Wednesday, January 04, 2006

bahai thought police

Once dormant, ex-Bahai, Muslim blogger, Maryam at Dervish has started posting again! And in addition to giving her blog a fresh coat of paint, she has come back swinging with a two-part piece on some of the more Orwellian aspects of the Bahai administrative order.

Basically Sen McGlinn was a Bahai scholar but was disenrolled from the Bahai faith for some of his political opinions. On top of that, the Bahai publishing house which distributed his works and certain other Bahai scholarly writings is receiving some flack from the Bahai officials as well. For more info, check out Dervish:
Blackwhite - Part One
Blackwhite - Part Two

Past Grenada entries:
gentle bahai
bahais and divorce

1 comment:

Abdul-Halim V. said...

Hello,

To be honest, I'm not sure what you are getting when when you say they are "from outside".

I guess overall, I would say that when I look at the writings, I would almost expect the Bahais to be very liberal, mystical, perhaps free-spirited. And from what I've read, there was a large wave of American converts who were of that persuasion... people who were "hippies" (for the sake of an easy label).

But for some reason, the official Bahai administration seems to be very much not like that. There is a strong impulse to unity and uniformity.

Maybe it is because the Bahais administration wants to carefully control the image of Bahais in the world in order to avoid persecution in Iran and other places.

Or maybe more generally, the administration believes that if they don't keep the faithful on a tight leash, the Bahai faith might get too decentralized and varied to the point of being unmanageable.

But whatever the reasons, it seems like there is this tension.