Posts from — April 2006

I started blogging last year on Blogger, before taking to WordPress and my own domain. John Barnabas Leith was the predecessor to Barnabas Quotidianus.

Unity in a Diverse World, on the other hand, was a blog that didn’t travel very far, having just two entries. But I think the second entry on the meaning of life is quite a good one.

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If you want to know what people are choosing as their favoured icons of Engllshness, you need go no further than these pages on the BBC’s website.

New icons of Englishness unveiled

Notting Hill Carnival has become Europe’s largest street carnival

The Notting Hill Carnival, Hadrian’s Wall, the mini-skirt, cricket, Morris dancing and the pub have all been added to a list celebrating icons of England.

Blackpool Tower, the Eden Project, Big Ben and York Minster are also among 21 new additions to the list.

The ICONS - A Portrait of England project celebrates things which symbolise the nation, with nominations and votes made by the public.

The online list will be expanded to 100 icons by the end of 2006.

Read more about this.

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Tomorrow morning Erica and I will be heading off to sunny Llandudno in North Wales for the UK Bah?’? National Convention, which starts tomorrow and finishes midday on Monday. So no bog entries over the weekend. I hope I’ll get time to write about Convention on Tuesday (12th day of Ridvan).

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai

This interview with a young Iranian Bah?’? from Scotland can be found on the BBC website:

Iranian diaspora: Soroosh Khavari
MEET THE PANEL

Name: Soroosh Khavari
Age: 24
Lives: Glasgow, Scotland
Works: Dentist

My family fled Iran during the revolution because they follow the Bahai religion, whose followers suffer much persecution in Iran.

I was only six months old when we left.

The Islamic fundamentalists saw the Bahai community as a threat to Islam because it was becoming popular. The Bahai were denied many rights.

My parents’ people were denied education beyond a certain year and my father, a doctor, was told by his hospital that he would have to renounce his religion to keep his job. He was not prepared to do that.

So my parents escaped. They hired two men on motorbikes to take them over the border into Pakistan. My father held me - still only a baby - and my mother held my sister.

They had one little bag, everything else they left behind. If they had been stopped they would have been killed.

It’s well worth reading the whole of Soroosh’s story.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, dentist, Iran

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UK Bah?’? Dr Dan Sarooshi (Reader in International Law and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford) has been awarded the 2006 Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law for his book International Organizations and their Exercise of Sovereign Powers (OUP). The book was cited as a ‘pre-eminent contribution to creative scholarship’ and won the prize from among 73 entries world-wide.

It’s a wonderful achievement by a wonderful Bah?’?. Congratulations, Dan!

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Erica and I spent most of yesterday unboxing and shelving books in our new home. Many of the books have been boxed up for some time or I’ve been apart from them, because they’ve been in one place while I’ve been living in another.

I have been ruthless in putting a lot of books back into boxes with a view to selling them - mostly books I no longer feel any relationship to. I have been a book lover all my life - I learned it from my mother, who developed a huge collection of books over her lifetime - and I develop a personal relationship with certain books, particularly those I’ve learned something really special from or which I have particularly enjoyed.

Even now I remember books that gave me a particular thrill or which have a particular significance from my childhood: Dracula by Bram Stoker, which I read during my last summer term at Nevill Holt (my prep school); Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, which I studied for ‘A’ Level, are just two examples. But as I went through my library, I found books that I had bought to meet a particular need at a particular time in my life. Time has moved on and I have moved on, and the books are no longer important to me, so out they go.

This is actually quite a change in my attitude. In the past, I refused to get rid of any books, no matter how old or irrelevant. It would have been like dumping my friends. But now I live in a smaller house and I’m older. I look at some of my books and think, ‘I’m never going to read that book on watercolour painting again (or at all - I’ve always bought many more books than I’ve read); I’m not going to do Zen meditation or become a professional photographer.’

This represents a sea change in me. If I’ve lived without that book about writing stories for children for seven years and now that I’m a couple of years away from 60, should I keep it. Does it make sense? I’ve had many dreams and ambitions in my life which remain unfulfilled, and which - sub specie aeternitas - are actually rather unimportant. These dreams and ambitions are reflected in the considerable number of ‘how to be a better/more skilled person’ books that I’ve accumulated over the years - and which now look ridiculous. So now my priorities are different than they were when I was thirty or forty or even fifty. So out go the books that reflect past priorities.

As we dug into the boxes I found my notebooks and diaries. I was amazed at the pages and pages I’ve filled with diary entries and notes of all kinds over a lot of years - most of which are could only describe as maunderings. I found a diary I kept for a time in the 1950s - repetitive entries of the ‘I had fun playing with my friends’ kind. No great insights, nothing to indicate the onset of genius - so a pretty good prediction of today’s reality, then.

And, joy of joys, I found school reports and other school documents, my first letter home from boarding school, school photos and other treasures that my mother had kept. When I read the diaries and look at the school reports, I connect with my own history - much of which I had forgotten, much of which seems now to have happened to someone else.

Technorati Tags: books, Dracula, Bram Stoker, Nevill Holt, Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens

It has been a real Spring day today - the first of the year, I think. Hari, Doug and Jake came over for lunch, bringing Mieko with them. (It was Mieko’s first visit to our new home). We were able sit out on the deck in the (small garden) and enjoy the sun.

The Welwyn (pronounced Wellin for those who don’t know) area of Hertfordshire includes some really attractive countryside and pretty villages. For somewhere so close to London, it is amazingly peaceful (apart from the frequent trains on the Great Northern line, which is about 700 metres to the east of us, and the planes flying to and from Luton).

As you can see, parts of the county are inside the M25 London orbital motorway, but most of it is to the north and outside. Before I moved here, I associated the county with London commuters and the the self-satisfaction of Home Counties England. I’m not too impressed by Hatfield, where my daughter is working for her PhD. But drive north on the A1 and there’s some lovely towns and countryside.

You can find my Hertfordshire pictures here.

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Ok, so here we are, the newly formed Spiritual Assembly of the Bah?’?s of Welwyn. Thursday evening (after sunset) was a joyous time for this particular group of Bah?’?s (including the author of this blog). We were able to declare our Local Assembly formed in the presence of a representative of the Bah?’? Council for England, Nadia Jiwnani.

Here’s Nadia (below left) with Roya Taidi, now the Vice Chair of our Local Assembly.

Bah?’?s talk a lot about administration - a word that’s almost guaranteed to get most of us yawning and finding an excuse to leave the building. But it’s actually a fundamental part of our faith. The Bah?’? institutions (which include the Local Spiritual Assembly, the National Spiritual Assembly and the Universal House of Justice) are, we believe, divinely ordained bodies through which administration becomes a sacred task and responsibility. The Bah?’? community has no priests or ministers. In fact, Bah?’u'll?h abolished the institution of priesthood, deeming it unnecessary in a literate world in which every person can read and study the Word of God for her or himself. There is no need for any individual to interpose themselves between the believer and God, to interpret the scriptures for the believer, or to perform rituals and sacraments.

Instead, where there are nine or more Bah?’?s in a given locality, they form a Local Spiritual Assembly. If there are more than nine Bah?’?s in the locality, they elect nine people from the community to serve on the Local Assembly. The election itself is a spiritual process. All adult Bah?’?s in the locality are eligible both to vote and be voted form. Nobody is nominated; nobody canvasses. The electors should vote for those they consider to have the right spiritual, moral and intellectual qualities and capacities to serve on the Assembly.

The National Spiritual Assemblies and the Universal House of Justice are similarly elected, but by indirect delegate elections. There is much more to the Bah?’? administrative structure than this, but I won’t go into it here. You can read about this elsewhere.

The heart of the collective life of the Bah?’? community is ‘Bah?’? consultation‘. I say ‘heart’ deliberately because it is an extraordinary, spiritual, uplifting and incredibly creative process - when it works properly. Consultation as Bah?’?s do it is a subtle flow that balances the complete freedom of the individual to express his or her views, to contribute facts and information and to speak frankly with the creative collective wisdom that emerges in the Assembly as the consultation proceeds. Once a decision has been made, preferably by consensus - but, failing consensus, by majority vote - all involved are bound by the decision, even if they voted in the opposite direction.

This is entirely contrary to what counts as ‘democratic’ in the West, since it seems to submerge individual conscience in the Assembly’s decision. What if the Assembly’s decision is wrong? What if it goes against my deeply held beliefs?

Actually, Bah?’?s believe that the individual conscience is sacred. Each and every individual has the right and responsibility to study, to look at things with a searching eye and to arrive at their own conclusions. This is the Bah?’? principle of the individual search after truth. However, each of us surely understands, in all humility, that our own picture of the world is limited, that we have only a few pieces of the overall jigsaw puzzle of the cosmos. So, to insist on my own view is to insist on something partial (and probably wrong). Many years experience in Bah?’? consultative bodies have taught me that what comes out of properly conducted consultation is always better and more complete than my own limited ideas and understanding.

I’m trying to find a way of expressing what I experience in consultation. Is it a love-filled dance of the spirit, expressed in words, ideas, gestures, laughter, tears? That’s how good consultation seems to me. The partners in the dance, filled with love for God, for Bah?’u'll?h, for each other, complement and add to each other’s moves and steps, together creating beautiful pattern. And there comes a moment when the beautiful pattern is somehow complete - and we know we’ve arrived at a decision. Actually, that’s the role of the Chair of the Assembly - a good chairperson senses when the pattern is complete and invites the Assembly to acknowledge the consensus.

But when one or other of the partners tries to dominate, to force the dance in a particular direction, the other partners trip and stumble, and the whole ensemble may fall over in pain and with recrimination.

I’ve experienced the beauty and I’ve experienced the pain.

I love the creation of beauty in consultation. It’s the most wonderful arena for spiritual growth; it challenges the ego and tests one’s spiritual capacities to the full. On the other hand, I would do almost anything to avoid the pain. And yet, the greatest growth can perhaps come only with pain. I and others of my dearest Bah?’? friends have sat together in the fire, weeping with pain, staying there only in the faith that our Assembly would grow and come to another place - and, God be praised, it did. In our darkest moments we could live only by faith and trust in the guidance of the senior institutions, which were holding us in the fire and what might have seemed like punishment, but which we knew to be an act of the greatest love. Now we bless and thank those senior institutions for their faith in us, knowing that we had the capacity to suffer the pain and to learn and grow.

All the Bah?’?s recognize the authority of the Assembly as a body. But the Assembly is a leadership of service. The Assembly enables, empowers and co-ordinates individual initiative and the collective life of the community. In fact, the real task of the Assembly is to be part of a worldwide process that is transforming (slowly but surely) the whole of society and building a new civilization based on unity and justice:

‘So powerful is the light of unity,’ Bah?’u'll?h declared, ‘that it can illuminate the whole earth.’ ‘We, verily,’ He further stated, ‘have come to unite and weld together all that dwell on earth.’ Bah?’u'll?h made the oneness of humankind the central principle and goal of His Faith, an emphasis that implies the organic and spiritual unity of the whole body of nations and signalizes the ‘coming of age of the entire human race.’

Dig around on The Bah?’?s web portal to find out more.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, religion, UK, UK Baha’i Review

Technorati Tags: Welwyn, Bah?’? consultation

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This broadcast has been drawn to my attention by a Bah?’? friend in the UK. It’s worth listening to if only to hear how such an eminent Muslim scholar as Seyyed Hossein Nasr struggles both to justify the persecution of the Bah?’?s and to say that nothing has really happened to them in recent years.

Nasr admits that the Bahai Faith presents a serious challenge to Islam by claiming to inaugurate a new heavenly dispensation, he reiterates the same nonsense about the alleged political involvement of Bah?’?s in Iran.

Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies, George Washington University, guests on a programme that is part of a series on the Qur’?n. The other guest is Imam Yahya Hendi, Chaplain, Georgetown University.

The relevant segment starts at about minute 6:45.

Real Audio
Windows Media

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, Islam, Muslim, religion

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The Independent on Sunday yesterday included a mention of the Faith in their Easter Special: I believe…

Every week in The Independent on Sunday, a public figure talks about their beliefs, but for Easter we asked the great and the good one question: do you believe in God?

By Peter Stanford
Published: 16 April 2006
Every year church-going statistics for the mainstream denominations fall further, and predictions abound that the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of “the Sea of Faith” first prophesied by Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach” in 1867 is finally complete.

Yet there is another, quieter story to be told - of the many people who are seeking spiritual enlightenment, not in designated houses of God but in their heads and hearts, working with the denominational baggage of their childhood, but also picking without prejudice through the various holy books and traditions to find a bespoke credo, tailor-made to their needs.

Will Young and Noel Edmonds are among those who have recently outed themselves as “religious”, in the broadest of senses. Dermot O’Leary has revealed he says his prayers each night and goes to Mass but dismisses much of the official teaching of the Roman Catholic church of his upbringing. Rock star Nick Cave writes lyrics suffused by Old Testament imagery and spiritual hunger, and the director Rebecca Miller, daughter of the religious arch-sceptic Arthur Miller, described herself at the launch of her new film The Ballad of Jack and Rose as spiritual but “in a theological limbo because I haven’t found a dogma I feel I can belong to”.

We are witnessing not the death of religion but rather the privatisation of faith. The institutional churches, with their catechisms and rule books, their faults and hypocrisies, may no longer hold such widespread appeal as once they did, but the search for a greater purpose and pattern to life than what can be bought in shops or proved under a laboratory microscope continues unabated. As it always has. Providing an answer to that yearning for there to be something more, something other, is fundamental to the human condition and is arguably why organised religion grew up in the first place.

Once faith was characterised in our secular and scientific age as something for the elderly when they began to worry about the approach of death. The heads bowed before the altars were all grey. But today, inside and outside the denominations, there is a new generation of younger souls on a private spiritual pilgrimage. They are unafraid to break the taboo that has existed since the 1960s and own up to being interested in religion as something more than a sociological dinosaur. And they are unafraid too of the stereotype that says being openly religious is simply uncool.

Omid Djalili, probably the UK’s best known Bah?’?, was amongst ‘the great and the good’ who spoke about his faith:

‘You have to contribute to an advancing civilisation’

Omid Djalili, comedian, Baha’i

One of the major messages of the Baha’i faith is religious unity.

You practise your faith in a very personal way, but with two purposes: to understand yourself and to contribute to an ever-advancing civilisation. This means you strive for excellence, which really appeals to me - I try to be the funniest comedian I can possibly be. Everything you do has a bearing - the Baha’i writings indicate that when you die you’ll move to another plane of existence but that your identity will stay intact.

Baha’u'llah left us an enormous amount of writings, which we read from each morning and evening, as well as saying prayers. Well, I sometimes go for weeks without, but then I realise how beneficial it feels.

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