Book and Film Reviews

Emergence is a collection of 6 essays which are intended to outline the dimensions of a new world order. Because there is no discussion of the relationship of the long-term vision of the first essay to the world order of the lesser peace which is discussed in the other essays, or of the role of some important institutions in the world order, what we actually have is several unrelated essays which highlight particular aspects of what the Bahá'ís intend for the world, while the articulation of the whole remains obscure.

The best of the essays are nevertheless very good. Arthur Dahl writes on The World Order of Nature. The ecological warnings are not new, and the realization that only global approaches can deal with the stresses which poor and industrially developed economies alike place on the environment is coming to be generally accepted. What was interesting here was Dahl's definition of the type of environmental concern which the Bahá'í Faith fosters. While we are intimately related to the world of nature, this is not nature-romanticism. Dahl speaks of managing nature wisely and the 'management of the biosphere'. This is based on a review of the Bahá'í Writings on nature, and on human nature. The emphasis is firmly placed in this essay on the oneness of humanity as the root principle, and the development of a world commonwealth of nations as the key instrument, which must govern our approach to global problems. The weak point in the essay is its attempt to align 'Abdu'l-Bahá's explanations of evolution literally with current knowledge of evolutionary processes, an attempt which leaves some rather large unanswered questions which distract from the point Dahl is making.

The editor, Charles Lerche, has contributed another valuable essay, on Human nature and the problem of peace. This outlines, and debunks, the 'falsehood that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive'. His most compelling argument against this view of human nature is that it uses evidence of the widespread aggressiveness of states - itself far from consistent or compelling - to argue for the natural aggressiveness of the individual (which does not follow), and then completes the circle by arguing that, since we are naturally aggressive, states will inevitably reflect this. The point deserves further development, with an examination of why, in some states and under certain conditions, a substantial part of a population can be persuaded to be aggressive and cruel.

It is unfortunate that Lerche includes, without comment, passages from the Bahá'í Writings which, prima facia, contradict his thesis concerning human nature: "self-love is kneaded into the very clay of man" (Secret of Divine Civilization 96-7, cited p. 119) and "If a man's Divine nature dominates his human nature, we have a saint." (Paris Talks 60, cited p. 117). Either these passages should be omitted, or the fact that they apparently say that human nature is sinful and humans are naturally selfish has to be addressed.

Holly Hanson contributes an essay on a Bahá'í Development Strategy, which identifies development strategies as characteristic expressions of the donor society's economic programme, be it capitalist or socialist. A comparison of capitalist, socialist, and Bahá'í development programmes, with the concepts of human nature and human society which lie behind them, leads to an exposition of the Bahá'í economic programme. This is seen, not as a middle way, but as a third way, incorporating as it does dimensions of human potential and purpose which the varieties of materialist philosophy leave untapped. The author thinks clearly and writes persuasively. In Eastern Europe, and elsewhere where the Bahá'ís face the temptation of placing the Faith somewhere on the ideological spectrum between socialist and capitalist, this essay will be particularly useful.

Peter Mühlschlegel has contributed an essay on A universal political thesis, which he formulates in these terms:

Any foreign policy which serves goals other than the immediate transformation of the United nations into a fully functioning world federation, bears within it the seeds of future world wars and is equivalent to a crime against humanity.

Whether the issue of world federalism should, as Mühlschlegel argues, be made "one of the central themes of Bahá'í activity" remains a moot point. I would at least want to caution that, before venturing on such a project, we need a clear understanding of the process of federalization, as it is working at regional and global levels, and a clear view of the structure of the Commonwealth of nations towards which we are working. It might also be valuable to ponder why the great tides of changes which are affecting every aspect of life have been divided into God's major and God's minor plan, and the role of the Bahá'ís limited to the latter.

Brian Lepard has provided a brief history of the development leading to the United Nations, and an assessment of its achievements and current shortcomings. He then looks forward to a world commonwealth of nations, a universal federation of states, to be established in the near future.

This brings us to the first essay in the volume, Loni Bramson-Lerche's An Analysis of the Bahá'í World Order Model. Whereas Lepard, and all of the other writers in this volume, do not look further than the World Order of the Lesser Peace, Bramson-Lerche looks beyond the Federation of Nations, which she treats as an interim stage, to the Most Great Peace. And in the Most Great Peace, according to her understanding, the Universal House of Justice is "the supreme legislative and judicial body both in the Bahá'í administrative order and the Bahá'í World Order model". The institutions of the world government, (the Supreme Tribunal, International Executive, and World parliament) have apparently withered away. There is one passing reference to the role given by Bahá'u'lláh to 'just kings and presidents' in governing the world, but this is not explicated. Her ideal model is clearly of a monolithic church state embracing the whole world. There are passages enough which indicate that the civil order will be brought under the umbrella of Bahá'u'lláh, and some which even indicate that some at least of the institutions of the world government may be replaced by the Universal House of Justice (though the textual status of the latter passages leaves much to be desired), but these are not cited here. Nor is there any reference to those passages which would indicate that the institutions of a civil government are to continue.⁽¹⁾ Thus the very important question of church and state is left unaddressed: is the state to be baptized only to be abolished, or does it have a continuing role as part of the organic structure of the Bahá'í World Order? I think myself that the shape of the World Order at the time of the Bahá'í Commonwealth will be considerably more complex than Bramson-Lerche supposes, and will contain a permanent place for kings and rulers and civil government.

The identification of the Universal House of Justice with the supreme legislative and judicial bodies of the Bahá'í World Order model is supported in this essay by a single quotation from 'Abdu'l-Bahá, taken from The Promulgation of Universal Peace (455).

He has ordained and established the House of Justice, which is endowed with a political as well as a religious function, the consummate union and blending of church and state. . . A universal, or international, house of Justice shall also be organized. Its rulings shall be in accordance with the commands and teachings of Bahá'u'lláh, and that which the Universal House of Justice ordains shall be obeyed by all mankind. This international House of Justice shall be appointed and organized from the Houses of Justice of the whole world, and all the world shall come under its administration.

Moreover, while 'Abdu'l-Bahá says, according to these notes, that the Universal House of Justice has political functions, it is the author who has identified these with the legislative and the judicial body of the commonwealth. One might set against this another quotation, also from Promulgation of Universal Peace, and with no more authority than the passage above:

The Bahá'í Cause covers all economic and social questions under the heading and ruling of its laws. The essence of the Bahá'í spirit is that, in order to establish a better social order and economic condition, there must be allegiance to the laws and principles of government. Under the laws which are to govern the world, the socialists may justly demand human rights but without resort to force and violence. The governments will enact these laws, establishing just legislation... (238)

The book as a whole is disappointing. Despite the high academic standard of the papers by Dahl, Hanson and Lerche, a certain spark is missing. I feel here that the authors' attention is focused on the visible artifact of scholarship - the published paper - rather than on issues being debated in the community. The genre of the academic paper in its various forms arose out of communities of specialists engaged in teaching, writing, conferencing and facing issues which needed to be argued and which mattered enough to warrant real engagement. In recent years Bahá'í scholars have discovered that the Faith can be presented in this format, and so gain new audiences and a new respectability. But this is old wine in new bottles, an essentially apologetic presentation of the Faith without the elements of fresh investigation and debate which gave rise to the form of the scholarly paper in the first place, and though the forms are satisfied, the result is rarely exciting.

The criticism above of Bramson-Lerche's paper may be mitigated by noting that her essay contains a passage on 'the catastrophe' (pp. 26-32 and note 144, pp. 59-63) which is the most vigorously expressed and readable passage in the whole collection. It deserves to be a paper in its own right. It is lively and coherent, and the author obviously believes very much in the position she is arguing (that 'the catastrophe' is the ongoing disaster of the 20th century, now drawing to a close, rather than some yet-to-occur event). It is to be hoped that the editor can find more writing like this for the next volume.

Appearing within two years of each other, "Asking Questions" and "The Secret of our Century – Bahá'u'lláh" are the latest additions to the impressive body of work by Bahíyyih Nakhjavání. In their own way, both the book and the film bear witness to the innovative style of the author. Nakhjavání affirms that her work is based on the particular contribution women make in history - not only the part they play but their vision of it as inclusive of myth and legend rather than as the traditionally masculine linear, intellectual and chronological perception of the passing of time.

As its title suggests, "Asking Questions" was written in an attempt to explore the subtle threat posed by questions to all bastions of fundamentalism. A well-aimed question has been known to bring such fortresses crashing to the ground. In the sense in which it is used in the book, fundamentalism can be seen not only as dogmatic rigidity within religious structures, but as any thought which plods blindfold around the treadmill of its own unquestioning assumptions.

The essays in the book range nimbly over a variety of such traditionally sacrosanct topics as priestcraft, women and religious law, exposing and exploding the sacred silence which has protected them heretofore and in the process pointing the way to a more fruitful, more untrammelled understanding of their place - or absence - in the Bahá'í folk culture. In the chapter devoted to priestcraft, Nakhjavání asks, "can we purge our psyches of the need for a priesthood just because it has been abrogated as an institution? Or are we in danger, irreligious as our society is, of turning lawyers and psychiatrists into priests, and assuming the mantle ourselves, even in the act of writing?" (41) She contends, "The word 'priestcraft' reveals more about those subject to its sway than those who command them" (41). One is reminded that a great number of those opposing the admission of women into the priesthood were members of congregations themselves, not just those priests who felt their own position threatened. But the implications of 'priestcraft', like fundamentalism, are not limited to religious institutions alone. "There have been many priests who did not commit the sacrilege to human dignity of wielding priestcraft, and there continue to be many people who employ it in the name of law and medicine, education and art" (41). Priestcraft in its religious and secular forms is, in a sense, moral coercion and intimidation - in Nakhjavání's words, "the last relic of our superstitious fear of the unknown" (42). The exclusion of priestcraft from the Bahá'í Faith ties in with the proscription of asceticism, monasticism, the confession of sins and congregational prayer; it ties in with the appointment of 'Abdu'l-Bahá as the Centre of the Covenant. All these ordinances can be seen as annulling the traditional role of priests in society, as "demystifying the path of holiness", as "replacing the role of spiritual leader in the community with the common exhortation to all alike to become servants before God" (42).

In the light of Bahá'u'lláh's laws in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas regarding priestcraft, and in view of the chasms yawning inexorably in the Church over the question of the ordination of women, one can see another example of humanity's stubborn refusal to address issues at their root. In an earlier chapter, Nakhjavání writes, " . . . the history of the human race, from one point of view, is the history of the wrong questions being asked" (4). In the context of women and priestcraft, she posits again, "Only by asking the question 'Can women be priests?' do . . . we . . . 'shake off the shackles of an antiquated system' that Shoghi Effendi tells us must be discarded in order for us to ask 'Why have priests at all?' Only forced by the question of which of them is 'right' do we face the dilemma that we may have been asking the wrong question all along" (58).

Familiar themes, such as tales of the Dawn-Breakers, are presented and juxtaposed in an unfamiliar way, lending a freshness to the style of the book itself, and serve to illustrate Nakhjavání's point that "it [has] been the distinguishing characteristic of the Manifestations of God that they take the symbolic gestures of an old and decaying civilization and transform them, revolutionize them, reverse their meaning" (160). Clearly a Revelation that revolutionizes calls for a vision unencumbered by the dross of prejudice, in however subtle a form. The book is written with an often arresting originality of expression and calls upon on impressive cast of characters, from heroes and heroines of the Faith to others as far afield as Sir Thomas Browne, Blake and Luther. If Nakhjavání's style sometimes threatens to become too implicit, nonetheless it issues an unmistakeable challenge to rise to new levels of response, while never lapsing into erudite pomposity.

Sharing some of the aims of the book but fulfilling them with less success is Nakhjavání's film "The Secret of our Century - Bahá'u'lláh". Tracing Bahá'u'lláh's exile and imprisonment and the parallels of this suffering with the sufferings now racking humanity, it brings into play another series of juxtapositions. Notable among these is the story of the Purest Branch: "A brief life. A brutal death," says the narrator, and on the screen flashes an image of stark white crosses marking the graves of the war dead. Such moments of felicitous editing are sadly few and far between as there is a marked gulf between the literary skill displayed in the production and its stock of images.. When visual ingenuity runs out, familiar images - sunsets, roses quivering with dew - are deployed, but for the most part remain all too familiar. The laconic, poetic script explodes the accepted rapturous loquacity of introductory videos of the Faith, but unsupported by a corresponding level of image, slides at times into a rather unwieldy stiffness and stiltedness. The original music composed for the film, while striking a blow at the hallelujah rock tradition, goes to the opposite extreme of near-atonality and its monotony is ultimately intrusive. Had the film concentrated on its initial theme of dispossession and exile in the twentieth century mysteriously linked with certain as yet obscure events which occurred in the nineteenth, it would have retained a great deal of its impact. Unfortunately, as with the majority of introductory videos being produced in the Bahá'í world today, the film is anxious to give a comprehensive view of the whole Bahá'í Faith, an impossible task. The initial potential it displays as a film with a relevant and wholly new outlook on current events is dissipated as it plods down a well-beaten track, whipping round the globe on a tour of Bahá'í communities, leaving the viewer bemused in a welter of information, styles and images.

Where "Asking Questions" is a milestone in recent Bahá'í literature, with a dazzling frame of reference and wealth of ideas and originality, the film shows the same literary craftsmanship and deftness, which however is not complemented sufficiently by the visual arts.

1. e.g. Shoghi Effendi's statements that these institutions are established "once for all" (WOB 202) and that it is not the Bahá'ís' purpose "to allow the machinery of their administration to supersede the government of their respective countries" (WOB 66), while Bahá'u'lláh says that: "The one true God, exalted be His glory, hath bestowed the government of the earth upon the kings. . . That which He hath reserved for Himself are the cities of men's hearts. . ." (Gleanings CXV). There is also a passage in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Will and Testament: "This House of Justice enacteth the laws and the government enforceth them. The legislative body must reinforce the executive, the executive must aid and assist the legislative body so that through the close union and harmony of these two forces, the foundation of fairness and justice may become firm and strong, that all the regions of the world may become even as Paradise itself." (emphasis added)