Bahá'í Scholarship
The publication in 1865 of the Comte de Gobineau's (1816-1882),Les Religions et Les Philosophies dans l'Asie Centrale created an interest in Europe. A scholar that was inspired by Gobineau was E.G.Browne. He travelled to Iran and also visited Bahá'u'lláh in Akka in the latter days of His life. He translated two histories of the new religion and published two other books as well as a number of articles. He also made an important collection of manuscripts that he gave to Cambridge University Library. Bahá'ís have criticized Browne's work for being too sympathetic to Azal, Baha'u'llah's half-brother and implacable enemy. One of the books that Cobineau for Les Religions... was Násikhu't-Taváríkh (the 'history to abrogate all previous historiies') by Lisánu'l-Mulk. This book had been condemned by Bahá'u'lláh as a falsification of history one which even an infidel would not have had the effrontery to produce. [SUR36-37]
A.L.M. Nicolas (1864-1939) was a French consular official in Iran who researched and wrote a biography of the Báb as well as translating three of the Báb's major works into French.
Just as the Báb was the centre of the scholarly interests of Gobineau, Browne and Nicolas, some Russian scholars who were more interested in Bahá'u'lláh. Baron Viktor Rosen (1849-1908), the director of the Oriental Department of the University of St. Petersburg was assisted by Aleksandr Tumanski (1861-1920). He spent a great deal of time with the Bahá'í community of Ashkhabad and with Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani. Although he did not write as much as Browne or Nicolas, what he did write was derived from a very deep and thorough investigation. [L&E43-83]
See An Officer and an Orientalist: Alexander Grigorevich Tumanskii and His Contribution to Russian Historiography on and Policy towards the Babi-Baha'i Religion by Soli Shahvar, Bahá'í Studies Review 20 (1), 3-19
There was much interest in scholarship in the early days of the Faith because almost all of the most important disciples of the Báb were Islamic religious scholars, as were many of the leading converts to the Bahá'í Faith in later years. The most important of these was the above mentioned Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani (1844-1914). He was learned in the Zoroastrian and Jewish scriptures and spent some time in the Christian West at the request of 'Abdu'l-Bahá prior to His visit.
During the 1930s to 1960s, a second generation of Iranian Bahá'í scholars, such as Fadil Mazandarani (1881-1957), 'Abdul-Hamid Ishraq-Khavari (1902-1972), and 'Azizu'llah Sulaymani (1901-1985) systematized Bahá'í theology and law, developed aids for scholars such as dictionaries of Bahá'í terminology, and wrote histories and biographies. This was of course a more traditional style of scholarship than is current in the West, but it continues to be useful to all present scholars.
The above-described initial flurry of interest in the Bábí and Bahá'í religions in the West was not sustained and from the 1920s to the 1970s, there were no Western scholars who were as deeply engaged as the above-named ones and only a handful of studies that can be said to have done much to advance knowledge. From the 1970s onward, there gradually emerged a new stream of scholars who can be said to be a fusion of the above two groups, the Western and the Bahá'í scholars. This new generation of scholars mostly began as Bahá'ís, although some have subsequently left the religion. They use Western academic methodology and most operate from within Western universities but they have access to insider information and resources. Apart from these individuals, the Bahá'í Faith has been very little studied by Western scholars of religion.
Early Bahá’í Scholarship in North America
The study of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States and Canada began almost as soon as the religion arrived on the continent in the late‑19th century. Early scholars were a mix of missionaries, journalists, university professors, and curious laypeople who sought to understand a new religious movement that was still largely unknown in the West.
In 1901 the British orientalist student of E G Browne, Edward Denison Ross, wrote a concise overview of “Babism” for The North American Review. The article was later reproduced in the 1912 volume Great Religions of the World, where Ross added a brief pre‑face describing ʻAbdu’l‑Bahá’s recent travels in the United States. Ross’s piece is one of the earliest academic treatments of the movement in a mainstream American periodical. [USMERCED]
During the early twentieth century, a number of America's religious thinkers were in touch with Sarah Farmer or visited Green Acre and participated in the dynamic exchange of ideas that took place there. Among them were the Harvard scholars William James and W.E.B. Du Bois, two of the most prominent and influential American writers and philosophers of the time. William James, in turn, invited Ali Kuli Khan, an Iranian diplomat and prominent member of the Bahá'í community, to give presentations on the Bahá'í Faith at Harvard University.
Du Bois, who had been a student of James, received his doctorate from Harvard and was the first African American to do so, graduating in 1895. His work as the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought him into contact with 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who gave a speech at its fourth conference in 1912. Du Bois, as pointed out by Guy Mount in his research, later published the speech in the official magazine of the NAACP, along with a photograph of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.
A contemporary and close colleague of Du Bois, Alain Locke was also among the most eminent thinkers of the time. Locke was the first African American Rhodes Scholar, and he is often remembered as the "Dean" of the Harlem Renaissance. In a biography on Locke, Christopher Buck suggested that Du Bois may have been the one who introduced Locke to the Bahá'í Faith. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1918, the same year he became a Bahá'í. Du Bois and Locke's profound contributions to philosophy were recognized widely—the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. compared their influence to that of Plato and Aristotle.
The early American Bahá'í community also included Albert Vail and Stanwood Cobb, graduates of the Harvard Divinity School and prior Unitarian ministers. Vail published an impressive article on the Bahá'í Faith emphasizing its principle of unity in the Harvard Theological Review in 1914. While the Harvard University and Green Acre represented significant meeting points for leading writers and philosophers of the time, Dehghani's lecture also noted that the influence of the emerging discourse on unity reached other prominent thinkers in the northeastern United States.
A word must also be said about what passes for scholarship on the Bahá'í Faith in Iran and to a lesser extent in the rest of the Middle East. Bahá'ís have been persecuted in many Middle Eastern countries and rejected by Islamic leaders, and one form of this discrimination has involved the manipulation of information. For most of the last 100 years, deliberately distorted or falsified information and documents have been created mostly by some within the Islamic religious establishment and then distributed as though these were facts about the Bahá'í Faith. Since the Bahá'ís have had no ability to respond to this material in the Middle East, these distortions have gradually become accepted in the Middle East as the truth. One example is the forged memoirs of Count Dolgorukov, the Russian ambassador to Iran in the 1840s to 1850s.
This and other contradictions were so clearly spurious that even some Iranian scholars debunked them when they were first published in the 1940s. But despite this, they are often regularly cited by Middle Eastern writers up to the present day as though they are a reliable source for the history of the religion.
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, this manufacturing of disinformation and forged material has increased greatly with programs in the media, articles, and books appearing on a frequent basis, especially in the government-run media. The result is that there is almost nothing published in the Middle East that has reliable information about the Bahá'í Faith in it. A little of this sort of scholarship has also appeared in the West; some Christian missionaries, notably Reverend William McElwee Miller(1892-1993)(Also see WOB83) have written anti-Bahá'í material and ex-Bahá'ís have published academic work that is calculated to make the Bahá'í community resemble a cult as portrayed in the anti-cult campaigns that were carried out in the Western media in the 1980s. [The above was copied from the website Patheos and has been edited for brevity. It was contributed by Dr. Natalie Mobini]
- See as well the publication of Der Bahā'ismus, Weltreligion der Zukunft?: Geschichte, Lehre und Organisation in Kritischer Anfrage (Bahá'ísm-Religion of the Future? History, Doctrine and Organization: A Critical Inquiry) by Francesco Ficicchia under the auspices of the Central Office of the Protestant Church for Questions of Ideology in Germany.
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