees are stipped and flayed.

They make our homes. But other seeds grow up.

I remember a tiny evergreen tree,

Alone in a clearing,

I saw as a boy. I felt sorry for it.

Now it has grown the size of three men,

But still alone, alive.

—Gerald B. Parks

[Page 53]

For Bahá’u’lláh’s Birthday

O pale red diffident light

Breaking dawn over the wet earth

O silent sun blooming from shadows

Chaser of night

O virginal flower of peace

Like the first opening of passion

You spread your omnipotent face

Over the day

The diffident light grows strong

The wet earth sheds the dew

Shadows like roots are buried in earth

The bud of passion gapes wide

Bahá’u’lláh like the sun

Dawned and is shining

Bahá’u’lláh like a flower

Grew and is blooming

The flower that will not wilt

The day without night is born

—Gerald B. Parks

[Page 54]

The Prayer

I descend a little below the earth

To enter a church whose threshold lies beneath

History’s rubble. History, I say,

Is only two feet deep, but we cannot shovel it away.

From the smoking altar a woman wheels slow

As a star, questioning in a tongue I do not know.

I answer in the tongue I do not know.

Then she turns to the mosaic virgin

Dozing on the wall like a map of Asia. “Virgin,”

She sings, “You who are famous for charity,

Do not from this stranger withhold charity.”

She reminds the Lady how She brought

A lily invisible into a Rose Incarnate.

“This man’s wife,” she sings, “has borne him no child.

Send her a child.” I want to say, “No,

Lady, let us all die, let there be no

More of life. We are all too tired.” But I say nothing,

For the Virgin now is smiling like the first Asia, as if nothing

Had ever happened. And the woman, singing no more,

Whispers, “Pray now and remember to ask for more

Than you deserve. The virgin always favors outrageous

Requests.”

Behind her the door opens to an outrageous

Film of sky where a uniform flattens like a photograph. Ashamed,

The officer explains he has come for this woman who has shamed

The mayor and put off the tourists. She is, he sighs, quite mad.

Alone, I remember to pray for too much: “Let me also, Virgin,

let me also go mad.”

—Radcliffe Squires

[Page 55]

Four Mirrors

Over four mirrors the light gushed late,

and four times it asked my part:

wherever I directed my gaze was a face,

but which was life, and which was art?

One mirror was perfect, or had shattered so smooth

that look as I could I couldn’t tell how

anyone’s eyes could ever see change—

no past, no future, just now.

One mirror leaned, always in peril,

never sure of a place on its shelf,

or on any other: the slant caught me so well

that I wasn’t an image, but the mirror itself.

And a third one held the other two still—

the world that I saw and welcomed as all,

and that other, the sly, the slanting me that feigned,

but while I looked could not quite fall.

Last was the deepest, the glass around me

that closed down finally; and the night was caught

over all three, and the world that held us—

that endless glass of a man’s late thought.

—William Stafford

North of Imperia

Napoleon could not capture the olive trees:

their color is escape. On the hills

they grow by going away. Their branches

pledge the rocks; their leaves become citizens

of any new state, any day, and retire

when evening does.

When Saint Paul came through, he did not

know why he said “The greatest of these

is Love.” Later he tried to reason it out,

but he forgot the real cause:

he was looking at olive trees.

—William Stafford

[Page 56]

The Generations

Our sons, twenty-four and twenty, refuse

To act their ages in my dreams;

Lately they run through all the early mornings,

Twelve and eight, six and two, four and newly born,

In scenes where their grandparents also keep appearing

Also in costumes I do not remember anybody’s wearing.

I do not think I reject any of those

Costumes, or persons, but I cannot be sure,

Including myself, crying the treacherous mornings

Where I am compelled to compose

Language and music for acting to,

Eager and unable to wake or use.

—Hollis Summers

From Pippa Passes, Kentucky

In the wind from the screened picture window—

The screen contains no picture:

Nothing holds behind the screen but air—

Five peacock feathers turn to change places

In their milk blue plastic vase.

If I got up from this bed

I could see a house and barn

On earth, a yard full of peacocks.

But I will not move. I can hear the peacocks

Calling from their vase.

—Hollis Summers

[Page 57]

Desert Spring

You cannot see them so much as feel them

Coming in crowds, never singly, coming

Sudden, bursting color, thrusting blood-reds,

Golds, pinks, on a landscape soon vibrant

With the pristine singing of Spring,

Laid upon a sea of dunes.

Watch them bloom quickly, coming

Sudden to the hidden self,

Spilling cocoons, gathering in groups,

To share the blaze of freedom

After the long year,

The inward movement of the soil,

The care of the single seed.

Now the moment deeply ancient,

Now the meaning fully cosmic

Explodes into being

Revealing the kingdom of Abhá!

—Joan Imig Taylor

The Swimmer

I swam

in a pool

at the center of a large park

and watched others

who were better than I,

and thought how much better

Jesus must have been than they.

He didn’t just float

or swim

He walked on the water.

And I thought how times

must have been when He was here

and how beautiful it would be

when He came again.

I didn’t know then

that He already had.

—Bryan Lynn Thacker

[Page 58]

For Biafra; a trilogy

1.

the wet eye

of a woman

in love is both

beautiful

glorious

& sad

2.

a man

is the sun

of his son

& rain

always falls

where its

the warmest

3.

a child

is the voice

closest too

the past &

the ancestors

who are pure

spirits

& love

everyone &

everything

—Quincy Troupe

[Page 59]

Kent

remembering May 4, 1970

The tears of God slant from the heavenless sky.

I sit in my studio at Yaddo,

Sodden with consciousness and conscience.

Though a grown man, I have wept sometimes,

Dallas and Memphis, but this day

Too many slaughters, too many lies,

Have drained the rain clouds of my eyes.

Gray sky presses down,

Fog moves up the branches of the drenched pines.

I read their names in the morning’s Times—

Schroeder and Scheuer, Miller and Krause—

Bland as my class rolls—

And their first names—William, Sandra, Jeffrey,

And Allison, my daughter’s name.

Fold enfolds my studio.

Nothing to see, nowhere to go.

Brain and heart an empty hull,

My Lai rotting in my skull,

Four names writhing in a row,

Four students I shall never know.

They were not, it appears, hippies, effete snobs,

Or bums. If President or Vice-President had met them,

Almost they might have approved, though Jeff’s hair

Needed some orderly attention. There was nothing by Mao or Che

In his room, but a soft-cover Lost Horizon for a President’s

bedside reading.

Sandy, “happy kid, always the one who made jokes,”

You stood up too soon from the shelter of parked cars,

Too young to believe how long horror can last.

Bullet in the neck on the way to speech therapy class,

You who might have discovered how to still some voices

And liberate tongues stuttering with a decade’s obscenity.

Bill, with the haircut of an Eagle Scout,

Captain of cross-country team at Lorain High School,

Trumpet player, second in ROTC,

You idly watched the advance of your brother Guardsmen.

How desperate a fratricide to gun you down.

[Page 60]

Allison, with the face of a young Madonna,

Whose dark eyes search me from a newsprint halftone,

Good Jewish daughter, loving a Jewish boy,

You dropped beside him, your class cancelled forever.

The fog seeps in through window frames.

I damply repeat the four dead names.

This was no Easterday uprising

To set a new Yeats sermonizing.

Say simply that they chanced to die

For reasons distant as My Lai.

I set their names down one by one:

Bill . . . Sandy . . . Jeff . . . and Allison.

—Chad Walsh

[Page 61]

A Book on the Subject Page Six

Do you think	No of course
I am a	I don’t
bad person?	think you are a
	bad person.
But when
I see	I don’t
the way	think you are a
I do	bad person but I do
sometimes	object to
I just wonder
	the way you
why. Why do I
do	trick yourself
that?
	into being sad
Yes, it is. I know it.	sometimes. I think it’s
And it hurts	bad. That is,
me.
	Well, it
But why	hurts other people
would I	too. You can’t
want to do that?	go around
To hurt myself?	hurting yourself with other people
Why?	without
Gol-
ly, I	hurting other people too. You put them
must really be a	through. I have never, you think
bad person	you are weak, I have never
or something. I mean
	seen anyone
it’s crazy.
Do you	as strong
think
	as you. You control
I am	everybody, the whole scene.
a bad person, then?	You rule it.
Do you
	And you’re messing up
like me?	people,
With me doing all that	all the people
and all,	a-
do you?	round!

—Klyd Watkins

[Page 62]

[Page 63]

The Future Across the Generation Gap

A Review of Culture and Commitment by Margaret Mead (Garden City, New York: Natural History Press/Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1970), 113 pages

By ARTHUR L. DAHL

LAST YEAR, in a lecture I attended, David Brinkley said that, after a forty-state tour of the United States, talking with people in all walks of life, he sensed a greater degree of uneasiness and dissatisfaction with the status quo then ever before in his long career of journalism. People were bothered by a long list of problems, including the Vietnam war, inflation, riots and decay in the cities, the rebellion of youth, racial conflicts, pollution, and the population explosion. They felt that all of these problems were getting beyond the capacity of our leaders to deal with, and they did not know what they or anyone else could do about it. This attitude of helplessness seems to be shared by most of the populations in the advanced countries of the world, for these problems are common everywhere.

One of the most bewildering of these problems is that involving the generation gap. Suddenly, to a greater degree than ever before, communication and understanding between youth and their elders have broken down, and suspicion and mistrust based upon age have arisen. This poses a serious threat to the stability and continuity of many of our political and social institutions.

Margaret Mead in her book Culture and Commitment has drawn on her decades of study of primitive cultures as well as her wise and humane observations of the accelerating pace of technological change in our developed societies, to present a new and challenging explanation of the origin of the generation gap, and the demands it makes upon all of us to cope with it—as we must if the world is to survive.

Dr. Mead points out the unique but short-lived condition we face:

An essential and extraordinary aspect of man’s present state is that, at this moment in which we are approaching a world-wide culture and the possibility of becoming fully aware citizens of the world in the late twentieth century, we have simultaneously available to us for the first time examples of the ways men have lived at every period over the last fifty thousand years. . . .

This is a situation that has never occurred before in human history and, by its very nature, can never occur in this way again. It is because the entire planet is accessible to us that we can know that there are no people anywhere about whom we might know but do not. . . . We have the means of reaching all of earth’s diverse peoples and we have the concepts that make it possible for us to understand them, and they now share in a world-wide, technologically propagated culture, within which they are able to listen as well as to talk to us. . . . The step from their past to our present is condensed, but they share one world with us, and their desire for all that new technology and new forms of organization can bring, now serves as a common basis for communication.

A study of these varied societies and cultures of the past shows that there have been two principal types with very different means for passing on knowledge, attitudes, [Page 64] and traditions from one generation to the next. The earlier, Dr. Mead has named the postfigurative. This culture is so self-contained and isolated from outside influences that it changes very slowly, and each generation lives in about the same way as past generations. Therefore, since youth expect to live in a similar world and face the same problems as their parents and grandparents, they are quite content to accept advice and guidance from those who have already dealt with and mastered the problems and conditions they themselves expect to face. The position of authority and respect for the elders is unquestioned, for very practical reasons.

In many cases, however, changes in a culture or society occur much more rapidly, because of the migration of the people from one place to the other, a catastrophe which decimated a population, a new technology in which the older people are not expert, or the strong influence of outside cultures or religions which infiltrate the original one. In this case, the young people recognize that the experience of their elders was gained under circumstances different from those they face and therefore that it is not wholly relevant to their needs. This Dr. Mead calls a cofigurative culture, a culture in which youth depend to a greater degree upon their peers for solutions to their problems. They may look to their elders for final approval of change, but to some extent each young person becomes a model for others of his generation. The conditions for a cofigurative culture become more prevalent with the evolution of a higher level of technological civilization, which greatly speeds up the pace of change.

In considering our own era, Margaret Mead challenges the view of many authorities that our problems and conditions are comparable to those of the past, with possibly some increase in degree. As examples, she mentions Teller’s comparison of the potential destruction of a nuclear war with the ravages wrought by Genghis Khan; the attitude of most commentators that the repudiation of the present and past by dissident youth all over the world is just an extreme instance of adolescent rebellion; and the common tendency to equate the industrial revolution to other times when there were important changes in agriculture, script, navigation, or organization of labor and law.

To her, this period is unique in all history, and in a sense is creating still another type of society which she calls prefigurative. This uniqueness stems from several factors. First, is the irreversibility of the changes that have taken place since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In addition, the changes are taking place with a speed and intensity and worldwide breadth never known before. As a result, the generation gap today is found almost everywhere in the world. It is applied in different ways in different places, but youthful activism is common virtually everywhere. Why?

Dr. Mead believes the initial cause of the generation gap and the activism of youth is the emergence, for the first time, of a world community. Not only has technology linked the entire world physically, but now man is recognizing more clearly those factors he has in common with other men, and thus is gaining a sense of mankind as a unit. He knows now there are no other humanoid species on the planet. He can now find out not only about the past of all existing societies, but also what is happening to men everywhere in the world today without delay or censorship. Science and computers have opened up possibilities for the first time of the development of our earth resources as well as those of the universe, yet at the same time they have created ecological and population threats to our survival and the preservation of our life values. The most remote primitive tribes are touched (through such devices as transistor radios), as well as the residents of the major capitals of the world.

In a sense, then, everyone born before World War II grew up in and was conditioned by a world wholly different from 1971, a world in which no satellite had ever [Page 65] flashed across the sky, no TV had given instant awareness of current events, and no atom bomb had wrought infinite destruction. “Their perception of the past,” says Dr. Mead, “was an edited version of what had happened. Whether they were wholly dependent on oral memory, art, and drama or also had access to print and still photography and film, what they could know had been altered by the every act of preservation. Their perception of the immediate present was limited to what they could take in through their own eyes and ears and to the edited versions of other men’s sensory experience and memories. Their conception of the future was essentially one in which change was incorporated into a deeper changelessness.”

Thus when the first atom bomb exploded, only a few understood that humanity was entering a new age. Even today, few over twenty-five grasp emotionally the difference between a war, no matter how destructive, in which there will be many survivors, and one in which mankind will largely be wiped from the earth. Even scientists are apt to form committees to restrict or control certain particularly objectionable kinds of war, rather than to abolish war altogether. The members of the older generation, therefore, are like immigrants in time, who have left behind familiar worlds to live in a new world different from any they have known, yet whose thinking is bound to the past and whose actions demonstrate time and again that they really do not understand this new world at all.

No wonder the new generation lacks confidence in those who still hold the seats of power, and control the resources of the world, yet who are building makeshift dwellings in old patterns with new materials. The new generation has never known another kind of world other than the present, when every war threatens annihilation, when control of pollution and population are essential to preserve life values, when distinctions of race and caste are anachronisms and world order an obvious necessity. They see no difference between killing an enemy and a neighbor, between peacetime and wartime, friend and foe, “my” group and “theirs.” They believe that each of us holds responsibility for the other’s children.

In truth, both the older generations and the younger generations are isolated and lonely. None has seen as much or as rapid change as has the older, and none has been so confused; yet the new generation does not yet have the wisdom, knowledge, and experience to deal skillfully with these far-reaching and complex issues. Each generation needs the other, yet is blocked by the present mistrust and lack of communication. They are like peoples with widely diverse backgrounds but a common language trying to converse— Americans and Englishmen, or Spaniards and Latin Americans. They must realize that sometimes the same words have radically different meanings. And the situation is greatly complicated by the fact that there no longer are any sets of absolute values to which large numbers of people subscribe. Religion, humanism, and science have all been found wanting in dealing with these problems. Most rules from the past are now regarded as meaningless, and the young feel that there are no adults anywhere in the world who know enough about the new conditions to formulate what the next step should be.

To Margaret Mead, recognition that this situation exists is the beginning of an answer. If both generations accept their inability to cope with conditons alone, and their need for each other, they will begin to communicate. But it should be on a new basis, and lead to a different result:

. . . the paths by which we came into the present can never be traversed again. . . . Coming by different roads out of the past, all the peoples of the earth are now arriving in the new world community. No road into the present need be repudiated and no former way of life forgotten. But [Page 66] all these different pasts, our own and all others, must be treated as precursors.

Unlike the past cultures, the prefigurative society will be based on the young, who represent the future, and who need to be loved and nourished and guided by the old. Postfigutative cultures were closed systems that replicated the past. We must now create open systems that focus on the future, and thus on the children. Youth must be offered a direct participation in power, even though those in positions of authority really do not understand the nature of youth. “. . . the development of prefigurational cultures,” Dr. Mead says, “will depend on the existence of a continuing dialogue in which the young, free to act on their own initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown. Then the older generation will have access to the new experiential knowledge, without which no meaningful plans can be made. It is only with the direct participation of the young, who have that knowledge, that we can build a viable future.”

IN MY VIEW, the very vehicle to bring about this new communication between young and old, and this redress of the balance of power between the two called for by Dr. Mead, is the Bahá’í Faith. For over one hundred years Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings have urged the establishment in this age of a world community and a world order. The search for some absolute standards and values is satisfied by His spiritual and moral teachings, which bring the wisdom of God to focus on human needs in this modern age. His social teachings offer the tools to counteract excessive nationalism, racial and class conflict, and economic and social division, and thus to deal with the urgent modern problems and lay the political, economic, and social bases for a true world community.

Having eliminated the hierarchy in religious organization and thus opening the way to a more truly democratic political organization, the Bahá’í Faith offers a viable form for bringing the generations together in a working partnership to deal directly with those problems facing all of us. Membership on the Bahá’í administrative bodies (which regulate and direct all aspects of Bahá’í affairs and have great spiritual as well as secular responsibilities for the well-being of Bahá’ís) is determined by democratic vote and is open to all adult Bahá’ís. These institutions provide the closest possible working interrelationship between the members, regardless of age, color, wealth, or outside attainments. The fact that in the United States the percentage of new Bahá’í membership from the ranks of youth has been rising steadily and has now reached fifty percent suggests not only that Bahá’u’lláh has something meaningful to say to youth, but that young people will be a growing influence in the evolution of the Bahá’í community in the years ahead.

Margaret Mead presents an illuminating picture of the world in a unique position of crisis and crossroads requiring radical departures from the past by older and younger generations alike. Perhaps under these conditions the world will at last be ready to understand and accept the breathtakingly original view of the future and possibilities for its attainment contained within the God-inspired Writings of Bahá’u’lláh.

[Page 67]

Authors & Artists

OLIVE V. APPLEGATE has written a number of poems on Bahá’í themes. She lives in Pacific Grove, California.

GERALD WILLIAM BARRAX teaches English at North Carolina State College. He has won prizes for his peoms, which have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. A volume of his poems, Another Kind of Rain, was published last year by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

BETH BENTLEY’S work has been widely published. She and her husband, the poet Nelson Bentley, have made outstanding contributions to the cultural life of Seattle, Washington, where they have lived and taught for many years. The Ohio University Press will publish Mrs. Bentley’s Phone Calls from the Dead later this year.

NELSON BENTLEY teaches verse writing and modern poetry at the University of Washington. He also conducts poetry programs on radio and TV as well as workshops and seminars which have become influential in the Northwest. Mr. Bentley is the author of Sea Lion Caves and is at present preparing another collection for publication.

ARTHUR L. DAHL is a partner in a prominent San Francisco investment counseling firm. His interests include the arts, education (he serves as a trustee of several educational institutions), and the human potential movement. Mr. Dahl was, for many years, a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís Of the United States.

MARGARET DANNER is Poet in Residence this year at LeMoyne-Owen College. She has also served in this capacity at Wayne State University, Miles College, and Virginia Union University. Her work is included in many journals and anthologies, and she has received several awards. Her published collections are To Flower and Poem Counter-Poem (with Dudly Randall).

MARZIEH GAIL is a familiar name in the pages of World Order, having contributed several articles and poems over the years. Mrs. Gail has translated a number of major Bahá’í works—Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys (with her father Ali-Kuli Khan), and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s The Secret of Divine Civilization and Memorials of the Faithful. She has also published Persia and the Victorians and The Sheltering Branch and, more recently, Avignon in Flower (Random House) and The Three Popes (Simon & Schuster).

ROBERT HAYDEN is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He has published several books of poetry, the most recent being Words in the Mourning Time. Last year he received the Russell Loines Award for his poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The poems appearing in this issue are reprinted by permission of October House, Inc.

KAZEM KAZEMZADEH, a graduate of the Moscow University Law School, has lived and worked on three continents as diplomat, lawyer, and university teacher. His interests range through history, literature, government, philosophy, and religion. He served for many years on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran and now lives in retirement in California, devoting his time to the study of Bahá’í writings and history.

JEAN KUUSENJUURI lives in Elgin, Illinois. He spent some time in Iceland as a Bahá’í [Page 68] pioneer several years ago. He has had poems published in various magazines.

CHARLES LYNCH is an instructor in English at Rutgers University (Newark). In addition to writing and teaching, he is doing research in Black Literature for a doctoral dissertation. He has had poems in Black Creation, Washington Square Review, Readers and Writers, and other magazines.

HERBERT W. MARTIN is the author of New York the Nine Million and Other Poems and has published in a variety of journals. He has been Poet in Residence at Aquinas College and is now teaching English at the University of Dayton.

DONALD MCQUAID lives in Boston.

DUANE MCGINNIS won first prize at the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference in 1966. His poems have been published in the Chicago Tribune, Prism: International, Jeopardy, etc.

ARTHUR OBERG is a member of the English Department at the University of Washington. He has contributed poems to Transatlantic Review, Sumac, Jeopardy, and other quarterlies.

GERALD B. PARKS is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he majored in classical literature. His poems have been published in magazines and anthologies. He is now living in Trieste, Italy.

ZDENEK SALZMANN, whose article “New Directions in Cultural Anthropology” appeared in the summer 1969 World Order and was reprinted by the U. S. Air Force Academy, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. During the spring of 1970 he was a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg in West Germany. Dr. Salzmann’s many publications include an introductory high school textbook, Anthropology, and articles on subjects ranging from Arapaho verbs to Czechoslovakian literature. He is currently very much interested in the ethnography of Czechoslovakia.

RADCLIFFE SQUIRES is the author of several books of poetry, among them Fingers of Hermes and The Light Under Islands. He has also published several critical studies. He is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and editor of the Michigan Quarterly.

WILLIAM STAFFORD is Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. His latest book is Allegiances, and he has also published West of Your City, Traveling through the Dark, and The Rescued Year. His awards include the National Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. Stafford’s poems have appeared in previous issues of World Order.

HOLLIS SUMMERS is Professor of English at Ohio University. His work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is the author of several volumes of poetry and prose, including Sit Opposite Each Other, The Peddler and Other Domestic Matters, and The Day After Sunday (novel).

JOAN IMIG TAYLOR is another of the growing number of poets writing on Bahá’í themes. She has had poems published in various magazines. She lives in Palm Springs, California.

BRYAN LYNN THACKER is the author of several poems reflecting his dedication to the Bahá’í Faith.

[Page 69]

QUINCY TROUPE is Writer in Residence at Ohio University. He was one of the original members of the Watts Writers’ Workshop. He edited the anthology Watts Poets and Writers and has had work in New Directions 22, The New Black Poetry, Antioch Review, and other publications. He is editor of the quarterly, Confrontation.

CHAD WALSH is Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Beloit College. Editor of numerous anthologies and textbooks, he has published five volumes of his own poetry. His most recent collection, The End of Nature, won prizes from the Council for the Wisconsin Writers and the Society of Midland Authors.

KLYD WATKINS has published poetry in Red Clay Reader, December, Poem, and other magazines. But he puts most of his creative efforts now into Poetry Out Loud, a “magazine” of poetry made on tape recorders and circulated as record albums. He lives in Madisonville, Kentucky, with his wife and four sons.

ART CREDITS: pp. 2, 5, 7, 20, 21, 32, drawings by Mark Fennessy; p. 62, drawing by Pierre J. Spierckel; p. 66, drawing by Mark Fennessy; back cover, drawing by Pierre J. Spierckel.

MARK FENNESSY, a former Yale University Scholar of the House in sculpture and drawing, is a regular contributor to World Order.

PIERRE J. SPIERCKEL, painter and novelist, was born in Marseilles, France and came to the United States two years ago. He lives in Evanston and edits and illustrates textbooks.