Century of Light.

by Baha'i International Community.

FOREWORD

The conclusion of the twentieth century provides Baha'is with a unique vantage point. During the past hundred years our world underwent changes far more profound than any in its preceding history, changes that are, for the most part, little understood by the present generation. These same hundred years saw the Baha'i Cause emerge from obscurity, demonstrating on a global scale the unifying power with which its Divine origin has endowed it. As the century drew to its close, the convergence of these two historical developments became increasingly apparent.

_Century of Light_, prepared under our supervision, reviews these two processes and the relationship between them, in the context of the Baha'i Teachings. We commend it to the thoughtful study of the friends, in the confidence that the perspectives it opens up will prove both spiritually enriching and of practical help in sharing with others the challenging implications of the Revelation brought by Baha'u'llah.

The Universal House of Justice

_Naw-Ruz, 158 b.e._

CENTURY OF LIGHT

The twentieth century, the most turbulent in the history of the human race, has reached its end. Dismayed by the deepening moral and social chaos that marked its course, the generality of the world's peoples are eager to leave behind them the memories of the suffering that these decades brought with them. No matter how frail the foundations of confidence in the future may seem, no matter how great the dangers looming on the horizon, humanity appears desperate to believe that, through some fortuitous conjunction of circ.u.mstances, it will nevertheless be possible to bend the conditions of human life into conformity with prevailing human desires.

In the light of the teachings of Baha'u'llah such hopes are not merely illusory, but miss entirely the nature and meaning of the great turning point through which our world has pa.s.sed in these crucial hundred years.

Only as humanity comes to understand the implications of what occurred during this period of history will it be able to meet the challenges that lie ahead. The value of the contribution we as Baha'is can make to the process demands that we ourselves grasp the significance of the historic transformation wrought by the twentieth century.

What makes this insight possible for us is the light shed by the rising Sun of Baha'u'llah's Revelation and the influence it has come to exercise in human affairs. It is this opportunity that the following pages address.

I

Let us acknowledge at the outset the magnitude of the ruin that the human race has brought upon itself during the period of history under review.

The loss of life alone has been beyond counting. The disintegration of basic inst.i.tutions of social order, the violation-indeed, the abandonment-of standards of decency, the betrayal of the life of the mind through surrender to ideologies as squalid as they have been empty, the invention and deployment of monstrous weapons of ma.s.s annihilation, the bankrupting of entire nations and the reduction of ma.s.ses of human beings to hopeless poverty, the reckless destruction of the environment of the planet-such are only the more obvious in a catalogue of horrors unknown to even the darkest of ages past. Merely to mention them is to call to mind the Divine warnings expressed in Baha'u'llah's words of a century ago: "O heedless ones! Though the wonders of My mercy have encompa.s.sed all created things, both visible and invisible, and though the revelations of My grace and bounty have permeated every atom of the universe, yet the rod with which I can chastise the wicked is grievous, and the fierceness of Mine anger against them terrible."(1)

Lest any observer of the Cause be tempted to misunderstand such warnings as only metaphorical, Shoghi Effendi, drawing some of the historical implications, wrote in 1941:

A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every pa.s.sing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome.

Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of G.o.d invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its inst.i.tutions, dimming its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.(2)

From the point of view of wealth and influence, "the world" of 1900 was Europe and, by grudging concession, the United States. Throughout the planet, Western imperialism was pursuing among the populations of other lands what it regarded as its "civilizing mission". In the words of one historian, the century's opening decade appeared to be essentially a continuation of the "long nineteenth century",(3) an era whose boundless self-satisfaction was perhaps best epitomized by the celebration in 1897 of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, a parade that rolled for hours through the streets of London, with an imperial panoply and display of military power far surpa.s.sing anything attempted in past civilizations.

As the century began, there were few, whatever their degree of social or moral sensitivity, who perceived the catastrophes lying ahead, and few, if any, who could have conceived their magnitude. The military leadership of most European nations a.s.sumed that war of some kind would break out, but viewed the prospect with equanimity because of the twin fixed convictions that it would be short and would be won by their side. To an extent that seemed little short of miraculous, the international peace movement was enlisting the support of statesmen, industrialists, scholars, the media, and influential personalities as unlikely as the tsar of Russia. If the inordinate increase in armaments seemed ominous, the network of painstakingly crafted and often overlapping alliances seemed to give a.s.surance that a general conflagration would be avoided and regional disputes settled, as they had been through most of the previous century.

This illusion was reinforced by the fact that Europe's crowned heads-most of them members of one extended family, and many of them exercising seemingly decisive political power-addressed one another familiarly by nicknames, carried on an intimate correspondence, married one another's sisters and daughters, and vacationed together throughout long stretches of each year at one another's castles, regattas and shooting lodges. Even the painful disparities in the distribution of wealth were being energetically-if not very systematically-addressed in Western societies through legislation designed to restrain the worst of the corporate freebooting of preceding decades and to meet the most urgent demands of growing urban populations.

The vast majority of the human family, living in lands outside the Western world, shared in few of the blessings and little of the optimism of their European and American brethren. China, despite its ancient civilization and its sense of itself as the "Middle Kingdom", had become the hapless victim of plundering by Western nations and by its modernizing neighbour j.a.pan. The mult.i.tudes in India-whose economy and political life had fallen so totally under the domination of a single imperial power as to exclude the usual jockeying for advantage-escaped some of the worst of the abuses afflicting other lands, but watched impotently as their desperately needed resources were drained away. The coming agony of Latin America was all too clearly prefigured in the suffering of Mexico, large sections of which had been annexed by its great northern neighbour, and whose natural resources were already attracting the attention of avaricious foreign corporations.

Particularly embarra.s.sing from a Western point of view-because of its proximity to such brilliant European capitals as Berlin and Vienna-was the medieval oppression in which the hundred million nominally liberated serfs in Russia led lives of sullen, hopeless misery. Most tragic of all was the plight of the inhabitants of the African continent, divided against one another by artificial boundaries created through cynical bargains among European powers. It has been estimated that during the first decade of the twentieth century over a million people in the Congo perished-starved, beaten, worked literally to death for the profit of their distant masters, a preview of the fate that was to engulf well over one hundred million of their fellow human beings across Europe and Asia before the century reached its end.(4)

These ma.s.ses of humankind, despoiled and scorned-but representing most of the earth's inhabitants-were seen not as protagonists but essentially as objects of the new century's much vaunted civilizing process. Despite benefits conferred on a minority among them, the colonial peoples existed chiefly to be acted upon-to be used, trained, exploited, Christianized, civilized, mobilized-as the shifting agendas of Western powers dictated.

These agendas may have been harsh or mild in execution, enlightened or selfish, evangelical or exploitative, but were shaped by materialistic forces that determined both their means and most of their ends. To a large extent, religious and political pieties of various kinds masked both ends and means from the publics in Western lands, who were thus able to derive moral satisfaction from the blessings their nations were a.s.sumed to be conferring on less worthy peoples, while themselves enjoying the material fruits of this benevolence.

To point out the failings of a great civilization is not to deny its accomplishments. As the twentieth century opened, the peoples of the West could take justifiable pride in the technological, scientific and philosophical developments for which their societies had been responsible.

Decades of experimentation had placed in their hands material means that were still beyond the appreciation of the rest of humanity. Throughout both Europe and America vast industries had risen, dedicated to metallurgy, to the manufacturing of chemical products of every kind, to textiles, to construction and to the production of instruments that enhanced every aspect of life. A continuous process of discovery, design and improvement was making accessible power of unimaginable magnitude-with, alas, ecological consequences equally unimagined at the time-especially through the use of cheap fuel and electricity. The "era of the railroad" was far advanced and steamships coursed the seaways of the world. With the proliferation of telegraph and telephone communication, Western society antic.i.p.ated the moment when it would be freed of the limiting effects that geographical distances had imposed on humankind since the dawn of history.

Changes taking place at the deeper level of scientific thought were even more far-reaching in their implications. The nineteenth century had still been held in the grip of the Newtonian view of the world as a vast clockwork system, but by the end of the century the intellectual strides necessary to challenge that view had already been taken. New ideas were emerging that would lead to the formulation of quantum mechanics; and before long the revolutionizing effect of the theory of relativity would call into question beliefs about the phenomenal world that had been accepted as common sense for centuries. Such breakthroughs were encouraged-and their influence greatly amplified-by the fact that science had already changed from an activity of isolated thinkers to the systematically pursued concern of a large and influential international community enjoying the amenities of universities, laboratories and symposia for the exchange of experimental discoveries.

Nor was the strength of Western societies limited to scientific and technological advances. As the twentieth century opened, Western civilization was reaping the fruits of a philosophical culture that was rapidly liberating the energies of its populations, and whose influence would soon produce a revolutionary impact throughout the entire world. It was a culture which nurtured const.i.tutional government, prized the rule of law and respect for the rights of all of society's members, and held up to the eyes of all it reached a vision of a coming age of social justice. If the boasts of liberty and equality that inflated patriotic rhetoric in Western lands were a far cry from conditions actually prevailing, Westerners could justly celebrate the advances toward those ideals that had been accomplished in the nineteenth century.

From a spiritual perspective the age was gripped by a strange, paradoxical duality. In almost every direction the intellectual horizon was darkened by clouds of superst.i.tion produced by unthinking imitation of earlier ages. For most of the world's peoples, the consequences ranged from profound ignorance about both human potentialities and the physical universe, to nave attachment to theologies that bore little or no relation to experience. Where winds of change did dispel the mists, among the educated cla.s.ses in Western lands, inherited orthodoxies were all too often replaced by the blight of an aggressive secularism that called into doubt both the spiritual nature of humankind and the authority of moral values themselves. Everywhere, the secularization of society's upper levels seemed to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism among the general population. At the deepest level-because religion's influence reaches far into the human psyche and claims for itself a unique kind of authority-religious prejudices in all lands had kept alive in successive generations smouldering fires of bitter animosity that would fuel the horrors of the coming decades.(5)

II

On this landscape of false confidence and deep despair, of scientific enlightenment and spiritual gloom, there appeared, as the twentieth century opened, the luminous figure of 'Abdu'l-Baha. The journey that had brought Him to this pivotal moment in the history of humankind had led through more than fifty years of exile, imprisonment and privation, hardly a month having pa.s.sed in anything that resembled tranquillity and ease. He came to it resolved to proclaim to responsive and heedless alike the establishment on earth of that promised reign of universal peace and justice that had sustained human hope throughout the centuries. Its foundation, He declared, would be the unification, in this "century of light", of the world's people:

In this day ... means of communication have multiplied, and the five continents of the earth have virtually merged into one.... In like manner all the members of the human family, whether peoples or governments, cities or villages, have become increasingly interdependent.... Hence the unity of all mankind can in this day be achieved. Verily this is none other but one of the wonders of this wondrous age, this glorious century.(6)

During the long years of imprisonment and banishment that followed Baha'u'llah's refusal to serve the political agenda of the Ottoman authorities, 'Abdu'l-Baha was entrusted with the management of the Faith's affairs and with the responsibility of acting as His Father's spokesman. A significant aspect of this work entailed interaction with local and provincial officials who sought His advice on the problems confronting them. Not dissimilar needs presented themselves in the Master's homeland.

As early as 1875, responding to Baha'u'llah's instructions, 'Abdu'l-Baha addressed to the rulers and people of Persia a treatise ent.i.tled _The Secret of Divine Civilization_, setting out the spiritual principles that must guide the shaping of their society in the age of humanity's maturity.

Its opening pa.s.sage called upon the Iranian people to reflect on the lesson taught by history about the key to social progress:

Consider carefully: all these highly varied phenomena, these concepts, this knowledge, these technical procedures and philosophical systems, these sciences, arts, industries and inventions-all are emanations of the human mind. Whatever people has ventured deeper into this sh.o.r.eless sea, has come to excel the rest. The happiness and pride of a nation consist in this, that it should shine out like the sun in the high heaven of knowledge. "Shall they who have knowledge and they who have it not, be treated alike?"(7)

_The Secret of Divine Civilization_ presaged the guidance that would flow from the pen of 'Abdu'l-Baha in subsequent decades. After the devastating loss that followed the ascension of Baha'u'llah, the Persian believers were revived and heartened by a flood of Tablets from the Master, which provided not only the spiritual sustenance they needed, but leadership in finding their way through the turmoil that was undermining the established order of things in their land. These communications, reaching even the smallest villages across the country, responded to the appeals and questions of countless individual believers, bringing guidance, encouragement and a.s.surance. We read, for example, a Tablet addressing believers in the village of Ki_sh_ih, mentioning by name nearly one hundred and sixty of them. Of the age now dawning, the Master says: "this is the century of light," explaining that the meaning of this image is acceptance of the principle of oneness and its implications:

My meaning is that the beloved of the Lord must regard every ill-wisher as a well-wisher.... That is, they must a.s.sociate with a foe as befitteth a friend, and deal with an oppressor as beseemeth a kind companion. They should not gaze upon the faults and transgressions of their foes, nor pay heed to their enmity, inequity or oppression.(8)

Extraordinarily, the small company of persecuted believers, living in this remote corner of a land which still remained largely unaffected by the developments taking place elsewhere in social and intellectual life, are summoned by this Tablet to raise their eyes above the level of local concerns and to see the implications of unity on a global scale:

Rather, should they view people in the light of the Blessed Beauty's call that the entire human race are servants of the Lord of might and glory, as He hath brought the whole creation under the purview of His gracious utterance, and hath enjoined upon us to show forth love and affection, wisdom and compa.s.sion, faithfulness and unity towards all, without any discrimination.(9)

Here, the call of the Master is not only to a new level of understanding, but implies the need for commitment and action. In the urgency and confidence of the language it employs can be felt the power that would produce the great achievements of the Persian believers in the decades since then-both in the world-wide promotion of the Cause and in the acquisition of capacities that advance civilization:

O ye beloved of the Lord! With the utmost joy and gladness, serve ye the human world, and love ye the human race. Turn your eyes away from limitations, and free yourselves from restrictions, for ... freedom therefrom brings about divine blessings and bestowals.

Wherefore, rest ye not, be it for an instant; seek ye not a minute's respite nor a moment's repose. Surge ye even as the billows of a mighty sea, and roar like unto the leviathan of the ocean of eternity.

Therefore, so long as there be a trace of life in one's veins, one must strive and labour, and seek to lay a foundation that the pa.s.sing of centuries and cycles may not undermine, and rear an edifice which the rolling of ages and aeons cannot overthrow-an edifice that shall prove eternal and everlasting, so that the sovereignty of heart and soul may be established and secure in both worlds.(10)

Social historians of the future, with a perspective far more dispa.s.sionate and universal than is presently possible, and benefiting from unimpeded access to all of the primary doc.u.mentation, will study minutely the transformation that the Master achieved in these early years. Day after day, month after month, from a distant exile where He was endlessly harried by the host of enemies surrounding Him, 'Abdu'l-Baha was able not only to stimulate the expansion of the Persian Baha'i community, but to shape its consciousness and collective life. The result was the emergence of a culture, however localized, that was unlike anything humanity had ever known. Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself.