Light upon Light, National Baha’i Festival, Scarborough

We were pretty lucky with the weather in Scarborough over the weekend. Over a thousand Baha’is and their friends made the trek to the North Yorkshire seaside resort for the annual National Baha’i Festival at Scarborough’s Spa Complex.

The theme? Light upon Light.

And it was well worth it. Talks by Douglas Martin, Shamsi Navidi (about the Guardian), Lesley Taherzadeh-O’Mara. Music by, amongst others Vahid Khadem-Missagh (who is a wonderful violinist), Ollie Heath, Soul in the City (from Manchester). Dances by the youth dance group, Oceans of Light. Talks in the Talks Pavilion, which Erica had organized (as last year). A parallel Baha’i Studies conference on Saturday. Activities for children and junior youth. A youth festival. A bookshop and stalls for people selling crafts, CDs, posters, pictures. The Lighthouse chillout zone. The reflective space in the Vita Dome (a wonderful name, ‘Vita Dome’, redolent of the 1920s and 30s, when the seaside smell of seaweed and mud was believed to be health-giving ‘ozone’). A film made by Alex about Baha’u'llah’s messages to the Kings and Rulers. And on and on.

And I missed a lot of it. With just over 24 hours’ notice I gave a presentation at the Baha’i Studies conference on One Common Faith first thing on Saturday morning. I did another presentation on One Common Faith in the Talks Pavilion on Sunday morning while the main stage. And, with Pete Hulme, gave the National Assembly’s parting message to the Festival. Much of the rest of the time I spent talking to people like Dave Black and Keith Mellard, whom I hadn’t seen for years, and to others who wanted to chat to me about various things. Linda Coulter, for example, wanted to update me about her work as the chaplaincy manager in Ashworth High Secure Hospital. I had a long chat to Jo Pearce about his work in Derby, establishing lines of communication with the Kurdish community and helping that community find good leaders, and the toy library he is running which turns out to be a great way to promote literacy.

In fact, I spent much of the first part of Saturday morning talking to Jo, Keith Mellard and Celia Cox, who is totally dedicated to working with asylum seekers and other marginalized people in Leicester. In fact, she’s just won an award - about which she’s deeply embarrassed - for her work. This is a very interesting group of people. All working class, all present or former (in Keith’s case) community activists. Both of Keith’s grandfathers (from Sheffield) were at the first meeting of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. As a child, Jo Pearce used to go out with his mum selling a communist newspaper on Soho Road in Handsworth, Birmingham. I don’t know Celia’s history, but she is certainly a firebrand - that is to say, she is quite prepared to speak her mind about issues that anger or concern her; and she is a totally dedicated Baha’i.

They all have a very interesting take on the Faith, each different, but each is well worth listening to. I would say that Jo has the strongest appreciation of the change of culture the Baha’i community is undergoing and the clearest understanding of the power of the Ruhi courses as a tool for empowerment. Keith’s discourse tends to look back to how things were in the days of Christine Herbert and the NTC, when Christine would send him to places to teach, to get teaching projects going and so on. He has strong views about what Baha’is must do if they are to convey the Message of Baha’u'llah to working class people in a way that is attractive to them, and he sees the UK community as predominantly middle class. I suppose it is, but I have spent a lot of time over the weekend talking to Baha’is with impeccable working class credentials. And I know many more. The thing is, that people accept Baha’u'llah, get an education of one kind or another and become ‘middle class’ (whatever that means). Of course people retain their memory of where they started and want to celebrate their particular heritage - these things are important in Britain, probably more important that many of us realize.

Jo and Celia both have a passionate interest in excluded and marginalized communities and both work with different excluded groups. Jo’s view is that the Ruhi Institute courses, which, after all, were developed in a poor country, are a powerful means to empower the marginalized. He envisages groups, such as the Kurds and others, embracing the Ruhi books, enrolling as Baha’is, ‘owning’ the Faith and only then meeting the rest of the Baha’i community. There could be enclaves of Baha’is growing up amongst different populations, which would change the face of the whole Baha’i community in a revolutionary way.

It seems to me that Jo, Keith and Celia all have important things to say about the way the Baha’i community grows and develops in the UK.

One of the most impressive aspects of the festival was the active presence of large numbers of junior youth and youth. In the past, some of the youth have caused trouble. But this year they played an important part in the programme (as presenters, link people, dancers, musicians) and atmosphere of the festival. To my mind, it shows the vigour and health of the Baha’i community in the UK that the youth turn up in large numbers, that they are engaged, that they are truly delightful people.

I missed the excellent theatre pieces that we had last year: Sarah Clive’s Martha Root piece, Dana Haqjoo’s single-hander on the life of Charles Dunning, and the crowning glory, Pure, Shirin Youssefian’s play about Tahirih. These sorts of pieces, if well written and performed, are very powerful.

But I’m afraid my age is now showing. I find the music that appeals to the young Baha’is less tolerable than I used to. I could have listened to Vahid Khadem-Missagh, with his wonderful young accompanist, Irena - not a Baha’i, studying at the Guildhall (I think) and only having met Vahid a couple of days before the festival - playing Bartok and Ravel and Rakhmaninov all night. I’m sure many would have found that a form of torture, although his playing was very well received. Ollie Heath’s song and dance spectacular on the festival theme (Light upon Light) was tremendous, but in the end it didn’t speak to me as it did to many in the audience. My tolerance for sitting for hours listening to others speaking or performing, unless they are very good, has almost disappeared. I have become a grumpy old man!

After Erica and I got back, I spoke at length to Alex about his film, The Prisoner and the Kings, which was premiered at the festival. It was a good solid film, written by Steve Vickers, about Baha’u'llah’s letters to Napoleon III, Pope Pius IX, Queen Victoria, Kaiser Willhelm I, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria Hungary, Czar Alexander II, Sultan Abdulaziz, Nasiri’d-Din Shah and about the fall of all of these powerful monarchs with the notable exception of Queen Victoria, who was the only one who (reputedly) gave anything near a positive response. Alex acknowledged that the film would need quite a bit of work to be suitable for sale. One of the issues is the lack of a narrative arc in the writing. Each monarch was presented separately and there was little feeling of the overall drama that engulfed the world at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century leading up to the First World War. We discussed ways in which the story could be told more effectively and we may work together on this. I think there’s a need for a good film about what is a fascinating piece of history.

Technorati Tags: arts, asylum seekers, Baha’i, Bahai, children, youth, religion, spiritual, spirituality, UK, Yorkshire