PREFACE

TERMINOLOGY

      While Bahais refer to their religion as the "Bahai Faith," this is perhaps not the most felicitous term for academic use. Other terms one encounters are Bahai community, Bahaism, Bahai (used as a generic noun), and Bahai religion. "Bahai community" focuses on the members, individually or collectively, and de-emphasizes the doctrinal and leadership aspects of the tradition. "Bahai Faith" is the traditional term that Bahais use for their religion and therefore conveys overtones of piety or sympathetic appreciation for the tradition. "Bahaism" is considered inappropriate by Bahais, for reasons that are not easy to determine; it is best avoided by scholars, just as "Mohammedanism" is now avoided in favor of the term "Islam" and "Musselman" or "Moslem" are avoided in favor of "Muslim." "Bahai" used as a generic noun, as in "Bahai teaches that...," is simply incorrect, for the word Bahai is an adjective. "Bahai religion," as a neutral term which carries the overtones of impartial scholarly study, has therefore been selected here.

      The terms Shiah and Shii are, in common English usage, to a certain extent interchangeable and sometimes seem to be chosen arbitrarily. In Arabic, Shiah is the (uninflected) noun and Shii is the (nisba) adjective. Here they will be used accordingly. "Shiah Islam" and "Shiism" are the two English terms used here to refer to this branch of Islam in toto.

TRANSLITERATION

      Certain circumstances in early and contemporary Bahai scholarship necessitate an unusually lengthy note on the diacritics and the system of transliteration used in this work.[1]

      Adopting a system for transliteration of Arabic and Persian words is singularly difficult. A preface to the Encyclopaedia Iranica summarizes the issue eloquently:

...The major problem in Iranian studies results from the difficulty of coordinating the representation of Persian and Arabic words. The system which has found fairly wide acceptance [i.e. that used by the Library of Congress[2]]...does not entirely suit the rendering of Persian. On the other hand, a scheme designed for Persian does not fit Arabic. Yet so many Arabic words, titles, and phrases are intimately involved in Persian usage that the employment of two systems would lead only to chaos. Unfortunately, no amount of ingenuity can devise a system ideal for rendering both Persian and Arabic..."[3]

      In Bahai scholarship the problem is further compounded by other issues, including:

      1) While most systems of transcription portray only a word's spelling (transliteration), the Bahai system, under a strong Persian historical and cultural influence, has been used to portray pronunciation as well. For example, on the one hand Bahai texts use the correct transliteration Baghdad and not Bagdad, as it is actually pronounced by anglophones. On the other hand, these same texts use the common Persian pronunciation Kitab-i-Aqdas in place of its correct Arabic title al-Kitab al-Aqdas.

      2) Certain words that are pronounced with an "a" sound are written with an "i." Thus "sayyed," which is pronounced "sigh-ed," is written "siyyid." One likely explanation, confirmed by many who knew Shoghi Effendi--the great-grandson of Baha'ullah and systematizer of Bahai transliteration--is that he spoke Persian with an Isfahani accent, passed down from Shoghi Effendi's Isfahani grandmother Munirih Khanum.[4]

      3) The Bahai system of transliteration seems to contain some inconsistencies. Examples include: (1) when a word ending in hamza is more commonly associated with the Persian, as in bahá, the hamza is dropped. However, when the word is more commonly associated with the Arabic, as in asmá', the hamza is retained; (2) the nominative case-ending of Arabic, u, has become frozen in the Bahai system, as in the Arabic name 'Abdu'l-Bahá. In Arabic, though, the name would be 'Abdi'l-Bahá when used as genitive and 'Abda'l-Bahá when accusative. Hence the Library of Congress transliteration system, which would write 'Abd al-Bahá, indicates no case ending; (3) the apostrophe has been pressed into signifying different elements. It is used both for ayn, as in 'Alí, for hamza, as in asmá', and elision, as in ...u'l-Bahá. Other systems utilize different characters, for example ^c for ayn and ’ for hamza, and ' for elision. Further, the apostrophe as elision marker indicates the removal of different letters--in 'Abdu'l-Bahá it indicates the dropping of the 'a' in ...al-Bahá, but in Bahá'u'lláh, which in full would be Bahá'u al-lláh, it indicates the dropping of both the 'a' of al- and one 'l' of '-lláh' ( (in Arabic/Persian script the extra 'l' is indicated by a shadda, a "doubler," over the second 'l' of Alláh).

      4) Perhaps most compellingly, the Bahai system has become merely prescriptive, not descriptive. Accents and diacritics are completely ignored by anglophone Bahais. While North American believers write "khánum," they say "khanúm"; while they write "Bahá’í," they say "Ba-high." Indeed, most anglophone Bahais would not be able to pronounce these words as pronounced in Arabic, and perhaps not even as in Persian. For example, prefacing Abdul Baha with an ayn and ending it with a hamza, as in the full transliteration ^cAbdu'l-Bahá’, thus becomes superfluous and confusing.

      5) Despite the above difficulties, most Bahai books and especially those produced by official Bahai publishing houses use the standard transliteration scheme, which was standardized for Bahai-published texts in the late 1920's and has remained constant to this day. Thus, while Bahais may not know why they are writing accents and apostrophes, what Arabic letters they denote, and how properly to pronounce them, they are used to writing these diacritics. The style of English chosen by Shoghi Effendi (quasi-Jacobean) and its system of diacritics have, for the Bahai community, come to be an expected quality of the sacred writings--these indicate that the text is a sacred Bahai work, and it can appear sacrilegious to write Baha' Allah or Baha'ullah when one has learned that the sacred name is Bahá'u'lláh.

      The use of the transliteration system adopted by Shoghi Effendi works well for the average book for Bahais and on Bahai subjects. Almost any word or name one will use has its own unique--if occasionally inconsistent--orthography, and one can always consult Marzieh Gail's A Baha'i Glossary[5] to find this correct orthography. An academic work, though, will often use names and terms not mentioned in Bahai writings and may also need to transliterate Arabic and Persian sentences. Here some scholars find it more simple, and easier for the non-Bahai reader (and perhaps the Bahai as well), to adopt one of the systems that have become standard in the current academic community.

      For the purpose of this study we are concerned with religious behaviour and belief--it is not a heavily textual or philological work. It would thus be unnecessarily cumbersome and distracting to include full diacritics where not absolutely necessary. For example, since the average reader is not going to care what kind of "h" Husayn is spelled with, is not going to mentally pronounce an ayn, and does not know the appropriate amount to lengthen a ya over a kesra, writing Husayn Ali as Husayn ^cAlí would be of interest only to those familiar with Arabic or Persian--and such a reader would know how properly to pronounce the names whether or not diacritics are supplied.[6] This study will use almost no diacritics in the body of the text, save where deemed absolutely necessary to prevent confusion. All diacritics have also been stripped from names and quotations; while this does a certain injustice to the originals, the great variety of transliteration schemes encountered in using works from a variety of Western languages, periods, and house styles would prove quite distracting were all quotations to be cited exactly as given in the original.[7] Similarly the spelling of names has been standardized; for example "Hussain," "Hossein," "Huseyn," and other such variations are all given as "Husayn." The only exception is names whose transliteration has been set into English by the authors themselves, as for example "Shoghi Effendi" instead of "Shoqi Effendi," "Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani" instead of Mirza Abu al-Fazl Golpaygani.

      Words will be written more or less as commonly pronounced in English or Persian, save where their technical meaning may be of interest, in which case the Library of Congress system of transliteration will be supplied in parenthesis or footnotes. Both Bahai and non-Bahai terms will be treated in this fashion: e.g. ulama for ^culama’, rauza for rawdah, etc. For the sake of legibility hamzas and ayns will also be dropped, even though these are consonants proper and not diacritics. They will be retained only where needed to demonstrate dieresis, as in "Baha'ullah" and "Qa'im."

The alteration of the most common Bahai terms as used in this work is as follows:

Abdul Baha: Abbas Effendi, 1844-1921. Eldest son of Baha'ullah. (Spelled here as commonly pronounced.)
Bahai: A believer in this faith. (Spelled here as commonly pronounced.)
Baha'ullah: Mirza Husayn Ali, 1817-1892, founder of the Bahai Faith. (Spelled here as commonly pronounced; apostrophe indicates dieresis--vowels are pronounced separately, not as a diphthong.)

Notes to this chapter