Celebrating the Upcoming Bicentenary of Baha’u’llah’s Birth

The Mansion of Bahji, Baha’u’llah’s final residence
Photo by the author

The Bab and Baha’u’llah were Twin Manifestations in a spiritual sense, as they both unfurled the Baha’i Dispensation, but also in a temporal sense, due to the closeness of their ages and birthdays. The anniversaries of their birthdays fall on consecutive days; this year, they occur on Saturday, October 21 (the Birth of the Bab), and Sunday, October 22 (the Birth of Baha’u’llah). The Twin Birthdays are always commemorated as Holy Days, anniversaries when Baha’is are asked to suspend work in honor of the occasion’s sanctity.

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Abdu’l-Baha’s Prayer for a Women’s College

Bahá'ís and friends gathered in an interfaith chapel
At the 2017 celebration, Vida Rastegar, Mia Taylor Chandler, and Eugenio Marcano read passages from a talk by Abdu’l-Baha. Credit: Ruijia (Rose) Wang

When Charlotte D’Evelyn stepped onto the bucolic campus of Mount Holyoke College in 1917, she was surely elated to join the faculty of the oldest institution for women’s higher education in the US. Looking around, maybe the hills of South Hadley, Massachusetts, reminded her of the steeper slopes of her hometown, San Francisco; perhaps the turrets of the Williston Memorial Library recalled the spires of buildings like the Bodleian at Oxford, where she had recently studied.

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Edward Granville Browne: The Only European Historian Who Met Baha’u’llah

You should appreciate this, that of all the historians of Europe none attained the holy Threshold but you. This bounty was specified unto you.1

These words Abdu’l-Baha wrote to Edward Granville Browne about his interviews with Baha’u’llah in 1890. From one of these interviews emanated the description of meeting Baha’u’llah famous in the Baha’i community, which you can listen to here.

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A New Era Begins: Reflections on the Declaration of the Bab

The Shrine of the Bab in Haifa
Photo by the author

The Baha’i Era began 174 years ago, in 1844 CE, when the Bab announced His mission to a young Shaykhi named Mulla Husayn. How exhilarating it must have been to live during a new revelation—to have been a devotee of Buddha, an apostle of Jesus, a disciple of Muhammad, a first believer in any of the Manifestations of God, attuned to the flood of spiritual power that each divine dispensation initiated!

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Feeling Boundless Love for Others

Bahá'ís consulting.
A Baha’i gathering. (Image source)

Shed the light of a boundless love on every human being whom you meet, whether of your country, your race, your political party, or of any other nation, color or shade of political opinion.

Abdu’l-Baha1

The security of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent living in the United States seems to be on thin ice: bearing brown skin and a “foreign” name are dangerous liabilities. Evidence comes in recent hate crimes like February’s Kansas killing. Engineers Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani were attacked by a man who told them to “get out of my country.” Kuchibhotla died. The attacker later disclosed that he thought his victims, who were natives of India, were Iranian. In March, Hasel Afshar returned to his Oregon town from vacation to discover his home ransacked and hateful messages coating the walls of his house. The messages indicated that the attackers believed Afshar to be Muslim. He is actually a Baha’i refugee from Iran. Persecuted for his faith in his homeland—attacked for his foreignness in his refuge. 

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Review of “Constitutive Visions”

Cover of Constitutive Visions courtesy of Penn State Press

Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (Review), Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 103, no. 1-2, 2017, pp. 186-190.

Christa J. Olson’s first book provides a model for rhetoricians who, like her, wish to transcend disciplinary divisions and the geographic scope of their homelands to study the rhetorics of other lands through an array of artifacts. In Constitutive Visions, Olson ambitiously intervenes in two significant projects: first, to “demonstrate the powerful roles played by resilient commonplaces in the constitution of national identity,” and second, to “emphasize the particular force that elements of visual culture lend to the constitutions of strong identifications” (24). That is, she exposes the processes through which rhetors compose a national identity for their country.

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Borderless Love: The Benefits of Marrying Outside Your Social Group

Ali-Kuli and Florence Khan
Florence and Ali-Kuli Khan. (Image source)

In 1904, Florence Breed and Ali-Kuli Khan married in Boston. Breed was American and Khan was Iranian; their union symbolized East and West uniting in the Bahá’í Faith. When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, visited the US in 1912, the Khans hosted a luncheon for him in Washington, D. C. There, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá defied social convention by giving Louis Gregory, an African-American Bahá’í, the seat of honor.

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