Freethought110
2004-06-08 00:12:52 UTC
Some Notes from my forthcoming book
Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri had several of the outspoken prominent Babis who
supported Azal murdered in Baghdad, Adrianople and Akka. See the
introduction to E.G. Browne's translation of The New History of Mirza
Ali Muhammad, the Bab (Tarikh-i-Jadid)(Amsterdam: 1975) pp.
xxiii-xxiv, for some of the names and particulars as well as the
Persian introduction to Nuqtat'ul-Kaf. In Note W (Mirza Yahya
Subh-i-Azal) of his critical edition of A Travellers Narrative
(Cambridge: 1891), 2 volumes, citing Hasht Behesht, Browne says, "All
prominent supporters of Subh-i-Azal who withstood Mirza Husayn Ali's
claims were marked out for death, and in Baghdad Mulla Rajab Ali
"Kahir" and his brother, Hajji Mirza Ahmad, Hajji Mirza Muhammad Reza,
and several others fell one by one by the knife or bullet of the
assassin" p.359. "As to the assassination of the three Ezelis, Aka Jan
Bey, Hajji Seyyed Muhammad of Isfahan, and Mirza Riza-Kulli of
Tafrish, by some of Beha's followers at Acre, there can, I fear, be
but little doubt...the passage in the Kitab-i-Aqdas alluding
(apparently) to Hajji Seyyed Muhammad's death...proves Beha'u'llah
regarded this event with some complaisance" p.370. On the murder of
one Aqa Muhammad Ali of Isfahan in Istanbul (who first bore allegience
to Husayn Ali and then went back to Azal) by one Mirza Abu'l-Qasim the
Bakhtiyari, Browne quotes the words of Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri addressed
to the latter, "O phlebotomist of the Divine Unity! Throb like the
artery in the body of the Contingent World, and drink of the blood of
the Block of Heedlessness for that he turned aside from the aspect of
thy Lord the Merciful!" p.363. Baha'i sources carefully omit all of
these facts but they have been recorded for posterity by scholars like
E.G. Browne, William Miller and Vince Salisbury in their European
language studies, not to mention the original language, source
documentation which has been provided in Azal's Notes. Baha'i sources
have even gone through great lengths to twist, hide and obfuscate
their crimes and attribute them to Azal and the Babis. For example,
Baha'is make much noise about a poisoning incident in Adrianople
whereby Azal is supposed to have attempted to poison his own brother.
Baha'is use the fact that their prophet's hand shook for the rest of
his life as evidence (I doubt very much if poison had anything to do
with it. I think the man was simply a nervous wreck. I am unaware of
any kind of poison in existence in the nineteenth century, which
without killing its intended victim as meant, would instead cause
permanent nervous damage! Besides, it does not occur to me that
amongst either the partisans of Husayn Ali or Azal there was anyone
who possessed a sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to contrive such
a potion. The Baha'is, typically, are simply attributing their own
malefeasance unto others.) When the counter facts, and the accounts of
direct eyewitnesses, one by one, are examined it turns out that it was
actually the other way around and that Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri and his
partisans where the ones attempting to poison and murder Azal (not
once, but several times, each time their plans backfiring in some
way). There is a first-hand eyewitness report in existence, currently
only in manuscript, by a maid who was working on the day in question
in Azal's household kitchen an account never published anywhere to
my knowledge but whose manuscript I have been shown which shows that
Husayn Ali had put his own agents up in Azal's kitchen on the day in
question and that she witnessed them pouring something in vials into
the food being prepared for Azal. In the aforementioned work, Browne
states: "Mirza Husayn Ali...caused poison to be placed in one side of
a dish of food which was to be set before himself and Subh-i-Azal,
giving instructions that the poisoned side was to be turned towards
his brother. As it happened, however, the food had been flavoured with
onions, and Subh-i-Azal, disliking this flavour, refused to partake of
the dish. Mirza Husayn Ali fancying that his brother suspected his
design, ate some of the food from the side of the plate; but, the
poison having diffused itself to some extent through the whole mass,
he was presently attacked with vomiting and other symptoms of
poisoning. Thereupon he assembled his own followers and intimates, and
declared that Subh-i-Azal had attempted to poison him" p.359. Mirza
Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), a son-in-law of Azal and a major figure of
the Iranian secular liberal democratic Constituional movement in the
19th C. (who was executed as a co-conspirator along with his
brother-in-law, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, after the assassination of
Nasiruddin Shah in 1896), quotes part of the woman's account regarding
the poisoning incident in the historical section which he wrote of the
'8 Heavens' (Hasht Behesht). It will be translated in full in my
forthcoming Materials for the Study of the Bayani Religion. Later
"...[a] plot was arranged against Subh-i-Azal's life, and it was
arranged that Muhammad Ali the barber should cut his throat while
shaving him in the bath. On the approach of the barber, however,
Subh-i-Azal divined his design, refused to allow him to come near,
and, on leaving the bath, instantly took another lodging in Adrianople
and separated himself entirely from Mirza Husayn Ali and his
followers" p.360. This same Muhammad Ali (Salmani) was later in Acre,
Palestine, responsible for taking a shovel to the head and thereby
killing one of Azal's chief Witnesses exiled with the Baha'is: Siyyid
Muhammad Isfahani (source, Juan Cole, discussion on the
***@yahoogroups.com list, November 2000). In the eternal words of
Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, "If this Husayn Ali is the manifestation of the
Husayn of Ali, a thousand mercies of God be upon the pure soul of
Yazid" (agar in Husayn Ali mazhar-e Husayn-e Alist, sad rahmat-e haqq
bar ravan-e pak-e Yazid) verses quoted by Izziyyeh Khanum in her
epistle Tanbih'u-Na'imin' (for those who don't know, Yazid is the
character and Muslim ruler - responsible for the martyrdom of the
Prophet Muhammad's grandson, the 3rd Shi'ite Imam Husayn [the paragon
martyr of all martyrs in Shi'ism], and his small band on the plains of
Karbalah in 680 CE who were on their way to Kufa to raise an army to
revolt against the Ummayyad rulers in Damascus i.e. the progeny of
Abu Sufyan: Muhammad's kinsman and bitter Qurayshite Meccan enemy in
the early days of Islam). This poem conveys a profound antinomy about
Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri and his bogus claims, namely, that if this guy
is the Return of the paragon martyr of Islam, then perhaps those who
killed him were in the right after all.
Another issue the Baha'is have used to hammer the Bayanis with is the
marriage of Azal to the Bab's second wife. As far as some of the
Bayani sources are concerned this did not happen exactly as the
Baha'is have made it out to be. But even assuming it did occur exactly
how the Baha'is portray it, one only needs to read between the obvious
lines to realize the Baha'is are wishing to have their cake and eat it
too and intentionally making mountains out of molehills in order to
castigate their enemies with irrelevant strawmen, whilst
opportunistically remaining silent on the fact that Husayn Ali himself
had two temporary wives (sigheh, muta') besides his two other official
wives. Also, despite what the Baha'is say, I have yet to see from
which letter or work of the Bab he prohibited the re-marrying of his
two wives or anyone to marry these two widows, and I have read pretty
much everything by the Bab. This statement and the purported letter or
epistle it comes from simply does not exist. I will go on record and
say that I believe the Baha'is have made it up. This is the nineteenth
century Middle East we're talking about, and a widow and unmarried
Iranian woman in exile is completely at the mercy of the world around
her, totally unprotected and without any means. This is also the Bab's
second wife we're talking about here and a sister of a Letter of the
Living and Witness of Azal, the abovementioned murdered Mulla Rajab
Ali Qahir who was killed by one Nasir the Arab, a devotee of Husayn
Ali Nuri! Besides, the Bab had already maintained that he and Azal
were made of the same metaphysical substance (were One, as it were),
so what is the big deal if the Bab in his second Return was taking
back his own wife? A fair minded, objective person cannot see any
blame here. I sure can't. Moreover, this woman composed later a
treatise in refutation of the claims of Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri to being
the Babi messiah, which conclusively shows where her views and
sentiments were on the matter, an issue which is quite embarrassing to
the Baha'i historians who keep hammering on this marriage of Azal to
the Bab's second wife and who in their all too typical dishonest,
gratutious and obfuscatory ways carefully gloss over this last detail
about the refutation in their accounts that explains the nature of
this 'purported' marriage in some detail. But this refutation exists,
I have seen it, and even according to one of my correspondents in
Haifa, Israel (who wishes to remain anonymous), the Baha'is have
copies of it sitting in their manuscript archives at their World
Center over there in Haifa, Israel, among many other juicy tidbits
they won't let anyone see. It was due to such incidents, such as the
"poisoning incident" and the general sectarian strife that had emerged
between the followers of Husayn Ali and Azal, who in Edirne due to the
circumstances the Ottomans had created for them where outnumbered by
the partisans of Husayn Ali Nuri, whereby the Ottoman authorities
exiled Azal, his family and followers to Famagusta, Cyprus, and the
older brother and his to Acre, Palestine, in the late 1860s.
Browne produces some discussion in the aforementioned work in the same
section (W) about an anonymous letter the Baha'is apparently
manufactured against Azal in Adrianople, pretending to be speaking on
his behalf and inciting a revolution against the Ottoman government
with Azal taking over as sovereign. This rumour mongering, overtly
suggestive of outright political sedition against the Turkish Imperial
state, finally forced the hand of the Sublime Porte (i.e. the seat of
power in Istanbul) to act against both factions. Knowing the
duplicitous ways of the Baha'i leaders, their track record and
proclivity for criminalism, manufacturing of evidence and thuggery all
too well, unlike Browne, I personally give one hundred percent
credence to this last story. See for example Browne's Materials for
the Study of the Babi Religion (Cambridge: 1961) pp. 154-69 regarding
the murder of an Azali-Bayani in Jedda in 1900 on Abbas Effendi's
direct, explicit orders: an individual who briefly had become a
supporter of Abbas Effendi's rival and half-brother, Mirza Muhammad
Ali (d. 1930) - who was designated in Husayn Ali's own will and
testament (Kitab-e Ahdi, Book of My Covenant) as his second succesor.
(The events of the first generation were repeated again in the second,
third and fourth generations, first, with Abbas Effendi and Muhammad
Ali, then with Shoghi Effendi and his family and several other
individuals (Ruth White, Farid, Ahmad Sohrab, et al), and finally with
the Hands of the Cause and American socialite and self-styled Guardian
Charles Mason Remey. Conflict, bids for power and factionalism is an
endemic part of the whole Baha'i experience from day one). Browne
translates several important documents in these pages that establishes
the guilt and complicity of the Baha'is and their leader beyond any
reasonable doubt whatsoever. Recent Baha'i scholarship has attempted
to dismiss this particular work of Browne's, but to no avail, see for
example fundamentalist UK Baha'i Moojan Momen's caustic remarks on
Browne's Materials in his introduction to Selections from the Writings
of E.G. Browne on the Babi and Baha'i Religions (Oxford: 1987). In a
typical attempt to obfuscate the actual issues by casting aspersions
on the character of the individual scholar and his work, i.e. ad
hominem (a common tactic used amongst Baha'is in virtually all forums
which Frederick Glaysher has most appropriately dubbed The Baha'i
Technique), Momen at no time attempts to even address the substance or
content of the matters he criticizes in Browne characterized as "of
dubious value" p.4. The same can be said across the board from
Gulpayagani to Balyuzi's tortuous , transparent, vacuously polemical
and unsubstantiated attacks on Browne's credibility, political agenda
and scholarship in his Edward Granville Browne and the Baha'i Faith
(Wilmette: 1970).
As far as I am concerned this is a common tactic employed in the
pseudo-historiographical scholarship of virtually all cults when
dealing with thorny historical facts and those who critically evaluate
them. Some years ago Juan Cole showed me an article at his home of a
case of a Trotskyist Marxist cult in Britian which, if one subsituted
key concepts, would mirror the Baha'i experience point by point,
letter by letter in this regard. Denis MacEoin experienced the exact
same thing in the early 80s when his scholarship on Babism began
coming out. For example, see the trilogy of articles: "From Babism to
Baha'ism: Problems of Militancy, Quietism and Conflation in the
Construction of a Religion," Religion 13, 1983: 93-129, "Baha'i
Fundamentalism and the Western Academic Study of the Babi Movement,"
Religion 16, 1986: 57-84 and "Afnan, Hatcher and an Old Bone,"
Religion 16, 1986: 193-95. Unless one possesses a trained eye and much
background reading in texts and methodology, not to mention
experience, it is quite easy to be misled and fall prey to such
uncritical obfuscations by these cultists and their bogus , largely
hagiographical and totally one-sided meta-narratives. "Baha'i
scholarship" is the perfect examplar of the sort of contrived,
Twilight Zone like bizarre ahistoriographical "cult" tradition of
pseudo-scholarship taken as objective historiography by adherents that
I am talking about here.
the dominant power elite of Baha'ism today is bent on a wholesale
kulturkampf against Iranians, Iranian culture and Iranian identity
(whether in Iran or outside of it) throughout the Baha'i community
tout court and its replacement by a sanitized, hyper-conservative
(nay, outright reactionary) White Anglo-Saxon Anglo-American
Protestant "Baha'i" culture, ethic and pseudo-identity.
Baha'ism today is very much in toe with the international menace of
the Neo-Conservative coup d'etat and its Anti-Non-White Anglo-American
agenda, which is why Iranians have generally been turned into the
'Other' in the popular perception of the Baha'i community and
scape-goated by the powers that be for virtually everything. This, in
my view, is clearly a systematic and orchestrated attempt at
undermining their ethnic self-confidence and cultural integrity by
this dominant clique bent on cultural colonization, who as far as I am
personally concerned, are one of the countless tentacles of the
neo-Fascist "Beast" and "Antichrist." The same case as Taheri's also
involved another, and Sufi oriented, Iranian Baha'i, Ahmad Karimpour.
But he has yet to be sanctioned and excommunicated, although he is
continually being harrassed locally by the Iranian Baha'i Continental
Board of Counsellor member and her Auxilliary Board Member, all based
out of Perth, WA. Iranian members of the Baha'i administration are
generally of the Uncle Tom, ethnic traitor and system-collaborator
types (i.e. such as those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the
SS, the Warsaw Ghetto and the camps). They are what Franz Fanon
appropriately characterized as those baring black faces but donning
white masks. The history of Baha'ism, from the very outset, is
underscored by a long and protracted attempt by White Anglo European
elites at cultural colonization of Iranians, together with those elite
Iranian cultural lackies who collaborated with them, and as such the
late Jalal Al-e Ahmad's neologism "Westoxication" (gharbzadegi) very
much applies to many Iranian Baha'i elites of the upper classes who
look down their noses at their middle, petty bourgeois and working
class Iranian compatriots whom they see as culturally "too Iranian,"
"backward peasants" and thus not Western, White and
'modernized'-sanitized enough. Interestingly, it is those very same
upper class Iranian Baha'i elites who are the most vociferous in their
defense of the cult system and a Baha'i theocracy, and thus the most
anti-democratic, fascist, Westoxicated, comprador-lackey and
reactionary of all a profoundly dogged anti-intellectualism is also
a pronounced characteristic of this sub-culture, not to mention their
highest value and that which they hold the dearest to their hearts is
'money' (their true god)! I know, because I came from out of this
sub-culture and have spent pretty much my whole adolescent and adult
life rebelling against its skewed and mind-boggling shallow value
system of callous materialism, hypocrisy and double-standards. Juan
Cole believes this to be a vestige of the Pahlavi era mindset. I think
he is generally right about this but believe that the matter requires
further problematization beyond even that era. Note that much of
Husayn Ali's economic enterprises (such as publications of works in
Cairo and Bombay, etc) in the 1870s-90s was bankrolled by a successful
mercantile elite, the Afnans, who had their fingers in numerous pies
of the late 19th C. international trade in the East from Hong Kong to
Beirut, particularly in opium, whom the Afnans held a monopoly on at
one point inside Iran. It is quite ironic that the publication of
Husayn Ali's 'Most Holy Book' (Kitab-i-Aqdas) was quite possibly
produced by profits coming from the coffers of the Afnans lucrative
opium monopoly. When Abbas Effendi decided he was no longer going to
support the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Iranian
parliament's fight against Qajar royalist reaction and its Russian
patrons from 1909 onwards, or when he accepted the knighthood offered
him by the British towards the end of World War I, there was no
Pahlavi regime in existence. And what about Habib Sabet's central role
in the events of the 1953 CIA-spearheaded coup d'etat against Premier
Mohammad Mossadeq: the same Habib Sabet who was soon designated a
'knight of Baha'u'llah' by Shoghi Effendi and who sat on the National
Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Iran until the eve of the Islamic
(Counter-)Revolution? As such Juan Cole and others who see evidence of
a liberal progressivism in the thought of Husayn Ali and his son, I
believe, are overlooking many other things, romantizing and thus
reading too much into works like Effendi's Secret of Divine
Civilization and Treatise on Politics, etc., see his Modernity and the
Millenium: The Genesis of the Baha'i faith in the Nineteenth Century
Middle East (Columbia: 1998) Husayn Ali's own 'Most Holy Book' is
already several dozen steps back in retreat from the Bayan. Words are
cheap and when the evidence is looked at closely, time and again, when
push has come to shove, the Baha'i leaders and their successors have
always sided with the forces of reaction and the powers that be, ergo
the principle of "obedience to government," never on the side of the
fighting underdog or the masses and progressive forces. Therefore the
liberal and progresssive sounding works of Husayn Ali and his son
should be taken as so many PR, window-dressings, and not serious
positions maintained by either. Unlike the liberals, I no longer
maintain "something went wrong after `Abdu'-Baha." I believe the
fascism of Baha'i culture to be a reflection of the earliest period
and the mind of Husayn Ali and Abbas Effendi. And I will say that this
is very much a reflection of the mentality of a 19th century Iranian
aristocrat in exile seeking reconciliation with the powers that be
after the initial failure and bloody debacle of the Babi revolution (I
say 'initial' because the Babi revolution is not over yet by a long
shot). The ambivalence of the American Baha'i leadership in its
support of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s is certainly
evidence of this, not to mention the aborted "Southern Teaching"
campaign in South Carolina in the early 1970s that was explicitly
aborted by the Baha'i leaders in the US because a large southern
African-American Baha'i constituency was seemingly threatening the
very elite "White" foundation and make-up of the American Baha'i
leadership of the time.
Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri had several of the outspoken prominent Babis who
supported Azal murdered in Baghdad, Adrianople and Akka. See the
introduction to E.G. Browne's translation of The New History of Mirza
Ali Muhammad, the Bab (Tarikh-i-Jadid)(Amsterdam: 1975) pp.
xxiii-xxiv, for some of the names and particulars as well as the
Persian introduction to Nuqtat'ul-Kaf. In Note W (Mirza Yahya
Subh-i-Azal) of his critical edition of A Travellers Narrative
(Cambridge: 1891), 2 volumes, citing Hasht Behesht, Browne says, "All
prominent supporters of Subh-i-Azal who withstood Mirza Husayn Ali's
claims were marked out for death, and in Baghdad Mulla Rajab Ali
"Kahir" and his brother, Hajji Mirza Ahmad, Hajji Mirza Muhammad Reza,
and several others fell one by one by the knife or bullet of the
assassin" p.359. "As to the assassination of the three Ezelis, Aka Jan
Bey, Hajji Seyyed Muhammad of Isfahan, and Mirza Riza-Kulli of
Tafrish, by some of Beha's followers at Acre, there can, I fear, be
but little doubt...the passage in the Kitab-i-Aqdas alluding
(apparently) to Hajji Seyyed Muhammad's death...proves Beha'u'llah
regarded this event with some complaisance" p.370. On the murder of
one Aqa Muhammad Ali of Isfahan in Istanbul (who first bore allegience
to Husayn Ali and then went back to Azal) by one Mirza Abu'l-Qasim the
Bakhtiyari, Browne quotes the words of Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri addressed
to the latter, "O phlebotomist of the Divine Unity! Throb like the
artery in the body of the Contingent World, and drink of the blood of
the Block of Heedlessness for that he turned aside from the aspect of
thy Lord the Merciful!" p.363. Baha'i sources carefully omit all of
these facts but they have been recorded for posterity by scholars like
E.G. Browne, William Miller and Vince Salisbury in their European
language studies, not to mention the original language, source
documentation which has been provided in Azal's Notes. Baha'i sources
have even gone through great lengths to twist, hide and obfuscate
their crimes and attribute them to Azal and the Babis. For example,
Baha'is make much noise about a poisoning incident in Adrianople
whereby Azal is supposed to have attempted to poison his own brother.
Baha'is use the fact that their prophet's hand shook for the rest of
his life as evidence (I doubt very much if poison had anything to do
with it. I think the man was simply a nervous wreck. I am unaware of
any kind of poison in existence in the nineteenth century, which
without killing its intended victim as meant, would instead cause
permanent nervous damage! Besides, it does not occur to me that
amongst either the partisans of Husayn Ali or Azal there was anyone
who possessed a sophisticated knowledge of chemistry to contrive such
a potion. The Baha'is, typically, are simply attributing their own
malefeasance unto others.) When the counter facts, and the accounts of
direct eyewitnesses, one by one, are examined it turns out that it was
actually the other way around and that Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri and his
partisans where the ones attempting to poison and murder Azal (not
once, but several times, each time their plans backfiring in some
way). There is a first-hand eyewitness report in existence, currently
only in manuscript, by a maid who was working on the day in question
in Azal's household kitchen an account never published anywhere to
my knowledge but whose manuscript I have been shown which shows that
Husayn Ali had put his own agents up in Azal's kitchen on the day in
question and that she witnessed them pouring something in vials into
the food being prepared for Azal. In the aforementioned work, Browne
states: "Mirza Husayn Ali...caused poison to be placed in one side of
a dish of food which was to be set before himself and Subh-i-Azal,
giving instructions that the poisoned side was to be turned towards
his brother. As it happened, however, the food had been flavoured with
onions, and Subh-i-Azal, disliking this flavour, refused to partake of
the dish. Mirza Husayn Ali fancying that his brother suspected his
design, ate some of the food from the side of the plate; but, the
poison having diffused itself to some extent through the whole mass,
he was presently attacked with vomiting and other symptoms of
poisoning. Thereupon he assembled his own followers and intimates, and
declared that Subh-i-Azal had attempted to poison him" p.359. Mirza
Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), a son-in-law of Azal and a major figure of
the Iranian secular liberal democratic Constituional movement in the
19th C. (who was executed as a co-conspirator along with his
brother-in-law, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, after the assassination of
Nasiruddin Shah in 1896), quotes part of the woman's account regarding
the poisoning incident in the historical section which he wrote of the
'8 Heavens' (Hasht Behesht). It will be translated in full in my
forthcoming Materials for the Study of the Bayani Religion. Later
"...[a] plot was arranged against Subh-i-Azal's life, and it was
arranged that Muhammad Ali the barber should cut his throat while
shaving him in the bath. On the approach of the barber, however,
Subh-i-Azal divined his design, refused to allow him to come near,
and, on leaving the bath, instantly took another lodging in Adrianople
and separated himself entirely from Mirza Husayn Ali and his
followers" p.360. This same Muhammad Ali (Salmani) was later in Acre,
Palestine, responsible for taking a shovel to the head and thereby
killing one of Azal's chief Witnesses exiled with the Baha'is: Siyyid
Muhammad Isfahani (source, Juan Cole, discussion on the
***@yahoogroups.com list, November 2000). In the eternal words of
Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, "If this Husayn Ali is the manifestation of the
Husayn of Ali, a thousand mercies of God be upon the pure soul of
Yazid" (agar in Husayn Ali mazhar-e Husayn-e Alist, sad rahmat-e haqq
bar ravan-e pak-e Yazid) verses quoted by Izziyyeh Khanum in her
epistle Tanbih'u-Na'imin' (for those who don't know, Yazid is the
character and Muslim ruler - responsible for the martyrdom of the
Prophet Muhammad's grandson, the 3rd Shi'ite Imam Husayn [the paragon
martyr of all martyrs in Shi'ism], and his small band on the plains of
Karbalah in 680 CE who were on their way to Kufa to raise an army to
revolt against the Ummayyad rulers in Damascus i.e. the progeny of
Abu Sufyan: Muhammad's kinsman and bitter Qurayshite Meccan enemy in
the early days of Islam). This poem conveys a profound antinomy about
Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri and his bogus claims, namely, that if this guy
is the Return of the paragon martyr of Islam, then perhaps those who
killed him were in the right after all.
Another issue the Baha'is have used to hammer the Bayanis with is the
marriage of Azal to the Bab's second wife. As far as some of the
Bayani sources are concerned this did not happen exactly as the
Baha'is have made it out to be. But even assuming it did occur exactly
how the Baha'is portray it, one only needs to read between the obvious
lines to realize the Baha'is are wishing to have their cake and eat it
too and intentionally making mountains out of molehills in order to
castigate their enemies with irrelevant strawmen, whilst
opportunistically remaining silent on the fact that Husayn Ali himself
had two temporary wives (sigheh, muta') besides his two other official
wives. Also, despite what the Baha'is say, I have yet to see from
which letter or work of the Bab he prohibited the re-marrying of his
two wives or anyone to marry these two widows, and I have read pretty
much everything by the Bab. This statement and the purported letter or
epistle it comes from simply does not exist. I will go on record and
say that I believe the Baha'is have made it up. This is the nineteenth
century Middle East we're talking about, and a widow and unmarried
Iranian woman in exile is completely at the mercy of the world around
her, totally unprotected and without any means. This is also the Bab's
second wife we're talking about here and a sister of a Letter of the
Living and Witness of Azal, the abovementioned murdered Mulla Rajab
Ali Qahir who was killed by one Nasir the Arab, a devotee of Husayn
Ali Nuri! Besides, the Bab had already maintained that he and Azal
were made of the same metaphysical substance (were One, as it were),
so what is the big deal if the Bab in his second Return was taking
back his own wife? A fair minded, objective person cannot see any
blame here. I sure can't. Moreover, this woman composed later a
treatise in refutation of the claims of Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri to being
the Babi messiah, which conclusively shows where her views and
sentiments were on the matter, an issue which is quite embarrassing to
the Baha'i historians who keep hammering on this marriage of Azal to
the Bab's second wife and who in their all too typical dishonest,
gratutious and obfuscatory ways carefully gloss over this last detail
about the refutation in their accounts that explains the nature of
this 'purported' marriage in some detail. But this refutation exists,
I have seen it, and even according to one of my correspondents in
Haifa, Israel (who wishes to remain anonymous), the Baha'is have
copies of it sitting in their manuscript archives at their World
Center over there in Haifa, Israel, among many other juicy tidbits
they won't let anyone see. It was due to such incidents, such as the
"poisoning incident" and the general sectarian strife that had emerged
between the followers of Husayn Ali and Azal, who in Edirne due to the
circumstances the Ottomans had created for them where outnumbered by
the partisans of Husayn Ali Nuri, whereby the Ottoman authorities
exiled Azal, his family and followers to Famagusta, Cyprus, and the
older brother and his to Acre, Palestine, in the late 1860s.
Browne produces some discussion in the aforementioned work in the same
section (W) about an anonymous letter the Baha'is apparently
manufactured against Azal in Adrianople, pretending to be speaking on
his behalf and inciting a revolution against the Ottoman government
with Azal taking over as sovereign. This rumour mongering, overtly
suggestive of outright political sedition against the Turkish Imperial
state, finally forced the hand of the Sublime Porte (i.e. the seat of
power in Istanbul) to act against both factions. Knowing the
duplicitous ways of the Baha'i leaders, their track record and
proclivity for criminalism, manufacturing of evidence and thuggery all
too well, unlike Browne, I personally give one hundred percent
credence to this last story. See for example Browne's Materials for
the Study of the Babi Religion (Cambridge: 1961) pp. 154-69 regarding
the murder of an Azali-Bayani in Jedda in 1900 on Abbas Effendi's
direct, explicit orders: an individual who briefly had become a
supporter of Abbas Effendi's rival and half-brother, Mirza Muhammad
Ali (d. 1930) - who was designated in Husayn Ali's own will and
testament (Kitab-e Ahdi, Book of My Covenant) as his second succesor.
(The events of the first generation were repeated again in the second,
third and fourth generations, first, with Abbas Effendi and Muhammad
Ali, then with Shoghi Effendi and his family and several other
individuals (Ruth White, Farid, Ahmad Sohrab, et al), and finally with
the Hands of the Cause and American socialite and self-styled Guardian
Charles Mason Remey. Conflict, bids for power and factionalism is an
endemic part of the whole Baha'i experience from day one). Browne
translates several important documents in these pages that establishes
the guilt and complicity of the Baha'is and their leader beyond any
reasonable doubt whatsoever. Recent Baha'i scholarship has attempted
to dismiss this particular work of Browne's, but to no avail, see for
example fundamentalist UK Baha'i Moojan Momen's caustic remarks on
Browne's Materials in his introduction to Selections from the Writings
of E.G. Browne on the Babi and Baha'i Religions (Oxford: 1987). In a
typical attempt to obfuscate the actual issues by casting aspersions
on the character of the individual scholar and his work, i.e. ad
hominem (a common tactic used amongst Baha'is in virtually all forums
which Frederick Glaysher has most appropriately dubbed The Baha'i
Technique), Momen at no time attempts to even address the substance or
content of the matters he criticizes in Browne characterized as "of
dubious value" p.4. The same can be said across the board from
Gulpayagani to Balyuzi's tortuous , transparent, vacuously polemical
and unsubstantiated attacks on Browne's credibility, political agenda
and scholarship in his Edward Granville Browne and the Baha'i Faith
(Wilmette: 1970).
As far as I am concerned this is a common tactic employed in the
pseudo-historiographical scholarship of virtually all cults when
dealing with thorny historical facts and those who critically evaluate
them. Some years ago Juan Cole showed me an article at his home of a
case of a Trotskyist Marxist cult in Britian which, if one subsituted
key concepts, would mirror the Baha'i experience point by point,
letter by letter in this regard. Denis MacEoin experienced the exact
same thing in the early 80s when his scholarship on Babism began
coming out. For example, see the trilogy of articles: "From Babism to
Baha'ism: Problems of Militancy, Quietism and Conflation in the
Construction of a Religion," Religion 13, 1983: 93-129, "Baha'i
Fundamentalism and the Western Academic Study of the Babi Movement,"
Religion 16, 1986: 57-84 and "Afnan, Hatcher and an Old Bone,"
Religion 16, 1986: 193-95. Unless one possesses a trained eye and much
background reading in texts and methodology, not to mention
experience, it is quite easy to be misled and fall prey to such
uncritical obfuscations by these cultists and their bogus , largely
hagiographical and totally one-sided meta-narratives. "Baha'i
scholarship" is the perfect examplar of the sort of contrived,
Twilight Zone like bizarre ahistoriographical "cult" tradition of
pseudo-scholarship taken as objective historiography by adherents that
I am talking about here.
the dominant power elite of Baha'ism today is bent on a wholesale
kulturkampf against Iranians, Iranian culture and Iranian identity
(whether in Iran or outside of it) throughout the Baha'i community
tout court and its replacement by a sanitized, hyper-conservative
(nay, outright reactionary) White Anglo-Saxon Anglo-American
Protestant "Baha'i" culture, ethic and pseudo-identity.
Baha'ism today is very much in toe with the international menace of
the Neo-Conservative coup d'etat and its Anti-Non-White Anglo-American
agenda, which is why Iranians have generally been turned into the
'Other' in the popular perception of the Baha'i community and
scape-goated by the powers that be for virtually everything. This, in
my view, is clearly a systematic and orchestrated attempt at
undermining their ethnic self-confidence and cultural integrity by
this dominant clique bent on cultural colonization, who as far as I am
personally concerned, are one of the countless tentacles of the
neo-Fascist "Beast" and "Antichrist." The same case as Taheri's also
involved another, and Sufi oriented, Iranian Baha'i, Ahmad Karimpour.
But he has yet to be sanctioned and excommunicated, although he is
continually being harrassed locally by the Iranian Baha'i Continental
Board of Counsellor member and her Auxilliary Board Member, all based
out of Perth, WA. Iranian members of the Baha'i administration are
generally of the Uncle Tom, ethnic traitor and system-collaborator
types (i.e. such as those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the
SS, the Warsaw Ghetto and the camps). They are what Franz Fanon
appropriately characterized as those baring black faces but donning
white masks. The history of Baha'ism, from the very outset, is
underscored by a long and protracted attempt by White Anglo European
elites at cultural colonization of Iranians, together with those elite
Iranian cultural lackies who collaborated with them, and as such the
late Jalal Al-e Ahmad's neologism "Westoxication" (gharbzadegi) very
much applies to many Iranian Baha'i elites of the upper classes who
look down their noses at their middle, petty bourgeois and working
class Iranian compatriots whom they see as culturally "too Iranian,"
"backward peasants" and thus not Western, White and
'modernized'-sanitized enough. Interestingly, it is those very same
upper class Iranian Baha'i elites who are the most vociferous in their
defense of the cult system and a Baha'i theocracy, and thus the most
anti-democratic, fascist, Westoxicated, comprador-lackey and
reactionary of all a profoundly dogged anti-intellectualism is also
a pronounced characteristic of this sub-culture, not to mention their
highest value and that which they hold the dearest to their hearts is
'money' (their true god)! I know, because I came from out of this
sub-culture and have spent pretty much my whole adolescent and adult
life rebelling against its skewed and mind-boggling shallow value
system of callous materialism, hypocrisy and double-standards. Juan
Cole believes this to be a vestige of the Pahlavi era mindset. I think
he is generally right about this but believe that the matter requires
further problematization beyond even that era. Note that much of
Husayn Ali's economic enterprises (such as publications of works in
Cairo and Bombay, etc) in the 1870s-90s was bankrolled by a successful
mercantile elite, the Afnans, who had their fingers in numerous pies
of the late 19th C. international trade in the East from Hong Kong to
Beirut, particularly in opium, whom the Afnans held a monopoly on at
one point inside Iran. It is quite ironic that the publication of
Husayn Ali's 'Most Holy Book' (Kitab-i-Aqdas) was quite possibly
produced by profits coming from the coffers of the Afnans lucrative
opium monopoly. When Abbas Effendi decided he was no longer going to
support the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Iranian
parliament's fight against Qajar royalist reaction and its Russian
patrons from 1909 onwards, or when he accepted the knighthood offered
him by the British towards the end of World War I, there was no
Pahlavi regime in existence. And what about Habib Sabet's central role
in the events of the 1953 CIA-spearheaded coup d'etat against Premier
Mohammad Mossadeq: the same Habib Sabet who was soon designated a
'knight of Baha'u'llah' by Shoghi Effendi and who sat on the National
Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Iran until the eve of the Islamic
(Counter-)Revolution? As such Juan Cole and others who see evidence of
a liberal progressivism in the thought of Husayn Ali and his son, I
believe, are overlooking many other things, romantizing and thus
reading too much into works like Effendi's Secret of Divine
Civilization and Treatise on Politics, etc., see his Modernity and the
Millenium: The Genesis of the Baha'i faith in the Nineteenth Century
Middle East (Columbia: 1998) Husayn Ali's own 'Most Holy Book' is
already several dozen steps back in retreat from the Bayan. Words are
cheap and when the evidence is looked at closely, time and again, when
push has come to shove, the Baha'i leaders and their successors have
always sided with the forces of reaction and the powers that be, ergo
the principle of "obedience to government," never on the side of the
fighting underdog or the masses and progressive forces. Therefore the
liberal and progresssive sounding works of Husayn Ali and his son
should be taken as so many PR, window-dressings, and not serious
positions maintained by either. Unlike the liberals, I no longer
maintain "something went wrong after `Abdu'-Baha." I believe the
fascism of Baha'i culture to be a reflection of the earliest period
and the mind of Husayn Ali and Abbas Effendi. And I will say that this
is very much a reflection of the mentality of a 19th century Iranian
aristocrat in exile seeking reconciliation with the powers that be
after the initial failure and bloody debacle of the Babi revolution (I
say 'initial' because the Babi revolution is not over yet by a long
shot). The ambivalence of the American Baha'i leadership in its
support of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s is certainly
evidence of this, not to mention the aborted "Southern Teaching"
campaign in South Carolina in the early 1970s that was explicitly
aborted by the Baha'i leaders in the US because a large southern
African-American Baha'i constituency was seemingly threatening the
very elite "White" foundation and make-up of the American Baha'i
leadership of the time.