Juan Cole is one of the world’s most well-known researchers in the subject of Baha’ism. He himself was a Baha’i and has made great services to Baha’ism. He was separated from Baha’ism following extensive research and has written critical articles one of which you can read below:
According to Wikipedia, John Ricardo I. “Juan Cole” (born on 23rd of October 1952) is an American contemporary scholar and historian in the area of Middle East and South Asia. At present, he is the “Richard P. Mitchell” Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Cole has written several books on modern Middle East and translates some Arabic and Persian texts into English. He who was from a Christian family, following the dispute with the Baha’i establishment, separated from the cult. He runs a weblog called Informed Comments on the address “juancole.com” which is also released in truthdig.com simultaneously.
This article reviews and analyzes the dissolution of the Assembly of Baha’is in Los Angeles by the America National assembly in the years 1986-1988. Official explanation in this regard emphasizes on the decline of moral affairs as well as the weakness of administrative discipline; but local interviews as well as some official statements consider the roots of differences in two things: 1- Globalization of the Cause Community and the resulting racial conflict between whites and African-American blacks and Iranian immigrants after the Iranian revolution. 2- National and local disputes over power and money.
The first was administrative and financial. The Local Spiritual Assembly had become disorganized, even though the National Assembly had around 1983 appointed an executive committee to work with it. For several months prior to the July 1986 dissolution, the local assembly of Los Angeles had neglected to keep minutes, leaving no permanent record of decisions. Beginning in the late 1970s, the National Assembly had required all local assemblies to submit copies of its minutes for spot-checking at the national headquarters in Wilmette, Illinois, as a means of national oversight over local affairs.
The Local Assembly’s financial situation had, Henderson explained, become perilous. The Baha’i bookstore had incurred a 35,000-dollar debt to the Baha’i Publishing Trust (an organ of the National Assembly), with poor bookkeeping and no effective plan to pay it off. The debts to the Baha’i Publishing Trust were sufficiently large that steps had had to be taken to avoid allowing them to push it into financial instability. The community would have gone into bankruptcy had not certain dramatic actions ultimately been taken by the National Assembly through the agency of the administrative committee. A member of the Local Assembly confirmed the financial problems, saying that by spring of 1986 less than 125 members out of the 1200 adults were contributing to the national fund because they had lost faith in the local leadership. The great expenses incurred in the building and opening of the new Baha’i center in 1983 appear also to have discouraged local congregants, insofar as they were continually dunned for increased sacrifices, with no end in sight. The second general area of problems, Henderson said, had to do with the deterioration of the social and spiritual life of the community. He used these words as a code for race relations and immorality. The Los Angeles Baha’i community consisted of about 300 African-American adults and 500 Iranians, with most of the remaining members being white (there were only two or three Latino families and no East Asian ones). Henderson alleged that the Iranian Baha’i immigrants had not been greeted with sufficient warmth into the Los Angeles community.
Another of his concerns in the area of social and spiritual dysfunction had been violations of Baha’i laws against gambling, drinking, drug use, extramarital sex, shady financial dealings, and tax evasion. Henderson complained that most in the community had been unwilling to report such violations, where they knew of them, to the Local Spiritual Assembly. And the assembly, even where it did learn of such behavior, had refused to take any action. Here, two central traditionalist Baha’i norms had been violated. There is a strong sense among conservative Baha’is that one should report to the authorities any behavior or speech of another Baha’i that seems out of the ordinary, that every believer should serve as a spy on all the others. The second is that public immorality as defined by Baha’i law should be investigated by the local assembly, that the perpetrators should be cautioned, and, if they continue in the activity, they should be disfellowshipped (in Baha’i terminology, their administrative rights should be removed.
Henderson’s second complaint, about race relations, had to do with the African-American Baha’is. He reminisced that in his childhood he attended the old Baha’i center on New Hampshire Avenue and that this community was a model of interracial fellowship and unity that went way beyond anything being done anywhere, I am convinced. He complained that this achievement had been lost, and that gradually, the non-white members of our community began to feel estranged. Black Baha’i attendance at community affairs and worship meetings had somewhat declined in the 1980s.
The third category of problem according to Henderson was a persistent set of conflicts among the members of the Los Angeles local assembly. Individual members of the assembly were engaged in gossip about the assembly’s affairs and engaged in public backbiting about the unwisdom of this decision and that decision. He stressed that the Baha’is norms called for unswerving and silent obedience even to decisions of the assembly with which one disagrees. He further alleged that electioneering had occurred, in addition to the problem of informal decision-making and backbiting. Criticism of a Baha’is institution by a Baha’is is considered a serious offense.
Henderson’s account of why the local assembly had been dissolved was challenged at the time and by my interviews the Baha’is in Los Angeles years later. The first gap in the explanations given has to do with the issues of power, control, and conflicts between local assemblies and the National Assembly. The Local Assembly of Los Angeles had had a long-standing reputation as insufficiently obedient to the national body, as too willing to take the initiative and to strike out on its own. In the 1970s and until the early 1980s its members had been relatively youthful and probably affected by the youth culture of the 1960s, which was despised by conservatives in Wilmette. Under this group the decision had been taken to build a new Baha’i center on the edge of a middle class black neighborhood, a project guaranteed to divert substantial resources to local needs, which was therefore disliked by some National Assembly members. Although this group of young people was perceived as somewhat maverick by Wilmette, they were also acknowledged to be relatively efficient and intelligent about avoiding a complete breakdown in relations with the national body. In the 1980s an older group of leaders was elected, including several Iranian-American expatriates. These leaders maintained the tradition of relative local autonomy, but were less adept politically. They inherited all the problems of finances and staffing related to the opening of the new local Baha’i center in 1983, and appears to have been unequal to the challenge.
In 1984, Robert Henderson was mysteriously elected to the National Assembly (in a way filling a slot vacated by his mother, Wilma Ellis), and he became its paid, full-time secretary-general. He was concerned, in tandem with authoritarian older members of the national assembly such as Firuz Kazemzadeh (who later married Ellis) and James Nelson, to assert the authority of the National Assembly over local bodies. To that end, the National Assembly ordered the dissolution of a number of local spiritual assemblies, and threatened others, such as San Francisco, with this step. They imposed national control by means of appointed Administrative Committees, and took advantage of their moment of local power subtly to promote candidates for local office who were acceptable to them. The failure of a local spiritual assembly to contribute any substantial sums to the national fund may well have helped determine which local bodies were dissolved. Certainly, Los Angeles was by 1986 sending on only risible contributions to Wilmette.
With regard to the finances of the Local Assembly of Los Angeles, Henderson’s account appears to have put unusual emphasis on some factors but to have ignored others entirely. His assertion that the Los Angeles Baha’i bookstore was 35,000 dollars in debt was challenged by Manila Lee, the manager, as being an old figure much larger than the actual debt in 1986. It was also alleged that this debt in fact included large amounts of book stock, which should rather have been counted as capital. In addition, Lee complained that the Baha’i Publishing Trust had refused to give her the sort of discounts routinely offered to other Baha’i communities, which exacerbated her difficulty in running the bookstore profitably. Although outside observers do agree that the bookstore was not run in good capitalist fashion, with Lee too willing to give away materials to those who pled inability to buy them, it appears that Henderson greatly exaggerated the bookstore’s straits. This issue, which Henderson elided, was far more important than the bookstore. Finally, the local assembly had decided to lend one of its members, an Iranian businessman with very shaky finances, $40,000, a step that had led one alarmed member of the assembly to contact Wilmette, which in turn led to the dissolution.
With regard to race relations, Henderson’s account oversimplified an extremely complex dynamic. The legal framework that permitted significant Iranian immigration was the 1965 change in immigration laws abolishing unequal country quotas, but the actual motivation for most Iranian immigrants to Los Angeles before the 1978-79 Revolution was largely economic. Because of turbulence and then revolution in Iran in the 1970s, impelling emigration, the Iranian population of Los Angeles increased six-fold in that decade, and although it grew at a smaller rate in the 1980s, its rate of growth was still far higher than for other Middle Eastern groups. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of Iranians in Los Angeles grew from only a few thousand to 76,000 (29 percent of all the Iranians in the country). Indeed, of 285,000 Iranians in the U.S., 100,000 or over one-third lived in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Jewish and Baha’i Iranians were most likely to be political refugees, whereas Muslims, for the most part actually secularists tended to be economic immigrants.
The immigration of Iranians still continued. However, the arrival of several hundred Iranian Baha’is who fled from persecution at the hands of the new government from 1979 forward changed the community enormously. Some twenty percent of the new arrivals did not speak English well enough to conduct committee business in it, and wanted everything that occurred at meetings to be translated into Persian, which alienated the English speakers. American Baha’is sometimes found the Iranian Baha’is cliquish, and complained that the many wealthy among them tended to over-dress and to introduce class distinctions into Baha’i social relations. Iranian Baha’is were instructed to follow American Baha’i practices, such as not rising to their feet for certain kinds of prayer. For their part, many Iranian Baha’is felt a certain superiority to American converts, convinced that they knew better what the Baha’i faith was, though in fact many of them confused their folk customs with the high scriptural tradition. Persian Baha’is, in turn, take joy in pointing out, in an equally patronizing way, the faults of Western Baha’i practices, such as the inconsistencies in the observance of the Baha’i calendar and the omissions in Baha’i laws of marriage and burial. All these things were a bit off-putting to both sides. The overwhelming predominance in the 1980s of Iranian Baha’is in many Southern California Baha’i communities such as Santa Monica led to a drastic fall-off in the participation of American Baha’is in community events and a slowing of conversions to the religion. (Santa Monica had had perhaps 15 Baha’is in the 1970s, many of them white converts from the youth culture with a New Age orientation; by 1981 it had some 100 Baha’is, almost all Iranians, and many of the converts had ceased participating in community events). Contrary to what Henderson implied, the Los Angeles community, in part because of its sheer size, did much better at integrating the Iranians.
Manila Lee observed, we had started assimilation programs around 1980-1981, and the assembly was very careful to appoint mixed committees, mixed as far as Persians and Americans. This effort, she said, had fallen into neglect in 1983, at a time when the local assembly was putting all its energies into the move to the new Baha’i center, preoccupied by the minutiae of financing and construction. In further reviews and more social studies, it became clear that basically the Iranian and Middle Eastern have less inclination toward assimilation programs than the Chinese and Koreans. Iranian Jews and Armenians also retained a distinct Iranian identity rather than melding in with local Jews and Armenians.
Unlike the Iranian Jews of Los Angeles, who began constructing their own synagogues, Iranian Baha’is were forced by Baha’i law to attend the feast designated for their part of the city, and were forbidden to hold separate meetings or build separate buildings, on pain of being shunned. Around 1981, Ruhiyyih Khanum spoke to the community harshly, upbraiding them for settling in a such a decadent urban center, implying they should never have left Iran, and that if they had insisted on doing so should at least have had the decency to settle as missionaries in some remote village of the global South. Many Baha’i traditionalists believe that cities are in imminent danger of evaporation. When someone from the audience asked where they should have settled instead, she replied in Persian that it was self-evident: I said my word, you are not asses.
Many Iranian Baha’is came away from the meeting angry. They were confused. They considered living in Los Angeles as a reason to live close to relatives or a job opportunity. However, the talk of that day did not attract Baha’i Iranians to convergence programs.
The Baha’i authorities also adopted from 1983 a punitive approach to any Baha’is who escaped from Iran through the Tehran airport, since it was known that they could only have gotten visas to fly out by claiming to be Muslims. These were disfellowshipped for at least a year upon their arrival in the U.S. in 1983-1986, and many so punished for preserving their lives became disaffected and fell away from the religion. The Universal House of Justice in Haifa felt that allowing such paper apostasies as a means of fleeing Iran might lead to a fatal weakening of Baha’i identity, and had to be strictly sanctioned. Escapees across the Baluchi desert into Pakistan were more acceptable, even though they had broken the law to cross the border without a visa. Henderson and the U.S. National Assembly had zealously pursued punitive measures toward those who flew out of the airport, rather as if the Jewish rabbis in the early 1940s should have rigidly excommunicated any Jew who eluded Hitler by pretending to be a Catholic. The Los Angeles Local Assembly was notorious for overlooking these apostasies under duress and recognizing escapees as Baha’is in good standing (provided two other Baha’is could vouch for their membership in the community), so that it was ironic that it should be berated by Henderson for mistreating the Iranian Baha’is. Finally, the Baha’i national electoral system, with no formal campaigning or nominations wherein the top nine vote-getters win, is extremely vulnerable to bloc voting by a distinct group.
Study the continuation of the article in part three …
