Surrendering the Baha’i religion
November 26th, 2007You know Allah 
, subhanahu wa t’ala works in your life in ways that sometimes… well they’re like a train with headlights coming towards you and you’re wearing sunglasses and facing the other way.
This apostasy business has had me in knots for a few days. I’ve run the gamut of emotions: ‘why me?’ ‘why now?’ etc. I’ve been so inactive with anything Baha’i and the domain bahai-religion.org I haven’t touched since 2003. I started to think ‘maybe I should resurrect the site and put more content in it’ and then I thought ‘I’ll get back onto Wikipedia and start editing’ (because the Baha’is have their Wikipedia entries run like promotional pamphlets) and then I stopped myself and realised - there is a reason all this is happening to me, and to me now.
It cannot be coincidental that just as I have started to deepen my iman, to develop my spirituality through tariqa all of this is floating to the surface. Shaytan (a`udhu billahi min ash-shaytani-rrajim) would like nothing more than for me to re-engage with all the Baha’i angst of my past, and distract me from the sirat and the tariqa.
So I’ve decided to surrender it to Allah , subhanahu wa t’ala. I don’t need for the Baha’is to accept me. This is a perfect opportunity to surrender my past and stop feeling like a divorcee from a bad marriage.
He it is Who sent down peace of reassurance into the hearts of the believers that they might add faith unto their faith. Allah
Alhamdulillah.
A Melburnian Muslim convert blogs religion, academia and life in general.
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I am certain that my religious knowledge is not as well-read as many others, so I can only offer something I read years ago, quoted by the lion Aslan in one of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis.
If you truly worship Him, then you worship Me, and you are welcome into My Kingdom.
Words written to children, yet they have kept my faith certain for years
I am sorry the Baha’is feel they should reject you, having read what you have to say I can’t see why they should, ultimately, the fact that you celebrate the love of God is enough.
Thanks Toby - you’ve a heart of gold, and it’s Baha’is like yourself that I will always believe live up to the very best of the faith and the Baha’i values I think are so fundamentally characteristic of the teachings of Baha’u'llah!!!
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You know, I felt the same way after a young, ignorant and ambitious Baha’i admimistrator scoured the community for some very vicious gossip so he could get me shunned for having reported a suspicion of violation coming from the membership of the Local Spiritual Aasembly. I cannot tell you how many Baha’i laws and directives this man and his community consciously and deliberately crushed (using their administrative titles as supreme authority) in encouraging that community to participate openly and willingly in a campaign of slander and ostracism behind my back and the backs of the National Spiritual Assembly and beyond.
From their responses annd the responses of the Auxiliary Board for Protection to this matter, I concluded that my initial suspicion was correct. The young man had succeeded not only in having the community and administration shun me, but cut me off from any communication with the administrative bodies that might have had the confidence to investigate the reported “odor of violation” I had brought to it or explain the reason for ostracising me. After some time I realized:the Guardian said that you cannot divorce Baha’i administration from the Faith; this is what the community had done. My rights as a Baha’i illegally taken from me, I was no longer a Baha’i. I had no community and no administration to turn to. So I withdrew.
Point being: I belive that Baha’is seem to be working very hard to destroy their own Faith. They administer their communities like they are administering the affairs of a college fraternity or a political party or a crime syndicate. They vaunt those members rich in worldly wealth and unite not around the Word of God but around the fads, styles and opinions of their own “elite”. The is totally against their Teachings! Yet if someone says, “Look! The emperor has no clothes!” that community will rush headlong to destroy the speaker’s reputation and standing in the community, and appear to be either heedless or very, very confident of the fallout and how their gossip will affect his ability to keep his job, relate to officials and friends in his town, etc.
May I quote from ‘Abdul-Baha in “Star of the West” vol. VI, No.6, p.45: “The worst enemies of the cause are in the Cause and mention the Name of God. We need not fear the enemies on the outside for such can be easily dealt with. But the enemies who call themselves friends and who persistently violate every fundamental law of love and unity, are difficult to be dealt with in this day, for the mercy of God is still great. But ere long this merciful door will be closed and such enemies will be attacked with a madness….”
Somewhere in the Writings it teaches that gossip and backbiting are the chief reason for their targets to withdraw from the Faith. Could this have been your situation? It rarely comes straight to your ears, but the feeling, the spiritual sense, as if filth is being forced into your mouth, is unmistakable. A relative, to whom I must always be grateful for guiding me to the Baha’i Faith, was likewise forced to resign under a barrage of gossip when, as a young person, she shared a personal confidance with a Baha’i couple she considered trustworthy.
So you are not the first and will not be the last to be unofficially expelled from Baha’i membership. As the Baha’is fail to carry out their duty to Him, God will raise up those who will. You will. I will. My relative will (she became a Moslem).
shahada’Llaha annahu la ilaha illa Allah
haqqan haqqan!
Dear Umm Yasmin, Nur ‘Aleykum,
Firstly, congratulations to all of us down here who are living at this great, momentous time in the history of Terra Lucida Australis when the rightwing Fascist forces of this country have finally be routed decisively by a electorate finally clued in to the toxicity these Nazis had been maliciously seeding in this place for far too long. The Spirit of the Children Overboard has finally taken its revenge (intiqam). It also seems like my own magickal curse via the employment of ’sihr’ culled directly from the book of the great Ahmad al-Buni (i.e. shams al-ma’arif al-kubra), which I placed upon Little Johnny Howard and his merry Brown Shirted dwarfs in Canberra some 11 months ago, finally paid off spectacularly, alhamdulillah rabb’il-’alamin. And, of course, one of my all time Australian heroes - former PM Paul Keating - has been roundly vindicated (see the musical, it is good). Funny how karma works and even funnier how Howard was made to literally eat the words he directed at the Keating government back in 1996 during that election and with interest - and precisely 11 years to the abjad of HU (i.e. the ism Allah
al-a’zam). This is Divine Justice (’adl)! Let’s just hope that the Ruddster stays honest, fair dinkum to his campaign promises and Labor doesn’t get corrupted - again. I am very optimistic, especially since a republican is also about to become the leader of the (new conservative) opposition.
In any case, this latest screed by Ibn al-Himar Momen should be taken with modest grains of salt and for what it is. While many of you guys are offering the usual “we are not hateful” line. Let me say that such neo-liberal fluffiness is unbecoming of true warriors and not what it’s about when comes to fighting for what is right. I readilly confess that I vehemently detest Bahaism and Haifan Bahais, and I detest this ideology and establishment which represents it because I love the Truth (al-haqq); this, in the same manner that the Prophet of Islam (pbuh) felt about the arrogant (mustakbirin) and corrupt (fasiqin) amongst the Quraysh and their jahiliya partisans during the bitter struggle and war that finally led to the total Victory of the Muslims over their Meccan enemies. In my world, archetypally speaking, Haifan Bahaism are the Meccans and the Quraysh, i.e. the forces of the jahiliya. I’ll let you figure who I see myself as in this archetypal scheme of things.
Chin up. We have made history here, left a legacy to the Truth (al-haqq) and thus a positive testimony for future posterity. This is the Work. Believe it!
La hawla wa la quwa illa bi’Llahi al-’aliyyu’l-’azim wa’l-hayy al-muhayyamin al-qayyum. Ya Haqq Amin!
‘Abdu’l-Haqq Wahid Azal
[…] is Wahid Azal, who has accepted the accusation with pride. His remarks can be read in the comments here. Here are links to some other responses, mostly by persons named or referenced in the […]