Post by g***@hotmail.com"The age has dawned when human fellowship will become a reality. The
century has come when all religions shall be unified. The dispensation
is at hand ... > Abdu’l-Baha. P 369. Promulgation of Universal Peace
This is from a talk on 12 October 1912 for which there are no Persian
notes (at least, not in Khitabat, the volumes of "talks" in Persian).
As such, it is pilgrim's notes, not Bahai scripture. Abdu'l-Baha
spoke,
an interpreter (Amin Fareed in this case)
conveyed what he understood in whatever English he had mastered, and
Bijou Straun
took shorthand notes of that which were later worked up to a readable
text. Naturally
things go wrong in the process, as Shoghi Effendi explains:
" I truly deplore the unfortunate distortions that have resulted in
days past from the incapacity of the interpreter to grasp the meaning
of Abdu'l-Baha, and from his incompetence ... Much of the confusion
that has obscured the understanding of the believers should be
attributed to this double error involved in the inexact rendering of
an only partially understood statement. ... I have insistently urged
the believers of the West to regard such statements as merely personal
impressions of the sayings of their Master, and to quote and consider
as authentic only such translations as are based upon the
authenticated text of His recorded utterances in the original
tongue." (World Order of Baha'u'llah pp 4-5)
Those worked-up notes were printed in Star of the West vol 3 no 13,
and the section you point to reads:
In a word, the age is ours when fellowship is to be established!
The century has come when all the religions are to be unified!
The century has come when all the nations shall enjoy international
peace!
The century has come when all the races and the tribes of the world
will do away with racial prejudice and associate perfectly!
The century has arrived when all the na tepidities of the world will
prove to be one home of the human family!
Thus may human kind in its entirety rest comfortably and in peace
under the great and broad tabernacle of the one Lord.
- SW, Vol. 3, No. 13, p. 11
Macnutt, who edited Promulgation of Universal Peace, has then altered
this.
I suppose he thought it inelegant to have 4 sentences all beginning
"The century ...".
So what century? Not the 20th, obviously, since Abdu'l-Baha was not a
westerner.
And has he been interpreted correctly? Persian doesn't even have a
word that means
specifically "century" and nothing else, it has two words which Abdu'l-
Baha might have
used: `asr and qarn. The first means an age, the second means a span
of years. `Asr-e Qajar
for example is the Qajar era, `asr-e mashrutiyyeh is the
constitutional revolution period.
Qarn can sometimes mean a decade, or a generation, or a lifetime (70
years).
There's an illuminating piece in Some Answered Questions - for which
we do have
an authenticated Persian text. The translation reads:
"Now consider, in this great century which is the cycle of
Baha'u'llah, what progress science and knowledge have made, ..."
The Persian that is translated as "this great century" is :
dar iin `asr-e `aziim keh qarn-e jamal-e mubaarik
Note that `asr and qarn are synonyms, for Abdu'l-Baha, and both mean
the period of a dispensation, but they have been translated with one
word,
"century." Obviously Baha'u'llah does not belong
to the 20th century, or the 20th century particularly to him.
From the parallelism it is clear that the
translation should read, "in this glorious *age,* which is the *era*
of the Blessed Beauty ...".
Baha'u'llah's era or age begins in 1863
and extends far into the future. Here, Abdu'l-Baha specifically says
that by `asr and qarn he means "the Bahai era."
Not having a recording of what Abdu'l-Baha said on 12 October, we
cannot be sure.
But it is is good educated guess that he was talking about iin `asr /
this dispensation
and that the interpreter thought he was talking about "this century",
and the western Bahais then thought it must be the western 20th
century.
It's like a game of whispers: the distortions get greater and greater
as the message is transmitted
Sen