c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The first 19 days of March are a special time for Baha’is, members of a worldwide religion with a liberal reputation based on its vision of the underlying unity of all faiths, the oneness of humanity and the harmony of science and religion.

The Baha’i faith grew out of Islam, and like the Muslim month of Ramadan, Baha’is set aside the 19 days _ the month of ‘Ala according to the Baha’i calendar _ as a period of dawn-to-sunset fasting and spiritual reflection. The month ends with the Feast of Nawruz, the Baha’i new year. It’s a festive time of community gatherings featuring prayers, spiritual readings, socializing and lots of food.

For ex-Baha’i Juan Cole, though, this year’s feast will be anything but festive.

Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, is among the nation’s leading experts on the faith. Until last May, when he formally resigned from the movement, he had been a Baha’i for 25 years.

Now, however, he counts himself among a small but influential group of past and present liberal Baha’is angry over what they say is the hijacking of the faith by a cadre of conservative leaders more interested in preserving their authority than the Baha’i principle of”independent investigation of reality.” That principle is among the core tenets of the Baha’i faith first articulated by its founder, the 19th-century Persian prophet known as Baha’u’llah (the Glory of God) and who is revered by the faithful as an incarnation of God akin to Jesus.

According to the critics, the National Spiritual Assembly (NSA), which oversees the American Baha’i movement, is dominated by a tight-knit group of authoritarian officials who keep the lid on free expression by threatening dissidents with excommunication and by manipulating the process by which NSA members are elected.

In the Baha’i faith, excommunication can include total shunning by family members and friends.

Spreading their message via the Internet, the dissidents _ many of whom, like Cole, once were members of the faith’s intellectual elite _ say the nine-member NSA also hides the truth about the faith’s shrinking American following.”Bahai’s are not open _ repeat, not open _ about how controlling this organization is,”said Cole.”Virtually no one who comes into this faith realizes that by becoming a Baha’i you are making your individual conscience hostage to the dictates of the leadership.”The Baha’is started out Unitarian and ended up Calvinist.” For their part, American Baha’i leaders, headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill., dismiss the critics as an inconsequential group of disgruntled elitists who _ blinded by their attraction to the faith’s more liberal aspects _ overlooked its deeply conservative side.

This includes an emphasis on”administrative order”as a prime religious goal. Baha’u’llah taught that religions fail in large part because of the disunity that tears them apart following their initial burst of spiritual energy.

As a result, tight controls are placed on all public statements made by Baha’is _ including the work of scholars, who are required to submit their writings for pre-publication review.”The Baha’i community as a whole does not encourage antagonistic confrontation,”said Firuz Kazemzadeh, an NSA-member and its secretary for external affairs.”We always seek consensus. But if there is no unanimity, then the majority must prevail.” Not all Baha’i scholars find fault with this.”I personally don’t buy the totalitarian argument,”said Canadian Baha’i B. Todd Lawson, an assistant professor of Islamic studies at Montreal’s McGill University.”The Baha’i faith posits a non-confrontation version of problem solving. My view is if you opt out of that mode, that’s your prerogative. But there are others who take a longer view of things. … Baha’i ideals are extremely demanding.” Michael McMullen, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, said prior review”makes sense”because much of the writings of Baha’u’llah and his successors remain untranslated from their original Persian and Arabic, and are therefore inaccessible to the majority of American Baha’is.”My experience has been that what is corrected are factual errors, not interpretation,”said McMullen, who is also a local Baha’i leader in League City, Texas.

The dissidents also claim the Baha’i prohibition against public campaigning or nominating candidates for spots on the nine-member NSA serves to keep it a closed body controlled by the American Baha’i establishment.

Baha’i leaders say they are only following an orthodoxy established by Baha’u’llah and his successors _ his son Abdu’l-Baha and his great-grandson, Shoghi Effendi, who died in 1957.”It is extremely deprecated if anyone even talks about how they voted,”said Kazemzadeh.”Voting is supposed to be a very spiritual act.” Assembly members are elected annually by a fixed number of 171 delegates who represent local Baha’i assemblies across the continental United States.

Robert C. Henderson, a former Atlanta businessman who is the NSA’s secretary-general, making him the highest ranking American Baha’i (the faith has no ordained clergy), said there have been 12 changes in the NSA’s membership over the past 15 years.”That’s not indicative of a closed group,”he said.

However, Cole said each change resulted from retirement, death or a member moving out of the country. No incumbent who has sought re-election has been defeated since 1961, he said.

Cole also noted that family and other close associations are common among American Baha’i leaders. Six of the nine current NSA members have family or professional connections.

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For example, Henderson’s mother, Wilma Ellis, is married to Kazemzadeh. Ellis herself is a former NSA member who has held a variety of prominent Baha’i positions. Currently she is a member of the Continental Board of Counsellors of the Americas, which provides advice and other services to elected Baha’i bodies throughout the hemisphere.

Two other current NSA members are husband and wife James and Dorothy Nelson. He is a former presiding judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court. She is a judge of California’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Two other members are Juana Conrad, a retired administrator for the Los Angeles Municipal Courts, and William Davis, former administrative executive of the Ninth Circuit Court.

Yet another current assembly member is South Dakotan Patricia Locke, the first American-Indian woman to serve on the NSA. She replaced her son Kevin Locke.

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McMullen, the University of Houston sociologist, acknowledged that the prohibition against nominations and campaigning has made it hard for those outside the Baha’i establishment to win election to the NSA.

But on the local level, he added, there is a much higher leadership turnover. Moreover, on this level of authority, he said, issues, even controversial ones, are freely debated without fear of official disapproval.

Henderson also said that”Baha’is are specifically asked to air their grievances”at local and national conventions.”There are specific channels for such expression, but it must remain within these established channels.”The Baha’i faith is outwardly liberal but inwardly conservative,”he continued.”It’s a matter of scripture.” Baha’is claim a worldwide membership of more than 5 million people living in more than 200 nations and territories. About 2.5 million Baha’is live in India.

In Iran _ where the faith first emerged in the 1840s when Baha’u’llah proclaimed himself to be the divine manifestation for the modern era _ there are about 300,000 Baha’is. Considered heretics by the Muslim authorities, they live as a persecuted minority.

The heresy charge stems from Baha’u’llah’s claim to prophet status some 1,200 years after Muhammad, the founder of Islam, proclaimed himself God’s final prophet.

In the United States, Baha’is claim some 130,000 members _ a third of whom are African-Americans. About 21,000 live in California, with the largest concentration _ more than 6,000 _ in greater Los Angeles.

Baha’is are also relatively strong in South Carolina, Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Arizona and Washington state.

However, Baha’i critics say the religion’s membership numbers are wildly inflated. Citing friendly but unnamed sources at Baha’i headquarters in Wilmette, the dissidents say no more than 30,000 names represent active Baha’is with verifiable addresses.”Wilmette has no idea who most of these so-called 130,000 Baha’is are,”said Steven Scholl, a Baha’i for 27 years until he withdrew his membership last October.”The large number of inactive members on the roles speaks to the number of people who have simply walked away from the faith out of their upset with the leadership,”said Scholl, a publisher of spiritual books based in Ashland, Ore.

A 1993 book on Americans’ religious affiliations,”One Nation Under God”by demographers Barry Kosmin and Seymour Lachman, estimated the number of adult Baha’is in the United States at about 28,000.”Every new religious movement that is in a missionary phase tends to overestimate its members,”Kosmin, currently at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London, said in an interview.”They count people coming in, but never count those who leave.” Kazemzadeh, the Baha’i official, insisted that the 130,000 figure is”essentially accurate.”But he also said that”if active means contributing funds and serving locally, it’s probably about half the names on the list.” Sizeable Baha’i communities in the South are traceable to the influx of mostly rural African-Americans who joined the faith in the 1960s and `70s, drawn by its strong rejection of racial prejudice. Jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie is probably the best-known African-American Baha’i.

During those same years, relatively large numbers of white liberals, attracted by the faith’s emphasis on a society free of social injustice, also joined. It is mostly members of this group _ many of them scholars of Baha’i texts, the Middle East and its languages _ that today lead the dissident movement.

Linda Walbridge, an anthropologist at the University of Indiana specializing in the growth of Islam in America, became a Baha’i in 1966 when she was a 19-year-old VISTA volunteer on the Navajo Reservation. Despite her anger at the hierarchy, she remains a Baha’i.

Raised Roman Catholic, Walbridge said she was attracted to the Baha’i faith by its”promise of a universalist vision. … It was far more open than anything I had experienced.” Walbridge’s public dissent has prompted Baha’i officials to threaten to label her a”covenant breaker”_ a form of excommunication that would require her Baha’i husband to divorce her or risk his own excommunication.”It was supposed to be the most liberal, broad-based religion on the face of the earth,”said Walbridge.”Instead, it turned out to be a straightjacket.” (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

For liberal academics like Walbridge, the lack of free expression is a prime bone of contention. However, they also take issue with the Baha’i claim of inclusiveness when only men can serve on the Universal House of Justice, the faith’s international authority based in Haifa, Israel, near Baba’u’llah’s burial place. Established in 1963 in accordance with Baba’u’llah’s dictates, the Universal House of Justice is considered an infallible body by Baha’is.

The critics also take issue with the harsh attitude taken by Baha’i leadership toward sexually active gay and lesbian members, who are subject to official sanction under the faith’s general prohibition against all forms of extra-marital sex.”I understand that this conforms to understanding of Baha’i orthodoxy that the leadership shares, but how is this inclusive?”said Walbridge.”For heaven’s sake, let’s at least discuss it. Things have changed since the 19th century.” (END SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

To members of the Baha’i establishment, Walbridge’s challenge of some of the faith’s basic tenets are indicative of the critics’ misreading of the movement’s conservative side.”These so-called dissident Baha’is like to be among Baha’is because they were liberal and we appear liberal,”said Kazemzadeh.”But they did not believe in God as Baha’is define it. That raises the question of hypocrisy.”This is a religious community united by a set of beliefs,”he said.”So if a person says he does not believe in these beliefs, why is he a member of the community?”

MJP END RNS