Baha'i Perspectives

negin September 27th, 2009

I would like to share a poem, revolutionary in style as well as content, by the mid-19th century poetess Táhirih:

Tags: revolution, Tahirih, women

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leila September 23rd, 2009

Wakili McNeill from Malcolm X Drummers and Dancers group at the 31st Adams Morgan Day Festival. (Photo Credit: Barbara Krawcowicz)

Maybe it was the graying of the skies, summer impatient to morph into fall.  A lively street festival, Adams Morgan Day, had descended upon my neighborhood on a sunny Sunday in early September– the air thick with smoke from grills sizzling with Jamaican jerk chicken, throbbing with the sound of drums from a Ghanaian dance troupe, as thick crowds of young and old and black and brown and white weaved through stalls selling scarves and jewels, and where local artists displayed their work.  The last day of summer hadn’t yet arrived, but the next morning, shuffling past sleepy cafes on the two-mile trek to work, it wasn’t raining but somehow the air felt damp, and clouds quilted the sky, making all gray and quiet.

My neighborhood is colorful and diverse in every sense, an eyeful and a story on every corner of every block.  But the part of town in which I work lacks some soul, a claustrophobic cacophony of steel and glass.  Men in black suits and ties lunch over terms like How Do We Get Our Work Onto the Agenda, and women practical heels punch at a Blackberry in right hand, cigarette in left.  Exit the polite double doors of any given office building, and one is welcomed by blaring of taxis honking, the whooshing of FedEx trucks and words, words, words about work in a language that I used to try to understand, but now seems so foreign.  There is a certain worldly power associated with this part of town– the World Bank, the IMF, the White House, the many lobbying firms and think-tanks that crowd the few blocks of downtown Washington, D.C.  And yet, I see so many blank stares, pinched faces, stressed countenances.  And many times I’ve thought: So many of them don’t seem happy.

***

I’m on a housing hunt these days.  I was barely a week back home from a trip when my roommate informed me that she was moving to a different part of town, giving me thirty days to scramble to find a place to live.  So my evenings have been packed with open houses, putting on a smile and nodding through chore expectations, and the obligatory small talk that characterizes the interview process.  And while I’d throw myself, exhausted, onto the couch in my half-empty apartment at night, I reflected on what I’d seen in the city.  The hunt took me to all corners, and while the rent was the same, the neighborhoods varied.  Rowhouses on quaint, tree-lined streets in quiet neighborhoods morphed into what some called the “rough” part of town, a fact which I conveniently hid from my parents.  My heart raced a little faster as I raced through these streets, and I wondered why the city was so fragmented.

One such neighborhood where my housing hunt has taken is the one in which I teach a children’s class.  On Saturday afternoons, with my co-teachers, we wave to neighbors as we collect the children, some of whom last week were dragging themselves to class.  I stopped by on a Wednesday evening, after looking at several homes in the children’s neighborhood.  And while I was already late for a class, I couldn’t help but linger on their street, where some of my students were teasing each other on front stoops, and scampering about the playground.  I was greeted with hugs and squeezes and laughter, as the obligatory drunken loiterers lounging in the playground muttered incoherently.  It isn’t an easy neighborhood, one where the children see and experience things that I hadn’t at their age.  And sometimes I see the struggles of immigrant families, of double-unbelonging, of making ends meet, and of the materialism so prevalent in American society pressing its finger upon their new lives in this country.  But despite the rough edges that characterize the neighborhood, I left that evening, prying the children’s arms from my waist and blowing kisses as I said goodbye, with a joy surging in my heart that I hadn’t felt for weeks.

***

And all of this — the stress of moving, the juxtaposition of materially poor and rich, and moving seamlessly between worlds seemingly apart– has made me think about happiness, a topic that has been covered in this space before.  As I mulled over this topic, I remembered a quotation by ‘Abdu’l-Baha that I’d read in The Secret of Divine Civilization:

…human happiness consists only in drawing closer to the Threshold of Almighty God, and in securing the peace and well-being of every individual member, high and low alike, of the human race; and the supreme agencies for accomplishing these two objectives are the excellent qualities with which humanity has been endowed.

(‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, page 60)

***

To be continued in Part II.

Tags: childhood, happiness

• Reflections , Society
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Baha'i Perspectives September 16th, 2009

Received yesterday in the Baha’i Perspectives mailbox…

“Kevin Locke, world-renowned Native American performer and educator, and member of the Baha’i community, has been nominated by the Native American Music Awards for Artist of the Year and Flutist of the Year.

His newest album Earth Gift, has been nominated for Record of the Year.

http://www.kevinlocke.com/nammy.html

We invite you to consider voting for Kevin. Kevin’s life work is sharing an understanding of the oneness of humanity through his music, dance, and storytelling. We are excited about this year’s nomination and the opportunity it provides to introduce more people to the message of love, unity, and oneness.

To learn how to vote, visit http://www.kevinlocke.com/nammy.html. The last day to participate is October 3, 2009.”

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nooshin September 12th, 2009

Equality.  I never thought it a hard concept to grasp: we are all equal in the sight of God, regardless of nationality, socio-economic status, race or gender. After all, I was raised on:

O Children of Men! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other….

Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic no. 68

And among the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh is the equality of women and men. The world of humanity has two wings—one is women and the other men. Not until both wings are equally developed can the bird fly. Should one wing remain weak, flight is impossible. Not until the world of women becomes equal to the world of men in the acquisition of virtues and perfections, can success and prosperity be attained as they ought to be.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, sec. 227

I get lulled into thinking that most people think the same way, and that our systems and governments are, by-in-large, all working under the same premise. Last week I read something that reminded me that, actually, vast numbers of women are still living greatly unequal lives.  I  was reading a paper entitled “Gender vulnerabilities, shocks and social protection responses“, (produced by the Overseas Development Institute), which outlines the various impacts the recent financial and food price crises have had on women.  It was sobering reading:

• It is women who bear the brunt of the food price crisis, not only because they are primarly responsible for the management of food in the household but also because they are often the ones who buffer the impact of the crisis at the household level through decreased consumption.
• Women often become ’shock absorbers of household food security’, reducting their own consumption to allow more food for other household members.
• In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the agricultural sector makes up more than 60% of all female employment.  But, women in Africa only own 1% of the land and also face biases against access to training, inputs, capital, credit and transportation.
• Rising food prices can hold important implications for the distribution of care responsiblities and time poverty.  Women’s time burdens are put under more pressure as the need for cheaper food may entail travelling further… on top of such chores such as the collection of water and firewood.  Increased demands on women’s time and energy could hold negative impacts for children’s health and schooling.  A reduction in childcare may translate into greater malnutrion and poor health affecting children’s life-long capacity, ability to learn and chances of climbing out of poverty.
• Where women have limited decision-making and bargaining power within the household over income, this often results in less expenditure on health, nutruion and education, and poorer outcomes for family members, including children.
• Women’s education and nutritional knowledge and status within the household contribute more than 50% to the reduction of child malnutrition.

It was the last two points that stood out the most for me, because the Baha’i Writings place such great emphasis on the education of women:

Furthermore, the education of woman is more necessary and important than that of man, for woman is the trainer of the child from its infancy. If she be defective and imperfect herself, the child will necessarily be deficient; therefore, imperfection of woman implies a condition of imperfection in all mankind, for it is the mother who rears, nurtures and guides the growth of the child.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, A Compilation on Women, page17

The education of women has far reaching consequences, beyond that of the strength and well-being of the family unit. For only once humanity recognizes the necessity of ensuring the equality of men and women will we be able to attain world peace:

The emancipation of women, the achievement of full equality between the sexes, is one of the most important, though less acknowledged prerequisites of peace. … Only as women are welcomed into full partnership in all fields of human endeavour will the moral and psychological climate be created in which international peace can emerge.

The Universal House of Justice, The Pomise of World Peace

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sam September 9th, 2009

Emotional pain is a reality that is given an inadequate amount of attention in the lives of the majority of people. The wounds caused by certain incidents and interactions are not necessarily visibly evident. This causes the pain to be ignored and oftentimes numbed with a large dose of alcohol or through irrational acts that transfer the harm to another individual. These “prescriptions” offer only an escape from the immediate pain. How to properly deal with the hurt is a lesson that society has yet to learn and it is only now that the issue is being given more attention. Only now are psychologists are being sought out, councillors approached and friends confided in on a regular basis. This is a stark contrast to the old way of dealing with emotional damage, which involved sucking it in and suffering in silence. As is often seen with change, the immediate action taken is either excessive or inadequate, nevertheless, society is slowly figuring out how to address it.

The first step to finding a solution to a problem is acceptance and then an attempt to understand its nature. A direct comparison can be made between physical wounds and emotional ones. If a person receives a physical wound such as a cut, first aid is administered and it is cleaned, unsanitary objects are kept away and time is taken to ensure the breach is dealt with carefully and immediately. If the wound is deep, medical care is sought immediately and action is taken in a prompt fashion. Furthermore, time and care is taken to allow it to heal and all possible attempts are made to ensure minimal scaring on our physical frame.

The concept should be the same with the emotional “frame”. We receive wounds from harmful or difficult moments in our lives. These cause emotional wounds and healing is needed. The problem is that we do not treat these wounds in the same way. By ignoring them, we leave them to heal without care. If a bone is broken, a doctor sets it properly. If not set properly, the bone will heal a manner that will cause a weakness to the skeletal structure. It may hold up for a while but when put under strain will break or cause unnecessary pain during certain conditions. Before it has fully set there is still the chance that the bone can be broken and re-set properly under the supervision of an expert physician, someone whose expertise will allow for the bone to be fixed as best as possible.

If the impact of this attitude on physical wellbeing is considered, one can evidently see how weak the body would be and how susceptible to future damage it would be. Similarly, if an emotional wound does not heal well, it will always be an area that is weak and susceptible to further injury. Therefore, understanding this concept gives an individual the awareness of both their reactions to people and also ensuring that they are careful to what they expose themselves to.

The trials Thou sendest are a salve to the sores of all them who are devoted to Thy will…

(Baha’u'llah, Prayers and Meditations by Baha’u'llah, p. 78)

While reflecting on dealing with the wounds one must also look at the scars that are inevitably going to be left behind. Generally, a scar is a lesson learned. An intelligent person will come away from an injury having learned not to put themselves in that situation again. If a child gets burned by a hot object they have learned the lesson that hot objects cause pain. The pain leaves an imprint in the mind that can either be seen as a positive (lesson learned) or a negative (the pain of the burn). When one sees the pain as a lesson, coping with it becomes intelligent and composed. The approach is rational and the lesson is focused upon. An escapist attitude is not adopted and therefore the wound heals well. The scar left behind is strong and minimalistic.

Men who suffer not, attain no perfection. The plant most pruned by the gardeners is that one which, when the summer comes, will have the most beautiful blossoms and the most abundant fruit…

(Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, p. 50)

However, it is rare that emotional pain is seen as an opportunity for growth and progress. All too often in our lives that lesson is not learned! This is mainly due to the fact that a competent remedy was not sought and the issue addressed without the skilled guidance of an expert physician. This means we are left with a scar that is viewed in the negative light and becomes a hindrance to our moving forward with the healing process. A grave situation arises and if not addressed before a long time has passed, can leave a lasting impression on the person. It can potentially impact our interactions with people and certain situations and can be the cause of great discomfort and more pain. From the outset this can be avoided by seeking correct guidance and then reflecting on how best to apply it to ones situation. The guidance found at the current time is overwhelming in number and confusing in the diverse opinions offered. What better place to look for a cure than from a Physician divine in nature.

Every divine Manifestation is the very life of the world, and the skilled physician of each ailing soul. The world of man is sick, and that competent Physician knoweth the cure, arising as He doth with teachings, counsels and admonishments that are the remedy for every pain, the healing balm to every wound. It is certain that the wise physician can diagnose his patient’s needs at any season, and apply the cure.

(Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Bahá, p. 58)

Tags: healing, tests

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nadim September 2nd, 2009

In his book Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Times, one of the 20th century’s most respected historians, Arnold J. Toynbee, puts his in-depth knowledge of human history and his concerns for its future into focus. He suggests that to avoid self-destruction and move towards unification, humanity must make a radical break from deeply ingrained habits built up over many generations. In cross-referencing Toynbee’s findings with the Baha’i writings, we discover a striking harmony between lessons learnt from history and Baha’i guidelines on lasting peace.

4. Should we be worried?

While researching this post, I stumbled across this list of sci-fi clichés, the ones we are repeatedly subjected to in movies and TV shows. Here are a few:

Today, we use crystals to make digital watches work. In the future, they’ll power entire starships.

“Reversing the polarity” is the solution to virtually every engineering crisis. It’s the futuristic equivalent of “turning it off and on again”.

Any intergalactic federation of planets will have a human president.

In the future, individuality, creativity and sex will be outlawed – and suppressed by a daily dose of drugs – while overpopulation will be solved by enforced euthanasia. Or… only heavy-metal fans will survive the apocalypse.

Laughable as some of these scenarios are, isn’t it strange that when postulating about the future many of them will sneak their way into our frame of reference? Some, like the first three above, are laughed away and soon forgotten, whereas scenarios like the last one, a future devoid of individuality and creativity, are a little harder to shake.

Toynbee himself ponders the potential effect that a future world authority would have on human creativity, and presents the following fictional metaphor as a warning –  based on the real-life stagnation and decline of the great Roman empire:

It is said to have been reported to one of the Roman emperors, as a piece of good news, that one of his subjects had invented a process for manufacturing unbreakable glass. The emperor gave orders that the inventor should be put to death and that the records of his invention should be destroyed. If the invention had been put on the market, the manufacturers of ordinary glass would have been put out of business; there would have been unemployment that would have caused political unrest, and perhaps revolution; and then the World might have been thrown back into the turmoil from which the Roman world-state had salvaged it.

The emperor clearly made an error of judgement by ordering the death of the inventor of unbreakable glass, much as he deemed it a necessary price to pay for maintaining the status quo. History has proven that states which stifle conscience and creativity are doomed to extinction (take for example the fate of the former Communist bloc).

It seems these days that humanity is caught between, on the one hand, acknowledgement that looming world catastrophes such as environmental or nuclear destruction can only permanently be addressed by having empowered world authorities, contrasted by a fear of “signing our lives and freedoms away” to the so-called mega state.

The result is a passionate debate within various strata in society, a debate that most Baha’is, as advocates of world unity, will at some point be engaged in. Let us examine, then, some of the common arguments or misconceptions against world governance and perhaps offer alternative views:

1. Loss of freedom. This particular fear, or variants of it, are certainly among the greatest of all barriers in peoples’ minds. But let’s turn this argument on it’s head. Today’s governments use and abuse the “freedom” of national sovereignty to spend hugely on increasingly sophisticated armaments, far beyond what is necessary. Consider, if checks and balances were enforced to prevent this from happening, just how much more money could be channeled towards improving education or providing better healthcare?

2. Greater bureaucracy. While this may be true in certain situations, it can also be stated that challenges such as reducing global warming could actually do with increased bureaucracy and sanction, rather than the carbon emission free-for-all occurring around us all the time.

3. Dictatorship. It is interesting to note that where the law of the land precludes dictatorship from happening, it generally doesn’t. Take the federated union of American states discussed in the previous part of this series, or more recently, the states which together formed the European Union. These two examples are key evidence that world governance does not necessarily imply dictatorship – and the power of the law can ensure it.

For the sake of brevity I will leave it there but would love to hear your own additions to this list. To end, I recall a talk delivered by one of my favourite Baha’i speakers, noted for his powers of intellect and occasional infusions of offbeat humour. Describing the vision of the future mentioned in the major Holy Scriptures, one of peace, unity and everyone getting along with each other, all of a sudden he exclaims: “But wouldn’t life be boring?!”

Chuckles fill the room, accompanied by a few barely discernible nods, and then an expectant pause. It is at this point that he presents this quotation from Shoghi Effendi, a glimpse into the exciting challenges that actually lie in store for the human race:

Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership on the other, will disappear. The enormous energy dissipated and wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to such ends as will extend the range of
human inventions and technical development,
to the increase of the productivity of mankind,
to the extermination of disease,
to the extension of scientific research,
to the raising of the standard of physical health,
to the sharpening and refinement of the human brain,
to the exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet,
to the prolongation of human life,
and to the furtherance of any other agency that can stimulate the intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.

(Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u'llah, p.204)

Tags: creativity, Toynbee

• General Interest , Society
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