Dervish

It’s taken me a while to appreciate there are many good things I can honour from my Baha’i upbringing. My parents taught me to believe in God; that racism was evil; that we should seek after world unity; that men and women are equal, all because of their Baha’i approach to life.

So, despite my occasional narkiness towards certain bureaucratic institutions of my parents’ religion, I do occasionally manage to pull myself together and note the positives in my natal faith. Does this conflict with my being a follower of a different religion? I don’t think so. Christians and Jews who convert to Islam, still have a place for Jesus and Moses (peace be upon them), but for a Baha’i reverting to Islam, the attitude to the founders of the Baha’i religion is a little more ambiguous. Your choices are:

• they were lying or mad
• they were the voice of God
• they were reformers who wished to change the society, but did so in a way that took them outside the fold of Islam.

I go with the last. So, given that it was just Ridvan, I wrote a faith column for The Sunday Age (no point looking for it, they never publish the faith columns) on the celebration, which I’ve reproduced below. Enjoy!

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I once heard a speaker suggest that each of the world’s religions has a gift to offer humanity. Buddhism, for example, emphasises the importance of mindfulness; Judaism, the strength of community; Christianity teaches forgiveness; and Islam, wholehearted commitment. Each is a glittering strand in the richly woven fabric of religious diversity.

The gift the Baha’i faith offers is a vision of global unity. Its founding figure was the Iranian prophet Baha’u'llah, who died in exile in 1892. He wrote: “Let your vision be world-embracing” and taught that nations should work together to bring about world peace: “These strifes and this bloodshed and discord must cease, and all men be as one kindred and one family. … Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.”

Baha’u'llah’s commitment to peace is a resounding theme of the festival of Ridvan, a twelve-day celebration between April 20 and May 2. It was at this time in 1863 that Baha’u'llah confided his mission to a few of his closest family and friends. He explicitly forbade the use of arms to achieve religious goals, and argued for cooperation and friendliness between members of different religions. As Baha’i scholar Juan Cole notes, “Ridvan really was meant as Peace Festival, a commemoration of the end of religious warfare, the end of ritual pollution and of the shunning of some human beings by others.”

It is during the celebration of Ridvan that Baha’is democratically elect their leaders. This year, as happens every five years, national representatives have gathered in Haifa, Israel, to elect the nine men who will sit as the “Universal House of Justice.” Baha’is hope this international convention to elect world leaders might set an example in promoting the concept of global governance.

Baha’u'llah lived at the dawn of modernity, and during a time when Persia, as modern-day Iran was then known, was undergoing great societal upheaval. He had much in common with fellow visionaries of the time such as Leo Tolstoy, who developed a doctrine of non-violent resistance to conflict, influencing Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.; Swami Vivekananda who captivated his Chicago audience at the first Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893, with his appeal against sectarianism, bigotry, and fanaticism; and Jane Addams, who in 1914 founded an international women’s peace movement and was the first American woman to win a Nobel peace prize.

All of them yearned for a world free of conflict, in which human beings might fellowship in peace and harmony. Their call is perhaps more relevant and urgent today than it was a century ago, as vast improvements in the technology of war make the machinery of death ever more effective.

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