Reform Bahai Faith
2009-11-02 00:19:36 UTC
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 temporary 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 accumulated,
bringing home to many that far from a temporary 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-censorship 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 fashion, 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 proportion 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 documented 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
censorship 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-censorship. To
assist in this program of ideological terrorization of the Baha’i
community, the uhj has on a number of occasions apparently, or
purportedly, 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 documented on the Internet and
elsewhere for those unfamiliar with them or for those who wish to
independently investigate them further:
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/
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 supported 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, incorporated, 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 censorship 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 Guardianship and the innovations and attempts to fill in
the gaps and unfulfilled portions 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 and elsewhere of the authenticity of the purported will and
testament of Abdul-Baha and, hence, the legitimacy of any guardianship.
See the pages for Reform Bahai Articles and Abdul-Baha's Covenant.
Baha'i Faith & Religious Freedom of Conscience
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship
Chicago Tribune. Baha'i rift. Baha'is upset with Orthodox Baha'i Faith
May 18, 2009
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/may/18/local/chi-bahai-18-may18
All my comments posted to The Chicago Tribune Forum on one page:
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/Chicago_Tribune.html
Yahoo Group - ReformBahai
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ReformBahai
Reform Bahai Faith
Rochester, Michigan USA
www.ReformBahai.org
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 temporary 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 accumulated,
bringing home to many that far from a temporary 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-censorship 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 fashion, 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 proportion 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 documented 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
censorship 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-censorship. To
assist in this program of ideological terrorization of the Baha’i
community, the uhj has on a number of occasions apparently, or
purportedly, 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 documented on the Internet and
elsewhere for those unfamiliar with them or for those who wish to
independently investigate them further:
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/
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 supported 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, incorporated, 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 censorship 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 Guardianship and the innovations and attempts to fill in
the gaps and unfulfilled portions 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 and elsewhere of the authenticity of the purported will and
testament of Abdul-Baha and, hence, the legitimacy of any guardianship.
See the pages for Reform Bahai Articles and Abdul-Baha's Covenant.
Baha'i Faith & Religious Freedom of Conscience
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship
Chicago Tribune. Baha'i rift. Baha'is upset with Orthodox Baha'i Faith
May 18, 2009
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/may/18/local/chi-bahai-18-may18
All my comments posted to The Chicago Tribune Forum on one page:
http://www.fglaysher.com/bahaicensorship/Chicago_Tribune.html
Yahoo Group - ReformBahai
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ReformBahai
Reform Bahai Faith
Rochester, Michigan USA
www.ReformBahai.org
