THE PLANK AUGUST 15, 2009
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Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, where he is the co-director of the Iran Democracy Project. His latest book is Eminent Persian: The Men and Women who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979 (Syracuse University Press).
This Tuesday, seven leaders of Iran's Bahai movement will go on trial on capital charges of espionage and threatening national security. They have been in prison for more than a year. The group's two lawyers have not only been refused the legally required visits with their clients, but neither will be in court on Tuesday. One, Abdulfattah Sultani, is in prison on charges of participating in the "Velvet Revolution," while the other, the Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, stands accused by the regime of participating in the same "conspiracy"--but has been fortunately traveling in the West.
For the last few weeks, all around the world, there have been meetings in support of the Bahai Seven in Iran. And last Wednesday, at the San Fransisco Herbst Theater, where the meeting to draft the declaration of Human Rights was once convened, a delightfully multi-ethnic, multi-faith group came to show their concern for the fate of the Bahai Seven and solidarity with the 300,000 Bahais who still live in Iran. Ross Mirkarimi, an Iranian-American member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was among the political leaders who spoke at the gathering. The president of the University of San Francisco offered a few words of prayer to begin the meeting. I am not a member of the Bahai faith, and like many in the hall, I was there in solidarity with a much persecuted religious minority in Iran.
6 comments
The Bahai faith tries to be an all inclusive one size fits all spiritual smorgasbord. Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad, Abraham. And on and on. So, it's only natural that, in trying to rope everyone inside one big "God is love" tent, they are hated and persecuted by sectarians who insist only the folks inside their tent can be saved.
To understand this you have approach religion less as a path to God and more as a path to those who wrap their entire lives around propping up eclesiastical orders of which they are smack dab in the middle of.
In other words, this is how they earn their living.
Instead, most folks brush all that aside and speak of a "higher calling". True enough, most ecclesiastics don't punch clocks, work in cubicles or man assembly lines. But they share in common with all of us the need to acquire the wherewithal necessary to put food on the table, provide shelter from the storm and gather in the accutrements that are part and parcel of one or another rendition of "creature comforts".
There are Gandhis and Kings, Swaggerts and Bakers, Ahmadinejads and bin Ladens among all the major religious denominations. That's no less true in America than it is in Iran. And always there is the danger of those who insist that ALL must be rendered to either God or Caesar. Fortunately for those of us who are citizens of America the loyalty can still be split with little or no reprecussions. But that says little about with the future portends. Either here or there.
george walton
d/a
- iambiguous
August 15, 2009 at 8:30pm
Back in June, one of my boys came up with a new drinking game: Any time the first post on any TNR thread is George, we drink! I guess it's not really much of a game, but needless to say, we've been shit-faced all summer.
- cvillekid
August 16, 2009 at 9:28am
Shouldn't you and the boys be out following Sarah Palin around to town hall meetings handing out the first list of senior citizens marked for termination by the Death Panels? At the very least you should be warning folks in here that I chair the panel.
Con brio I might add.
And let's not forget, the last time you got shit-faced you handed out her recipe for mooseburger tortillas instead. Some folks are still in intensive care.
gw
- iambiguous
August 16, 2009 at 11:01am
" Any time the first post on any TNR thread is George, we drink!"
With me any time I see George Walton's ambiiguous name on a post I just keep pressing the down-arrow key till his name disappears.
- J. Dyer
August 16, 2009 at 11:06am
The comments of iambiguous may be well-intentioned toward the Bahai Faith (I can't tell), but they mischaracterize the Faith. it is incorrect to describe it as a spiritual smorgasbord. Though it recognizes the validity of the other religious dispensations, acknowledging that in each age God has his messengers, the Bahai Faith has its own principles, some of which Prof. Milani mentions in his speech. Some important ones that don't appear in the earlier dispensations (such as Christianity) include the equality of the races and of men and women and belief in the reconciliation of science and religion. At the same time it is, by American standards, socially conservative on some important issues. Describing the Bahai Faith as a big "'God is Love' tent" is a gross caricature of a serious and complex belief system.
- howellis
August 16, 2009 at 11:49pm
how:
Describing the Bahai Faith as a big "'God is Love' tent" is a gross caricature of a serious and complex belief system.
george:
Point taken.
But from my perspective, all formal religious liturgies are gross cariciatures of the human condition itself. They try to funnel the astonding mystery of existence itself down to a series of "serious and complex belief system[s]" that often completely contradict each other with respect to both means and ends.
But sure, if someone wants to espouse a catechism that welcomes those who worship Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad etc., nothing I say will persuade them otherwise. But what does that say about those who insist that salvation is had only through the worship of one monotheistic liturgy to the exclusion of all the others?
I will readily admit I have not explored the nuts and bolts of the Bahai faith since I stopped listening to Seals and Croft. But I recall then how I interpolated it in the "faith" of Albert Einstein, by way of Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Jeffereson. A faith in other words that tries to encompass as broad a swath of the cosmos as possible.
That is close enough to an ecumenical approach to religion for me.
george walton
- iambiguous
August 17, 2009 at 3:04am