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[Page -1] World order

WINTER 1974-75

A VIEW OF WORLD ORDER

Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau

ECONOMICS AND MURAL VALUES

William S. Hatcher

VARQÁ’ AND RÚḤU’LLÁH: DEATHLESS IN MARTYRDOM

Kazem Kazemzadeh

WHAT IS A HUMAN BEING?

Howard B. Garey

[Page 0] World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 9, NUMBER 2 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

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

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Editorial Assistant

MARTHA PATRICK

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence and changes of address should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

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

Subscription rates: USA and Canada, 1 year, $4.50; 2 years, $8.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $5.00; 2 years, $9.00; single copies $1.60.

Copyright © 1975, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

1 Witness to Faith

Editorial

2 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

6 A View of World Order

by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau

12 Public Accommodation 2207-BC-415M-44, 14.5.70

poem by Klaus N. Kallenberger

14 Economics and Moral Values

by William S. Hatcber

29 Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh: Deathless in Martyrdom

by Kazem Kazemzadeh

45 What Is a Human Being?

book review by Howard B. Garey

48 Palingenesis

poem by Cal E. Rollins

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue

[Page 1] Witness to Faith

WHENEVER a new religion appears in the world, it evokes the opposition and hatred of all those whose self-interest makes them wish to maintain the old and outworn order. The new Messenger is either exiled or put to death. His disciples are dispersed, hunted down, imprisoned, tortured, and massacred. Throughout recorded history early followers of all religions have borne witness to their faith with their lives.

In our materialistic age when the pursuit of power, riches, and pleasure seems to be the only preoccupation of much of mankind, it is hard to believe that men can willingly exchange security, comfort, and life itself for the attainment of an incomprehensible Ideal. The modern mind recoils from the notion of voluntary sacrifice. It needs to be reassured that we are all essentially selfish and base. And yet . . .

Touched by “the light of the Sun of Divine Revelation,” tens of thousands confessed and acknowledged the liberating Truth. “Such was their faith, that most of them renounced their substance and kindred, and cleaved to the good pleasure of the All-Glorious. They laid down their lives for their Well-Beloved, and surrendered their all in His path. Their breasts were made targets for the darts of the enemy, and their heads adorned the spears of the infidel. No land remained which did not drink the blood of these embodiments of detachment, and no sword that did not bruise their necks. Their deeds, alone, testify to the truth of their words.”

They were not ascetics, fearing and rejecting life. They were devoted fathers, tender mothers, happy children, and wise old men, loving God’s creation and enjoying His gifts. If they gladly rushed to their death, it was to testify to the power of life, and to be “endued with the Divine Elixir that can, alone, transmute into purest gold the dross of the world” and give the power “to administer the infallible remedy for all the ills that afflict the children of men.” Thus martyrdom became a willing sacrifice offered for the sake of the entire human race, an act of supreme transcendence and total affirmation.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THE EDITORS of WORLD ORDER are pleased to present to their readers in this issue a moving account of two extraordinary heroes of the early days of the Bahá’í Era—two individuals who gave their lives for the Faith to which they were so deeply attached. While we may never be called upon to prove our faith by laying down our lives, we are emphatically reminded of the degree of commitment necessary to show, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written, that we have torn away and cast aside the “ragged and outworn garment” we have inherited from the past and “put on the robe woven in the utmost purity and holiness in the loom of reality.” Ours, more frequently than the sacrifice of martyrdom, is the challenge to certitude which drew that “spiritual wayfarer,” Mishkín-Qalam, away from the fame of his calligraphy and caused him to cross great distances, measure out the miles, climb mountains, pass over deserts and the sea, until he reached Adrianople and attained the presence of Bahá’u’lláh.

We of an age in which we may witness the formation of a new order being thrust upon us, like maturity on a teenager bent on remaining a youth, cannot literally make the journey to the fountain source. But we can prove good faith by turning to those principles which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, once again, has told us “must he added to the matter of Universal Peace and combined with it, so that results may accrue.” Thus, we are equally pleased to offer our readers Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s assessment of the need—nay, the absolute responsibility—for every individual, government, and nation to cease to live in isolation and to pursue policies inconsistent with the interests of others, and Dr. William S. Hatcher’s “Economics and Moral Values,” which, by a different route, also underscores the need for cooperation on every level of human society, a new sort of cooperation which recognizes differences but in no way implies judgments of superiority or inferiority. Martyrs we may be, too—living martyrs who help to usher in the new order so resistlessly advancing upon us.

• • •

That moral qualities are basic to the survival of society and are, therefore, indispensable to human, as against animal, life is a proposition which would be rejected by a great many intelligent people. Such human virtues as trust, confidence, and faith are frequently considered to be derivatives of social or economic situations and conditions. It will, therefore, come as a surprise to some to read in Professor Hatcher’s article that at least certain human virtues, including the indispensable virtue of trust, must precede economic activity, which is impossible without them. This particular passage in Dr. Hatcher’s article caused one of the Editors to think of the word “credit”—a thing without which no complex economy could exist. Credit, in Latin, means “he believes.” Without a belief that a loan would be repaid, or the price of goods remitted, how could exchange take place?

Credit, too, is central to an understanding of the breakdown in Ik society. For [Page 3] credit, in its Latin signification, is what has disappeared from Ik society, where every individual has become a separate entity, mistrustful of others and relying only upon himself. Professor Howard B. Garey’s review of Colin M. Turnbull’s The Mountain People, like Dr. Hatcher’s article on economics and moral values, makes it abundantly clear that human virtues are not luxuries but the very cement which holds society together.

• • •

To the Editor

MORE NOTES ON WOMEN

I read with interest Mr. Haden’s article “Notes on Women’s Liberation” that appeared in the Winter 1973-74 issue of WORLD ORDER. The subject of equal rights and status for women has long been a concern of Bahá’ís all over the world. Four years prior to the historic 1848 feminist meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, the Bahá’í Faith had begun in Persia with the clarion call of the equality of men and women. As the Bahá’í Writings point out, “This is peculiar to the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, for all other religions have placed man above woman.”

However, Mr. Haden’s article, though provocative at a first reading, was not really illuminating, and greater illumination is what this important subject needs. Mr. Haden states that “the wheel of things is turning to a new position,” yet he refuses to accept the visionary or metaphysical aspects of the women’s movement. As a Bahá’í, I believe that a new world vision is precisely what is needed to create a new social reality and that without a transcendent view we, feminists or not, are lodged in the past.

It is incredible the basis on which Mr. Haden dismisses the thesis that women in politics will create a peaceful world. He looks at two or three women leaders in a male-dominated world and wonders why their countries are not at peace. The Bahá’í Writings unequivocally state that “Assuredly woman will abolish warfare among mankind” and that “she will be the greatest factor in establishing Universal Peace. . . .” This refers not only to the special qualities she brings to world affairs but to the need for establishing an urgently needed balance in our society. “Inasmuch as human society consists of two factors, the male and female, each the complement of the other, the happiness and stability of humanity cannot he assured unless both are perfected. Therefore the standard and status of man and woman must become equalized.”

Mr. Haden says there are “neither straw men nor straw women” in his article, yet he passes off a major issue of the movement with a sweeping generalization that he states as fact. The idea that drudgework, as I call it, is a bitter pill we must all swallow and that “in most or all male occupations there is the same high percentage of non-creative activity” flies in the face of the most basic research into the occupations of men and women, their levels of responsibility, and opportunities for development.

For one who implies that language is a red herring in the women’s movement, Mr. Haden devotes half of his article to the subject. He objects to the father removing the word “boy” from his daughter’s tool box. This is not a matter of singling out the “approved social themes” but rather of giving a more balanced view based on social reality. Mr. Haden’s logic would lead us to accept most of the stereotypes around us— all the way from “brother doctor” and “sister nurse” in our children's books, to all white faces on television.

I fail, also, to see how Mr. Haden can place his hopes on art as “a true liberating force,” when art is always a by-product of a culture and not an initiator of it. What examples do we have of art liberating a group or race of people?

Mr. Haden chooses to base his article on criticism of the positions of the “radical ideologues.” Their extreme positions do not conform to my thinking, either, but these are not the [Page 4] fundamental thrust of the movement. Still, although I agree with several of his points, I object primarily to the approach he uses. In one place he alludes to a parallel movement, the civil rights movement. I doubt that, if asked, he would have treated the issues of that movement with the same superficiality and tone of sarcasm. Both movements have their extreme elements and highly charged vocabulary, but that should not obscure our deep appreciation of the underlying issues. It seems that the “voice of patience and sensitivity” he holds up would be the one to consider those issues in earnest—to give attention to the pressing needs of the rank and file minority person or, in this context, the everyday woman.

Instead, Mr. Haden has substituted a derisive, pot-shotting style that only reinforces the sparring mentality so pervasive within and without the movement, one that contributes little constructive to the problem.

I look forward to seeing in WORLD ORDER another discussion of this topic—one that illuminates the relationship between a woman’s role 1n “bringing up a Bahá’í child . . . which is the chief responsibility of the mother” and her obligation to “participate fully and equally in the affairs of the world” and to “go neck and neck with men” into “all human departments.”

PENNY WALKER

South Hadley, Massachusetts

ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP

I have read with great pleasure Mr. Denis MacEoin’s scholarly and significant article, “Oriental Scholarship and the Bahá’í Faith” [Summer 1974]. It should be made widely available to students of religion and of the Middle East.

However, I must disagree with Mr. MacEoin’s assertion that Edward G. Browne “largely misunderstood the relationship between the Bábí and Bahá’í religions, feeling that in the latter, the Báb had been relegated to a position resembling that of John the Baptist (a misconception which the frequent and not always careful use of this analogy by Bahá’ís only perpetuated).” I am not sure that Browne misunderstood the Bahá’í position or that the Bahá’ís have been careless 1n their use of the analogy to which Mr. MacEoin refers.

Speaking of those few Bábís who rejected the Bahá’í Revelation, Bahá’u’lláh states: “They that have turned aside from Me have spoken even as the followers of John (the Baptist) spoke. For they, too, protested against Him Who was the Spirit (Jesus) saying: ‘The dispensation of John hath not yet ended; wherefore hast thou come?’” (Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 157). Notice the word “dispensation” which suggests that John was indeed a Prophet in his own right.

In The Kitáb-i-Íqán (p 64) Bahá’u’lláh cites the verse of the Qur’án which testifies that John was a Messenger: “God announceth Yaḥyá [John] to thee, who shall bear witness unto the Word from God . . .” (Qur’án 3:39). In the Kitáb-i-Badí‘, characterized by Shoghi Effendi as “His apologia, written to refute the accusations levelled against Him by Mírzá Mihdíy-i-Rashtí” (God Passes By, p.172), Bahá’u’lláh states among other things that “John appeared before Jesus, proclaiming his [John’s] prophethood, and all sects of Islám recognize him as a prophet; and he came with laws and commandments . . .” (Kitáb-i-Badí‘, p. 159). In another passage in the same book, Bahá’u’lláh states: “I swear by God that the Manifestation of the Primal Point [the Báb] and this most luminous, most wondrous Manifestation [Bahá’u’lláh] are exactly like the appearance of John, son of Zachariah, and the Spirit of God [Rúḥu’lláh— Jesus] . . .” (p. 161). Further, Bahá’u’lláh adds that John was a Prophet and Messenger (Nabí’ va rasúl) and simultaneously a herald of the subsequent revelation.

In one of His epistles, Bahá’u’lláh says that John “having the station of prophethood [Nubuvvat], in spite of the greatness of that station proclaimed to man the glad tidings of the Manifestation of the Spirit [Jesus] . . .” A number of people did not understand the meaning of John’s words, Bahá’u’lláh continues, and some of his disciples, after his martyrdom, failed to recognize the Divine Manifestation in Jesus, remaining a separate group of followers of John. (See Ishráq-i-Khávarí’s commentary on the Íqán, vol. 2, pp. 186-87.)

In the same vein Shoghi Effendi writes in God Passes By with reference to the Báb: “He the ‘Qá’im’ (He Who ariseth) promised to the Shí‘ahs, the ‘Mihdi’ (One Who is guided) awaited by the Sunnis, the ‘Return of John the Baptist’ expected by the Christians . . . (pp. 57-58). In the light of these passages it would seem that the relationship of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh is in every respect analogous to that of John and Jesus.

KAZEM KAZEMZADEH

Santa Monica, California

[Page 5]

[Page 6]

A View of World Order

BY PRIME MINISTER PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU

IT IS 452 YEARS since the expedition commanded by Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe and proved irrefutably that the planet earth was of finite dimensions. In that period of four and a half centuries, man’s penchant for discovery, for conquest, and for exploitation has been demonstrated unceasingly. Since the sixteenth century educated men and women with few exceptions have believed that the resources of the world were in excess of whatever use mankind could ever make of them, that the wealth of the oceans was inexhaustible, that the numbers of human beings inhabiting the earth could never exceed the natural carrying capacity of the planet. For much of that time, too, few men or women gave any thought to the immense disparities—in social condition, in economic position, in education—that existed between populations of European origin and all others.

How much we have been forced to learn in the past quarter century! One need not be a neo-Malthusian, or a subscriber to any of the pessimistic theories now abounding, to have learned that there are limits to the rate at which the earth’s resources can be exploited, that there are limits to the ability of our biosphere to absorb pollution, that there are limits to the capacity of the globe to support human life. These truths we now know and accept.

We know, too, albeit with a different kind of knowledge, that the imbalance in the basic human condition—an imbalance in access to health care, to a nutritious diet, to shelter, to schooling—is intolerable in its magnitude.

We know all this, but the knowledge has not made us wise. Certainly it has not made wise those whose responsibility it is to take decisions on behalf of their constituents. Nor should we be surprised. The decision-making process reveals remarkably little change from its condition as described three centuries ago by an eminent Swedish statesman. In a letter to his son written in 1648, Count Axel Oxenstierna described the then condition of man in words that remain applicable to this day. He wrote: “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia regitur orbis?” (Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?)

If wisdom was lacking at the time of the Peace of Westphalia, its omission was compensated for by the seemingly infinite resilience of this planet and its population to recover from human errors. In 1974 we know that the resilience of both is limited and, in some respects, dangerously close to exhaustion. But until that knowledge is made manifest in an extended sense of responsibility, it will be of little use to mankind. The classical scope of responsibility—to one’s self, to one’s family, to one’s community, and to one’s nation —must be broadened. Not even the biblical admonition of responsibility to all men is sufficiently broad. The new responsibility must be more. It must extend to all space and through all time. It must be inclusive of persons far beyond our own national frontiers; it must encompass the physical planet and all its ingredients—water and air, non-renewable resources, living organisms; it must extend into the future not just for months or years, but for decades.

This responsibility, in short, must be universal in concept and planetary in scope. It demands a great deal of every man and woman, but it falls with particular weight on the inhabitants and governments of the developed

This article is excerpted from notes prepared for a talk by Prime Minister Trudeau at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, on May 12, 1974.

[Page 7] nations for we are the ones who have amassed the knowledge; we are the ones who possess the means to alter positively the course of human destiny.

Yet this responsibility is not unbearable. Its exercise, after all, is no more than an exhibition of maturity. For is it not essential to maturity that we are able to contemplate and comprehend the fate of others beyond our immediate circle, not just in the present but for generations to come? A distinguished Canadian, Dr. Brock Chisholm, believed so. As the first Director-General of the World Health Organization he did much to encourage the acceptance of that responsibility. And is it not a reflection of maturity that we employ our energies not merely in a contemplative but in a positive fashion? Henry David Thoreau believed so. He observed with scorn, you will recall: “As if you can kill time without injuring eternity.”

THIS NEW MATURITY requires new values. Foremost among them is an acceptance that economic growth and material advantage are not goals to be isolated from the general aim of mankind. The twentieth-century devotion to material gain has created an imbalance in the human condition that infects the attitudes of all too many men and women and the policies of most governments. Economic criteria to the exclusion of almost all others are employed as the measurement of individual achievement and of governmental performance. “Prosperity” is the rallying cry of politicians everywhere. But what of happiness? What of contentment? What of satisfaction? Are we to believe that these are concomitants of economic growth? To anyone who has despaired at endless traffic jams, to anyone who has encountered the obscenity of unplanned urban sprawl, to anyone who grieves over the despoliation of oceans and beaches by needless oil spills—to any of these persons the answer must be no.

The Gross National Product is no measurement of social justice, or human dignity, or cultural attainment. Yet in the absence of reliable social indicators we elect governments, formulate foreign policies, offer advice to the world at large—all on the assumption that economic growth is not only an attribute of the good life but is in fact its guarantor. How often in our blindness do we reflect on the fact that those computers calculating the magical GNP, measuring as they do prices of items, regard with equal weight the manufacture of a motor vehicle and the consequences of a fatal automobile accident, marriage and divorce, health and sickness, lawfulness and crime. The computer does so because GNP is the total value of goods and services. A museum, for these purposes, is indistinct from a mortuary so long as it charges an entrance fee. Both provide service. So does an autobody shop, a lawyer specializing in divorces, a narcotics ward in a hospital, a prison. Dollar for dollar, a manufacturer of handguns is treated no differently than the farmer who cultivates an apple orchard, nor is the school teacher from the security guard. The paving of a parking lot is indistinguishable from the construction of a public swimming pool. If money is spent, the GNP is enhanced. The economy benefits, but surely not the human condition.

Yet we plan our lives all too often on the assumption that the human condition is capable of measurement, is a reflection of the GNP. And we not only continue the charade; we hold it out as a standard of conduct to the developing nations. We have the arrogance to project our condition, our society, as the universal model.

So indiscriminate are our values that we [Page 8] allow ourselves to be directed by governments on the single assumption that the expenditure of money is a measure of happiness. Yet what does growth of the GNP do to confine or reduce the extent of delinquency in juveniles, corruption in government, monopoly in business, stagnancy in cultural activity, limitations in educational opportunity, pollution in our environment? What solutions does it offer to the presence of violence, or to the absence of beauty? Bluntly stated, it does nothing.

Nevertheless, it is this “nothing” that directs our lives. It is this “nothing” that ridicules all too often the warnings of conservationists and the admonitions of theologians. It is this “nothing” that we have the effrontery to export to the newly independent countries under the guise of foreign aid. It is this “nothing” that we have come to worship even as we suspect its falsity and its perversity. This “nothing” we clothe all too often with attractive descriptions: “progress,” “modernity,” “achievement.” As we do so, we admit our woeful weakness in the quality of our words, of our attitudes, and of our actions.

Our definition of the good life has become inextricably intertwined with abundance— abundance which invites waste and obsolescence, which forgives tawdriness and self-indulgence.

Are we here in our lands of apparent— though limited—plenty unable to expand our consciousness and our attitude, to reexamine our value system, to discount the worth of purely economic factors as an evaluation of the human condition? Are we unable to replace these with standards which will measure not Gross National Product but Net Human Benefit? If we are not, I fear that increasingly we will prescribe our own fate, and unfailingly we will fix the fate of hundreds of millions of others. We will have set the pattern and provided the wherewithall for a no-win contest. To paraphrase a distinguished American jurist, many of our practices in this respect are so short sighted in character and so long term in effect that we cannot tolerate their being ignored for we cannot survive their being repeated.

IF WE ACCEPT, as I presume we do, that the extreme disparity in living standards between the rich and the poor, the comfortable and the hungry cannot be permitted to continue; if we also accept, as I think we do, that there are benefits which flow from a reduction of the division between states which are developed and those that are developing; if these propositions we accept, then also we must accept some responsibility for their implementation. Yet however advantageous is a community of nations cooperating to reduce tension, however desirable is a multitude of states expanding its purchasing power, however enriching is a world population able to turn from bare existence to culturally creative activity, these ends cannot be achieved by present means.

The evidence is more than convincing.

If the biosphere cannot tolerate further pollution from the third of the world that is industrialized, then surely it cannot absorb simultaneously the same rates of pollution from the other two thirds. If the earth’s resources cannot support the present rate of exploitation for the benefit of the minority, then it cannot permit that extraction to be tripled. If assistance and transfers to the developing countries are as yet making little significant impact, considerably more cannot be expected from only a marginal increase in the pattern and quantity of aid. If the developing countries cannot now support the heavy burden of over-population, relief will not be found in transferring a few hundreds of thousands of human beings to the more developed countries.

Given that present patterns of economic growth in the developed countries must level out for environmental and physical reasons, can we ask the developing nations to limit their development, curtail their goals, dampen their desires? Surely not. But how otherwise?

[Page 9]More will be required of us in this exercise than mere charity or compassion. This task demands a rational employment of our talents and skills, one founded on a community ethic more pronounced and more heeded than any in our present experience.

The challenge is immense, and I am glad that it is, for only the greatest of challenges are able to capture the imagination of men and women everywhere.

The challenge is at once both basic and sophisticated, and I am glad that it is, for only a challenge of many parts is able to stimulate simultaneously the response of theologians, philosophers, scientists, and politicians.

The challenge is not a gloomy one of avoiding doomsday; it is a joyous one of introducing into the world a dynamic equilibrium between man and nature, between man and man.

What we face now is not deprivation, but the challenge of sharing. We need not do without, but we must be good stewards of what we have. To ensure nature’s continued bounty, we are not asked to suffer, but we are asked to be reasonable. We are asked to adjust our demands to nature’s limitations. We are asked to concentrate not on what we have, but on what we are. I sincerely hope that man’s know-how—this prolific, admirable yet dangerous know-how—can be so redirected that it will free all men from the fascinations and illusions of quantity and bestow instead the lasting gift of quality. . . .

THIS APPEAL does not ask for the rejection of any fundamental beliefs. It asks, essentially, that we be responsible. The scope of that responsibility must be so broad, however, and its application so universal, that I dare to regard it as qualitatively distinct from classical concepts. This responsibility is a new value, a new ethic.

This new ethic does not demand necessarily the continued existence of the world’s trading or monetary systems in their present form any more than it requires revolutionary activities for its broad implementation. What it does require is an understanding that no individual, no government, no nation is capable of living in isolation or of pursuing policies inconsistent with the interests—both present and future—of others.

In these final decades of the twentieth century, social justice can no more be compartmentalized than can quality of life be isolated. Justice is found everywhere, or it is found nowhere. Contamination in one community taints every other.

Demanding upon us as is this extended sense of responsibility, I am confident that the burden can be shouldered with enlightenment and success. I am confident partly because of my experience with that unique association called the Commonwealth of Nations. I attach importance to the Commonwealth because in its diversity, its broad representation of every continent, every color, every creed, every stage of development, there is a shared belief in the overwhelming importance of human equality and dignity. There is more. When Commonwealth Heads of Government gather together, we converse with one another with remarkable candor. We are not reluctant to describe our weaknesses, our dreams for our peoples, our belief in the value of human life, our dedication to the concepts of cooperation and understanding. We are not fearful of admitting that we do not know all the answers, that our ignorance has led to mistakes, that our patience with ourselves and with one another is sometimes sorely tried.

In those gatherings there exists a link between the sense of what is ideal and the knowledge of what is possible, between the domain of absolute values and the domain of practical politics—a link that elsewhere is all-too-seldom identified, yet that is essential to the forward movement of society. It is a link I often wish was better understood by academics and by politicians in all countries.

There are impatient men in the Commonwealth, for most come from countries not yet developed to a fraction of their potential, and there are wise men in the Commonwealth, for [Page 10] all have tasted the frustrations of introducing change and of adapting to change. This blend of impatience and wisdom lends to our discussions an invaluable richness.

We are able, around a single table, to articulate the lofty, questing nature of mankind and then to relate these aspirations to the bone-wearying requirements of providing our citizens with the basic elements of survival. In this virtuoso kind of exercise—this posture of head in the clouds and feet on the ground—the leaders of the developing countries often display an impressive capability. It is a capability which is born of necessity. In their countries the few who are well-educated cannot be narrow specialists, cannot refuse to accept responsibility. One does not distinguish between town and gown if there are present in an entire country few of the former and almost none of the latter. Whatever tension exists between university and government in a newly independent state tends to be of a positive, dynamic nature if only because the problems to be solved are so many and the number of persons qualified to think about them so few.

In this respect I find ironical the attitude of some western scholars who profess reluctance to push against the outer barriers of social norms, to question old values or to test new ethics, all because they believe governments will not follow the newly broken ground or that society is too sedentary to change. This difference—dare I call it irresponsibility? —contributes to the very sedentary condition about which the social scientists rightly voice concern, A government faces an insuperable task in encouraging the electorate to abandon old assumptions unless it can count upon the exploratory assistance and the philosophical commitment of its university graduates.

THE DIRECTION in which a nation is to move may be fixed by its leaders, but the speed with which the nation responds depends upon the influence of others. And especially is this so in the democracies where Siren-like appeals originate from so many sources and interests. No single political leader, no group of political leaders, is capable of changing the values and attitudes of a whole society. In your country and mine, the role of universities and university graduates is immense. . . .

But they must not underestimate the magnitude of the challenge we face or the extent of the responsibility we bear. . . . All must work to extend to others a measure of human dignity—to ensure through our efforts that hope and faith in the future are not reserved for a minority of the world’s population but are available to all.

If this can only be accomplished through the acceptance of a new ethic, then so be it. But we cannot ask others to subscribe to that ethic without realizing that we are answerable to ourselves for its proper discharge. If we deny that truth, we deny to others the right to be free. Ethics are the fibres of civilized conduct. Interwoven with enlightened laws they become the fabric we call society. A rent in that fabric weakens the whole structure, no matter who does the tearing. The act is the more heinous, however, when done by one to whom society has granted special privileges and from whom society has the right to demand enlightened conduct.

. . . My message . . . is a simple one. It is that the world is our constituency: yours, mine; governmentally, personally. That world is not just a physical planet with immutable physical laws and finite limits; it is as well a single, interdependent community. No one has described it more vividly, nor more accurately, than Barbara Ward when she named it “The Global Village.” In that village we are all accountable. In that village we all face the most pervasive, the most integrated and, perhaps—if we should fail— the final challenge in the history of mankind. For this reason, none of us can escape the burden of our ethic. Equally, none of us should underestimate the joy and the satisfaction which will follow from its proper discharge.

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Klaus N. Kallenberger

[Page 14]

Economics and Moral Values

BY WILLIAM S. HATCHER

THERE IS a pervasive modern sentiment that economics and morality are peculiarly incompatible. Morality, it is felt, deals in intangible values. It treats of what is most human, personal, and emotional about man, whereas economics, by its very nature, dehumanizes and depersonalizes. It puts a price tag (tangible value) on everything and regards the individual primarily as a producing and consuming unit in a vast impersonal system.

The modern “business ethic” has contended in effect that this impersonal aspect of modern economics is unavoidable. To produce the abundance we all desire, it is said, the rate of production must constantly increase. That which does not contribute to constantly increasing productivity is considered irrelevant and harmful to the economy and thus to the public well-being. “What’s good for General Motors is good for everybody.”

In thus creating an opposition between economics and morality, between tangible and intangible values, those who put forth this point of view seek to buttress the economic system by ridding it once and for all of extrinsic controls not germane to “purely economic” considerations. They see nothing to fear from public acceptance of the economics- morality opposition since it seems clear that, human nature being what it is (or rather what they conceive it to be), people generally would unhesitatingly choose tangibles over intangibles.

However, it is now clear that a considerable number of people, especially members of the current younger generation, are quite willing to make the opposite choice. If dehumanization is the inevitable result of the present economic system, they say, then let us be done with the system. Human nature, it seems, is not so clearly one-sided after all. One does not exaggerate by saying that the battle is joined and that the ultimate resolution of this opposition is neither certain nor inconsequential.

[Page 15] However, one can question the validity of this opposition of moral and economic values. It is just possible that the dehumanizing values associated with our modern economic system precede the system rather than flow from it. Perhaps it is not so much that money corrupts but that corrupt people are using wealth in corrupt ways for corrupt ends. Perhaps, in short, our economic system is simply an external and concrete reflection of our collective inner life which the immense resources of modern technology have allowed us to project and magnify to greater dimensions.

I do not claim that this hypothesis is so self-evident as to command immediate assent, but it is plausible enough to be worth serious thought. There are things which immediately come to mind to reinforce this initial plausibility. For example, in recent years the business community generally has come to appreciate and acknowledge openly that many intangibles can severely affect productivity. Instead of yielding a greater concern for employees as individuals, this realization has given rise to a manipulative approach towards human relations in an effort to induce the “right” attitudes. The social sciences have been applied so as to produce instant “concern” and phony sincerity in order to reassure the individual that one is genuinely interested in him.

Thus, even when it became pragmatically useful to introduce intangible values into the production system, people chose impersonal substitutes, though these were not necessarily the most efficient. Surely this says something about our inner life, our psychological makeup, and our moral character independently of the system itself.

Viewing economics as primarily a concrete reflection of our morality has profound implications for understanding the dynamics of our economic system. For a consequence of this view is that one cannot change the economic system in any significant way without [Page 16] changing morality. It is thus all the more important to consider whether this analysis might be correct.

LET US BEGIN with a thought experiment. Imagine an ideal starting point for our history at which there are only individuals and no social organization whatever. (Such a starting point surely never existed; but milennia ago, when man’s consciousness was little above the animal state, there might have been something approaching it.) In this imagined state of affairs, man’s freedom from social constraint is total since there is no society to impose constraints. The individual must produce all he consumes, and he is the sole consumer of everything he produces. The whole economic cycle is closed on the individual.

Generally speaking, an individual in society is subject to two types of constraints. First, there are personal ones imposed by the individual’s internal needs which cry for satisfaction. These are partly tangible—the need for food, shelter, and the like—and partly intangible. Second, there are social constraints which are external demands placed on him by society in an effort to force him to play a certain role in its life. From the individual point of view, every form of social organization which man has developed can be viewed as a compromise between these two forces: the individual’s need for a certain self-realization, on the one hand, and society’s need for order and control, on the other. Thus the degree of freedom of an individual in society can be resolved into two components: his degree of freedom from his internal needs and his degree of freedom from external, social demands or constraints.

In the ideal situation we are imagining, the individual is totally free from social constraints because there is no society. But he is, at the same time, a prey to his personal internal needs and indeed the most basic, physical ones. The second component of his freedom is infinite while the first is nil. If sickness, weakness, or any slight natural calamity prevent him from being active for too long a period, he will die. Not only is the economic cycle of production and consumption closed on the individual but the cycle of life itself.

Having now acquired some idea of the economic state of an individual without society, let us consider precisely in what way social organization actually contributes to changing this state of affairs. Our ideal state was characterized by two basic facts; the individual produces all he consumes, and he is the sole consumer of all he produces. The only way to modify this pattern is for other men to produce some things the individual consumes or else for other men to consume some things the individual produces. Since the situation is symmetric as between two or more individuals, both of the alternatives really amount to the same thing—namely, division of labor.

Thus division of labor is the logical first step towards society, at least from the purely economic point of view. Division of labor is a tool of social organization which does not presuppose any given state of technology, though its concrete expression in a particular society is obviously affected by existing technology. However, division of labor does presuppose certain kinds of human relationships. For example, in order that the individual accept to cease producing some items he needs, he must have confidence that others are going to produce them. Similarly, others must have confidence that he is going to produce things which they need. A mutual trust must be felt. This mutual trust is the whole basis of division of labor and thus is a foundation stone of society itself. It is intangible values which produce the tangible ones.

This mutual trust is two-fold. It is first a trust in the individual, that he will honestly seek to fulfill his duty to produce a portion of what others need and are no longer producing. It is also a trust in the social organization itself, that it will require other individuals to play the necessary role and that it will assure each individual of receiving those things he needs but no longer produces. [Page 17] Thus all of the essential features of morality are implicit in the very beginning: individual discipline, obedience, trust, individual ethic, social responsibility, and so on.

It is also the beginning of a basic tension because now the individual is forever subject to two distinct forces, the internal force of his own needs and desires and the external force of society which requires him to perform a certain function for society.

The individual, however, is relieved of the necessity of having to produce certain things he needs since others are now producing them. His degree of internal freedom has increased at the same time that his degree of external freedom has decreased. Social organization has allowed the individual greater internal freedom and self-realization at the expense of a decrease in external freedom.

IN THE ORIGINAL, purely individual state of affairs, the individual’s self-realization never rose above that of pure physical survival since the struggle for survival took all his time and energy. There was no intellectual, spiritual, or other intangible development since the purely physical necessities forced the individual to live on an animal level. Nor was there “progress” from one generation to the next since each new generation began again at the same level.

This shows just how social are our most private feelings and thoughts. Everything which lifts us above an animal level of existence is made possible only through the existence of a certain level of social organization which, in turn, depends on the existence of a certain level of moral functioning. We may, therefore, say that the particular form of social organization in a given society at a given time is an expression of this basic morality on which it depends. Economics depends on morality.

We can also see that the basic direction of social evolution is that it progressively maximizes the internal freedom of the individual, requiring a concomitantly more refined and delicately balanced level of social organization. The goal of society could hardly be taken to be the satisfaction only (or primarily) of the individual’s purely physical needs as these were already more or less satisfied in the most primitive state.

Clearly, society is not just a collection of the individuals which make it up, but it is rather the individuals plus the quality of relationships that exist among them. Thus something approaching our original, imagined state can exist even in large collectivities if the mutual relationships of trust and so on are sufficiently absent. Since the existence of these relationships is, again, a function of the basic morality, we can summarize the situation as follows: Immoral or amoral collectivities, however large, tend toward a purely animal level of existence in which every man is for himself alone and internal freedom tends towards zero.

Division of labor is a tool of social organization which represents the first step above a purely animal level of existence. As society progresses, the division naturally tends toward greater individual expertise and therefore greater specialization. A second basic step in development occurs when the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain the social system become too great to be handled by the individual alone. There is a need for a second level of organization to maintain the first one. There are teachers and intellectuals who concentrate on understanding the basic skills and in transmitting them from one generation to the next. There is a more explicit awareness of the importance played by the quality of human relationships necessary to the system. There are those whose duty becomes that of studying and understanding this morality and of transmitting it to each generation. These are priests, philosophers, moralists. Finally, there is a necessity for certain people to concentrate on the administration of the process. These are jurists, overseers, and administrators of various sorts.

However oversimplified this sketch may be, one point is beyond dispute: This secondary level of specialization of labor is [Page 18] characterized by the fact that its members no longer directly produce anything. The teacher, the priest, the intellectual, the administrator consume but do not produce tangibles. The secondary level of organization, therefore, necessitates for its maintenance a greater level of economic production. Modern industry has furnished society with certain powerful tools to accomplish this. But in preindustrial societies there seemed to be only one answer—namely, the creation of a class which produced considerably more than it consumed in order to compensate for the intellectual class which consumed more than it produced. Thereby did some form of slavery or serfdom become a basic institution of human society.

This seeming inevitability of some form of involuntary servitude is confirmed by the fact that it has been a feature of every society before the twentieth-century level of industrialization was attained. There are no exceptions. It was only in the nineteenth century that slaves were freed in North America, that the serfs were liberated in Russia, and that the slave trading was prohibited in the British Colonies. Moreover! industrial bondage has continued in Europe and North America well into the twentieth century.

One could try to argue that it really was possible to eliminate enforced labor in preindustrial society. Nevertheless, it is one of the most pervasive facts of history that no preindustrial society ever did.

None of the great religious Prophets of the past, neither Moses nor Jesus nor Muhammad, forbade slavery. Perhaps the existence of the secondary level of social organization depended on slavery to such an extent that to forbid it would have been tantamount to forbidding society.

However, if the great Prophets did not abolish slavery, they took very strong steps to humanize the institution as much as possible. Besides giving various minor laws that tended to ensure the good treatment of slaves, Moses assured them at least some leisure by requiring a total cessation of work every seven days. This latter principle He made one of the ten commandments, coeval with the most basic moral principles of His system. Jesus stressed the intrinsic worth and value of the individual by teaching that each individual was capable of establishing a certain internal relationship with God, a relationship unconditioned by social or economic status. The outward form of this relationship involved a certain reciprocity based on a new kind of love (agape). The early Christians viewed this new relationship primarily as between individuals and as one that did not seem to imply any necessary change in social status. Nevertheless, we can see in Paul’s request that Philemon accept the slave Onesimus as a brother an attitude towards slaves (if not towards slavery) that was doubtless significantly different from the one usually found in Roman society. Let modern social reformers be cynical if they will, but slaves in Roman society no doubt appreciated the difference.

The attitude of white Christian slave masters toward black slaves in nineteenth-century America further illustrates the force of Jesus’ teaching in a strangely negative way. Realizing that the perpetration of brutal enslavement on a fellow human was contrary to the Christian view of man, some white Christians persuaded themselves that blacks were not men—that is, that they were a subhuman species. This allowed them to enslave blacks and salve their consciences at the same time. It also explains why superficial racial differences were so important in the white view of slavery. It was the only way that slavery could be morally justified in Christian terms.

A similar belief in the subhumanness of blacks developed among white settlers in Australia towards the aborigines who were hunted for sport.

Islám made slavery a self-liquidating institution, by encouraging the conversion of all men and acknowledging any child born to a Muslim a free man. This undermined hereditary slavery and provided an avenue for the [Page 19] integration of freed slaves or children of slaves into society. Moreover, in the society into which Muhammad was born women were virtual slaves. They were bought and sold both for sexual pleasure and economic servitude. In marriage Muhammad gave women strong rights which could not be easily put aside by men, and required the protection of women by men.

These few examples serve not only to illustrate something of the relationship between the revealed religions and the economic aspects of man’s life but to give a general idea of the role and purpose of religion. The Prophets and Founders of religions have taught that which, given the level of technology existing in their society, tended to produce the greatest possible social unity and progress with maximum individual self-realization.

Returning now to the mainstream of our discussion, let us sum up our points as follows: The organized economic life of a society is built on division of labor. The first level of this division is the production and consumption of material goods, and the second level is the production of ideas and services necessary to the maintaining of the first level at a desired pitch of efficiency. The whole organization presupposes the existence of a certain morality involving mutual trust, willingness to work within the system, and so on. Such an organization can exist without any particularly advanced technology, but technology can significantly affect the form of the organization such as, for example, allowing for the elimination of slavery.

WHAT IS IT that makes the individual willing to specialize and accept his place in the system? What gives him the confidence that the things he needs but does not produce will be furnished to him? What, in short, is the motivational basis of the mutual trust so necessary to the continuation of the system? Clearly, different answers are possible to these questions. Each answer will determine a particular kind of economic system, a system which may rightly be said to be defined by this basic motivation of its underlying morality. We will consider several possible bases which are related to contemporary economic systems.

One possible motivation is the individual’s desire for increasing consumption—that is, the individual consents to play his role because he desires more and more goods and services. “I produce in order to get more and you do the same” is the unwritten watchword. This is the motivation of the morality on which contemporary capitalism is based. Production is a function of desire for increasing consumption. In order for the system to work this motivation must be universal or nearly so. If a significant proportion of the population ceases to desire increased consumption, the system is in difficulty.

One feature of such a system is its dynamism. Since desires are potentially unlimited (as opposed to needs which are limited), there is no natural or necessary saturation point. There is a never-ending spiral in which desire for increased consumption yields increased production which again leads to new desires. Desire for consumption is a spark that goes directly from consumer to producer [Page 20] and back. It needs no intermediary. Nor does the individual producer-consumer need much formal assurance by government or other agencies that others are being made to produce. He “knows” they will produce because he knows they want to consume as much as he does. Thus in a capitalistic system the role of government is largely directed towards assuring that the “rules” of the game are respected in some minimal way.

In recent years Western countries have also felt an increasing need for governmental control and restriction in order to ensure greater economic justice (that is, a more equitable distribution of goods). The point is that the dynamic of the system is independent of the government which appears rather as a regulatory agency in various ways.

The ability of the capitalistic economic system to function with so much independence allows the government to appear somewhat more stable than it actually is. Any number of crises can occur in the political realm without the economic system’s being noticeably affected.

More directly antithetical to the basis of capitalism than subversion of the government is anything which tends to weaken the basic motivation of the system. Hippies and other “dropouts” are perceived as a considerable threat since they reject the “increasing consumption” motivation. One can see that the extraordinary anger directed towards these generally innocuous people is tacit recognition by the public of the seriousness of the threat to the system posed by an erosion of this motivation.

The other major economic system is socialism and its variants. The motivation which characterizes socialism is similar to that of capitalism—except that the emphasis is on satisfaction of needs before desires. But this necessitates some agent, usually the state, which determines what needs are. Moreover, socialist distribution of goods differs from capitalist distribution. While the latter is governed primarily by the market, the former is governed by both the market and the state (though in theory the state should have withered away and should not be a part of a socialist society). Thus under socialism the government has turned out to be much more important to the functioning of the system than under capitalism.

In a socialist system the individual must have confidence not only in those who produce the things he needs but also in the fairness and efficiency of the government as a determiner of needs and an agency of distribution. In capitalism an individual can have little confidence in the government and still have complete confidence that the desire of the producer for consumption will motivate him independently of government functioning. Thus critical attitudes towards the government in socialist economic systems are much less easily tolerated than in capitalist systems. Confidence in and loyalty to the government are crucial to the continued functioning of a socialist system, much more so than in capitalism. This helps to explain why ideology is much more important in socialist countries. The government must continually make efforts to convince the public that it is a fair and efficient agent of regulation and distribution, and this entails continued efforts to inculcate the public with a certain philosophical attitude. In capitalism, on the contrary, we see rather the “end of ideology.” Problems are viewed not as philosophical but as practical problems of increasing production, increasing the desire for consumption, and increasing the efficiency of distribution.

This necessity for individual confidence in government under socialism also explains, at least to some extent, the repressive features of many socialist governments. Since the individual is no longer motivated to produce by the hope of increased consumption, he must be made to produce if he does not want to. And if he ever goes so far as to call into question publicly the fairness or efficiency of the government as a regulatory agency, he must be dealt with stringently.

Thinking people everywhere are beginning to feel that neither of these two basic systems [Page 21] is adequate for the world in which we now live. Socialism was born in the midst of the nineteenth century when slavery and industrial servitude were still widespread even in technologically advanced nations. However, late twentieth-century technology and automation have radically changed the ratio between the quantity of production and the quantity of physical labor necessary to production. This change, occurring in a fairly short period of time, has eliminated the necessity of economic slavery. In fact, not only is there no need for slavery, but underemployment has become the major problem, so powerful are the new means of production. In one century we have gone from slavery to massive unemployment. Even the term “overproduction” has become a part of our economic vocabulary.

Since satisfying basic needs is no longer the prime problem in countries with advanced technology, the very raison d’être of socialism has been largely undermined. Socialism appears more and more as an anachronism, a system designed primarily to fight a problem which no longer exists.

However, capitalism has produced problems just as great, if not greater, than socialism. Since capitalism feeds on the continued desire for increased consumption, the desire to consume must be artificially stimulated. This leads to manipulation of the public and a squandering of natural resources. The quality of products tends to decline in order to foster continued consumption of new items. Growth becomes an end in itself, and the quality of life is often sacrificed in the name of some vaguely defined notion of progress. Decisions as to the use of resources are made for the short-term profit of a few rather than for the long-term profit of everyone. When local markets become impossibly saturated, there is a frantic search for foreign ones, leading to the phenomenon of economic imperialism.

Recent research by the “Club of Rome” group has shown that if capital investment, unbridled growth, and unchecked exploitation of natural resources continue at anything like the present exponential rate, a major economic and social catastrophe is inevitable within about a generation. What is truly frightening is that the basic motivation of our system tends to reduce the possibility that the right decision will be made in time. The myths abound and are firmly entrenched: Growth is always good and is to be sought for its own sake; that which is new or different is necessarily better; and so forth.

Both capitalism and socialism were developed before the twentieth-century technological revolution. Both systems have had to adapt to the changes wrought by this new technology, but each system has dragged with it certain basic conceptions and myths which were too close to the spiritual heart of the system to be abandoned. Technology has made the basis of socialism obsolete and the basis of capitalism dangerous.

TO CHANGE these systems we must change the underlying motivation on which they are based. But what new basis to offer? The Bahá’í Faith proposes a solution to this dilemma. According to its teachings the basis of our economy in this new age should be twofold: service and cooperation. The individual’s basic motivation to produce should be service to others. This basic motivation should supplant both the socialist motivation of security and satisfaction of need and the capitalist motivation of desire for increasing consumption. Moreover, the service motive must express itself individually and collectively through cooperation rather than through competition.

Undoubtedly the motivation of service represents a higher level of morality than the basic motivation of either socialism or capitalism. Service implies a generally less egotistic approach to life than satisfaction of need or satisfaction of desire. Similarly, cooperation rather than competition implies a less selfish kind of relationship between groups.

In view of this, many will certainly object to the Bahá’í approach as being too “idealistic.” [Page 22] It is often felt that human nature is basically selfish and that the desire for increasing consumption will always be the natural basic motive for man. Let us recall, however, that the function of an economic system is that it liberates the individual for greater self-realization. In the past lack of technology put severe restraints on the possible forms of social and economic organization. Work was viewed as being only for survival; and the majority of people were forced to do jobs which were distasteful, boring, or otherwise uncreative. Work, then, carried a rather negative connotation.

In this framework the opposite of “work” was “leisure”; and leisure, previously available only to a few, became more generally available once the first fruits of modern technology were harvested. It was, therefore, a natural and easy step to consider that the ultimate fruits of technology would be more and more leisure made pleasurable by more and more consumption. Thus, imperceptibly but devastatingly, materialism became the philosophy and practice underlying our economic system and indeed our whole collective life.

Although it was natural that materialism be the result of twentieth-century economic abundance, it was not logically necessary. There is an increasing realization in every segment of society that this way of life has not made people truly happy. The massive unhappiness of the affluent young people, the tensions, nervous disorders, and misery which are so generally found in society today, the steady deterioration of family life and the quality of human relationships, the profound sense of uselessness which accompanies the vast majority of jobs in society (even those at “high” levels)—all of these things bear witness to the gross failure of materialism to satisfy the deeper, intangible needs of the individual.

The quickness of the transition from slavery and the old economic pattern to the new economy of abundance and leisure has hidden from us the fact that work has an intangible, spiritual component as well as an external, economic one. No one is happier than when he is doing work he truly loves. Creative, satisfying work is necessary to the self-realization of the individual. Technology, by relieving mankind of the necessity of doing boring, dull, and uncreative jobs offers the possibility of a society in which people work for motives other than pure economic necessity. It is the first time in history that we have been faced with this possibility on such a large scale. In a paradoxical way technology, which is material progress, has allowed us to realize the spiritual values of work. Rather than viewing the new abundance as a promise of liberation from work, we can see it as an opportunity to work in a new way and from an entirely new point of view. It is liberation not from work but rather from certain kinds of work which were all too pervasive in the past.

In highly industrialized countries technology has already created massive unemployment and drastically reduced working hours, all pointing to the inadequacy of the old concept of work. Without the fantastic waste due to war and senseless competition it is clearly possible to reduce the “necessary” component of work far beyond the present level.

Thus the Bahá’í motivation of work as service is actually reinforced by human nature and by the individual’s desire for self-fulfillment. Rather than contradicting human nature, this new basis gives expression to the deepest that is in every individual. Rather than being impractical or idealistic, it is really the only practical way in which to organize a society in the face of the new and powerful means of production which history has thrust in our hands. The whole process of economic evolution, which began with a crude division of labor thousands of years ago, has arrived at a new stage of maturity in which work has been lifted up from its most immediate function of physical survival to a higher spiritual function. This “lifting up” process might be compared with other areas of life, for example sexual relations which [Page 23] clearly performed a biological function at the beginning of man’s evolution but which have, over the years, come to be regarded as capable of expressing deeper, spiritual aspects of man’s nature when appropriately channeled.

Objections might also be forthcoming regarding cooperation. The virtues of competition are extolled as being the incarnation of the evolutionary principle of “survival of the fittest.” Competition, it is said, is necessary to progress. It weeds out weak and inadequate organisms and allows the strong, healthy ones to survive.

The fault with this argument is that it presumes the criterion of survival to remain constant throughout all stages of evolution. True, only the fittest will survive; but what is the criterion of fitness? In biological evolution there was clearly a point when brains and intellect represented superior fitness to physical strength or physical size (“growth”), for man survived against creatures who were physically stronger in every way. Thus we are clearly wrong to think that physical force and sheer size (“growth” again) are the sole criteria of survival. The criterion of fitness may vary drastically from one stage of evolution to another.

Indeed, in a world which has become a neighborhood overnight, cooperation is clearly the only means of survival. Competition may have served as a stimulus to progress at a certain stage of development, but it clearly hampers progress now. Evolution now challenges us to cooperate.

The modern situation cries out for cooperation on every level: between nations, between races, between religions, between peoples. Consider, for example, the economic waste that results from nationalistic economic competition. Wheat, oranges, and other foodstuffs desperately needed in one place have been burned in another. We talk of “overproduction” when in reality we should be talking about inefficient distribution. Even so tentative and halting a step as was the European Economic Community has proved to be a success beyond the expectations (mostly cynical) of anyone because it is based on cooperation rather than competition. The world is a neighborhood, and the attempt to maintain economics with artificially created local markets will not long endure.

Not only must there be cooperation on an international level. Even a single enterprise should be organized as a partnership between all parties, according to the Bahá’í teachings. In this way, the traditional conflict between capital and labor disappears since now all share in the profits and benefits of the enterprise.

According to the Bahá’í conception these principles of service and cooperation do not operate in a vacuum. Rather, they operate in the context of a system called the “World Order” of Bahá’u’lláh. While a detailed description of this system is beyond the scope of the present article, certain salient features should be mentioned.

IN THE BAHÁ’Í SYSTEM community life is organized on at least three distinct levels: local, intermediate (usually national), and international. At each of these levels there is an elected body of nine individuals. Both the manner of functioning and the manner of election of these organs is significant. Let us illustrate by considering briefly the local level.

Each year a local Bahá’í community elects a Local Spiritual Assembly consisting of nine adult members chosen from the community at large. In these elections there are no nominations of candidates or discussions of personalities. Each voter lists (by secret ballot) the names of those nine people he considers most fit to fulfill the function of Assembly member. When the votes are counted, those nine persons receiving the highest numbers of votes are declared elected.

There are two significant aspects of this election process. First, those who are elected never have the chance to seek such a position or even to indicate their desire to be elected (or not to be elected). Indeed, in the morality [Page 24] of the Bahá’í system any individual who openly hinted at such a desire would almost surely not be elected. Second, the individual voter has voted only for people whom he personally knows and judges to have qualities which fit him for the task. He does not vote for an image on a TV screen or for a number of preselected candidates.

Under such an electoral process each voter’s choice of nine tends to be good in that it does not represent a compromise in his judgment. The final selection by plurality is not a compromise either but rather follows the principle that those independently considered to be fit by the most people are liable to be so.

Elections at the national and international level follow much the same procedure.

The Local Spiritual Assembly has the task of directing community affairs, and its manner of functioning tends to assure that decisions will be made for the long-term benefit of everyone rather than, as is current in present society, for the short-term profit of a few. The basis of the Spiritual Assembly’s decision- making process is consultation, by which it is meant that each member has the duty and privilege to set forth his views in complete frankness. Only after such a thorough discussion is a decision made. The decision is made unanimously or, failing that, by a majority vote.

Consultation takes place not only in Spiritual Assembly meetings but also in periodic community meetings called Nineteen Day Feasts. At these Feasts all members of the community consult on all questions of community interest and are free to make recommendations to the Local Spiritual Assembly which the Assembly must, in turn, consider, reporting to the community the decision it takes with regard to the suggestion. An individual may likewise give suggestions directly to the National Spiritual Assembly or to the Universal House of Justice (the international body).

Here again is an important feature of the Bahá’í system. Even in democratic countries the people can only express their opinion by voting for or against a given proposition in a referendum. If the individual has an idea he feels is important for the community as a whole, what chance does he have of obtaining a hearing by those in a decision-making capacity? Practically none. This deafness to individual suggestions and ideas is a feature common to all systems of government which are practiced in the world today; it is significantly absent in the Bahá’í order.

This brings us to a very important point concerning the Bahá’í system and economics: In the Bahá’í system there is a complete separation of the technical role and the social role of the individual. It is not presumed that because a person has a talent for building bridges, operating on brains, or piloting airplanes that he has better ideas about how collective social life is to be organized than someone who, lacking these talents, sweeps streets or collects garbage.

Indeed, one of the sicknesses of our present economic system is the decision-making process itself. Clearly, society can never decide democratically who operates on brains or who flies airplanes. We cannot democratize individual abilities and talents. Decisions regarding an individual’s technical role must thus be based on some criterion of technical competence (which should be as fair as possible). The protection of society must take priority over individual desires in this case. But in current socio-economic systems, both capitalist and socialist, social status—the weight one accords to the opinion of a given individual—is almost directly proportional to technical role or ability. Simply put: Doctors, lawyers, and such have more pull than ordinary people.

To be a doctor in our society does not mean just having a certain technical role. It means having certain privileges, enjoying a certain life style, moving in certain circles, etc. This confusion of social and human worth with technical role stratifies society, causes disunity and prejudice, and tends to accentuate economic differences since now the [Page 25] same people who, by virtue of their technical skills, make more money are also those who hold political power and who therefore decide how natural and human resources will be used. Moreover, this confusion actually creates hypocrisy in technical standards and thereby creates technical incompetence as well. This is because individuals, feeling that the only way to achieve human worth is by exhibiting technical competence in some specialized field, are motivated to use all means to achieve the recognition of technical (and therefore human) status. Thus there is pressure both to lower standards and to generalize access to jobs which, however irrationally, hold high status. In this confused value system an individual would rather be an incompetent, thoroughly unhappy, and unproductive mechanical engineer than a competent, happy, and productive mechanic.

Is it not this very hypocrisy that has led large numbers of the present young generation to refuse jobs of high technical and social status even when such jobs are easily accessible to them? Is it not the banal and soul- stultifying status-seeking that has so polluted our economic and social life that many young people reject jobs which, in other circumstances, they would actually enjoy?

The seeming “inevitability” of this disastrous stratification of society is defended by pointing to the impossibility of paying the same salaries to everyone. The fact is that it is possible to make technical distinctions without making social ones. This is exactly what the Bahá’í system does. Gradations of [Page 26] salary are admitted for different technical categories; but when it is time to make decisions regarding our collective life, every individual has the same status and worth. In the Nineteen Day Feast, for example, the suggestion of the streetsweeper to the Local Spiritual Assembly binds that Assembly to consider his suggestion to the same degree as a suggestion from the doctor. Moreover, the discussion of such suggestions and ideas takes place with all members of society (even children and youth) sitting together and fraternizing in a spirit of unity and using the process of consultation.

The reader unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the Bahá’í community would be astonished to see how well this system works and is working already all over the world. In every culture people sit together and take decisions together—people who would never have met, talked, or even acknowledged each others’ existence in society at large. In consultation the individual feels that he gives his idea to the group, and the final decision in almost every case is different from the idea of any given individual while being profoundly influenced by every idea. Those who have taken part in this process and who, at the same time, have had occasion to take part in decision-making in society at large can testify to the profound difference between them.

Though the Bahá’í system admits gradations of salary, as implied above, extremes of rich and poor will be eliminated in the Bahá’í society of the future. Through taxation and similar means, the higher-paid individual will never be allowed to amass excessive riches. Similarly, farmers and others who might find themselves in want will be guaranteed the necessities of life by the community under the direction of the Local or National Spiritual Assembly. Moreover, since enterprises on all levels will be organized on a profit-sharing basis, as mentioned above, different technical categories of society will benefit from the economy on a more equitable basis.

Not only will it be possible to make technical distinctions without making social ones, it will also be possible to make technical distinctions without arranging the resulting categories in any hierarchy of values. I can recognize that physically (and thus technically) my wife is different from me without thereby believing that such a difference implies inferiority or superiority. Or, to take another example, I can recognize that the French language and the German language are technically different without ever having to believe or affirm that one language is somehow better than the other. In short, recognition of difference does not imply or necessitate a value-judgment of superiority or inferiority.

Here we have another basic Bahá’í concept with important consequences in the realm of economics. In society at large the notion that logical and technical distinctions must culminate in a hierarchical system is so ingrained that many people feel it is a law of life. The prevalence of this false conception also disrupts the economic system.

In a university, for instance, everyone feels the need for at least two technical categories: administrators and professors. But this has resulted in a hierarchical system in which administrators are viewed as superior to professors. This has even led competent and happy professors to seek administrative posts in which they are incompetent and unhappy. The famous Peter Principle operates in any hierarchical system; this Principle is the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the confusion between technical role and social worth and between functional distinctions and hierarchical ordering.

Administrators and professors can each consider their activity a service for the good of all without ever having to feel that one is superior to the other. The same thing obtains for any system in which different technical roles are present.

WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN that each higher religion has furnished the motivational basis for an economic system. Further, each higher religion has taught that which was most productive of unity and justice, given the [Page 27] restraints imposed by the technology of the time. In our age technological restraints are virtually gone. This practically unlimited choice imposes upon man a greater responsibility for the system which results and necessitates a new motivational basis for such a system. Bahá’ís believe that mankind is reaching its maturity and that no economic system can survive which does not take into account the fact that the meaning and purpose of man’s life are fundamentally spiritual. We need to rediscover and bring to full collective consciousness the spiritual purpose of work and the spiritual purpose of technology. Only then, and only within the context of a well- balanced and orderly social system based on this conception, can we hope to achieve a truly healthy economy—healthy for us and for the earth on which we live. Since, as we have seen, it is intangibles which produce tangibles, we must get the intangible values right before the tangible ones will fall into place.

The utopian conception of socialism was wrong because it supposed that one could arrive at an ideal economic situation without any substantial change in the spiritual motivation of the men making up the system. One was somehow to get unselfishness from selfishness. Capitalism sought to build a system by satisfying everybody’s selfishness to the ultimate degree. But if society does not take conscious steps to correct the materialistic spiral of competition and desire-consumption, the system will simply “correct itself” by breaking down. People will have to learn to seek their fulfillment otherwise than in the mere possession and consumption of material goods.

The solution to these problems offered by the Bahá’í Faith is powerful because it goes to the root of the illness, and it is efficient because it treats man as a total entity and not just an indifferent unit of consumption and production. Measures which are truly efficient are those which will ultimately work. The immediate, stop-gap response to an ailing system may be the least efficient.

Finally, to those who may be interested in pursuing in greater detail the Bahá’í answers to social problems, it must be stressed that what we have presented here is only the barest outline.

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[Page 29] Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh: Deathless in Martyrdom

BY KAZEM KAZEMZADEH

THE HEROIC DEATH of Mírzá ‘Alí-Muḥammad Varqá and of his son Rúḥu’lláh is one of the most striking episodes of Bahá’í history, which is incredibly rich in joyful sacrifice. From the moment the Báb proclaimed His mission, His disciples were exposed to persecution that eventually took thousands of lives.

In the hecatomb of 1852-1853 the ranks of the Bábís were drastically thinned. Most of the leading disciples were killed, only a few surviving in distant exile. The next ten years were hopelessly dark. Within the Bábí community there was much confusion and fear. It seemed at times that all the heroism, all the sacrifices, had been in vain. Enemies gloated over the virtual extermination of what they saw as a pernicious heretical sect. Sympathetic outsiders concluded that the movement that had shown so much promise cracked under persecution and collapsed, leaving behind only a glorious memory.

Virtually no one realized that the stream of Bábí history was still flowing with great force, its course now being directed by Bahá’u’lláh from His exile, first in Baghdád, and later Constantinople, Adrianople, and ‘Akká. After 1867 the remnants of the Bábí community in Persia rallied to Bahá’u’lláh. Soon the numbers of Bahá’ís grew, and the Faith once again began to draw the attention of friend and foe alike. The Shi’ite clergy was distressed at the revival of a movement they thought they had drowned in blood. At the instigation of the mullás, fresh persecution broke out in a number of towns and cities. Secular authorities frequently lent the clergy their support. Bahá’ís were attacked, their homes were ransacked, their property was confiscated, their very lives were threatened. In Iṣfáhán, Zanján, Tabríz, Ṭihrán, and elsewhere martyrdoms began to occur, culminating in 1903 in the massacre of Yazd. As might be expected, every instance of persecution served to strengthen the spirit of the Bahá’í community, whose ranks were swelled by new converts, surpassing in number all those who had been massacred in the preceding decades.

Mírzá ‘Alí-Muḥammad Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh were killed in May 1896 during a violent anti-Bahá’í outbreak occasioned by the assassination of the Sháh, in which the Bahá’ís had no part. The story of the martyrdom of a father and his young son became well-known in Írán and abroad. It was passed by word of mouth and made its way into print. In 1921 Star of the West (12, No. 4 [May 17, 1921], 93) published a photograph of Varqá, Rúḥu’lláh, and their two companions. Still later, Mr. ‘Azízu’lláh Sulaymání told the story more fully in volume one of his valuable work Maṣábíḥ-i-Hidáyat (Ṭihrán, 104 B.E.), a book that was one of Mr. Kazemzadeh’s primary sources. Mr. Sulaymání writes in his preface: “that which is recounted below is based on the words of the daughter of the late Ḥájí Ímán, Laqá’íyyih Khánum Kazemzadeh, who was for two years [Page 30] Varqá’s wife. Whatever she told me was based on Varqá’s own statements.” Further, Mr. Sulaymání writes that he had shown his chapter on Varqá to the latter’s surviving son Valí’u’lláh, who added a few details. Another source was the unpublished text of the memoirs of Mírzá Ḥusayn Zanjání who shared Varqá’s last incarceration.

The account which we present in English translation to the readers of WORLD ORDER, like Mr. Sulaymání’s essay, is based on Mírzá Ḥusayn’s memoirs and the reminiscences of Laqá’íyyih Khánum Kazemzadeh. However, Mr. Kazem Kazemzadeh, while utilizing Mr. Sulaymání’s account, adds his own reminiscences of conversations with his mother, Laqá’íyyih Khánum; with his grandfather, Ḥájí Ímán, and with Mírzá Ḥusayn. Moreover, Mrs. Rúḥá ‘Aṭáí, Laqá’íyyih Khánum’s daughter, has recorded a number of stories told by her mother and put her notes at Mr. Kazemzadeh’s disposal. Thus Mr. Kazemzadeh’s article contains a certain amount of new information and represents a significant contribution to our knowledge of the heroic age of the Faith.

F.K.

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IN THE CONSTELLATION of heroes who sacrificed their lives to the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh an outstanding place belongs to ‘Alí-Muḥammad Varqá and his son Rúḥu’lláh.

‘Alí-Muḥammad, later known as Varqá, was the son of Ḥájí Mullá Mihdí, who embraced the Faith in his native city of Yazd and immediately became one of its most zealous propagators. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written that “the evil ‘ulamás of Yazd rose up, issuing a decree that he must die. Since the mujtahid, Mullá Báqir of Ardikán, refused to confirm the sentence of these dark divines, Mullá Mihdí lived on, but was forced to leave his native home.” With his two sons, ‘Alí-Muḥammad and Ḥusayn, he traveled to Tabríz where he received a warm welcome from Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh Khán-i-Núrí, a devoted and influential Bahá’í who was in the service of Muẓaffari’d-Dín Mírzá, heir to the throne and governor of Ádhirbáyján. Soon ‘Alí-Muḥammad married Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh’s daughter.

Sometime later Ḥájí Mullá Mihdí, accompanied by his sons, set off for ‘Akká to visit Bahá’u’lláh. He fell ill in Beirut, but his yearning to see Bahá’u’lláh drove him on.

He set out on foot for the house of Bahá’u’lláh. Because he lacked proper shoes for the journey, his feet were bruised and torn; his sickness worsened; he could hardly move, but still he went on; somehow he reached the village of Mazra’ih and here, close by the Mansion [of Bahá’u’lláh] he died. . . . Let lovers be warned by his story [‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote]; let them know how he gambled away his life in his yearning after the Light of the World.

When ‘Alí-Muḥammad attained Bahá’u’lláh’s presence he experienced the distinct feeling of having encountered Him before; but no matter how he tried, [Page 31]

From left to right: Varqá, Rúḥu’lláh, Mírzá Ḥusayn Zanjání, and Ḥájí Ímán Zanjání in chains.

he could not remember when or where. On one occasion Bahá’u’lláh addressed ‘Alí-Muḥammad telling him to burn all the idols of false ideas and vain imaginings. Suddenly ‘Alí-Muḥammad remembered a dream he had in childhood. He was playing with toys in the garden when suddenly God appeared to him, took away his toys, and threw them into a fire. In the morning the child told his parents of his marvelous dream. They reproached him, noting that God could not be seen even in a dream. ‘Alí-Muḥammad had not forgotten the dream. When Bahá’u’lláh commanded him to burn the idols of doubt and imaginings, he remembered the burning of the toys, and, wide-awake, found the interpretation of his childhood dream.

On Bahá’u’lláh’s command, ‘Alí-Muḥammad and Ḥusayn returned to Írán to spread the Faith. In Tabríz ‘Alí-Muḥammad began to acquire a reputation as a poet, writing under the pen name of Varqá, the dove, a name bestowed upon him by Bahá’u’lláh. He attended meetings of scholars, writers, and poets who gathered at the palace of the heir to the throne, Muẓaffari’d-Dín Mírzá, and frequently read his poems to an appreciative audience which showered him with praise. He also traveled the length and breadth of Ádhirbáyján, teaching the Faith. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has stated that Varqá “was perfect in eloquence, his speech was convincing, his arguments were evident. No one could withstand him . . . In verse and in prose he was unique in Írán.”

[Page 32] At a gathering in the presence of the Crown Prince conversation turned to the Bábís and the means they used in spreading their Faith. A mullá said that formerly the Bábís offered people dates the eating of which converted one to the Bábí religion. However, people had gradually discovered this trick and began to abstain from eating dates, whereupon the Bábís changed their tactic. They squeezed the juice out of dates and made pills. The Bábí teacher would hold a pill between his fingers and begin a conversation about religion. He would speak so marvelously and enchantingly that his listener’s mouth would open involuntarily. Quickly, the Bábí would drop in the pill. The listener would swallow it and be converted.

Varqá received Muẓaffari’d-Dín’s permission to reply and spoke thus: “First, I am acquainted with medicine [Varqá was a physician of the traditional Persian school] but have neither heard nor read of an extract of dates. Second, to throw a pill into the mouth of a listener in the way this gentleman recounts and not to miss is no easy matter and would require long practice. Third, why do people sitting in the presence of others contrary to the rules of etiquette keep their mouths open so that Bábís could throw pills in them? Fourth, how is it possible to get a pill in one’s mouth and to swallow it without becoming aware of the fact?” Neither the mullá nor anyone else said a word.

When visiting Yazd in 1883, Mírzá ‘Alí-Muḥammad Varqá was arrested and jailed for about a year. He was then transferred to Iṣfáhán where he fell into the clutches of Mas’ud Mírzá Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán, Naṣiri’d-Dín Sháh’s eldest son. Though he was not heir to the throne, for his mother was a commoner and he could not legally succeed his father, this did not prevent him from dreaming of supplanting his brother, Muẓaffari’d-Dín, and grabbing the crown. Cruel and treacherous, utterly unscrupulous and selfish, Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán, whom Bahá’u’lláh stigmatized as “The Infernal Tree”, was prepared to use any means to secure power for himself, including the murder of his brothers and the dethronement of his father.

Pursuing his burning ambition, Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán some years later sent a certain Ḥájí Sayyáh of Maḥallát to ‘Akká for the purpose of persuading Bahá’u’lláh to command His followers in Persia to support Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán’s bid for the throne. In return, Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán promised to protect the Bahá’ís. Bahá’u’lláh emphatically rejected Ḥájí Sayyáh’s plea, making it clear that the Bahá’í Faith was not political and could not be toyed with. Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán’s bitter disappointment soon became evident. He launched a campaign of persecution against the Bahá’ís in the provinces he governed, provinces which comprised almost half of Persia. Many Bahá’ís were arrested and several were put to death, among them two brothers, Mírzá Muḥammad Ḥasan and Mírzá Muḥammad Ḥusayn of Iṣfáhán, “twin shining lights”, now referred to as King of the Martyrs and Beloved of the Martyrs, “who were celebrated for their generosity, trustworthiness, kindliness, and piety.”

In the Iṣfáhán jail Varqá befriended a prominent prisoner, the Khán (chieftain) of a neighboring tribe. As a result of long conversations with Varqá, the [Page 33]Khán embraced the Faith. Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán, while visiting the Khán in prison, noticed Varqá and asked who he was. A guard replied that he was a Bábí from Yazd. Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán began to taunt Varqá, telling him sarcastically that if his prophet was a true one, he should have no difficulty performing a miracle and freeing a disciple from heavy chains. An attendant of the Prince stepped forward and explained to His Highness that Varqá was an educated individual and a well-known poet.

Poets have always been highly esteemed among the Persians. Ẓilli’s-Sulṭán’s mood changed at once. Forgetting his mocking remarks, he entered into a lively conversation with Varqá and was so favorably impressed with the poet’s erudition and wit that he ordered the guard to remove the shackles from Varqá’s body. No sooner were the chains off than the tribal chieftain exclaimed: “Behold, Varqá’s Prophet has performed the miracle!”

Eventually Varqá was released and permitted to leave the city. In 1890-91, accompanied by two sons, ‘Azízu’lláh and Rúḥu’lláh, the latter six or seven years old, Varqá made another visit to ‘Akká, where he was lovingly received by Bahá’u’lláh. It was on this occasion that Bahá’u’lláh who felt indisposed, asked Varqá for medical treatment. Varqá prescribed medicine which Bahá’u’lláh took and which improved his condition.

One day Bahá’u’lláh asked Rúḥu’lláh what he had been doing. “Studying,” the boy replied. Bahá’u’lláh asked what the subject was. When Rúḥu’lláh said that the subject he had been discussing with his teacher was the return of God’s Messengers, Bahá’u’lláh asked him to interpret the term “return”. Rúḥu’lláh explained that by “the return” was meant the reappearance in a human being of divine qualities and attributes. “This,” Bahá’u’lláh commented, “is a literal, parrot- like repetition of the explanation given by your teacher. How do you understand the term?” “This year,” Rúḥu’lláh proceeded, “a rose bush produced a rose. We have cut the flower and placed it in a vase on the shelf. The same bush will produce another rose next year, but that rose will not be identical with this year’s flower, though it will be similar in qualities: shape, color, aroma.” Bahá’u’lláh praised Rúḥu’lláh for his understanding and from then on referred to him as his excellency the teacher.

Once Rúḥu’lláh and ‘Azízu’lláh were visiting Bahá’íyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s sister. The future enemies of the Faith (covenant-breakers), her half-brothers, Mírzá Ḍíyá’u’lláh and Mírzá Badí‘u’lláh, were also present. Bahá’íyyih Khánum asked Rúḥu’lláh what he and his brother did in Persia. “We taught the Cause,” he replied. Bahá’íyyih Khánum wanted to know how they taught the Faith and what they told the people. “We told people that God had manifested Himself,” the boy said. Bahá’íyyih Khánum expressed surprise that Rúḥu’lláh told everybody such a thing. “We did not tell everybody,” Rúḥu’lláh explained. “We told only those who had the capacity to hear.” Bahá’íyyih Khánum asked how they determined who had such a capacity. “We looked in their eyes and saw whether or not they should be told.”

[Page 34]Bahá’íyyih Khánum laughed and told Rúḥu’lláh to look into her eyes to determine whether she could be given the glad tidings. He approached her and looked into her eyes: “You are already convinced of it yourself,” he said. Then Bahá’íyyih Khánum asked Rúḥu’lláh to look into the eyes of Mírzá Ḍíyá’u’lláh and Mírzá Badí‘u’lláh. Did they have the capacity to hear? Rúḥu’lláh gazed at the two: “It is not worth the trouble,” he declared.

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Varqá and his sons ‘Azízu’lláh and Rúḥu’lláh made another pilgrimage to ‘Akká after Bahá’u’lláh had passed away. Once Varqá recited before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and a number of Bahá’ís a poem in praise of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, His exalted station and His divine attributes. Gently and humorously, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá reprimanded the poet, telling him that he should, instead, have written of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s servitude.

‘Abdul-Bahá showed great love for Rúḥu’lláh. While playing with some boys Rúḥu’lláh hit a playmate who had used indecent language. The boy complained to Varqá who decided to punish his son, but Rúḥu’lláh took refuge in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s room. Varqá came to the door. Not daring to enter, he motioned to his son to come out. Rúḥu’lláh only shook his head, refusing to obey. ‘Abdul-Bahá noticing the pantomime, asked what went on. Rúḥu’lláh confessed that he had hit a boy for using foul language. Now the father stood outside, waiting to administer punishment. ‘Abdul-Bahá called Varqá and strictly forbade him ever again to punish Rúḥu’lláh. From that moment to their death, Varqá treated Rúḥu’lláh with special tenderness and respect.

Once ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked Rúḥu’lláh what he would do if, after all the events that followed the declaration of His mission by the Báb, there suddenly appeared a man who proclaimed himself the Qá’im, performed miracles, and literally produced all the material signs expected to accompany his coming. Without hesitation Rúḥu’lláh replied, “We would have to teach him the Faith.” ‘Abdul-Bahá praised the boy, saying that he was now ready to tackle top-ranking divines (‘ulamá).

Varqá’s mother-in-law, the wife of the faithful Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh Khán-i-Núrí, was a fanatical Muslim who resented the marriage of her only daughter to a Bahá’í. She made every effort to have her daughter obtain a divorce.

Whether she caused them or not, rumors began to spread in Tabríz that Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh Khán, an influential nobleman close to the Crown Prince, who was by tradition governor of Ádhirbáyján, supported the Bábís and that they gathered at his house. Intrigues and whisperings undermined the standing of Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh with the Prince, whose attitude suddenly changed for the worse. Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh Khán was in danger of being arrested and had to leave Tabríz for Ṭihrán.

Taking advantage of her husband’s absence, Mírzá ‘Abdu’lláh’s wife bribed Varqa’s young and vigorous manservant to murder his master, promising him money and a horse as a reward. However, the servant was a believer at heart and [Page 35] much devoted to Varqá. Late at night under the pretext of seeking medical help for a stomach-ache, he entered his master’s room, revealed to him the murder scheme, and advised him immediately to leave the house. That same night Varqá threw his Bahá’í manuscript books out the window, then walked out of the house empty handed so as not to arouse suspicions. Quickly picking up the books, he made his way to the home of a fellow Bahá’í.

Varqá’s wife soon obtained her divorce, keeping the children who therefore fell into the clutches of their fanatical maternal grandmother. She was still not satisfied. Burning with hatred, she approached one of Tabríz’s mujtahids, asking him to issue a fatvá (decree) for the execution of her son-in-law as a renegade. The mujtahid refused to issue such a fatvá without first obtaining proof of Varqá’s renegacy. The woman promised to prove her case through Varqá’s own children allegedly raised by him in the spirit of heresy and unbelief.

The next day she brought Rúḥu’lláh to the mujtahid. Thinking that he was in the presence of a Bahá’í, the boy greeted the divine with the Bahá’í greeting “Alláh-u-Abhá”. The grandmother told the mujtahid that Rúḥu’lláh said his prayers very well. “Say your prayers, my dear,” the mujtahid ordered. Rúḥu’lláh turned toward ‘Akká and began to recite in Arabic the long obligatory prayer. The divine was visibly moved. When the boy finished, the mujtahid dismissed the grandmother, saying, “Shame on you for seeking the execution of a man who raised his little son in such a spirit of faith, piety, and devotion.”

Though Varqá soon succeeded in gaining custody of Rúḥu’lláh and ‘Azízu’lláh, two other sons, Valíyu’lláh and Badí‘u’lláh, remained with their mother.

The grandmother was possessed by hatred and furious at her failure to achieve Varqá’s execution. As a consolation she would sit her two small grandsons next to her and tell them that she would pray and they must say amen at the end of her prayer. “O God,” she would begin, “if these two children grow up to be good Muslims, make them happy and rich, give them the joy of a pilgrimage to Mecca. However, if they are to become like their father, destroy them now.” The innocent children would chime in—“Amen.” When the old woman learned that Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh had been martyred, she gave a festive party to celebrate the event.

Since it was no longer possible for him to remain in Tabríz, Varqá, with his two sons, went to Zanján, where he stayed in the house of Umm-i-Ashraf, a heroic woman whose son, Siyyid Ashraf, had been martyred a few years earlier. Bahá’u’lláh Himself described that glorious episode in these words:

When the infidels, so unjustly, decided to put him to death, they sent and fetched his mother, that perchance she might admonish him, and induce him to recant his faith, and follow in the footsteps of them that have repudiated the truth of God, the Lord of all worlds.

No sooner did she behold the face of her son, than she spoke to him such words as caused the hearts of the lovers of God, and beyond them those of the Concourse on high, to cry and to be sore pained with grief. Truly, thy Lord knoweth that My tongue speaketh. He Himself beareth witness to My words.

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And when addressing him she said: “My son, mine own son! Fail not to offer up thyself in the path of thy Lord. Beware that thou betray not thy faith in Him before Whose face have bowed down in adoration all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth. Go thou straight on, O my son, and persevere in the path of the Lord, thy God. Haste thee to attain the presence of Him Who is the Well-Beloved of all worlds.

On her be My blessings, and My mercy, and My praise, and My glory. I Myself shall atone for the loss of her son. . .

Varqá had intended to go to Ṭihrán but instead remained in Zanján for over two years. He married Umm-i-Ashraf’s granddaughter, Laqá’íyyih, whose father, Ḥájí Ímán, was a survivor of the heroic struggle of Zanján (1850-1851). Varqá’s young wife and her grandmother became very much attached to Rúḥu’lláh, who returned their affection and began to address Umm-i-Ashraf as mother.

Rúḥu’lláh frequently questioned Umm-i-Ashraf about the execution of her son, telling her not to grieve. “Think, mother,” he would say, “if Siyyid Ashraf had not been executed, he would have died in bed some years later. What would have been the advantage of that? But now he is the pride of his family and friends, and the subject of endless praises and mercies of Bahá’u’lláh. I wish I could attain such joy.” Umm-i-Ashraf would reply: “Do not say such things. Yon must live to teach.” “Then let me teach you,” the boy would say. “You be a Muslim and I will be a Bahá’í teacher.” But Umm-i-Ashraf would not consent even to pretend to be a Muslim. “After all I have suffered, I cannot be a Muslim and argue with you,” she would say. Rúḥu’lláh would give up and instead would make a speech about Bahá’u’lláh’s religion. Though his voice was sonorous and clear, he would occasionally stop and cough, explaining that all adult orators coughed when they spoke, to clear the throat. Laqá’íyyih Khánum repeated this story years later to her own children and grandchildren.

Once Rúḥu’lláh and ‘Azízu’lláh met a mullá riding an ass through the streets of Zanján. Noticing the strange children, the mullá asked their names. Rúḥu’lláh told the mullá his name. “Well, well,” the man commented sarcastically, “what an important name! Do you resurrect people too?” He was referring to the meaning of the name Rúḥu’lláh, the Spirit of God, designating Jesus. “If you rode a little slower,” Rúḥu’lláh said, “I would resurrect you.” “Clearly you are Bábí children,” replied the mullá in anger.

Varqá’s successes in teaching the Faith aroused the opposition of the Zanján clergy. In the mosques they cried of the need to defend religion from Bábí attacks, pointing at Varqá’s “heretical” activities. Tensions increased, and the Bahá’ís felt the change in the attitude of the populace toward them. They were insulted in the bazaar and threatened in the streets.

Varqá felt the storm approaching. Not wanting to furnish the fanatics a pretext for fresh persecutions and martyrdoms in a town where a few decades earlier more than 1,500 Bábís had been put to death, he decided to leave for Ṭihrán.

On the eve of his departure, Varqá, in company with Mírzá Ḥusayn, a Zanján [Page 37] Bahá’í, paid a farewell visit to the head of the local telegraph office. The telegraph came to Persia about the middle of the nineteenth century. The British were the first to string across the country wires that formed part of the great Indo-European telegraph. Among the Persian masses there developed the belief that wires ran from all telegraph offices directly to the foot of the Sháh’s throne. Thus the offices, like royal stables and other buildings associated with the Crown, acquired a measure of sacredness and became sanctuaries where one could seek refuge from injustices perpetrated by local authorities. Moreover, the telegraph quickly put one in touch with the capital making it possible for a complaint to reach His Majesty the Sháh in no time.

In the evening, as Varqá and Mírzá Ḥusayn were leaving the house of the Zanján telegraph office, they were espied by Mullá ‘Abdu’l-Vási’, a fanatic and a well-known intriguer. He immediately informed the governor, ‘Alá’u’d-Dawlih, provoking that official’s suspicion that Varqá had sent a complaint against him to Ṭihrán.

Early the next morning Rúḥu’lláh, Varqá, and his father-in-law, Ḥájí Ímán, left Zanján, ‘Azízu’lláh having gone several days ahead of the others. Mírzá Ḥusayn accompanied them to the first caravan stop and then returned home, as was the custom in those days of long farewells.

That same morning the governor sent his footmen to bring Mírzá Ḥusayn to him to investigate the purpose of yesterday’s visit to the telegraph. Mírzá Ḥusayn was nowhere to be found. The governor’s footmen broke into the houses of many Bahá’ís, arrested several, and tortured some in an effort to discover Mírzá Ḥusayn’s whereabouts. In the midst of all this commotion, Mírzá Ḥusayn returned to Zanján and was instantly taken to the governor.

‘Alá’u’d-Dawlih first asked where the dervish had gone. Mírzá Ḥusayn explained that Varqá was not a dervish but a learned man, a physician and a poet, that he had gone to Ṭihrán and that Mírzá Ḥusayn had accompanied him to Dízaj, the first stop on the road. The governor ordered the master of the house to ride after Varqá, catch him, and bring him back to Zanján. Mírzá Ḥusayn was to be chained and held in jail.

▣

The governor’s footmen caught up with Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh on the road to Ṭihrán, arrested them, and brought them back to Zanján. Ḥájí Ímán, taking advantage of the confusion during the arrest, quietly slipped away, carrying with him several cases of Bahá’í books. These he took to Qazvín, entrusting them for safe keeping to Jináb-i-Samandar, a prominent local Bahá’í. Thereupon, he set off for Zanján, was arrested on the road, and joined the others in jail.

Later, on several occasions, ‘Alá’u’d-Dawlih had Varqá brought to his private quarters to meet a number of ‘ulamá (learned divines) who asked Varqá questions. He gave exhaustive replies. The priests argued, attacked Varqá, mocked him, and accused him of heresy. They read confiscated Bahá’í books and objected to their content. One of the ‘ulamá said that if verses were a proof of truth, he too could [Page 38]reveal verses. “At the time of the Prophet Muḥammad,” Varqá said, “the infidels also claimed that they could reveal verses such as His, but they could not.” The priest retorted that he could and would produce verses superior to Bahá’u’lláh’s. “No,” Varqá said, “you cannot. But, supposing you produced some Arabic sentences and considered them superior to Bahá’u’lláh’s and someone asked you who was their author, what would you reply?” “I would say they were mine.” “But the author of these verses [Bahá’u’lláh],” Varqá said, “claimed that they were revealed from on high. Followers of many religions accepted the claim and recognized Him as the Promised One of all the holy books. . . . Show us one man who would recognize you as the greatest of divines, who would claim that you excelled all other divines, past and future, in knowledge and wisdom. You cannot even claim to be truly learned, let alone to reveal verses.”

The priests were in an uproar. One was accusing another of incorrectly phrasing his question. The other shouted that the first one did not understand the substance of the argument. “What?” the first one roared. “You dare say that I do not understand and err while the Bahá’ís understand and are right?”

Varqá turned to the priests: “Gentlemen, you are in the presence of an eminent personage. You should follow the rules of polite behavior. Why all the noise?” The governor joined in the reprimand: “What is this priestly nonsense?” he said angrily. “What is this savagery? Argue according to rules, so one could understand what you are saying.” But even the governor could not silence the noisy clergy who continued their vituperations.

At one of the meetings, when Varqá quoted a passage from the Bible, a mullá objected. He referred to the belief, widespread among the Muslims, that the original texts of the Old and the New Testaments had ascended into heaven and that at the time of Muḥammad, Jewish and Christian divines had further tampered with the holy texts, deleting references that pointed to Muḥammad. Thus quoting the Bible was no way to strengthen an argument. Varqá replied by citing the relevant passages from Bahá’u’lláh’s Book of Certitude (Kitáb-i-Íqán) to the effect that such thoughts were false. Jewish and Christian divines were unlikely to mutilate the books in which they believed.

Moreover, the Pentateuch had been spread over the surface of all the earth, and was not confined to Mecca and Medina, so that they could privily corrupt and pervert its text. Nay, rather, by corruption of the text is meant that in which all Muslim divines are engaged today, that is the interpretation of God’s holy Book in accordance with their idle imaginings and vain desires.

Impressed with Varqá’s knowledge, the governor begged him to return to Islám, promising to appoint Varqá his private physician and to obtain for him a stipend from the authorities in Ṭihrán. Varqá explained that in the new Dispensation thousands had given their lives for true Islám. They infused Islám with a new life and proved Muḥammad’s prophethood to many Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. The governor again pleaded that Varqá return to Islám. Varqá smiled: “Am I a Jew or Zoroastrian to convert to Islám? For the last sixteen days I have been proving to you the truths of Muḥammad’s prophesies and you still [Page 39]want me to convert to Islám. I am a true Muslim. As for your promise of a stipend, how could a wise man renounce his faith for money?”

The governor was deeply affected. He was willing to compromise, to find a way out of the impasse. “Very well,” he said. “I do not want to be the cause of your execution. Profess Islám outwardly and be, in your heart, whatever you want to be. If you do so, I will release you and your son, will return your books, and will let you go wherever you wish. Say that you are only a scholar and a poet. I will report to His Majesty [the Sháh] that we have investigated the case, have determined that Varqá was not a Bábí and have released him.”

“Outward profession,” Varqá replied, “must correspond to inner conviction. Otherwise, it would be hypocrisy and in the Qur’án God curses hypocrites. Act as your duties demand.” The governor flared up with anger. “I have done my duty and said everything in your favor. Tomorrow morning I will have Mírzá Ḥusayn shot from a cannon and send you and your son to Ṭihrán.”

Fearing for Mírzá Ḥusayn’s life, Varqá told the governor that the former had lived in Ashkhabad (Ishqábád) and that his son-in-law worked as an interpreter in some Russian office. Mírzá Ḥusayn had returned to Persia only after the Persian consul at Ashkhabad had stated to the Persian émigrés in Russia that the Sháh promised them the full protection of the law if they chose to come back to their own country. The execution of Mírzá Ḥusayn would bring about inquiries by the Russians and trouble for the governor. It would be simpler to send Mírzá Ḥusayn to Ṭihrán with Varqá. “Many Bábís have been killed in Zanján. It would be better for you not to be the cause of renewed bloodshed,” Varqá concluded. The governor thought about it, then ordered that Mírzá Ḥusayn should be charged the cost of the trip to Ṭihrán, chained, and sent along with Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh.

Before being sent to Ṭihrán, Varqá and Mírzá Ḥusayn were allowed to see their wives. Laqá’íyyih Khánum told the story of her visit thus:

It was a small but relatively clean room. Varqá, Rúḥu’lláh, and Mírzá Ḥusayn sat on a rug. Rúḥu’lláh looked thinner [than before his arrest]. Addressing me, Varqá said: “See how they turned us back on the road,” and added in a whisper so that the guards would not hear, “It would be good if friends could take Rúḥu’lláh from us.” Then he said: “Every evening this room fills with visitors. Some come from sheer curiosity to stare at us, others come to argue and insult, but there are also those who listen carefully. When I do not want to reply to attacks of some of our visitors, I let Rúḥu’lláh answer them.” When we [Laqá’íyyih Khánum and Mírzá Ḥusayn’s wife] came home, we learned that Ḥájí Ímán had been arrested on the way back to Zanján and was in jail, being tortured so he would reveal where he had been and why he was not with Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh when they were arrested.

On ‘Alá’u’d-Dawlih’s orders Varqá, Rúḥu’lláh and Mírzá Ḥusayn were chained and sent to Ṭihrán on horseback, escorted by guards. Ḥájí Ímán had been sent [Page 40]there two days earlier in a horse-drawn carriage, his hands and feet chained to the sides of the wagon.

The prisoners traveled slowly, stopping at villages and towns to rest and buy victuals. At every stop crowds of curious inhabitants came to stare at the captives. Among the crowds there were always mullás who cursed the Bahá’ís, mocked them, and asked silly questions. One even addressed the people: “What are you standing there for? Kill them.” Only the presence of guards prevented a lynching.

A mullá asked Varqá how it was that a man of such accomplishments became an apostate? Varqá replied:

You do not understand the meaning of the term apostate. We have not turned back, we have not denied our faith, we have moved forward. Moreover, I have inherited my faith from my father. This child [Rúḥu’lláh] is a third generation Bahá’í, and I testify to the truth of my father’s faith.

A spectator asked Rúḥu’lláh, “And what do you say, boy?” “I am just like you,” Rúḥu’lláh replied. Thinking that by these words Rúḥu’lláh meant that he was a Muslim, the spectators were delighted. Varqá, however, immediately explained that Rúḥu’lláh meant he, like the others, professed an inherited religion, that he had been born in the faith of his father.

Curses and screams greeted Varqá’s words. “Why are not this boy’s feet chained?” someone shouted. A carpenter brought stocks and Rúḥu’lláh’s feet were firmly chained to the frame.

Mírzá Ḥusayn writes in his memoirs that the horsemen of the guard were constantly on the alert because they feared that Bábís would attack them and free the prisoners. They repeatedly checked the chains, the stocks, and the locks, “fearing that we would fly off into heaven.”

At one of the stops, a large crowd gathered to look at the prisoners. A large and strong young man in the crowd entered into conversation with Rúḥu’lláh. His father-in-law, trying to play a practical joke, asked the guards to pretend they were arresting him. Two guards grabbed the young man and threw a chain around his neck, shouting, “Ah, you, so and so! You too are a Bábí and have to be chained with the rest.” The young man was so frightened he mumbled something indistinctly and fainted. When he regained his senses, the guards laughed: “What a coward you turned out to be. We were only playing a trick on you.” “What sort of a joke was this?” the young man protested; “I almost died of fear.” A bystander said, pointing to Rúḥu’lláh: “Why is this child not afraid?” “But he is a Bábí,” replied the young man.

As the prisoners were leaving a village, Varqá noticed that Rúḥu’lláh was covering his feet with his ‘abá. Later the father asked, “Why did you, dear son, [Page 41]cover your feet? Were you ashamed of the chains? You should be proud of them rather than ashamed.” “No, father [áqá ján—master of my life—a form of addressing one’s father],” Rúḥu’lláh said. “I covered my feet because it was cold. I am not ashamed of chains.”

One of the guards who treated the prisoners well listened carefully to the conversations they had with the mullas and was convinced of the truth of their arguments. He embraced the Bahá’í Faith. Two other guards, on the contrary, were exceptionally hostile to Varqá, and especially to Rúḥu’lláh, doing everything to increase their suffering. One of them noticed that when the horse trotted, saddle bags moved, making the chains at Varqá’s ankles tighten, causing him great pain. The guard was asked to place the saddle bags on another horse. He refused saying, “These are infidels. The more they suffer the more it pleases God.” “Let God judge between us,” Varqá remarked.

The guard whipped his horse and rode ahead, disappearing from sight. When the caravan reached its next stop, the guard was found in convulsions on the ground by a spring of water. He had excruciating pains in his stomach. Varqá dismounted, examined the sick man, and prescribed a remedy. The medicine did not help. The guard died the next day. Varqá was upset. “Why did not I endure the persecution at the hands of this man?” he said. “Instead of calling for God’s judgment, I should have forgiven him, and prayed the Lord to guide him on the path of truth.”

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In Ṭihrán the captives were first lodged in the stables of General Jahánsháh, a Sháhsavan tribal leader. The next day they were taken to the house of Mu’ínu’d-Dawlih, brother of ‘Alá’u’d-Dawlih, the governor of Zanján. Here Varqá, Rúḥu’lláh, and Mírzá Ḥusayn met Ḥájí Ímán, who had arrived in the capital a few days earlier. A few hours later the entire group was marched off through the bazaar and the principal streets of the capital to jail.

In jail even heavier stocks and chains were placed on the prisoners. The chain on Rúḥu’lláh’s neck was so heavy that it had to be propped up with a forked stick. Ḥájí Ímán recounted that even with the prop the chain was so heavy Rúḥu’lláh had difficulty sleeping. Night after night Ḥájí Ímán held up the chain so that the boy could fall asleep.

Among Varqá’s papers confiscated in Zanján were some photographs of Bahá’ís and a portrait of the Báb. These were turned over to Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih, the chief of royal footmen and, in fact, the Sháh’s chief executioner. Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih requested the jail warden to have Varqá identify each picture in writing on the back. On the back of the Báb’s portrait Varqá wrote: “A likeness of His Holiness the Siyyid-i-Báb. He asked the warden to tell Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih that he would like to speak with him confidentially.

Assuming that Varqá wanted to offer him a bribe, Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih came to [Page 42]see Varqá, who asked him to carry a message to the Sháh. Let His Majesty examine the books and papers confiscated from Varqá. Should he find in them a single statement contrary to the laws of the state or to the principles of humanitarianism, let Varqá be punished. Or let the ‘ulamá gather, hear him out, and then pass judgment. Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih was impatient. “What?” he exclaimed, “are you trying to convert me? Come to the point.” Varqá added that his purpose in asking for an examination of his beliefs was to establish the differences between the Bábís and the Bahá’ís.

Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih realized that there would be no bribe. Giving in to his wrath, he struck Varqá on the neck with a cane and shouted, “You are too arrogant and your conversation today is like your presumption of yesterday when you wrote on the portrait of the Siyyid of Shíráz ‘A likeness of His Holiness the Siyyid-i-Báb’. Did you not know that I would show the portrait to the Sháh?”

The arrest and incarceration of Varqá and his companions coincided with the approach of festivities celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh’s accession to the throne. Rumors spread everywhere that on this occasion general amnesty would be proclaimed and all prisoners would be freed. On 1 May 1896, the eve of the Jubilee, the Sháh was shot dead, while kneeling in prayer at the shrine of a Muslim saint near Ṭihrán. The government was panic stricken. The Crown Prince, Muẓaffari’d-Dín Mírzá, was in Tabríz. Both Mas‘úd Mírzá Ẓillu’s- Sulṭán and Kámrán Mírzá Náyibu’s-Salṭanih, his recalcitrant brothers, had designs on the throne and were expected to make an attempt to supplant the legitimate heir of their assassinated father. Since virtually nothing was known about Mírzá Riḍáy-i-Kirmání, the Sháh’s murderer, it was instantly assumed, in the atmosphere of all-pervasive fear, that he was a Bábí, and if he was one, then all Bábís (that is, Bahá’ís) were guilty of regicide. Only later did the government acknowledge the fact that Mírzá Riḍá was a follower of the Pan-Islamist leader, Siyyid Jamáli’d- Dín-i-Afghání, an open enemy of the Bahá’í Faith. Mírzá Riḍá himself refuted the allegation that he was a Bábí, professing Islám and declaring that he had killed the Sháh to avenge the oppression and tortures he and the entire country had suffered at the hands of that cruel despot.

Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih, head of the late Sháh’s footmen, did not await the results of the investigation of his master’s assassination. Without asking the Prime Minister’s permission, accompanied by four executioners and a detachment of soldiers, he rushed to the city prison to work his own revenge.

Varqá, Rúḥu’lláh, Ḥájí Ímán, and Mírzá Ḥusayn were brought before him for interrogation. Mírzá Ḥusayn thus recorded the event in his memoirs:

We entered another building. Soldiers armed with rifles stood everywhere, even on roofs. Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih, his eyes bloodshot, paced the room like an enraged beast. He ordered that Varqá’s and Rúḥu’lláh’s chains be removed and they be taken to an adjoining room. The first guard who tried could not take the chains off because his hands shook. A second guard performed the task, led Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh to the next room and closed the door.

[Page 43]Hájí Ímán and Mírzá Ḥusayn waited, full of anxiety. Some time later a farrásh (footman) entered, picked up a falakih, and took it to the next room. Ḥájí Ímán and Mírzá Ḥusayn concluded that Varqá would be bastinadoed. However, a moment later another farrásh passed through the door on his way to the courtyard. In his hand he held a blood-stained dagger which he proceeded to wash in the pool. Soon a third farrásh appeared, carrying under his arm Varqá’s clothes. Now Ḥájí Ímán and Mírzá Ḥusayn knew that a terrible tragedy had taken place.

The door opened again and an excited and alarmed Ḥájíbu’d-Dawlih appeared before the two Bahá’ís. They thought it was their turn to be led to the room where Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh had been taken. Pointing to them, Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih said, “Leave these for tomorrow,” and left the building. Ḥájí Ímán and Mírzá Ḥusayn were returned to their cell.

Late that night two prison guards who had grown friendly to the Bahá’ís gave them a full account of what had taken place before their eyes.

When Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih saw Varqá, he said, “Varqá, you have done your work at last,” meaning that it was the Bahá’ís who had assassinated the Sháh. “Tell me now whom to kill first, you or your son.” Varqá replied that it made no difference to him. Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih drew his dagger and plunged it into Varqá’s stomach. “How to you feel?” he shouted at his victim. “Thank God, I feel better than you do,” Varqá answered, Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih ordered four executioners to finish the job, and they hacked Varqá to pieces.

Rúḥu’lláh, who witnessed the scene, cried out, “Father, father, take me with you!” Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih turned to the child. “Did you see what happened to your father? Recant and I will obtain for you both rank and pay.” Rúḥu’lláh indignantly rejected the offer. “I do not need your rank and pay. I want to join my father, I want to be with him!” Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih asked for a rope. (Islamic law prohibits the shedding of the blood of minors, and this cruel caricature of a Muslim was determined to follow the letter of the law and to strangle the boy.) No rope was at hand. Instead, one of the footman rushed out and returned with a falakih. The executioners put Rúḥu’lláh’s head through the loop and began to twist the stick. With every turn the rope pressed harder at the child’s throat. He fainted and [Page 44]dropped to the floor. Thinking that he was dead, Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih ordered Ḥájí Ímán and Mírzá Ḥusayn to be brought in. Suddenly Rúḥu’lláh jumped up, but immediately fell back to the floor. He was no longer breathing.

Ḥájibu’d-Dawlih was so frightened and shaken by this scene that he could not proceed to the execution of Ḥájí Ímán and Mírzá Ḥusayn. Nor did he return to the prison the following day to complete his bloody work. After fourteen months of incarceration, the two were released. Both reached old age and both frequently expressed deep regret that they had not been granted the great honor of martyrdom in the path of Bahá’u’lláh and in the name of His Faith.

Mírzá Ḥusayn ultimately attained his heart’s desire. The Bahá’ís of Chárjúy in Russian Turkistan invited him to visit the town to debate with a particularly violent mullá who was attacking the Faith. He easily bested the mullá in argument. At night a number of the mullá’s followers broke into the house and pistol- whipped Mírzá Ḥusayn. He traveled to Ashkhabad, where he died of his wounds.

On a cold, blustery winter day Ḥájí Ímán, then over eighty years old, heard of his friend’s death. He rose and began to put his coat on. “Where are you going on such a cold day,” asked his son-in-law. “To wash the body of Mírzá Ḥusayn [in preparation for burial],” Ḥájí Ímán replied. “We promised one another that the one of us who survived the other would perform this last task for his friend.” Ḥájí Ímán returned home badly chilled, came down with pneumonia, and never recovered, passing away in his sleep one day.

In a number of epistles, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá praised the martyrs, their devotion to the Cause, their love, steadfastness, and heroic courage in the face of death. He wrote that one of the divine mysteries was the mystery of martyrdom in which men sacrificed their lives with joy and enthusiasm, “But until now no one had shown the joy, the passion, and the ecstasy displayed by Rúḥu’lláh in the arena of martyrdom.”

Perhaps Rúḥu’lláh may have had a presentiment of his own death when he wrote a poem containing these verses:

When shall the moment come, O God, for me to sacrifice

my life out of love for Thy Face?

Blessed the day when on the field of love I will

surrender my life in the path of the Beloved.

Sweet is the moment when I shall openly proclaim from

the gallows the might of Bahá.

Varqá, no less than his son, was ready for martyrdom. Several years earlier he had asked Bahá’u’lláh to accept his supreme sacrifice. Both father and son had dreamt of giving their lives to the Cause. Their dream came true.

[Page 45]

What Is a Human Being?

REVIEW OF COLIN M. TURNBULL’S The Mountain People (NEW YORK: SIMON AND SCHUSTER, 1972), 310 PAGES

BY HOWARD B. GAREY

READING The Mountain People by Colin M. Turnbull is a sobering experience. It recounts the sojourn of its author, an English anthropologist, among a people, the Ik, who are seen by him as having lost those noble traits considered to be characteristic of humanity. This small tribe, apparently approaching extinction, lives (or at least was living, in 1972) in northern Uganda, where it borders on Sudan and Kenya. Formerly a typical hunting and gathering people, they found their ancestral hunting grounds closed to them by the establishment there of a state Game Park, within whose borders hunting and agriculture were forbidden. Their territory was drastically limited to a valley and its adjacent mountains, where the Ik established villages and attempted some rudimentary farming. However, several years of drought rendered this activity nearly useless, and the people were obliged to accept shipments of food from the government.

By the time Turnbull reached them, their culture was in an advanced state of decay. Only the older men and women, who remembered the free but orderly wanderings through the hills and forests in search of game, edible insects, fruit, roots, berries, and the like, knew the stories, both historical and mythological, of their people, or could recall with any clarity their heritage of cosmology and religion. Only they knew the songs, the rites that accompany those great events in the life of an individual which impinge upon the well-being, the very structure and existence of society: birth, accession to adulthood, marriage, death. And, most important, only they remembered a time when people had been compassionate, creative, capable of sacrifice, imbued with a sense of order and purpose. It was the discovery of an apparent moral vacuum into which he had stumbled that most astonished and dismayed this anthropologist. He found a people whose only moral principle is the procurement of food for oneself. Cooperation is resorted to only when the personal benefit to each individual engaged in it is inescapable to him; but a quality or sentiment of genuine helpfulness is practically unknown. Food is routinely snatched from the hands—even the mouths —of those too old and weak to defend themselves. Children are turned out of the parental abode at about the age of three, left to fend for themselves as members of a band of children. Laughter is frequent among the Ik; its occasion is always the discomfiture of one’s fellow: an old man knocked down and trampled, some one falling off a cliff, a child reaching for a glowing ember. The old taboos on incest and adultery have lost their force; girls quite normally prostitute themselves to neighboring herding peoples—the Ik being mostly incapable of paying for their favors— beginning at the age of nine or ten. Conversation is limited pretty much to abuse and quarreling, or it takes the nonverbal form of groups of people sitting together, glances never meeting, the eyes being employed to scan the landscape for signs of food or to look at the work of one’s neighbor’s hands in the hope that he, whittling something, will cut his hand or make a mistake that will provide the opportunity for loud and spiteful jeering.

This is but a small sampling of the observations which led Turnbull to the conclusion that, in terms of the norms of most societies, the Ik do not have a moral code, [Page 46] and from there to certain inferences of a general nature about morality and society. The book may, then, be reviewed as a work of ethnology, as an attempt to define morality for the whole human race, as a vision of the future of our own civilization, and, finally, as an unconscious revelation of the anguish of a man who has decided that there is no absolute moral truth, and by the incompatibility of his training as a scientist with the deep convictions he learned in childhood but which he seems unable to recognize in himself and therefore to articulate.

I can only judge it as an ethnological study from a lay point of view. But since this book is destined for the general public rather than for an audience of specialists, it may legitimately be reviewed in that spirit. The author has remained resolutely human, simple, and sincere and has written in decent English, sometimes in a style approaching eloquence when the author’s feelings are clearly engaged. He never regards the people with whom he lived for two years as things, as objects of study whose existence is solely justified by their being grist for an anthropologist’s monograph mill. No matter how repugnant he sometimes finds their behavior, he never loses the sense that they are human beings who, in the actualization of some of the worst traits of which human beings are capable, never feed a sense of complacency or superiority in their observer; for, on looking both into his own society and his own psyche, he sees the potentiality for the full development of the same loathsomeness, a potentiality which is becoming more real among us by the minute. His writing is vivid and concrete. We see the Ik in their material environment and come to know a handful of them as individuals.

THE CENTRAL INTEREST of this book for our purposes resides in the inferences drawn by its author for the basic question of morality. In an eloquent passage he expresses his disappointment that certain humane virtues are demonstrated by the Ik not to be universal after all, and further that they do not seem necessary for survival.

. . . hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: Kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity, and others. This sounds like a formidable list of virtues, and so it would be if they were virtues, but for the hunter they are not. For the hunter in his tiny, close-knit society, these are necessities for survival; without them the society would collapse.

Let us just note for the moment that Turnbull says that these traits are not virtues, because they are necessities for survival —that is, for the survival of the particular society in which they are found. May we deduce from this that, in his view, the survival value of a behavioral trait is unrelated to its status as a moral good?: “. . . far from being basic human qualities they are superficial luxuries we can afford in times of plenty, or mere mechanisms for survival and security.”

Here he seems to suggest a definition of a virtue as a basic human quality, presumably a quality to be found in all human beings, regardless of cultural differences. In the following passage, he changes his ground: Here he denies the status of virtue to the positive values he has enumerated on the ground that they have turned out not to have survival value:

[The Ik] were as unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable and generally mean as any people can be. For those positive values we value so highly are no longer functional for the Ik; even more than in our own society they spell ruin and disaster. . . . Given the situation in which the Ik found themselves as I headed toward them, man has not time for such luxuries, and a much more basic man appears, using much more basic survival tactics.

Let us examine the result of this kind of reasoning: The “positive traits” are not virtues [Page 47] since, to qualify as virtues, they should be universal (Turnbull finds that they are not); they should have survival value (whereas, according to the author, among the Ik, as in our society, they have negative survival value) ; and yet, paradoxically, if they were really virtues, they would not be “mere mechanisms for survival and security” (that is, in some sense unspecified by Turnbull, they would transcend “mere” survival value).

Evidently two different conceptions of virtue are at war here. Is it a plausible supposition that Turnbull is caught between a religious view and a scientific one, the former arrested at an immature state in the life of the author, the latter inadequate to deal with questions beyond the reach of methods suited to inquiry into physical phenomena?

If we follow this hypothesis, the religious training Turnbull received in his childhood would account for his reluctance to see virtue as a survival mechanism—surely, he feels, it must transcend so material a purpose and, in so transcending it, in some way repudiate it. And yet his scientific training, of which it is a prime methodological principle not to allow value judgments to influence the investigation into cause-and-effect sequences or complexes, will not permit him to accept any goal on the part of a living organism other than that of biological survival as having explanatory power. So, whether he regards survival value as essential to virtue or as incompatible with it, he meets disappointment, confusion, and dismay. The two views can, however, be reconciled if one considers man to be essentially different from the beasts in the possession of free will, intellectual curiosity, the capacity for esthetic delight, and compassion; and if, further, one regards man as being in a state “natural” to his species only if he is in a society, to the survival of which the exercise of these capacities by its members is indispensable. Survival is not such an ignoble goal, after all, when one considers what is at stake.

It is much to Turnbull’s credit that he refuses to disregard the promptings of his heart and conscience; he never allows a “scientific” attitude to oyerrule and to dull his sensitivity. In the following passage, he recognizes the inadequacy of mere survival:

There is no goodness left for the Ik, only a full stomach. But if there is no goodness, Stop to think, there is no badness, and if there is no love, neither is there hate. Perhaps that, after all, is progress; but it is also emptiness.

Turnbull continues this desperate dialogue to the very last word of his book:

The Ik teach us that our much vaunted human values are not inherent in humanity at all, but are associated only with a particular form of survival called society, and that all, even society itself, are luxuries that can be dispensed with. . . . The Ik have relinquished all luxury in the name of individual survival, and the result is that they live on as a people without life, without passion, beyond humanity. We pursue those trivial, idiotic technological encumbrances and imagine them to be the luxuries that make life worth living, and all the time we are losing our potential for social rather than individual survival, for hating as well as loving, losing perhaps our last chance to enjoy life with all the passion that is our nature and being.

Two expressions, “beyond humanity” and “the passion that is our nature and being,” affirm once and for all what is human, as far as Turnbull is concerned. The satisfied hedonist of some perfect technocratic world of the future, though a member of the biological species, man, is not spiritually a member of the human race. There are two aspects to man, the animal and the spiritual; two kinds of survival, individual and social. If society dies, so does spiritual man. The “positive qualities” have spiritual survival value, although, according to Turnbull, they are not necessary for physical survival. He has said that in some situations the virtues have negative survival value; but it is worth noting that without positive qualities an aggregation is not a society.

[Page 48] One may seriously question Turnbull’s claim that the virtues have no necessary survival value, even on the basic level of physical existence. A technological society cannot exist without a viable economic system—and that, in turn, is based on a complicated network of trust and mutual responsibility. In view of the present world economic situation, one may well wonder if Turnbull still believes, as he did in 1972, that the soulless technological system can survive indefinitely its increasing chaos, its rupture of social expectations that, even in 1972, one may have tended to take for granted. In that part of the book which comes from his heart (instead of his brain), Turnbull is right: Our present world structure is breaking down; our societies are breaking down into Ik-like individualism.

The Ik situation is hardly typical of human situations, just as our present civilization is in so many ways unprecedented. The Ik situation is itself a product of twentieth-century technology, which has brought what is perhaps the oldest way of life into irreconcilable conflict with the newest. The Ik had a code which was adequate, both materially and spiritually, to their pattern of living. A rupture was produced between their essential morality—which, since it includes the love- derived virtues enumerated by Turnbull, is probably universal under “normal” conditions —and the material environment to which the behavior patterns expressive of this morality were tied in the most intimate and intricate way. The material manifestation of morality in a particular environment was rendered impossible by a radical transformation of that environment. The will to be “good” continued to live in the hearts of those who had known the old ways—but how were they to transmit the old values in the absence of techniques for their expression? Clearly the time had come for them, as it has for us, for a new cluing in of moral values as old as mankind to the new material conditions of existence. A new set of behaviors, a new network of relationships must be brought into play, by people who are incapable of finding it by themselves, since they are the product of a culture which has become irrelevant to their present needs. Such a social pattern, which must transcend the social arrangements of the past (whose inheritors are quite incapable, unaided, of devising the techniques of living for the future), can only come from a transcendent source. Bahá’ís know that the social and ethical arrangements of the past, which continue into our time as a clearly dying world order, are incapable of meeting our present needs; and they can only thank God that Bahá’u’lláh has brought to mankind the social, ethical, and spiritual modalities which will assure our living as genuine human beings, still capable of love.

Palingenesis

A nebula fuses,

condenses into a

spore.

Whirling,

stretching,

bumping worlds,

it suffers a rebirth

into a new genre.

Cal E. Rollins

[Page 49] Authors & Artists

HOWARD B. GAREY is an Associate Professor of French and Romance Philology at Yale University. He has published a number of articles on French linguistics and now has at press an edition of a fifteenth-century French songbook “The Mellon Chansonnier.” Dr. Garey is an Associate Editor of World Order.

WILLIAM s. HATCHER, a professor of mathematics at Laval University, holds two degrees from Vanderbilt University and a doctor of sciences degree from Université de Neuchâtel. His publications include Foundation of Mathematics and numerous articles on mathematics, logic, computer science, and philosophy. Our veteran readers will remember his “Bahá'u’lláh to the Christians” (Winter 1966) and “Science and Religion” (Spring 1969).

KLAUS H. KALLENBERGER was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1958. He holds bachelor and master of fine arts degrees from Bethany College and the University of Kansas and is now a professor of jewelry and sculpture at Middle Tennessee State University. He has had numerous exhibitions and has published several poems in German. His interests include sailing, camping, hiking, and poetry.

KAZEM KAZEMZADEH makes a third appearance in World Order in this issue, his “Two Incidents in the Life of the Báb” having appeared in the Spring 1971 issue and his “Five Books about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá” (coauthored with one of his sons) in the Fall 1971 issue. A graduate of Moscow University, he has lived and worked on three continents as diplomat, lawyer, and university teacher. He served for many years on the National Spiritual Assembly of Iran and now lives in retirement in California, devoting his time to the study of Bahá’í Writings and history.

CAL E. ROLLINS is the creative writing instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has also served as language arts supervisor for Wingate High School, a Bureau of Indian Affairs school on the Navajo Reservation. He has worked with Indian students in speech, drama, and writing for eleven years. Mr. Rollins is a graduate of the University of Arizona in Tucson and has done graduate work at Tennessee A & I State University, the Universities of Kansas, Iowa, and Southern California, and St. John’s College.

PIERRE ELLIOTT TRUDEAU has been Prime Minister of Canada since 1968.

ART CREDITS: P. 5, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 11, photograph by Jay Conrader; pp. 14, 19, 25, and 27, engravings from The Growth of Industrial Art originally published by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. in 1892 and republished by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1972; p. 28, photograph of the interior of the dome of the Bahá’í House of Worship near Frankfurt, West Germany, by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 31, photograph, courtesy of the National Bahá’í Archives; back cover, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.

JAY CONRADER, a freelance photographer, contributes to World Order regularly.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL is managing editor of World Order.

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