On the occasion of the bicentenary birthday of the founder of the Babi creed (Ali Muhammad Shirazi) and to proselytize and introduce Bahaullah and Baha’ism, the Baha’ism organization unveiled a film called “the gate” (Bab) in order to indicate that Bab has been a peaceful and great character who has been emerged to be the gate for the Baha’i faith. The following notes are worthy to be mentioned:
۱- The film has been made ignoring the historical realities and historical research articles, works and books. It has merely been made using Baha’i organization’s mono-lateral and proselytizing works and writings exclusively narrate by several Baha’i people mentioning their academic titles. Those who have been interviewed are as follows:
- Nader Saeedi: The proselytizer and the author of some proselytizing books residing in Los Angles
- Armin Eshraqi: The offspring of Iraj Ishraqi, the proselytizer and the activist of the Baha’i media,
- Moojan Momen: The Baha’i proselytizer and medium activist and the author of some books confirming the Baha’i faith,
- Firouz Kazem Zadeh: The Baha’i proselytizer who was the member of the Baha’i spiritual assembly since 1963 to 2000 A.D. and died
- Layla Miller-Muro: The Baha’i lawer and activist from the United States and the founder of the center of justice “Tahireh”,
- Ruin Wilson: The American actor and comedian. His wife and he are Baha’is,
- David L. Rowe: The counsellor of the Baha’i creed documentations and William Miller’s beliefs (The Christian researcher),
- Todd Lawson: The official member of the Baha’i organization since 1968 A.D.,
- Catherine Wessinger: The editor of the book “The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism” which has investigated Baha’ism,
- Hooper Dunbar: The member of the Universal House of Justice from 1988 A.D. to 2010 A.D.
- Carolyn Sparey Fox: The author of the book “The Half of it was never told” in proselytizing Baha’ism,
- John S. Hatcher: The author of the book “An ocean from his words: the guide for the readers of Bahaullah’s art” who has had good relationship with Hassan Mooqer Bahyuzi (the activist in BBC Radio),
- Joe De Gruy: A Baha’i and the author of the book “The symptoms of slavery after injury: The heritage of America from tolerating harm and healing up.
۲- The film has been produced investigating some million dollars by the Baha’is community produced by Edward Price and directed by Steve Sorrow Witz and Bob Herkuls during 3 years in Spain and America. Translated into several languages on the occasion of bicentenary of Bab’s birthday for advertisement, the gate was displayed in various countries in proselytizing occasions of the Baha’is. The film has just used the Baha’i proselytizers and speakers. It resembles an advertising announce not a historical and research document. There aren’t any traces of independent researchers or Muslim criticizers
۳- The film is trying to introduce Bab as a peaceful person. However; according to his remaining works such issue isn’t true because all Bab’s works are full of inciting people to war, bloodshed and calling Babis to destroy non-Babis! This issue is so bold that even the Baha’i leaders and proselytizers have also acknowledged it. According to Golpaygani the well-known proselytizer of Baha’ism who has written his materials earlier 20th century the basis of the Bayan religion is destroying all books except for Babi ones and destroying all tombs and resting places, temples and holy places of other religions, massacring all human beings and legitimating excommunication and eventually killing all the people who don’t believe in Bab’s creed and vanishing their works (Golpaygani, Kashful Qita’, p. 166). Abdul Baha, the Baha’i leader, is also declaring that it is ordered in the book Bayan (a book considered to be sent down by God and Islam to be abolished after that. (Abdul Baha, the Makatib, Vol. 2, p. 266).
۴- Without paying attention to the proselytizing motives of the Baha’ism organization in making this film, it must be declared that making this film is considered as a strategic mistake even in proselytizing strategy point of view. Because making a film about a person like Abbas Effendi could be justified with some modern slogans and up-to-fate teachings. Nevertheless, honoring the Bab with harsh and extreme teachings can’t be justified?!
۵- The movie starts from the very beginning with fake and false information. Relating the expectation of a cult from Christianity led by William Miller for the end of the world in October 22, 1844 A.D. claiming for the Babism of Ali Muhammad Shirazi against Mullah Hussein Boshrouee who was Sheikhi in Jamadi 5, 1260 A.H. (Jan. 22, 1844 A.D.) concerning this issue that Bab is Imam Mahdi (P.H.) is a baseless and ridiculous word. In this comparison, Miller’s claim for the end of the world has been manifested as the expectation of all the people of the world(!) for the emergence of the promised one; that is, Jesus Christ. Then, Bab’s claim-for calling himself as the 12th Imam of Shia who will be appeared later by writing his interpretation of the Yosof chapter –has been considered as consistent with Miller’s one concerning claiming for the end of the world and futurity!
۶- In the film, it is claimed that all Islamic religions believed that in 1260 A.H. (The year claimed for Miller for the end of the world) the promised one will be emerged, while even there isn’t any example of speech or tradition in an Islamic book that refers to this years 1260 A.H. (1844 A.D.) as the year of the emergence of the promised Mahdi (P.H.) or his 1000-year periods of Imamate, but on the contrary, there have been many narrations and traditions in narrative books and tradition communities since long time ago until now which have introduced the time-determiners of the emergence of imam Mahdi (P.H.) as liars. The rest of the film the gate’s claims has been presented in the same style.
۷- As if the author of film has been appeared in the role of a storyteller not a documentary maker. Consequently, in the scene when Bab was shot, he imagines that 750 soldiers lined up the shoot Bab and then they couldn’t hit the target and all soldiers shot the rope with which the convict was tied(!) is it needed for a person whose hands were tied up to be shot by 750 soldiers? Has a person recorded such thing in the past and present time?! Just in the book the summary of Nabil history and the Baha’i resources such claim is acceptable which is a superstitious and impossible claim; because the photos of the former barracks in Tabriz are existent and available and basically hundred people can hardly fit in that place, let alone if 750 people want to line up and shoot!!!
۸- It is claimed in the film the gate that Bab and his followers were peaceful and liberal, while according to all historical documents and evidence and Bab’s own writings and also the historical investigations done recently he was going to gain the Iranian government and eventually to create the universal Babi one. His disciples massacred the innocent people and rioted in several cities of Iran and fought against the Iranian troops and caused great damage to the country. The action which is compatible with ISIS movement today. His followers also attempted to assassinate the king.
۹- It is appropriate to quote a short article from Dr. Dennis Mc Ewen-who was a member of the British Baha’i community for about 15 years and wrote his Ph.D. thesis in the field of Babism. He has also written some books and articles concerning this issue in order for Baha’i proselytizers and film makers to be tested:
Against whom the babies fought?
Bab by no means restricted the terms Kafir and Mushrik to atheists or polytheists, but applied them to Muslims, whether Sunni or Shia who held what he regarded as heretical doctrines or, more particularly who refused to recognize him’. A few pages later (p. 108), I discuss the same question with respect to later Babi law and conclude that “Jihad”… could be waged against any group who did not believe in the Bayan; the questions of belief, Islam, faith, dissidence, and is forth no longer apply here since the entire non-Babi world is now the “realm of unbelief”, while on page 1099 I note in a particular that the Shia population of Iran was now regarded as subject to the decree of holy war’.
…In any case, the Persian Bayan constantly assumes holy war in its references to conquest, booty, the treatment of non-believers and their property, and the elimination of unbelief. If even the Baha’i leader, Abdul Baha, accepted, as we have seen, that ‘the decree of the Bayan was … the universal slaughter of all save those who believed and were faithful’. I think Afnan and Hatcher would be well to read the Bayan, not to mention their own scriptures, more carefully.
I don’t propose to look in any detail at the next section, which deals with the uprisings at Sheikh Tabarsi, Nayriz and Zanjan. It will suffice to point out that the source used by the authors are all later Baha’i ones, namely Zarandi, Shoqi Effendi and Balyazi. Merely asserting the platitutes of contemporary Baha’i doctrine is no way to proceed in a complex historical argument. If the authors wish to disprove what they call any “charges” against the Babis, will they please deal in detail with the specific instances I cite, providing, if they can, textual evidence from the same period which will prove that my interpretations (and my sources) are false? Sweeping generalizations based on late tendentious materials are no substitute for original research. That the Babis were militant, that they had political aspirations (and did not distinguish these from their religious aims any more than Muslims or modern Baha’is do), and that they believed that the Qajar state had delegitimized itself by its treatment of the Bab are all verifiable assertions based on clear textual evidence, presented in my article and elsewhere, and it would be futile to carry the discussion further until my critics prove at least willing to examine and treat seriously the material in question. What might also help would be a very large dose of empathy for the Babis themselves, whose ideals and aspirations have been lost sight of beneath a haze of modern Baha’i pious rhetoric and historical reconstruction.
Let me reply briefly to one or two points made by the authors in their notes. The Baha’i author refer to my gratuitous assertion that the future manifestation was expected ‘at a distant date”, contrary to the clear indications in the Bab’s writings that the advent of this Manifestation was imminent;. It has to be made clear that it is Babi interpretation of the Bab’s writings that makes the date of the appearance of him who God shall manifest’ ‘imminent’, and not necessarily the texts themselves. Anyone with a knowledge of late Babism knows that this has been a much debated question, carried on basically between the Baha’is on the one hand and everyone else on the other. I discuss the issue at some length in a forthcoming article entitled ‘Charismatic authority in middle Babism’. Here, the main point I wish to het across is that my statement is not ‘gratuitious’, but based on a widely –accepted reading of well- known texts mixed with a little common sense.
I feel I cannot let go unremarked the comment in note 53 to the effect that MacEoin quotes from book five, chapter five of the Bayan which states, among other things, that the kings and leaders of the earth should not wait for people to enter the Faith of the Bab spontaneously, but should actively teach the Faith to others and lead them to belief in it’. This, they say, ‘is not just a “very different” from of jihad; it is not jihad at all’, and they argue that I here betray how difficult the defence of my central thesis has become.
Unfortunately, I did not write what they seem to imply I did, namely that Babi kings were to ‘teach the Faith’ (which is, in any case, a purely Baha’i phrase). I quoted the Bayan to the effect that ‘the possessors of power [i.e. kings] must not wait for something to descend from heaven in order to bring all that are on earth into the faith of God, but it should be as all entered the faith in Islam… ‘Perhaps it would have helped had I also quoted an earlier passage from the same section of the Bayan (5:5, p. 157), which reads: ‘If, for example, at the beginning of Islam a country was conquered by force and violence, (its people) would enter Islam and attain to the fruit of faith’. In case the authors have not read it in full, the chapter from which these two quotations are taken deals with the ‘decree concerning the seizure of the property of those who do not believe in the Bayan. Should the point still be unclear, perhaps they would care to read the opening words of the next chapter of the book (5:5, p. 159): ‘If God, the Knowing, should grant the believers the favor of conquering a land which has not accepted the faith (Islam), anything (in it) which is unique shall belong to the point of the Bayan [i.e.: the Bab]’. I remain to be persuaded that any of this means the polite ‘teaching of the Faith’ suggested by Afnan and hatcher.
Finally, I must respond the Excellency Afnan and Hatcher where I am quoted as stating that the Babis showed ‘great brutality not only to the hostile soldiers but to civilians in the region as well’. The authors go on to say that ‘this undocumented and unsupported accusation by MacEoin is particularly gratuitous and unscholarly. There are in fact a number of such summary, unsupported judgments throughout the paper’. May I reply that their criticism is at this point both unfair and inaccurate. Babi brutality, particularly at Shaykh Tabarsi, is well documented , as the following selected instances taken from Babi sources will demonstrate.
The Nuqtat al-Kaf admits that when en route to Barfurush, the Babis in the company of Mullah Hussein Bushrui killed a dervish and his small child for having misdirected them. In the course of an early attack on the besieging army at Sheykh Tabarsi, a group of Babis killed 130 soldiers and villagers, destroyed the village near which the military had erected its defences, and seized two years’ worth of provisions from the inhabitants.
In a later attack on the army camp at Vaskas, two princes took refuge in an upper room, whereupon the Babi attackers set fire to the house, burning them to death, after which a group of Mazandarani Babis looted the village. On a later occasion, the Babi defenders of the fort were instructed by Barfurushi to sever the heads of their enemies from their bodies and to erect the grisly relics on poles around the walks. Describing one of the Babi attacks on the village of Vaskas, Lutf Ali Mirza Shirazi (himself one of the defenders of the fort), speaks of the extreme hard-heartedness of his co-religionists, who killed anyone they came across, including a man and a woman in a village before Vaskas, by mistake. (Lutf Ali Khan Shirazi, nameless and titleless history, document F-28 Ms, part 3 and Eduward Browne’s documents, Cambridge university library, p. 92). Zarandi speaks of a similar mistake, too. (Nabil Zarandi, Dawn Breakers, pp. 346-347).
- During the Zanjan upheaval, a Babi renegade named Farrukh Khan was killed (along with 22 other prisoners) by being skinned alive and then roasted.
More than once in the past century, scholars have had occasion to speak of the intellectual dishonesty of the Babis in dealing with matters of historical fact. Unhappily, it has been fallen to my lot to reiterate the sentiments of my predecessors and to deplore, as they deplored, the high-handed and tendentious matter in which texts are manipulated, facts swept aside or transformed, and common sense outraged by the exponents of a religion that prides itself –justly in many other respects- on its respect for human reason and its freedom from prejudice. May I, therefore, plead that this present clash of opinions, acrimonious as it has by its nature been, may at least serve to alert those among the Baha’i community who have the sense and the intelligence to recognize the problems generated by the hitherto dominant fundamentalist element in their ranks to the dangers of leaving such debates in their hands. I would ask such individuals, whether or not they be academics themselves, to encourage future Baha’i scholars to treat seriously and with due respect for academic standards any further work carried out on aspects of their history by myself or others. The alternative will be to dissuade anyone with sense from engaging in Babi or Baha’i studies, to the permanent detriment of a rich and important field of religious and historical research.
Most of all, perhaps, those of a fundamental persuasion among the Baha’i ranks, would be well to ask themselves whether they are not unwittingly doing more harm than good to the cause they seek to represent. There are in existence, in Britain and the United States, a number of Baha’i scholars, sociologists, and historians among them, whose work is of a very high standard and on whose efforts any possibility of a meaningful dialog with non-Baha’i academics will largely rest. It cannot be anything but an embarrassment for such individuals to have their less qualified co-religionists complicating an already difficult area of study by seeking to keep arguments at an apologetic level. Baha’i scholars have proble4ms not the least of which is the onerous obligation to submit their work for review, but they are making sincere and often very successful attempts to transform the image of Baha’i scholarship to one consonant with rigorous standards and academically tested methodology. I hope that those who are not prepared to follow them in adopting such a course will at least have the grace to recognize that the introduction of apologetics into scholarly debate is at best a distraction and at worst a means of wrecking the foundations on which future studies involving both Baha’is and non-Baha’is may be based.
۱۰- The film is called “the gate” in which Bab has been introduced as the gate for the Baha’i creed. Although this introduction has been repeated over and over by the Baha’i proselytizers and they have introduced Seyyed Bab as the forerunner of Bahaullah, but if we search the reason of the introduction of Ali Muhammad Shirazi as the gate, we will encounter a very different issue explained by Abdul Baha: “He meant by using the word the gate to show he has been the intermediator of a great person who is hidden in glory possessing unlimited accomplishments. I am active due to his will and resort to his guardianship. In his first book in interpreting the Yosof chapter, he has addressed that absent person out of whom he been blessed and helped, such as:
“يا بقيّة اللّه قد فديت بکلّی لک و رضيت السّبّ فی سبيلک و ماتمنّيت الّا القتل فی محبّتک و کفی باللّه العليّ معتصماً قديماً.” (مقاله شخصی سیاح ص۲).
It must be mentioned that “بقیه الله” is the special title for the Excellency Mahdi (May God hasten his reappearance) and Seyyed Bab has repeatedly mentioned it in that book. According to Seyyed Bab’s speech, people and those who had relationships with him thought the excellency Ali Muhammad is the gate for Imam of the time and intermediator between the rest of people and him. As Abdul Baha has written clearly that Bab has addressed Imam Mahdi (P.H.) and said he is satisfied to be cursed in his path and to be killed in his path is his mere wish. When the people of the time who believed in Imam of the time (P.H.) became aware of Bab’s speech thought in fact that he is the intermediator between people and Imam of the time (P.H.). For this reason, they resisted in his path. Consequently, it can’t be accepted that in the book Qayyumul Asma’ Bab meant the good news to Bahaullah by the word the gate. The book Qayyumul Asma’ is apparently his first book which has been written for Mullah Hussein Boshroyee to interpret the chapter Yosof to prove his position. In this book he has explicitly declared that
“اَللهُ قَد قَدَّرَ أن يَخرُجَ ذلِک الکتاب في تَفسيرِ أحسَن القِصَص مِن عِندِ مُحَمَّدِبنِالحَسَن بنعَليبنمُحَمَّدِ بنِعَليِّ بنِموسي بنِجَعفَر بنِمُحَمَّدِ بنِعَليِّ بنِالحُسينِ بنِعَليِّ بنِأبيطالب عَلي عَبدِهِ لِيَکونَ حُجَّة اللهِ مِن عِندِ الذِّکر عَلَي العالَمينَ بَليغاً”
۱۱) It seems even a film regulates principles to proselytize for a good. It isn’t regulated in this film. All actors and actresses have been introducted by titles, but there creeds as Baha’is haven’t been mentioned. Undoubtedly, the producers of the film were going to indicate that a group of educated impartial people have said it! The unreal claims about Zarrin Taj for unveiling and … aren’t compatible with the historical documentations because she didn’t unveil when she was to be executed accused by killing her paternal uncle and assassinating the king. Bab and Babis’ violence have been censored and this movement has been falsely displayed which isn’t confirmed by the open-minded Baha’is. In fact, Bab and the Bab’is activities were mixed with violence and all Bab’s books are full of intriguing and preaching violence against Muslims. The name of the film is also incorrect cos Bab never gave good news to Bahaullah and didn’t consider himself as the gate for him. However, he mentioned a person called the one who God will manifest who would be to be emerged nearly two thousand years later! Having numerous clear errors, this film must be called the gate of lies!
Notes and references
The materials narrated by Denis Mac Eion are adopted by the article: “Baha’i Fundamentalism and the Academic Study of the Babi Movement” (۱۹۸۶) pp. 57-84.
