On Bahai Liberty
The Prisoner of Akka, Baha'u'llah, lived much of His life deprived of
liberty, harassed and suppressed by the tyranny of one despot or another,
yet He envisions a world of global freedom and universal brotherhood. From
His experience of the liberty of His own Mind, from His mystical
experience
of the oneness of God, He teaches the oneness of all religions and the
oneness of humankind. His immortal and challenging proclamation is "The
earth is but one country and mankind its citizens." His love of liberty
resonates with the noblest reflections on liberty that run throughout
human
history, East or West. Like Edmund Burke, Lord Acton, and the signers of
the
Declaration of Independence, Baha'u'llah upheld a responsible liberty
seasoned with a sense of duty to God and society, while preserving and
protecting the sanctity of the individual from tyranny and debasement.
What the Baha'i Faith has become today contrasts sharply with His
enlightened Writings: a prison house of oppression, coercion, deception,
manipulation, employing all manner of "slanderous vilification" against
its
own members for the slightest ideological divergence from its
interpretation
of His Teachings, calculated to deprive the individual of religious
liberty
and freedom of conscience, demanding nothing less than complete, absolute,
and servile obedience. From a secular perspective, the Baha'i Faith has
become the antitheses of the liberty discussed by John Stuart Mill in his
classic work and the antitheses of the virtues extolled by Baha'u'llah and
his son in the societies of England and the United States of America.
To those who are unfamiliar with the complicated history of the Baha'i
Faith
during the last one hundred years, these claims may well seem extreme and
unwarranted, if one only knows the version propagated by self-serving
Baha'i
sources; To those who have suffered at the hands of Baha'i administrative
inquisitors and oppressors, these claims will ring all too true, evoking
bitter and painful memories. For the past ten to thirty years, the Baha'i
Faith has imposed one inquisition after another upon its members. It has
been widely assumed by many Baha'is that these incidents marked a
tem****ary
aberration from Baha'i administrative conduct, which would soon be
corrected
once the Universal House of Justice became sufficiently apprised of the
issues involved, and that it would reprimand the particular counselor or
auxiliary board member involved. Time has gone by, and incident after
incident has ac***ulated, bringing home to many that far from a tem****ary
aberration, a prison house of tyranny has indeed supplanted the liberty of
the individual mind and soul that Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha had
guaranteed
their followers.
It is the sheer number of these incidents that convey, more than any one
of
them, the truest picture of what has become of Baha'u'llah's Faith. In the
mid 1970s, a group of young students and scholars in Los Angeles loosely
formed a study class for the sharing and encouragement of their research
of
Baha'i history and theology. They were harangued, harassed, and attacked,
some leaving the Baha'i Faith in confusion and disbelief. Later in that
decade, Bahai scholars at the University of Michigan and elsewhere who
were
commissioned, by the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States of
America, to write a Bahai encyclopedia, met with a similar experience,
many
ending up having to resign from working on it, believing they could not do
so in good conscience, given the interference of Baha'i authorities
regarding historical fact and detail; some were driven out into the
self-censor****p of silence. The 1980s witnessed an increasing number of
incidents. In 1987 "A Modest Proposal," intended for, but never published,
in Dialogue Magazine, attempted to suggest improvements in procedure and
operation of the national community, only to be publicly denounced at the
national convention the following year, while its writers were handled in
a
most reprehensible fa****on, some threatened with excommunication. Another
group of scholars and writers in 1998 contributed to a paper known as "The
Service of Women" which again met with a vehement crackdown all out of
pro****tion to the issues and intentions of its authors. No brief
highlighting of the shockingly dictatorial abuse of power by the Baha'i
administration would be complete without mention of an open letter in 1996
by Steven Scholl, one of the Dialogue editors, which attempted to bring
attention to the frequency and severity of these incidents and urged
moderation and a more open and tolerant community. Many of the young
editors
and writers of Dialogue Magazine, as well as others, have been harassed
and
hounded into silence or driven out the door.
With the wide availability and development of the Internet during the
1990s,
Baha'is all around the world, enjoying the liberty given them by God
Himself
and lauded by both Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha, entered into free and open
discussion in a number of online venues. One of the first was Talisman, an
email list sponsored through one scholar's affiliation with Indiana
University. Baha'i interrogators of conscience were quick to quibble and
denounce members for their views and opinions expressed in emails to group
members, ultimately denouncing, as had happened in previous incidents,
individuals as "covenant breakers" or possibly holding opinions which were
tending toward covenant breaking. Through such methods, the abuse of
individuals was carried out "in the best interest of the Faith," driving
more young, intelligent, inquisitive, vigorous minds and souls away in
shock
and horror over what the Baha'i Faith had become, not was.
Another major incident, publicly do***ented in the newsgroup databases of
Google and other search engines, was the proposal of an open and
unmoderated
newsgroup, talk.religion.bahai. Given the pervasive censor****p and
manipulation of thought and discussion on the previously existing
newsgroup,
soc.religion.bahai, praised in The American Baha'i, many Baha'is and
non-Baha'i observers believed such a newsgroup was essential for
unfettered
discussion about Baha'i matters of concern. The overwhelming opposition of
Baha'is to its formation shocked many inside and outside of the Baha'i
Faith, as many fundamentalists called upon Baha'is "in good standing" and
"firm in the covenant" to vote NO against it, garnering more than 600
votes
through such rabble-rousing techniques on private Baha'i-only email lists.
It took three years and as many rounds of voting to create what is still,
as
of 2004, the only forum on the Internet that cannot technically prevent
the
expression of any opinion or point of view.
No survey of incidents should fail to mention the lawsuit of Deborah
Buchhorn against the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the
United States and the Assembly of Albuquerque, New Mexico for fraud and
libel in 2001. The court's dismissal of the lawsuit proved only that the
government of the United States was wisely not about to adjudicate on
issues
of religion and conscience and in no way exonerated the Baha'i
administration of the charges.
Throughout all these incidents and others, most Baha'is thought only in
terms of an aberration, surely something had gone wrong, a miscarriage of
Baha'i justice that the ultimate defender of justice, the Universal House
of
Justice, would rectify, restoring order and sanity to Baha'u'llah's Cause.
Yet the tactics used were virtually identical in each case, and have
become
widely known, through talk.religion.bahai, as The Baha'i Technique,
essentially, "slanderous vilification," imputations of covenant breaking
or
incipient covenant breaking, frightening people involved into silence,
fear,
and self-censor****p. To assist in this program of ideological
terrorization
of the Baha'i community, the uhj has on a number of occasions apparently,
or
pur****tedly, autocratically thrown people out of the Baha'i Faith, despite
such a practice not existing anywhere in the Baha'i Writings, despite
Shoghi
Effendi* explicitly stating that only the Guardian could pronounce someone
a
covenant breaker. This indefensible, desperate tactic, non-doctrinal, has
been wielded a number of times since 1997. All these incidents and more
are
do***ented on the Internet and elsewhere for those unfamiliar with them or
for those who wish to independently investigate them further:
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensor****p/
How often in religious history have the teachings and vision of the
Founder
become debased by the organization that rears itself upon His Sacrifice.
No
impartial, fair-minded observer who conscientiously explores, to whatever
degree, these incidents, thus far recounted, can fail to perceive that the
Baha'i Faith and what it calls its "administrative order" has become, in
the
most apropos words of Martin Luther, a "terrible tyranny." Its wolves in
sheep's clothing have turned far aside from the Middle Path, envisioned by
Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha, universally condoned by the reason of all
persuasions. On all sides Baha'i administrators see only heretics and
apostates, point the finger, denounce people as breakers of Baha'u'llah's
covenant, or Abdu'l-Baha's Will and Testament, or Shoghi Effendi's*
non-existent will, which, in disobedience to Abdu'l-Baha, he never wrote.
In 2004, H-Net, a scholarly website sup****ted by Michigan State University
and Humanities & Social Sciences Online, reprinted in digital format the
works of Mirza Ahmad Sohrab, who for over eight years served Abdu'l-Baha
as
a secretary and translator in the Middle East and on his American and
European journeys. In Sohrab's several books, especially in Broken
Silence:
The Story of Today's Struggle for Religious Freedom (1942) and The Will
and
Testament of Abdu'l-Baha: An Analysis (1944), Sohrab presents his opinion
that the Baha'i Faith was already well on the road to becoming an
oppressive
organization in the 1920s and '30s, exploitative of the individual, and
departing further, with every year, from the moderation and predominately
democratic liberalism of Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha. Sohrab located the
source of the emerging problems of conscience and religious freedom in the
desire of some early American Baha'is for absolute control, modeled on the
Roman Catholic Church and other forms of autocratic religious
organization,
leading to and encouraging Shoghi Effendi's increasingly fanatical
interpretation of Abdu'l-Baha's Will and Testament:
To interpret this section of the Will in such a literal
sense, is, to say the least, utterly short-sighted and a complete
subversion
of all the glorious teachings of the Bahai Cause (53).
The young and impressionable Shoghi Effendi, a little dreamy and not
entirely ready for it all, unsure of himself and what direction to chart
after Abdu'l-Baha's passing, increasingly came under the influence of
people
in both the East and West who wanted a rigidly controlled bureaucratic
system, until his own hand became the dominating force shaping the now
trademarked, incor****ated, and copyrighted organization. H-Net's digital
reprinting brought home for insightful observers of the victimization of
fellow Baha'is, during the purges and pogroms of the 1970s and after, the
inescapable realization that, far from an aberration, the same pervasive
fanaticism and censor****p had indeed been experienced by Sohrab and
earlier
Baha'is in virtually the same form and manner. No amount of distorting and
slandering the intentions and beliefs of Sohrab and Mrs. Chanler could
deny
the validity and eloquent truth of their own testimony, repeated and
confirmed by the experience of subsequent generations of Baha'is.
Dying without leaving a will in 1957, Shoghi Effendi left the Baha'i Faith
with no infallible successor, no appointed Guardian, and no infallible
interpreter of Baha'u'llah's Writings. Shoghi Effendi's own words state
emphatically that without a Guardian the Baha'i Faith would be mutilated
and
completely deprived of the "unerring guidance of God." Subsequent to his
death, Baha'i experience only corroborates his judgment. No matter to what
extent the Hands of the Cause assumed, or presumed, an authority that
neither Abdu'l-Baha's Will and Testament nor any of the writings of Shoghi
Effendi bestowed, their innovations and attempts to lay a credible
foundation for the uhj failed, and time has proven it, made it open and
blatant as the noonday sun.
The end of the Guardian****p and the innovations and attempts to fill in
the
gaps and unfulfilled ****tions of Abdu'l-Baha's Will and Testament have
continued unabated since the earliest schism between the Hands of the
Cause,
their unilateral and unauthorized attempt to fill the interpretive void
left
by Shoghi Effendi's failure to foresee his untimely end and the commotions
it would unleash upon Baha'u'llah's Faith. Neither the custodians nor the
Orthodox Baha'is had, or have, a credible claim to assumption of the
mantle
of authority. Nothing in Abdu'l-Baha's Will and Testament nor Shoghi
Effendi's writings anticipated or justified what they did after the
Guardian's death.
Similarly, the International Baha'i Council that the Hands put aside was
not
in the Will and Testament nor an instrument of the Master for the
appointment of a new Guardian. That the Hands were nominated and appointed
by Shoghi Effendi gave them no legitimate authority to assume, or usurp,
the
"rights and powers in succession to the Guardian," which they claimed, nor
to change the method of creating a universal house of justice from what
was
stipulated by the Master in His Will and was already anticipated by the
Guardian through the unfolding of the International Baha'i Council. Any
pretense to "infallibility" ended with Shoghi Effendi, and subsequent
Baha'i
experience has proven it in the ruined and destroyed lives of many
thousands
of individuals, married couples, families, and Baha'i communities.
The eventual creation by the uhj of the continental board of counselors, a
type of Baha'i college of cardinals, and the auxiliary boards, notorious
for
operating like the Jesuits at their worst, has only exacerbated the
situation and deepened the rift between Baha'is in all walks of life and
the
barely concealed clergy that now exists and demands at every turn
"obedience" to the covenant, as the "infallible" universal house of
justice
interprets it, ignoring that Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi both
explicitly
stated that only the Guardian has interpretive guidance and that the uhj
has
only legislative authority.
For decades the fanatical interpretation of Abdu'l-Baha's Will and
Testament
has demonstrated that not the slightest reform, or suggestion of reform,
will be tolerated, let alone considered or acted upon. The uhj and its
clergy have demonstrated beyond a doubt that they do not possess
infallible
powers or interpretive authority worthy of respect, let alone obedience.
Reform Bahais have watched or participated in all this. Many have been
victims of intolerance and witch hunts; of coercion of conscience and
denunciation, ostracism and shunning, and all the other tactics and
techniques of The Baha'i Technique, suffered under the ferocious attacks
of
their fellow Baha'is who never hesitate to violate the Words of
Abdu'l-Baha:
"According to the direct and sacred command of God we are forbidden to
utter
slander."
Far from censuring such slander, a corrupted organization has encouraged
among its cadre an ever more vicious campaign of slander, by what Mirza
Ahmad Sohrab rightly recognized and scathingly called in the 1940s,
"fawning, cringing, sniveling, mealy-mouthed sycophants, flatterers and
flunkies."
Lessoned by time and history, by experience that cannot be taken but as a
revelation of the Will of God, an unveiling of what lies behind the marble
facade, acknowledging that the loss of the dream of unity and
infallibility
happened long ago, Reform Bahais seek to recover, restore, and return to
Baha'u'llah's central and pristine Teachings-the oneness of God, the
oneness
of religion, the oneness of humankind-to His vision of responsible
individual liberty in service to humanity, to the Example of the Master's
Love, Wisdom, Kindness, Compassion, and Self-Sacrifice.
Reform Bahais choose to leave those who choose hatred, denunciation,
shunning, endless and unproductive argument and recrimination over
Abdu'l-Baha's Will and Testament, seeking justification for fanaticism,
over the Will of
Shoghi Effendi, which he never wrote or implied, or over the successors he
never intended or appointed, or over the oppressive organization
Baha'u'llah
Himself never envisioned nor proclaimed.
Reform Bahais invite all Bahais, all humanity, to a Convocation of
celebration, peace, love, and brotherhood, to seek humbly His Will, during
Ridvan 2006.
The Reform Bahai Faith
www.ReformBahai.org
October 4, 2004
* Please note that the Reform Bahai Articles depart from the acceptance
here of the authenticity of the pur****ted will and testament
of Abdu'l-Baha and, hence, the legitimacy of any guardian****p. See the
pages for Reform Bahai Articles and Abdu'l-Baha's Covenant.
http://www.reformbahai.org/Covenant.htm
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