Preface

Summary

This book presents three of the works of Abduʾl-Bahā dealing with social and political issues that deserve to be taken more seriously as contributions to reformist literature in the Islamic world during the period leading up to Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). It is intended for general readers, scholars in the field of Persian intellectual history and students of Persian political and religious history. These works, in chronological order, are The Secret of Divine Civilization, A Traveller's Narrative and The Art of Governance.

In recent years there have been signs of a softening in the anti-Bahāʾism which, in Abbas Amanat's words, has long been “a social affliction – a kind of Iranian anti-Semitism, …” affecting Iranians of all backgrounds. Some of the texts translated here, especially the extracts from A Traveller's Narrative, give an authoritative overview of Bahāʾi religious teachings, and will be an initial and indispensable source – along with the Tablets of Bahāʾuʾllāh Revealed after the Kitāb-e Aqdas and Epistle to the Son of the Wolf – for those seeking primary material for an informed judgement. The failure to reach a modus vivendi between religion and politics has been the major cause of Iran's aborted modernity, which has continued for more than a century past its first tragic failure at the end of the Constitutional Revolution. Those Iranian intellectuals who are coming to regard the relationship between church and state as the central question to be resolved in Iran may well be willing to examine again what Bahāʾuʾllāh and Abduʾl-Bahā were saying on this topic in the period leading to the Revolution.

At the same time, in Iran and around the world, doctrinaire secularism has given way to an awareness that religions are part of our cultures, and neither religion nor culture is destined to wither away in a march towards progress enlightened by scientific consciousness. Public intellectuals must therefore consider how to preserve the gains of modernity and secularism in societies that are becoming post-modern and post-secular, in which the death of religion anticipated by the pioneers of modernism no longer looks likely.