Posts from — December 2006

…I don’t feel any older, but I can’t quite believe that I’m almost 60.

We had an excellent family get-together on 27 December to celebrate two birthdays, mine and Jacob’s.

This time last year Jakey was an utterly helpless baby. Now, one year on, he’s an active, bright, rather mischievous little boy, just beginning to walk and with the very early signs of language. I had forgotten just how much development goes on in a child’s first year.

As for me, I’m heading towards the other end of life on this plane of existence. If I’m spared (as people used to say), I hope to do something special for my 60th…

More pictures of the Leith and Weights familieshere.

Technorati Tags: birthday, Leith, Weights

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OK, so what is this gang of Baha’is doing celebrating that festival on 25 December?

Our excuse was that the whole country had shut down for the day and there wasn’t anything else to do. (The UK completely shuts for business on 25 December - no trains, no shops, no offices… But someone must be working. How do the lights get to stay on? And what happens if you have an accident? And who’s staffing the service areas on the motorways? Surely not Father Christmas and his little helpers.)

Anyway, we had a wonderful day. Even Choo Choo the cat slumbered his way through the Leith/Howlett/ Rahmanian festivities.

More pictures here.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Christmas

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The Universal House of Justice, the world governing council of the Baha’i community, has addressed a wonderful message to the Baha’is of Egypt. It is also available in Arabic.

If you’re at all interested in seeing how Baha’is respond to deprivation of their human rights and their civil rights, you should read this letter. You will see that the Baha’is are not claiming special privileges for themselves, but are, rather, promoting “a single global standard of human rights”, that those organizations in Egypt that are working for this single global standard are praised as “committing themselves in large measure to the vital task of reconciling the tensions that bedevil their society.

Such reconciliation should not be impossible to Egypt’s people, who can take pride in the celebrated enlightenment that in a glorious past ensured their unity in a flourishing society. Undoubtedly Egypt will rise to participate, as benefits its stature, in the fruition of that destiny of world peace and prosperity of which all nations dream.

The letter briefly reviews the distinguished history of the Baha’i community in Egypt, dating back to the lifetime of Baha’u'llah in the 19th century, and shows how it flourished until 1960, when Presidential Decree 263 was issued without warning, banning national and local Baha’i institutions in Egypt and confiscating Baha’i properties and other assets. It reminds us of the time in 1925 when an appellate court in Egypt declared that the Baha’i Faith was “a new religion”, “entirely independent” of Islam, and with beliefs, principles and laws of its own.

The letter also gives the wider context for the current difficulties faced by the Baha’is in Egypt, “that from it you may derive an ever-larger sense of meaning and purpose.” “Injustice is rife,” writes the Universal House of Justice. “Throughout the world it afflicts every department of life whether in the home, at the workplace, or in the public sphere as a consequence of the ill conduct of individuals, groups, or governments.”

Human society has arrived at a stage in its evolution when unity of the whole human race is imperative. To not appreciate this reality is to not grasp the meaning of the current crisis in world affairs. The principle of the oneness of humankind identifies the code for resolving the far-reaching issues involved. As Baha’is, you understand that this principle implies not only the ultimate peaceful goals that it signifies but involves, as well, your participation in the painful tasks entailed in attaining it. Hence, you appreciate the global connotations of instances of oppression at home or abroad and accept the responsibility of striving, guided by the principles of the Faith and in collaboration with others whenever possible, to combat injustice, for the common good.

The letter’s opening paragraph is a clarion call to persistent and positive action by the Egyptian Baha’is. Note the opportunity offered to the authorities in Egypt to right a wrong whose implications go beyond the Baha’is; and note the call not to discount the moral courage of others who have publicly stood up for the Baha’is:

But you must stand firm and persevere in your effort to win affirmation of this right. To do less would be to deprive the authorities in Egypt of the opportunity to correct a wrong which has implications for many others, no less than for yourselves. Moreover, to relent would be to disregard the moral courage of those organizations, media, and persons of goodwill who have joined their voices to yours in the quest for a just solution to a serious inequity.

Technorati Tags: Universal House of Justice, Baha’i, Egypt, human rights, civil rights, world peace, prosperity, Baha’u'llah, Islam, Injustice

Could Tibetan Buddhist monks be the secret weapon against climate change

I recently came across this 2002 article from the Harvard University Gazette. It seems that some Tibetan Buddhist monks were the subject of an experiment while in deep meditation:

In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.

If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.

Now (silly thought, I know), just imagine that everyone home replaced its tumble drier with a meditating Tibetan Buddhist monk. Energy consumption would drop; carbon emissions would reduce; climate change would be ameliorated. Simple! (?)

Technorati Tags: climate change, Tibetan, Buddhist, monk, meditation, g Tum-mo, carbon emissions

Thanks to The Independent newspaper on 16 December for elevating me in age and status. According to the Indie’s Portfolio: Our leading religious figures I am a 68-year-old aristocrat and, well, a “religious leader“.

Let’s get this straight. I am 58, the younger son of a Baron (who died when I was 11), and a member of the UK Baha’i community’s national governing council, none of whose members has any kind of individual authority. It is almost impossible to persuade people that, although I am an elected member of the Baha’i National Spiritual Assembly, I am not anything like a religious leader. The Baha’i Faith just doesn’t do religious leaders.

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Technorati Tags: religious leader, Baha’i

L to R: Keith McDonald, Carolyn Neogi, Fiona McDonald, Thelma Batchelor, Lindsay Thorne

Erica and I went to a Baha’i nostalgia-fest last night at the home of Sean and Tebby Hinton in London. Fiona and Keith McDonald were visiting from Australia and gathered together some of us who were Baha’i chums in the early 1970s. When we were young we were impatient at the constant reminiscing of the old fogeys. Now I am an old fogey and I can take undiluted pleasure in recalling the past, laughing, and still thinking with excitement (or trepidation) about the future.

Mind you, I am not as old as The Independent made out on 16 December. According to their Portfolio: Our leading religious figures, I am 68, exactly 10 years older than I really am. Either that, or I am doing very well for a 68-year-old.

Anyway, it was great to see old friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen for ages, to talk, laugh, eat, and laugh some more.

Unfortunately I put a sticky finger on the camera lens, which explains the unwanted “soft focus” patch in each of the photos.

Erica Leith and Margaret Appa

Sean and Tebby Hinton with Shirin Maanian

You can find more photos on my Flickr pages.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, nostalgia, 1970s

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A poll reported in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper claims that most people in Britain think religion does more harm than good.

The poll also reveals that non-believers outnumber believers in Britain by almost two to one. It paints a picture of a sceptical nation with massive doubts about the effect religion has on society: 82% of thosequestioned say they see religion as a cause of division and tension between people. Only 16% disagree. The findings are at odds with attempts by some religious leaders to define the country as one made up of many faith communities.

The Guardian report continues:

Most people have no personal faith, the poll shows, with only 33% of those questioned describing themselves as “a religious person”. A clear majority, 63%, say that they are not religious - including more than half of those who describe themselves as Christian.

Older people and women are the most likely to believe in a god, with 37% of women saying they are religious, compared with 29% of men.

The faith communities in the UK have been living off the 2001 Census figures, in which some 72% of people in England and Wales claimed to consider themselves Christians. The secularists have been claiming for ages that the Census figures do not record any kind of reality other than the default position of many when faced with a form that asks what their religion is: “Church of England“. Now this poll adds fuel to their particular fire, which is that the religions have unjustly gained a privileged position in British society and that they, the secularists, are unjustly kept away from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of the government’s consultations with faith community representatives.

I suspect that this poll highlights a problem with polls: the answers they get depend on the wording of the questions they ask. Many years ago I took a course on social surveys as part of my sociology degree; one of the things we learned was that it is extremely difficult to ask questions that do not presuppose a particular answer.

Of course, the Census faces exactly the same problem and the religious question in the 2001 England and Wales Census was badly constructed.

Religion and faith are complex matters. Those who do not habitually think about faith and religion may assume that someone asking them about their faith wants to know what religion they belong to, what place of worship they attend. But formal attendance at a place of worship does not necessarily define one’s beliefs. People may have spiritual beliefs without belonging to any formal religious group; likewise people may formally belong to one or other religious group without believing what that group formally believes.

A final point: humanists and secularists are given to implying that their organizations “represent” those who do not have any particular religion or who do not consider themselves “religious”. This is an invalid claim. People who do not have any particular belief or religious affiliation may not, because of that, consider themselves to be actively atheist or secularist. Religion, faith, belief may just not be part of their lives. It’s a “non thing” for them; it does not imply an active commitment to what the humanists and secularists themselves believe.

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Technorati Tags: religion, non-believers, Christian, Christians, secularists, Church of England, humanists, atheist

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This is the headline to a scurrilous article in the Aljazeera.com online magazine (in English) by Sheikha Sajida, who is commenting on the recent judgement of the Supreme Administrative Court in Egypt that Baha’is cannot enter the word “Baha’i” on any official document where they have to state their religion.

Sajida makes this extraordinary claim:

Endorsing a new and peculiar religious trend, and I stress Baha’i shouldn

Technorati Tags: Aljazeera, Baha’i

The life of the Prophet Muhammad has always polarized opinion in the West. After 9/11 and 7/7 it has become increasingly difficult to find balanced accounts of Islam and its founder. Having read Robert Spencer’s “The Truth About Muhammad”, which is relentlessly hostile, I was looking for something rather more sympathetic about Muhammad’s life. I found it in Barnaby Rogerson’s book (published by Abacus in 2003. ISBN: 0-349-11586-9).

Rogerson is an excellent storyteller, a professional, in fact. In the preface, Rogerson tells how, when taking Western tourists around Roman sites in a Muslim country, he heard groups of men sitting around in cafes telling tales from the days of the Prophet as if they were fresh and new. “I was on the side of a good story,” says Rogerson. “The life of the Prophet Muhammad is a story of overpowering pathos and beauty. It is history, tragedy and enlightenment compressed into one tale.” And that’s how Rogerson tells it.

He has the knack of taking the reader into the picture, of conjuring up the sights and sounds and smells of Arabia in the days of Muhammad. And he gives us a sense of the struggles that Muhammad and his early followers went through, of the Prophet’s family, and of the harsh life of the Arabs in the desert. He tells it in the end as a tale of triumph over challenge, but never implies that victory was a foregone conclusion.

But - and it is a big but - I was conscious throughout that Rogerson had omitted many of the very difficult episodes of Muhammad’s apparent cruelty that Spencer includes in his book. In fact, my first reaction to Rogerson’s book was that he was a Romantic, that he had to some extent sentimentalized Muhammad’s story and had evaded these difficult episodes. The problem with writing a biography of Muhammad that is accessible and readable for the non-scholarly Western, non-Muslim reader (which is what I am) is that the writer must inevitably abbreviate the story and cannot really acknowledge the difficulties that a historian would have with the very limited primary sources for the life of Muhammad.

This is not to say that Rogerson avoids reference to sources. In fact, he has included a useful note on sources, as well as a timeline, maps, profiles of the main characters in the story, and a glossary of the 99 Names of God. But the main issue, as with all historical material, is one of interpretation. What do the various episodes mean? What frame of reference do we wish to put on the story of Muhammad? Spencer starts with harshly negative assumptions and sets out to prove what he already believes about Muhammad. Rogerson, on the other hand, starts with positive assumptions and sets out to show the beauty and majesty of Muhammad’s life.

I have to admit I was repelled by Spencer and beguiled by Rogerson. Beguiled, but always a tad suspicious that he was carried away with the story and not conscious enough of where there could be difficulties and different views of what he was asserting about Muhammad. Somehow, I heard the echoes of Fitzgerald’s translations of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam in Rogerson’s voice.

As a Baha’i I found Rogerson’s telling appropriate, respectful, and filled with faith (although I don’t think he is a Muslim himself). As it happens, I am reading passages from Gems of Divine Mysteries, that wonderful effusion of the Pen of Baha’u'llah, each morning and evening. The other day I read this (pages 38-41):

It is Our wish at this juncture to digress from Our theme to recount that which befell the Point of the Qur’an, and to extol His remembrance…

Consider and reflect upon His days, when God raised Him up to promote His Cause and to stand as the representative of His own Self. Witness how He was assailed, denied, and denounced by all; how when He set foot in the streets and marketplaces, the people derided Him, and laughed Him to scorn; how at every moment they sought to slay Him. Such were their doings that the earth in all its vastness was straitened for Him, the Concourse on High bewailed His plight…

…

Had these souls but clung steadfastly to the Handle of God manifested in the Person of Muhammad, had they turned wholly unto God and cast aside all that they had learned from their divines, He would assuredly have guided them through His grace and acquainted them with the sacred truths that are enshrined within His imperishable utterances.

Rogerson’s telling of the life of the Prophet gave me a sense of the historical reality of what Baha’u'llah says about His illustrious predecessor.

I shall now read Rogerson’s “The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad” and move on to the next part of the story of Islam. It is essential that we understand Islam’s history and try to avoid the hatred and prejudice that so many in the West accept as the “proper” reaction to Islam. However, we must also acknowledge that extremist voices have captured the attention of the media and, indeed, of the Muslim community. Any form of religious extremism is, as Baha’u'llah says, “a world-devouring fire”.

Technorati Tags: Muhammad, Islam, Muslim, Arabia, Baha’i, Baha’u'llah, Qur’an

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Afshin is a Baha’i and a media student at Brunel University in London. His blog has lots of good stuff about the Baha’i Faith, Baha’i activities and music. It’s well worth a read.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, media