The Bahā’ī religion and its predecessor, the Bābī movement, have a 180-year history in Iran. The Bābī movement was founded in Iran in 1844 by the Bāb (Sayyid ʿAlī Muḥammad Shīrāzī, 1819–50). Emerging from the Bābī movement, Bahā’u’llāh (Mīrzā Ḥusayn ʿAlī Nūrī, 1817–1892) publicly claimed in 1866 to be the founder of a new religion, whose ultimate goal was the uniting of all humanity. The religion gained a widespread following in Iran but was heavily persecuted.Footnote 1 At no time during its history have newspapers, journals, books, or academic publications in Iran been sympathetic to the Bahā’ī viewpoint, nor have Bahā’īs in Iran been able to publish refutations of the numerous attacks published against them. Indeed, as Houchang Chehabi noted:
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that until very recently any discussion of the Baha’is and their religion that did not use abusive, disparaging, or at least sarcastic language was suspected of being an apologia, and that any writer or speaker who talked about Baha’is in respectful or even in a merely matter-of-fact way was suspected of being a Baha’i.Footnote 2
As a consequence, the generality of the Iranian population, including academics and intellectuals, have remained broadly ignorant of any reliable information on the religion. Some Iranian scholars and intellectuals in Iran have participated in attacks on the Bahā’īs (a few going as far as fabricating evidence), while others have simply avoided any mention of the Bahā’īs.Footnote 3 Western scholars, finding little or no reliable information on the Bahā’īs in the standard Iranian sources, have also largely ignored the Bahā’ī community, sometimes resulting in glaring omissions in their work.Footnote 4 In more recent decades, this situation has improved and a solid body of scholarship has started to emerge through the work of a number of scholars resident in the West, such as Abbas Amanat, Mangol Bayat, and Juan Cole.Footnote 5 This paper aims to address the proposition that the implications of re-integrating these two religious movements into Iranian history has yet to be fully realized.
This paper describes the conceptual basis of the Bahā’ī lines of social action. It is in this conceptual basis that the most revolutionary changes being made in the Bahā’ī community become visible. Following on, the paper then turns to a few examples of the effects of this conceptual position in creating the values and strategies of a number of lines of social action (leadership, religious ethos, education, and the position of women) within the Bahā’ī community; the manner in which these differed in strategy and underlying values from similar lines of action pursued by Iranian secular reformers; and evidence that the Bahā’ī community may have impacted what was going on in the wider Iranian society.
When considering the wider social impact these Bahā’ī ideas may have had, it is important to remember that, in the late 19th century, the number of Iranian reformers (“enlightened” thinkers, rawshanfikrān) who also held some of these views and carried out some of these activities was limited to a relatively small number of educated town-dwellers, estimated by Mahdī Malikzādih to be a few hundred, operating within secret societies. The Bābī-Bahā’ī viewpoint and activities, in contrast, were being implemented by 100,000 or more followers across a range of settings, from urban to rural, educated to illiterate.Footnote 6 Unlike other religious minorities, the Bahā’īs did not live in isolated quarters in most Iranian towns; they intermingled with the majority population and had multifarious opportunities to influence it. Furthermore, the secular reformers were creating programs of action influenced by European and Ottoman political thought, often using words and concepts foreign to the Iranian cultural world and therefore difficult for people to understand.Footnote 7 The Bābī-Bahā’ī ideas and words, on the other hand, as Guity Nashat has pointed out, were native to the Iranian cultural world and easily grasped by people.Footnote 8
These points, together with evidence presented here of certain reform ideas being present in the Bahā’ī discourse before appearing in the writings of secular Iranian reformers and the close association between some reformers and the Bahā’ī community, suggest that the nativist Bābī-Bahā’ī discourse may have penetrated Iranian society to a greater extent than is currently appreciated, particularly between 1890–1914, when these ideas were being publicly discussed by Bahā’īs in many of Iran’s towns.Footnote 9 A preliminary survey of the Bahā’ī role in the Constitutional Revolution and their presence among the upper echelons of Qājār society is published elsewhere.Footnote 10
It should be noted at the outset that the word “revolution” in the title of this article does not denote the political or violent attempt by a group to overthrow a government and set up a new one in its stead. While there was violence accompanying the Bābī movement in Iran in 1848–53, this was not the Bāb’s intent. This violence occurred despite his attempts to prevent it; it was largely defensive in nature; and, in any case, only relates to five years of a 180-year history.Footnote 11 In this paper, the term “revolution” primarily denotes a conceptual revolution in the social and religious imaginary of the Bahā’ī community. This, of course, had consequences for the community’s social structure and activities, and evidence is presented here that it may also have affected Iranian society in general. However, the Bahā’ī leaders specifically advocated against political confrontation and violence, and so this was a non-violent, grassroots movement aiming to overturn and replace the social order and the values system upon which it was based, initially within the Bahā’ī community but eventually across society as a whole. Since the movement did not operate at the political level and, apart from the turbulent Bābī period (1848–52), proceeded quietly and slowly, its revolutionary nature remained largely hidden from the populace, observers, scholars, and perhaps many Bahā’īs. The periodic persecutions were usually a matter of local power politics or because Islamic clerics perceived a religious threat from the Bahā’ī community, not because the full revolutionary implications of the Bahā’ī teachings as outlined in this paper were understood.
Another point to bear in mind is that, while the Bahā’īs’ social aims in the years leading up to the Constitutional Revolution may have appeared very similar to those of the reformers (democracy, an advancement in the social role of women, modern education, etc.), the values, strategies, and implementation of these aims were very different.
The revolution in worldview
Around the 1880s, Bahā’u’llāh surveyed the chaos and strife afflicting societies across the world and pronounced that there were no adequate means on hand to rectify the situation.Footnote 12 Since nothing could fix this system, it was no longer fit for purpose and destined to gradually decay and collapse:
The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight, that to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. Its perversity will long continue. And when the appointed hour is come, there shall suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake.Footnote 13
In a letter written to Queen Victoria around 1870, Bahā’u’llāh likened the statesmen and advocates of the political and economic theories of his time to ignorant physicians summoned to heal the body politic of illness, but who only make matters worse.Footnote 14 Whereas he, “the true Physician is debarred from administering the remedy.”Footnote 15 Writing in 1873, he described his remedy as a most mighty, wondrously new order (Shoghi Effendi translates this as “this most great, this new World Order”).Footnote 16
The above apocalyptic vision of “suddenly appear that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake” is suggestive of a moment of “revolutionary liminality,” when, in Said Amir Arjomand’s words: “… the sociopolitical rules and conventions are broken… the existing reality is radically rejected, indeed destined for cataclysmic destruction.” The result is “the imminent destruction of the current cosmic and normative order and its radical sociopolitical transformation,” and thus “… a new beginning can be made.”Footnote 17 It is thus the apocalypticism and messianism inherent in the Bāb’s claim to be the Imām Mahdī and Bahā’u’llāh’s claim to be the fulfillment of the savior prophesied in every religion that produces the conceptual space and social permission to break with the old order and create a “new World Order,” as well as creating the communal energy to drive forward the revolutionary changes required.Footnote 18 In Arjomand’s words: “The apocalyptic vision is a powerful means for transcending the normative order. True order is no longer identified with this world but requires a radical break with it.”Footnote 19 It is this “transcending the normative order” and creation of a “new World Order” prefigured by the Bāb and Bahā’u’llāh and actualized by the Bahā’ī community that is the subject of this paper.
There is no space in this paper to present all the details of this “new World Order.” One of its key revolutionary elements, however, was its aim of dismantling the power hierarchy of the existing social order and the accompanying hegemonic dominance. In around 1868, Bahā’u’llāh declared that power had been seized from both secular and religious leaders (umarā va ʿulamā).Footnote 20 The aim was not, as in the Constitutional Revolution (and indeed in other revolutions, such the American, French, and Communist revolutions), to take power from one group and hand it to another, but rather to remove power from the grasp of individuals altogether. The radical and far-reaching implications of this would only gradually become apparent in the Bahā’ī community as it evolved, following the instructions of Bahā’u’llāh and succeeding Bahā’ī leaders, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā (ʿAbbās Effendi, 1844–1921) and particularly Shoghi Effendi (Shoghi Rabbani, 1897–1957), who oversaw the transfer of power from individuals to elected leadership councils. As Shoghi Effendi wrote:
But praise be to God that the Pen of Glory has… dismissed the assertions of individuals as an authoritative criterion, even though they were recognized as the most accomplished and learned among men, and ordained that all matters be referred to authorized centers and specified assemblies.Footnote 21
Leadership councils (spiritual assemblies) were thus elected, functioning on a basis that eliminates electioneering and partisan politics and removes power from individuals. More recently, an element of participatory democracy has been added, with most decisions at the grassroots level taken by those actively engaged in social action – the ultimate and ongoing aim being to replace the competition, conflict, and compulsion inherent in the existing hierarchical social order with a new order that functions through consultation, cooperation, and collaboration and aims to give agency to every individual in society. Of course, the ultimate aim of dismantling the fetishization of power was not achievable through administrative changes alone. It also depended on additional measures: education, the social advancement of women, and grassroots change in society’s moral and spiritual foundations. Although the Iranian Bahā’ī community has been hampered by persecution in recent years, it is still endeavoring to effect the changes that have occurred in the rest of the Bahā’ī world, where the administrative structure is evolving towards becoming a tool for the facilitation and coordination of grassroots activities rather than a mechanism for individuals to exert power.
There was also a second element of the Bahā’ī teachings that contrasted with the reformers’ agenda. When Iran was polarized in 1908–9, with Muḥammad ʿAlī Shāh (r. 1907–9) and his supporters on one side and the constitutionalists on the other, many believed ʿAbdu’l-Bahā would lead the Bahā’īs to support the constitutionalists, as the latter’s platform shared many similarities with Bahā’ī social teachings. However, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā instructed the Bahā’īs to avoid all engagement in the fevered politics of the era:
We have no connection with any party: we are neither partisans of the Victorious Government nor do we share the opinions of the Glorious People. We stand aside from all strifes, wish well to all, and offer our prayers and supplications at the Throne of God that He will reconcile these two honourable elements with one another.Footnote 22
In the 1970s, the Bahā’īs similarly refused to join Mohammad Reza Shah’s Rastākhīz party even though, for many, this refusal meant losing jobs or other social pressures. These were important indicators that, from the Bahā’ī viewpoint, the existing political order was part of the problem and so could never be part of the solution. To participate in this order would be to get sucked into the competitiveness, conflict, and corruption that characterize it (being indeed an inherent part of it) and thus perpetuate and reinforce the hierarchical power structure.
The present Bahā’ī program of action aims to decenter the social dynamics of competition and conflict and create a new space for a different style of social and political activity; to move from a culture of monologue to a culture in which the capacity of all to engage in dialogue is fostered, becoming the foundation of community life; and to break the socialization perpetuating the dominant culture. The program of action does this by creating educational initiatives that build the capacities of all and encourage independent thought, meaningful consultation, and collective action by every willing member of society (whether Bahā’ī or not). The Bahā’ī program refuses to present itself as an alternative in the competitive political sphere; rather, its politics is to work towards creating an alternative space (outside the conventional political framework) built on participatory democracy, consultative decision-making, and collaborative grassroots social action.Footnote 23 One result is that most commentators and scholars, who tend to focus on the short-term concerns of the conventional political and economic landscape, have failed to notice the long-term change taking place within the Bahā’ī community. A more significant and serious result is that many secular Iranian intellectuals have considered the Bahā’īs’ failure to engage with progressive political movements as stemming from an indifference to Iran’s plight and have therefore impugned the patriotism of the Bahā’īs.Footnote 24
A third revolutionary element in Bahā’u’llāh’s teaching was his attempt to move his followers away from the nationalism central to the secular reformers’ worldview. Bahā’u’llāh’s aim was to decenter nationalism and reorient his followers towards internationalism (peace and cooperation among nations) and, even beyond that, towards globalism (meaning here a global vision of an organically interconnected, united humanity), as indicated by statements such as: “The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens” and, using an organic analogy for interconnectedness, “Regard the world as the human body.”Footnote 25 Shoghi Effendi, in his development of this idea, points out that it is not a “repudiation” of “a sane and intelligent patriotism,” but rather a realization that such patriotism must operate within a “wider loyalty” to the human race.Footnote 26
Particularly significant to Iranian culture was Bahā’u’llāh’s abolition of the concept that the world is divided into believers and unbelievers (the concept of kufr) and that unbelievers are impure (the concept of nijāsat).Footnote 27 One sees evidence of this from as early as the 1880s among ordinary Iranian Bahā’īs, in their willingness to make contact with Western visitors in Iran, their openness when Bahā’īs from Western nations began visiting Iran in the 1900s, and their willingness to go to distant parts of the world to spread Bahā’ī teachings (thanks to this global spread of the Bahā’ī Faith, the Iranian festival of Naw-Rūz is celebrated, the land of Iran is venerated, and there are even individuals learning the Persian language in order to read the Bahā’ī scriptures in their original language in almost every country in the world).Footnote 28 Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the revolutionary effect of this teaching among the Bahā’īs of Iran, however, is the fact that accounts of the conversion of a number of Jews and Zoroastrians specifically note that their attraction to the Bahā’ī community stemmed from observing Bahā’īs of Muslim background (even those who had previously been Muslim clerics) engaging with those of other religions with kindness and friendship, treating them as equals, and being willing to abandon the laws of ritual impurity (nijāsat) to the extent of eating and drinking from the same vessels as them.Footnote 29 This internationalism and cosmopolitanism among Bahā’īs has led to a certain degree of hostility from some secular Iranian intellectuals, whose nationalism has often been tinged, as Chehabi has pointed out, with more than a little xenophobia.Footnote 30
These revolutionary elements of Bahā’u’llāh’s worldview could not be realized all at once, nor should it be thought that the Bahā’ī writings present a detailed end picture of this “new World Order.” Rather, the Bahā’ī leadership has presented certain social principles, such as equality and justice, that should animate any future society and certain principles of social action that should guide the way there. But it is up to humanity to create and evolve the new structure, and thus, in 19th and 20th-century Iran, Bahā’ī leaders initiated certain lines of social action towards this goal. Such social action, even when it seemed superficially similar to what reformers advocated, aimed at a much more radical change in society. These lines of social action are the subject of the following sections.
The revolution in society and leadership
In Shīʿī theory, all religious and political authority belongs to the Hidden Twelfth Imām (the Qā’im, the Imām Mahdī). During the Qājār era, an uneasy and unstable tension existed between the Qājār power structure and the religious leadership that collectively claimed to be the deputy and agent of the Hidden Imām, putting the religious leadership in a position to give legitimacy to the Qājār dynasty. Therefore, the Bāb’s claim of being the authorized agent of the Hidden Imām Mahdī, and later the Imām himself, had far-reaching revolutionary and subversive implications for Iran’s political leadership. However, while he called on Muḥammad Shāh to accept his claim, the Bāb did not demand the shah hand over political leadership.Footnote 31
In the late 19th century, apart from a relatively small number of “enlightened” thinkers, the majority of Iranians were wedded to a traditional worldview and negative perception of the outside world. Owing to the above-mentioned concept of kufr (unbelief), Iranians were unwilling to accept ideas and innovations coming from Europe, and owing to the Shīʿī concept of nijāsat (uncleanness), they limited personal interactions with Europeans.Footnote 32 This isolationism was later augmented by an increasing willingness to believe in conspiracy theories. Most Shīʿī clerics were particularly antagonistic to the West, condemning all contact and influence, whether through trade, inventions, social change, knowledge, or modern education.Footnote 33
In contrast to the clerics, the Bāb indicated that Iran should become more open to some aspects of the science, technology, and social organization found in the West. The concept of historical religious progression (rather than Islam’s sanctified religious past), which lays at the heart of the Bāb’s writings, allowed for the emergence of an “indigenous concept of modernity” and an implicit call for human social agency, as Abbas Amanat has pointed out.Footnote 34 In the Qayyūm al-Asmā, his first book after declaring his mission, the Bāb called upon the people of the West to aid his cause.Footnote 35 In later works, the Bāb showed himself open to the advances of the West, but did not advocate the wholesale adoption of everything from the West. The Bāb advocated the import of technologies and more open attitudes not as an end in itself but as a means to achieving societal improvements. For example, he commended and called for a postal service and speedy dissemination of news akin to the West, but cautioned that this be made available to all, not just the powerful and wealthy.Footnote 36 He was favorable to trading with European merchants, but only if the goods they brought benefitted Iran.Footnote 37
The reform agenda promulgated by the Bahā’ī leadership, Bahā’u’llāh and his son and successor ʿAbdu’l-Bahā in the ensuing decades continued the process of an emerging indigenous modernity created by human social action. This agenda differed significantly from that of contemporaneous Iranian secular nationalist reformers. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, when Iranian reformers – such as Malkam Khān and Mīrzā Ḥusayn Khān Mushīr al-Dawlih – were calling on the shah to share leadership with an appointed cabinet, Bahā’u’llāh and ʿAbdu’l-Bahā were already advocating representative democracy and constitutional monarchy as the best way forward for Iran (at a time when most of Europe was still ruled by autocratic regimes).Footnote 38 At a time when world peace was not within most Iranians’ conceptual universe (or that of most Europeans or Americans for that matter), Bahā’u’llāh was writing about this and, around 1888, called for a universal conference of world leaders to arbitrate all outstanding disputes, sign a universal peace treaty, and make a declaration of collective security (whereby all nations agreed to rise up against any nation that attacked another), thus allowing the countries of the world to reallocate most military spending to more beneficial ends.Footnote 39
The path advocated by Iranian reformers took various directions. Some advocated that Iran should closely follow the social and intellectual patterns established by European powers, while others sought to establish that Islam was compatible with the modern world and held the key to the progress of the nation (for more on the latter, see below). The Bahā’ī leaders rejected the mimetic project of those reformers who advocated the wholesale adoption of European ideas and institutions. For example, Iranian reformer Malkam Khān (1834–1908) wrote in Dastgāh-i Dīvān of the need to import European ideas and technology:
… the crux of the matter is this that the surging power of Europe has made the survival of barbarian states impossible. From now on, all governments of the earth must be organized like the European governments or they will be conquered and subjugated by them.Footnote 40
The Bahā’ī leaders warned against such a course. For example, while praising some aspects of the West, such as democracy, Bahā’u’llāh was critical of its colonialist, war-mongering, and hypocritical actions. In several of his writings, for example, he expressed horror at the attack carried out by the British to suppress the ʿUrābī revolt in Egypt in 1882 and the resulting destruction in the city of Alexandria.Footnote 41 British Professor Edward G. Browne visited Bahā’u’llāh in 1890 and heard his criticism of the armament expenditures of the Western powers, despite their lip service to Christ’s peaceable message.Footnote 42 Bahā’u’llāh also noted the hypocrisy of European governments that proclaimed liberal values but nevertheless fostered anti-Semitism.Footnote 43
ʿAbdu’l-Bahā, while praising the West’s scientific and technical progress, was also highly critical of the manner in which Europe used science and technology to create destructive armaments, which he called “the malignant fruits of material civilization.”Footnote 44 Writing in 1875, he presented evidence of Europe being “morally uncivilized.”Footnote 45 Like Bahā’u’llāh, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā also condemned the hypocrisy and racism of the West. On November 23, 1911, while ʿAbdu’l-Bahā was in Paris, a train fell in a river and killed twenty-five people; it was a subject of great concern and debate in French newspapers and the parliament. ʿAbdu’l-Bahā stated:
I was very much astonished that for twenty-five persons who fell in the river and drowned, such a strange tumult appeared in the parliament; but for Tripoli, where thousands are being killed in a day, they never say a word. Undoubtedly, so far at least, five thousand persons have been killed. It never occurs to the parliament that these persons are human. It is as if they were stones. What is the reason that the parliament is in this way disturbed over twenty-five persons and never speaks of the five thousand? … The reason is that the five thousand are not of the French nation. It does not matter if they are cut in pieces. Behold, what injustice, what senselessness, what ignorance!Footnote 46
Much the same applies to the next Bahā’ī leader, Shoghi Effendi. Some have accused Shoghi Effendi of adopting the values of the West and being “orientalist” in his attitude towards Iran and Islam.Footnote 47 This position can, however, only be maintained by being highly selective with one’s facts and looking at Shoghi Effendi’s writings with an absurdly narrow lens while ignoring the bigger picture and his full range of writings. A broader, more nuanced and culturally aware reading of the sources shows that Shoghi Effendi neither acquired an “orientalist” frame of mind as a result of his very short period of education in England nor was he ill-disposed towards Iran and Islam. Rather, his position arose from his close familiarity with the writings of Bahā’u’llāh and ʿAbdu’l-Bahā and was almost identical to theirs. Shoghi Effendi’s criticism of the “Orient” only related to the corruption and maladministration of the secular and religious leaders there.Footnote 48 He was just as critical of the hypocrisy, war-mongering, corruption, racism, and colonialism of the Western leadership. Writing in 1936 about some trends in the West, for example, Shoghi Effendi criticized the “an intolerant and militant nationalism” that “insisted on deifying the state, has inculcated the war-spirit, and incited to racial animosity.”Footnote 49 In the opening years of World War II, Shoghi Effendi wrote of the three “false gods” of “Nationalism, Racialism and Communism” corroding and destroying governments and peoples.Footnote 50 He also wrote to the Western Bahā’īs who had gone to Africa to spread the Bahā’ī teachings, that they:
… must realise that their standard is very far from that of the white colonials. They have not gone there to uphold the white man’s supremacy, but to give the Cause of God to, primarily, the black man whose home is Africa.Footnote 51
In his last general letter to the Bahā’īs in the United States of America in 1957, he wrote of “the cancerous growth of militant racialism, political corruption, unbridled capitalism, wide-spread lawlessness, and gross immorality” affecting that country.Footnote 52
ʿAbdu’l-Bahā had great love for Iran, its culture, and its people. As Chehabi noted, “there is good evidence that at least ʿAbdu’l-Bahā harboured feelings of Iranian patriotism bordering on nationalism.”Footnote 53 When royalists and nationalists were fighting after the coup d’état of 1908, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā was concerned for the welfare of Iran, asserting that this disunity and strife was weakening the country and opening the door to foreign forces (which is what happened). As he stated: “I wrote to Persia that so long as the nation and the government do not combine like milk and honey, prosperity and happiness are impossible. Persia will become desolate and the end result will be intervention by neighboring powers.”Footnote 54
Another important difference in the Bahā’ī approach was its rejection of the materialism sweeping European philosophy and reflected in social and political ideologies.Footnote 55 Thus, while Iranian secular reformers concentrated on political change, albeit with attention to matters such as modern education and women’s social advancement, Bahā’ī leaders believed that grassroots change in the moral and spiritual foundations of society was the priority, as it is only on this basis that changes such as modern education, women’s social advancement, and the benefits of science and technology could be firmly established and lead to social progress. The Bahā’ī leaders rejected the instrumentalist and materialist approach to modernization advocated by secular reformers, considering instead that there must be a balance between the rationalization advocated in the West and the spiritual and moral values inculcated by religion.Footnote 56
Despite the differences in the approaches of Iranian secular nationalist reformers and the Bahā’ī community, and perhaps due to the strong link in the Iranian Islamic conceptual universe between innovation and heresy (both captured within the word bidʿat), Negar Mottahedeh has pointed out that modernity became identified in the Iranian imaginary not so much with the “European Other” as with the “abject Babi Other.”Footnote 57 In the late Qājār imaginary, thoughts of reform were linked in an inchoate manner with the negative feelings and revulsion evoked by the term “Bābī” (Bahā’īs were known as “Bābīs” by the general population until around the 1920s). There are indications of this in a report by American Morgan Schuster (1877–1960): when his financial mission arrived in Iran in 1911, many Iranians reacted negatively, thinking they must all be Bahā’īs.Footnote 58 Of course, the connection in the public mind between heresy, the Bahā’īs, and the West was used by Muslim clerics in their campaigns against both Bahā’īs and modern reforms, as well as utilized in the Pahlavi period to spread conspiracy theories attacking Bahā’īs as agents of Western powers.
There is evidence that suggests the Bahā’īs may have influenced the Iranian reformers. Among the earliest reformers, Mīrzā Malkam Khān is known to have met Bahā’u’llāh during the former’s exile in Baghdad in 1861, before his further exile in April 1862 to Istanbul, where he may again have contacted Bahā’u’llāh and his followers during their parallel exile in the city in May 1863.Footnote 59 In any case, Malkam Khān had had such close contact with the Bābīs that when Ernest Renan met him in Istanbul in June 1865, Malkam Khān represented himself as being so knowledgeable about Bābīs that Renan encouraged him to write on the subject in 1866.Footnote 60 Nikki Keddie has suggested that Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Asadābādī (“al-Afghānī,” c. 1838–1897) was in contact with the Bābī leaders in Baghdad in the 1850s.Footnote 61 He was certainly very familiar with the movement and provided information on the matter that was included in Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s Arabic encyclopedia.Footnote 62 Al-Afghānī appears to have wanted to remain in contact with the Bahā’ī leaders in Acre, as he sent them copies of his newspaper, Urwat al-Wuthqā, from Paris in the 1880s.Footnote 63 A third prominent Iranian reformer of this early period was Mīrzā Ḥusayn Khān Mushīr al-Dawlih (1827–81). As the Iranian minister in Istanbul, he had been instrumental in effecting the various stages of Bahā’u’llāh’s exile from Baghdad to Istanbul, Edirne, and finally Acre, and had used all his influence to restrict Bahā’ī activities. It was reported, however, that in 1870, after reading petitions addressed to Bahā’u’llāh that had been confiscated after Shaykh Salmān’s arrest in Aleppo, Mushīr al-Dawlih altered his attitude and, from that time on, was reportedly sympathetic.Footnote 64 Certainly there were no persecutions of the Bahā’īs during the time he held important cabinet positions, including prime minister.Footnote 65
In Isfahan, in the late 1890s to 1903, Mīrzā Naṣrullāh Bihishtī Malik al-Mutakallimīn (1861–1908) and Sayyid Jamāl al-Din Vāʿiẓ Iṣfahānī (1863–1908) were leading members of a circle of reformers, the Progress Society (Anjuman-i Taraqqī). As these two men were, in later years in Tehran, closely associated with Azalī circles, it has been assumed that they were also Azalīs in Isfahan.Footnote 66 The Progress Society, however, was composed primarily of Bahā’īs – including Mīrzā Aḥmad Khān Fātiḥ al-Mulk and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Mīrzā Muʾayyad al-Salṭanih – and met at the house of Mīrzā Asadullāh Vazīr (1848–1917), the most prominent Bahā’ī in Isfahan. Further evidence that Malik al-Mutakallimīn and Vāʿiẓ Iṣfahānī were effectively part of Isfahan’s Bahā’ī community comes from the fact that Malik al-Mutakallimīn allowed his home to be used to house the prominent Bahā’ī Mīrzā Ḥasan Adīb when he visited Isfahan. Both Malik al-Mutakallimīn and Vāʿiẓ Iṣfahānī were also hunted as Bahā’īs and forced to leave Isfahan during the anti-Bahā’ī persecution of 1903, and there is no evidence to suggest they were in contact with Azalīs while in Isfahan.Footnote 67
In the years leading up to the Constitutional Revolution, Ḥājī Abul-Ḥasan Mīrzā Shaykh al-Raʾīs (1848–1918) was a leading constitutionalist. Juan Cole has presented enough evidence to conclude that Shaykh al-Raʾīs was a Bahā’ī, including his poetry and his visit to the Bahā’ī leader ʿAbdu’l-Bahā.Footnote 68 After the revolution, the two leaders of the counter-coup that ended the Lesser Tyranny in 1909, Muḥammad Valī Khān Tunukābunī (Naṣr al-Salṭanih, Sipahsalār-i Aʿẓam, 1846–1926) and ʿAlī Qulī Khān Sardār Asʿad Bakhtiyārī (1856–1917), were in close contact with the Bahā’ī community and met ʿAbdu’l-Bahā in France.Footnote 69 The contribution of the Bahā’īs to the Constitutional Movement in Sari is the subject of a separate article.Footnote 70
Also important as a vehicle for the dissemination of Bahā’ī ideas among Iranian reformers was the 1882 publication in India of ʿAbdu’l-Bahā’s treatise on reform, Risālih-yi Madaniyyih.Footnote 71 This work was published anonymously so as to not prejudice Iranians against reading it. It was probably the second Iranian reformist treatise to be published (after Mustashār al-Dawlih’s Yik Kalamih) and there is evidence that it achieved a wide readership in Iran.Footnote 72
Given the close links between Iranian reformers and the Bahā’īs, and the fact that, as demonstrated here, the Bahā’ī leadership was ahead of most reformers in calling for reforms such as democracy, modern education, and the advancement in the social role of women (see below), it is not unreasonable to suggest that these reformers may have been influenced by Bahā’ī ideas in the years leading up to and after the Constitutional Revolution.Footnote 73
The revolution in the religious world
The Bāb’s claim of being the Imām Mahdī also challenged the religious leadership. Although the Bāb reassured Muḥammad Shāh that he had no desire to take over political leadership, he gave no such reassurances to the clerical leadership. The Bāb called on clerics to submit to his authority. Although the Bāb displayed the utmost respect for the Prophet Muḥammad, the twelve Shīʿī Imāms, and Fāṭimih throughout his writings, he regarded the madrasih studies of the clerical class as a waste of time and forbade it for his followers.Footnote 74 Since the authority of the clerics was based on their madrasih learning, the Bāb was effectively undermining their authority. In addition, he blamed the clerics for misleading Muslims to reject his message.Footnote 75
Apart from the question of religious leadership, the Bāb disrupted the religiosity of the Iranian nation. In place of the passive attitude constantly looking toward the twelfth Imām's promised return, expecting all the social and economic problems oppressing the masses to be resolved by his coming, the Bāb announced that he was the promised Imām and that religion now involved people taking an active role, working for the implementation of the laws and reforms outlined in his writings that would bring about the desired changes.
The traditional Shīʿī view is that the twelfth Imām will come to ensure the victory and spread of Shīʿī Islām. The Bāb overturned this expectation, claiming to bring a new revelation from God and a new religion, with a new book and new holy law. One of the ways the Bāb took on the traditionalism of Muslim clerical leaders was by turning this traditionalism against them. For example, the first book he wrote after putting forward his claim, the Qayyūm al-Asmā’, was ostensibly a commentary on the Qurʾan’s Sūrah of Joseph, a very traditional genre of Islamic literature. And yet it was unlike any commentary written in Islamic history; it was not a commentary that any Islamic scholar would have dared write. This commentary turns the table on the Qurʾan: instead of interpreting what the Qurʾan’s text means, the Bāb tells the reader what the Quranic text should now be, writing a new Qurʾan, better suited to the present. To call this approach innovative is a gross underestimation of its explosive, revolutionary effect. Muslims believe the Qurʾan to be the final word of God. Claiming to reveal what the Qurʾan should now be is to claim the authority of divine revelation.Footnote 76 As Todd Lawson has stated, “interpretation became revelation.”Footnote 77 In January 1845, the Ottoman pasha convened a court of senior Sunnī and Shīʿī clerics in Baghdad to examine the book. Clearly understanding its disruptive potential, the clerics unanimously condemned the book and its author.Footnote 78 Over the next few years, the Bāb gradually enacted the implications of his claim, asserting the right to abrogate Islamic law and dismantle Islamic institutions, especially in his book the Bayān. Although the Bāb’s ability to carry out his reforms was limited by the short duration of his ministry and the violent reaction his teachings incited, he began a process continued by subsequent Bahā’ī leaders.
The Bahā’ī leaders followed the same pattern as the Bāb, respecting the Prophet Muḥammad and Islam. Bahā’u’llāh praised the Prophet Muhammad.Footnote 79 ʿAbdu’l-Bahā defended Islam in churches and synagogues in the United States.Footnote 80 Shoghi Effendi was also respectful towards the Prophet Muhammad and Islam, even instructing Western Bahā’īs to learn about the religion and become its defenders.Footnote 81
However, like the Bāb, Bāhā’u’llāh also discounted the knowledge acquired by the clerical classes in madrasihs, even declaring that the Prophet Muḥammad “was never burdened with a single letter of these limited and obscure learnings… these fanciful illusions.”Footnote 82 ʿAbdu’l-Bahā condemned the hypocrisy and some practices of Muslim clerics.Footnote 83 Shoghi Effendi criticized Muslim religious leaders he considered fanatical and corrupt.Footnote 84 Such statements should not, however, be seen as directed solely at Muslim clerics. Bahā’u’llāh pointed out that the main enemies of all the founders of the world’s religions had been the religious leaders of the previous religions, and it was they who were most responsible for preventing ordinary people from accepting new religious teachings.Footnote 85 Thus, Bahā’u’llāh forbade the elitism of a priesthood or any professional religious class among his followers.Footnote 86
In place of religious professionals, the Bahā’ī community built up, from the 1900s onwards, an administrative system that eventually involved participatory democracy, consultative decision-making, and a network of elected local, national, and international councils. These councils do not perform the same functions as Muslim clerics, however. For example, the councils do not interpret scripture, which is left to the individual. Their role is to co-ordinate the affairs of the community.
Moreover, the Bahā’ī leaders called for a change that went far deeper than the mere abolition of a professional religious leadership. They aimed for revolutionary change in the social imaginary of religion. True religion, according to these leaders, is not about correct doctrine, performance of rituals, or precise adherence to a holy law (the sharīʿah). It is not passively sitting and listening to sermons or even participating in ritual commemorations of the sufferings of the Imāms. It is not about following the leadership of a mujtahid or Ṣūfī Shaykh. This type of religiosity (often signposted in the Bahā’ī scriptures by the word “taqlīd,” usually translated as “blind imitation”) is condemned. True religion, according to the Bahā’ī leaders, has a two-fold purpose: individual improvement through the acquisition of moral and spiritual qualities (such as love, justice, trustworthiness, etc.) and the betterment of society (leading to more peaceful, united, coherent communities); it aims “to effect a transformation in the whole character of mankind, a transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly, that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions.”Footnote 87 This is the difference between the Shīʿī and the Bahā’ī ethos and is exemplified by the fact that both communities have a source of emulation. For Shīʿīs, the mujtahid is the source of emulation (marjaʿ al-taqlīd), and it is his judgments and decrees on the sharīʿah that are to be emulated. For Bahā’īs, this source is ʿAbdu’l-Bahā (mathal-i aʿlā, the perfect exemplar) and it is his moral and spiritual qualities that are to be emulated.
One of the social implications of the Bahā’ī view of religion is that each individual Bahā’ī should seek to be of service to others, not just within their own community but to the whole of society. Even under the pressures of the recent persecutions, Bahā’īs have tried to help the wider Iranian community. For example, following the Bam earthquake in 2003, Bahā’ī educators volunteered to teach young children whose education had been disrupted as a result, for which the educators were arrested and imprisoned.Footnote 88 Similarly, some fifty-four young Bahā’īs were arrested in 2006, and several imprisoned, for literacy work they were conducting with other like-minded Iranians among the poor in Shiraz.Footnote 89 However, the most important consequence of this change of ethos was to take social agency down to the level of the individual.
While some Iranian reformers advocated reform along European lines, others – such as Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Asadābādī (“al-Afghānī”) – held that Islam was compatible with modernity and worked to create pan-Islamic unity against European encroachment. Nikki Keddie has described how, in the 1890s, Asadābādī, after seeing the power of the clerical leadership in the uprising against the Tobacco Regie, was courting such leaders in an attempt to co-opt them to his cause (assisted by his followers, including Āqā Khān Kirmānī and Shaykh Aḥmad Rūḥī).Footnote 90 At exactly this time, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā wrote in his Treatise on Politics (Risālih-yi Siyāsiyyih) of the need to keep the clerics out of politics, pointing to the fact that every time clerical leaders in Iran had been involved in politics, the result was disastrous for Iran.Footnote 91
With the abolition of religious professionals and reimagining of religion away from almost all the elements characteristic of Iranian Shiʿism (e.g., sharīʿah, the hierarchical control of religious leaders, taqlīd, the focus on weeping and death, and the strict control of women), it is little wonder that the spread of the Bahā’ī religion among the general population caused a moral and existential panic among the Iranian clerical class. It goes a long way towards explaining their vehement and dogged persecution of the Bahā’īs for decades.Footnote 92
The revolution in education
In the 19th century, the only education available to most Iranians was controlled by the Islamic religious hierarchy and only available to those who could pay for it. At the primary level, this education did not prepare children for any useful occupation and was irrelevant to the country’s needs.Footnote 93 Iran’s early 19th-century military defeats awakened some to the need to modernize, but this was only expressed in a positivist and instrumentalist manner – i.e., catching up with the military capabilities of the West – in a single institution in Tehran: the Dār al-Funūn. Only a handful of Christian missionary schools offered modern education, but primarily only for Christian children.
Bahā’u’llāh placed great importance on education: “Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”Footnote 94 As early as 1875, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā was calling for modern education to be available throughout Iran: “The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education. It is inconceivable that any nation should achieve prosperity and success unless this paramount, this fundamental concern is carried forward.”Footnote 95 As a result of this emphasis on education, and as soon as it became possible due to the slight relaxation of social pressures on the Bahā’ī community, ʿAbdu’l-Bahā began encouraging the Bahā’īs to build modern schools. He also encouraged American Bahā’īs (such as Sydney Sprague and Lillian Kappes) to travel to Iran and assist Iranian Bahā’īs with curriculum development and modern pedagogy.Footnote 96
From the last decade of the 19th century onward, many secular Iranians began establishing schools.Footnote 97 Bahā’ī schools, however, were different from these in a number of ways. As result of the religious obligation to educate all, Bahā’īs began building schools in the 1900s, not just in the cities where the secular schools were being built, but wherever their communities were large enough to sustain a school, even in small towns and villages. Just how difficult and revolutionary this was is demonstrated when the Bahā’īs tried to establish a school in the remote village of Īvil in Māzandarān in 1922. The governor of the area said to Shahāb Shahmīrzādī, a Bahā’ī educator:
How do you hope, here in the middle of the jungle, to convince these wild and ill-behaved people, who are a hundred centuries removed from education and civilisation and spend their days from dawn to dusk in the paddy-fields up to their waists in mud and water accompanied by cows, of the benefits of education and knowledge or that Moses or Jesus or Muhammad or Baha’u’llah has commanded this or forbidden that? They are not able to understand such matters… What an optimist you are! I have been to Īvil. There is no possibility of a school there. Governors have come to the Chahārdānga district and tried to set up a school here in Kiyāsar which is the centre of the district and has almost 500 families, most of them having wealth and land, and they have failed. Two years ago, A‘ẓam al-Vuzarā was the governor here. He really tried hard in this regard and spent fifty tūmāns of his own money for the furniture of the school. They constructed tables and benches. But he was not able to get the children to come to school for even a day. After he left, they used the furniture of the school for firewood… What do these people know of education and training?Footnote 98
Another way in which Bahā’ī schools were distinct from secular schools concerned the use of corporal punishment. The beating of children was (and continues to be) a key tool for Iranian teachers. The Bāb initiated a change in this regard, severely limiting corporal punishment and prescribing consequences for exceeding this limit. This trend was continued by ʿAbdu’l-Bahā, who wrote against all corporal punishment; advice that was gradually implemented in Bahā’ī schools across Iran.Footnote 99
The effects of these Bahā’ī schools on wider Iranian society are difficult to document, but it should be noted that these schools were open to all and often taught notable numbers of non-Bahā’ī children. In all, this must have increased awareness of and appreciation for modern education throughout Iran. In small towns and villages, where the only alternative education was a maktab run by a local mullah, many non-Bahā’ī families preferred to send their children to the Bahā’ī school. Even in cities such as Tehran, where there were a number of alternative modern schools, many notable families sent their children to Bahā’ī schools and many of these went on to become ministers and intellectuals.Footnote 100 This must have had an impact on Iran’s progress during the 20th century. Another impact may have been the rapid shift from French as the second language of the country – preferred by secular schools and the government – to English, adopted by the Bahā’ī schools on the advice of ʿAbdu’l-Bahā.Footnote 101
The revolution in the world of women
The world of women in 19th-century Iran was extremely limited. While religious law dictated that women be confined to their homes, many, perhaps most, lower and middle-class women engaged in work of some kind, often outside the home, and the bazaar was teeming with women. Nevertheless, women’s choices were constrained throughout their lives by the religious concept of male guardianship, the limited social options available to them, and their lack of education.Footnote 102 While the Constitutional Revolution raised the level of debate around women, it did not appreciably improve their situation (it did not give women the vote, for example).Footnote 103 During the Pahlavi period, while opportunities for women to work, be educated, and engage in public discourse increased, the Pahlavis’ dictatorial centralizing tendencies (exemplified by women’s forced unveiling) did much to strengthen the patriarchy. As Hamideh Sedghi has pointed out, Reza Shah used women’s “emancipation” as a way “to emasculate religious authorities and transfer patriarchal power from the domain of the clergy to the realm of the state.”Footnote 104 Haideh Moghissi states that, by the mid-1930s, all women’s organizations had been closed down.Footnote 105
Regarding the world of women in the Bābī-Bahā’ī movement, minds automatically turn to Ṭāhirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn, but it is important to note the Bāb’s contributions that laid the groundwork for her activities. Armin Eschraghi has pointed to the revolutionary potential of the Bāb teaching his followers that “men and women, are allowed to look [at each other], speak and sit together.”Footnote 106 Accompanying this were laws requiring bridal consent, limiting polygamy and divorce, and abolishing concubinage and temporary marriage (mutʿah). The Bāb even made his injunction against causing grief to anyone doubly binding with respect to women.Footnote 107
Much has been written about Ṭāhirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn. All that will be attempted here is a summary review of the revolutionary impact she had and continues to have on the world of women in Iran. Ṭāhirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn was born into a traditional clerical family. One way to view her life is to consider that she, like all Iranian women of the time, was handed a script at birth that she was expected to follow for the rest of her life. This script, that of a Shīʿī woman, daughter, wife, and mother, confined and restricted her intellectual and social development to what would be fitting for these roles. Ṭāhirih, however, tore up this script and wrote her own: she challenged the strict traditional Uṣūlī interpretation of Shīʿī Islam that her father, husband, and father-in-law zealously advocated, adopting the Shaykhī school instead; left her husband and family in order to pursue her religious and intellectual quest in Karbalā; subverted gender norms and societal expectations of women’s intellectual capacity when she taught the male students of her recently deceased teacher Sayyid Kāẓim Rashtī from behind a veil in Karbalā (and is even said to have taught a circle of male students within the courtyard of the shrine of Imām Ḥusayn); turned social expectations upside-down by becoming the leader of most of the Shaykhīs in Karbalā, overcoming opposition from more senior men; pioneered a new path by being among the first to accept the revolutionary teachings of the Bāb, being appointed among his Letters of the Living, his first and foremost disciples; turned away from a millennium of religious orthodoxy by being among the earliest of his followers to realize, and probably the first to openly proclaim, the full implications of the Bāb’s claim to be the initiator of a new religious dispensation succeeding Islam; defied social conventions by joyfully celebrating the Bāb’s birth during the Muḥarram period, when Shīʿīs mourn the martyrdom of Imām Ḥusayn; accepted the social opprobrium of being divorced by her husband for her views and activities; refuted the gendered expectations that the psychological impact of losing her children to her husband would prevent her from escaping her husband’s control; shattered the centuries-old religious and social convention that women must be veiled in public by appearing unveiled to the Bābīs gathered at Badasht; and spoke loud and clear in public in a world that expected women to be silent and submissive – indeed, not to appear at all – in the public space. All these revolutionary acts were done with the knowledge that they would lead to her losing her children, family, reputation, social standing, liberty, and even possibly her life.Footnote 108
In thus claiming agency, exerting power, defiantly insisting on making her own choices, and rejecting the constraints of the traditional pathway and roles assigned to her, Ṭāhirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn inspired and led the way to a women’s movement in Iran. But men’s lives and choices are also limited in a traditional society (although to a lesser extent than women’s), and so the way Ṭāhirih led her life and made her own choices could also be considered as the dawn of modernity in Iran, the releasing of both women and men from the constraints of a traditional society.
Negar Mottahedeh has suggested that the image of Qurrat al-ʿAyn (an unveiled woman) is a fetish for Iranian modernity – an object that is both desired and reviled; a figure who simultaneously constitutes the nation and threatens the nation’s dissolution.Footnote 109 Parallel to this and within the framework of psychoanalysis, Farshid Kazemi has postulated that, although some see the sacrifice of the son, Imām Ḥusayn at Karbalā, as the originary trauma of Shīʿī Islam, resulting in a religion imbued with the ethos of rebellious male defiance, this – while distinct from the religion of male-dominated submission resulting from the subconscious guilt of patricide in the Freudian Oedipal myth – still leaves men as the agents of history, towards whom women act only in submission and obedience. The killing of the revolutionary figure of Ṭāhirih acts as a point of trauma and rupture, signaling the end of the Shīʿī imaginary and the start of a new symbolic order in which former patriarchal norms are cast aside. In the unveiling of Ṭāhirih, not just was her face uncovered, but also her speech and actions. As revolutionary and scandalous as her act of unveiling was, disrupting the Iranian social space, what she said at that time, to the effect that she was the trumpet that sounds on the Day of Judgment, was possibly even more important, signifying that she was the apocalypse, the end of the old world (and the beginning of the new). She threatened a rupture in the Islamic conceptual world. That is why she had to be silenced – and she was literally silenced by being strangled.Footnote 110
The Bahā’ī community, as it emerged from the Bābī movement, continued the work of Ṭāhirih, reconstructing gender roles and giving agency to women. This was based on the teachings of Bahā’u’llāh, who stated that he had “lifted distinctions from between His servants and handmaidens, and… hath conferred upon all a station and rank of the same plane,” breaking “the back of vain imaginings.”Footnote 111
As early as 1870, Polish historian and ethnographer Alexandr Jablonowski (1829–1913) met the Bahā’īs of Baghdad and commented on the teaching of equality between women and men and the advancement in the position of women among them in Baghdad and in Iran.Footnote 112 Dr. John Cormick, an Irish physician who met the Bāb in Iran, echoed this perception.Footnote 113 The words spoken to E.G. Browne by a simple Bahā’ī peddler are also evidence that this teaching had sunk into the consciousness of ordinary Bahā’īs and become part of their self-identity by the 1880s: “we believe that women ought to be allowed to mix more freely with men, and should not be compelled to wear the veil.”Footnote 114
ʿAbdu’l-Bahā took forward the process of advancing women’s social role. Although urged by American Bahā’ī women to promote the unveiling of Iranian Bahā’ī women, he considered this would only stir up conflict and persecution for the Bahā’īs of Iran and that the promotion of girls’ education was the more sustainable and effective way forward. Bahā’u’llāh had already made clear that his advocacy for children’s education applied equally to girls and boys.Footnote 115 And so, as ʿAbdu’l-Bahā encouraged Bahā’ī communities to establish modern schools, he wrote:
The school for girls taketh precedence over the school for boys, for it is incumbent upon the girls of this glorious era to be fully versed in the various branches of knowledge, in sciences and the arts and all the wonders of this pre-eminent time…Footnote 116
Consequently, the Bahā’ī community considered the establishment of girls’ schools, as well as those for boys, to be a religious duty. While other groups were also setting up girls’ schools in Iran, none were reaching the small towns and villages as the Bahā’īs were.Footnote 117
It is also significant that the American Bahā’īs whom ʿAbdu’l-Bahā had encouraged to settle in Iran and assist in the development of schools and medical facilities were almost all women, who then also provided Iranian Bahā’ī women with role models for how to claim agency and become more socially active.Footnote 118 Indeed, the first Iranian woman to seek further education in the West was a Bahā’ī.Footnote 119 Awareness of the need to advance women’s social role is evidenced by the fact that, in 1909, the Bahā’ī Committee for the Advancement of Women (Lajnih-yi Taraqqī-yi Nisvān) was set up at the national level, alongside a number of local committees.Footnote 120
Bahā’īs played a part in advancing the social role of women both within their own community and in Iranian society more broadly. For example, Tāyirih Khānum, a Bahā’ī, was a leading figure in advocating for the rights of women during the Constitutional Movement.Footnote 121 By 1973, the Bahā’ī community was able to claim 100 percent literacy among Bahā’ī women under the age of forty; this at a time when the literacy rate for women under forty in Iran stood at 44 percent.Footnote 122 More recently, the Bahā’ī community, in its efforts to restore the human rights of Bahā’īs in Iran, expressed empathy with the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement through launching a global media campaign called “Our Story is One.”Footnote 123 But perhaps, in the long term, the most profound change that the Bahā’īs have made and continue to work for is, as described above, the dismantling of the hierarchical social order that butresses the patriarchy.
Resistance and opposition
The creation of such a radically different community did not, of course, proceed smoothly. Indeed, for perhaps the first half century of its existence, the Iranian Bahā’ī community was led by former Shīʿī clerics, towards whom the Bahā’īs displayed the same deference Shīʿīs displayed for their mujtahids. Gradually, however, elected councils took over the community’s leadership. A handful of individuals who held prominent positions in the Bahā’ī community – such as ʿAbdul-Ḥusayn Āvārih (Āyatī), Ḥasan Nīkū, and Ahmad Sohrab – resisted these changes, eventually leading them to leave and turn against the community.Footnote 124
The advancement of the role of women in the community followed a similar trajectory: although women were able to vote for the Bahā’ī leadership councils from 1923 (40 years before women in general in Iran), it took until 1954 for them to be elected to these councils.Footnote 125
Bahā’īs were also trying to enact these changes amid continuous efforts by the Iranian religious establishment to constrain and cause difficulties for them. As described by Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, these efforts were aimed at “othering” the Bahā’ī community, marginalizing it in a cultural ghetto.Footnote 126 Paradoxically, secular intellectuals also aided clerics in their efforts. While, as noted by Houchang Chehabi, these secular intellectuals should, in principle, have opposed such efforts, they instead contributed to a climate in which any public mention of the Bahā’ī community and its ideas was shut down (except for hostile remarks) and the number of obstacles the community faced in conducting its individual and community affairs was maximized.Footnote 127 Inevitably, this led to a situation in which Bahā’ī attempts to create a new alternative communal structure were hampered and set back, such as when Reza Shah shut down the national network of Bahā’ī schools in 1934.Footnote 128
There were also general setbacks resulting from the periodic outbursts of violent persecution throughout the Bahā’īs’ 180-year history, most recently after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Paradoxically, however, these persecutions proved as springboards for Bahā’ī ideas to penetrate the general population of Iran more widely. Recent persecutions by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran have led to far greater public sympathy for the Bahā’ī community and understanding of its principles (as against the century of fabrications and disinformation told about it in the public space).Footnote 129 For example, Bahā’īs in prison in Iran have had the chance to converse at length with jailed reformers such as the Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi and the prominent politician Fatemeh Hashemi-Rafsanjani, leading to a greater understanding of each other’s position.Footnote 130
Conclusion
This paper presents suggestive evidence that the revolutionary changes pursued by the Bahā’ī community internally may also have had an impact on Iranian secular reformers and wider society. However, the information outlined in the sections on society and leadership, religion, education, and the advancement of women, while representing an important mark of Iran’s transition from a traditional society to modernity in its social, political, and religious culture, could be considered more evolutionary than revolutionary in nature. Furthermore, while Bahā’ī ideas and lines of social action may have been new in Iran at the time, they were already present in the West, leading some to argue that this was not an indigenous modernity but the result of foreign influence.Footnote 131 While it is true that, by the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the outward form of reforms suggested and actioned by secular reformers was not very different to those taking place within the Bahā’ī community, the worldview and associated social structural consequences being promoted by the Bahā’īs were revolutionary, not widely accepted anywhere in the world, and it is therefore difficult to argue that they were the result of foreign influence.
In accounts of Qājār and Pahlavi Iranian history, the Bābī movement is often dismissed as a failed rebellion and the Bahā’ī religion barely mentioned at all, as though it had no importance. The details laid out in this paper paint a different picture. What the Bābī and later Bahā’ī communities were doing was at a deeper, more radical level than anything attempted by secular reformers. Bahā’ī efforts to move towards a society with a different conceptualization of religion and society could only be carried out at the grassroots level. This was not a political program advanced through conventional political processes. These efforts, instead, were focused on empowering individuals and communities, a radical departure from the elitist, top-down, centralized approach to leadership and society that prevails in the world’s current political and social order.
As suggested at the start of this paper, the messianism and apocalypticism of the early Bābī-Bahā’ī movement created the conceptual space and social energy to drive forward the creation of what might be called a counter-culture, countering most of the social and religious norms of Iranian society. The Bahā’īs’ discourse on unity countered a fractious social and political sphere; their vision of religion as a potent force for moral and social action, rather than an ossified legal system, made religion a powerful agent in the betterment of society as well as countering the materialist and anti-religious ideologies of some secular reformers; their refusal to engage in the partisanship of the national political space demonstrated their commitment to a long-term, constructive process operating at a deeper level; their decentralized, non-hierarchical system of administration, as well as being an alternative model for how society could function (a model of social agency), created an inbuilt resilience that meant that, even if their leadership councils were imprisoned or executed (as occurred after the Islamic Revolution of 1979), community members continued to support both each other and those in the wider society in need of help; and their commitment to development and education for all has led to their drawing together women, minority groups, and others excluded by the official ideology, into an alliance for social progress.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant funding from any funding agency, or from the commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
