Let’s name and shame those who foster hate through disinformation under the name of scholarship. Start a section of this site for scholarly hate-speech, with one page for each allegation: one for “agents of Israel” one for “founded by Russia” “founded by the English” “allow incest” “insult Islam” and so on. Then users can contribute examples via the ‘comments’ section for that page. If the contribution is substantiated, and the work is one posing as scholarship, then that author’s name can be entered on that blog page (so that other users know what instances have already been found) and also in the central roll of dishonour, under the heading “No True Scholar.”

For example, I contribute the following:

“Firaydun Adamiyyat, in a biography on Nasser-al-Din Shah’s first Prime Minster Amir Kabir, stated that Mulla Husayn, the Báb’s first disciple, was really a British agent that was recruited by Arthur Conolly, a British intelligence officer, explorer and writer. Adamiyyat states that the evidence of such an accusation appears in Conolly’s book “Journey to the North of India Overland from England through Russia, Persia, and Affghaunistaun,” but no mention of Mulla Husayn or the Báb appears in the book. In later editions of Adamiyyat’s biography on Amir Kabir, the fabrication has been removed.”

That’s based on a wikipedia article which gives sources, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_involvement_with_other_powers

The source is:
Momen, Moojan (2004), “Conspiracies and Forgeries: the attack upon the Baha’i community in Iran”, Persian Heritage 9 (35): pp. 27-29.

Momen could for example be asked to provide a scan of the page where Adamiyyat makes this claim, or other users could obtain the book and scan it. When the evidence is there in a form that every reader can verify for him/herself, the author should be given a chance not just to change the text, but to go on record saying that the initial statement was a falsehood and was no true scholarship.

Naturally one cannot name and shame the anonymous authors of the Dolgorukov Memoirs, but it could include the newspapers which publish anonymous or pseudonymous slanders: these are “no true journalists.”

Rwanda has shown us the possible impact of an organised campaign of hate speech through media: the challenge is to mount an equally effective response. It takes little energy to make up a lie, and a great deal to demonstrate clearly that someone is lying. It can be done collaboratively, by incorporating input from users

~~ Sen McGlinn

ترجمة الرسالة بالعربى
إن رفضتم دينى أرفضوه فهذا من حقكم

ولكن لا تشوهوه اتركوه كما جاء

وإن لم تصدقوه لا تضيفوا عليه كلمات تغير من ملامحه

ليظهر كإنسان مشوه ينفر منه البشر

الدين البهائى لم يحلل زواج المحارم

وانتم تدعون هذا ، من اين جئتم بهذا الإدعاء ؟

نحن نقول بهاء الله رسول لا نقول إله كيف نحن مشركين بالله؟

من أين جئتم بهذا الإدعاء

نحن نقول أن محمد خاتم الانبياء

ولكن نقول ان هناك رسل وستبقى كل ألف عام تنزل عليهم رسالة من الله

والله خير الشاهدين

لنا صلاتنا…. نعم

وصومنا …. نعم

مختلفة عنكم …. نعم

ولكن

هل صلاة وصيام اليهود والمسيحيين والمسلمين واحدة؟ أليس بها إختلاف؟

لدينا قبلتنا …. نعم

ولكن

هل قبلة الاديان واحدة ؟

تقولوا دين …. تقولوا فكر

نحن لم نفرضه عليكم ونحترم رأيكم وحريتكم

ولكن

نرفض ما تزيدوا على ديننا وتحرفوه

أصبحنا بين الناس زُناه نحلل الحرام

كفرة لا نعرف الله

وهذا بفضل ما تدعونه علينا

أيها العلماء

لا ترموا الناس بالباطل

فإن كنتم لا تريدوه أتركوه بلا زيادة أو نقصان وفى الاخرة يفضل بيننا الله عز وجل

لا تحرفوه لا تضيفون عليه ، لا تدعون أشياء لم يأتى بها

قال نبى الاسلام محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم من غشنا ليس منا

وانا معكم ولكن بأدله من التوراة والانجيل والقرأن

بأن تحريف الكلام حق وأن الله أعطاكم هذا الحق

رسالة من بهائية

The Baha’i religion had it’s birth in Islam and Iran and as a religion with Shia roots it never has gotten far from them. It is highly theocratic, paternal, and is a top down hierarchcy. It has little no external interest in other cultures or religions.

What you say is interesting jack. Perhaps you have the Bahai Faith confused with some other religious group?

1: theocracy: It would be difficult to find a religious community with stronger anti-theocratic principles than the Bahai Faith. Mangol Bayat said that Baha’u'llah “embraced what no Muslim sect, no Muslim school of thought ever succeeded in or dared to try: the doctrinal acceptance of the de facto secularization of politics which had occurred in the Muslim world centuries earlier.” ( Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1982), page 130). Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahai Faith and the authorised interpreter of its teachings writes that the Baha’i's must never “allow the machinery of their administration to supersede the government of their respective countries.” Baha’u'llah writes “The one true God… hath ever regarded, and will continue to regard, the hearts of men as His own, His exclusive possession. All else, whether pertaining to land or sea, whether riches or glory, He hath bequeathed unto the Kings and rulers of the earth ….The instruments which are essential to the immediate protection, the security and assurance of the human race have been entrusted to the hands, and lie in the grasp, of the governors of human society. This is the wish of God and His decree …” (The Lawh-i Ashraf, in Gleanings, CII, 206). He cites and endorses the principle of “render unto Caesar” (in his Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, pages 89-92 and 137). His son Abdu’l-Baha wrote a short book advocating the separation of church and state (Sermon on the art of Governance / Resaleh-ye siyasiyyeh). There’s more citations and analysis on this in my article in the Journal of Church and State, which is online at
http://bahai-library.org/articles/theology.state.html

2) Paternal: no idea what you mean here. The Bahai community is run by elected councils called Spiritual Assemblies. People are expected to investigate truth for themselves, and ‘fight their own spiritual battles,’ without the help of clergy. So neither paternity nor paternalism play a role.

3) Hierarchy: yes, there is a hierarchy – that is inevitable because there are local communities and local issues, national communities and national issues, and issues that affect Bahais all over the world. Hierarchy is not a dirty word, it is part of the structure of life. Methodists and Quakers and Anglicans have a hierarchy too, so does the Olympic movement and FIFA. Nothing global can be organised without a hierarchy.

>Naturally one cannot name and shame the anonymous authors of the Dolgorukov Memoirs,

Actually there will be an article coming out that does just that!

Jack,

The Baha’i religion is an *independent* religion which happens to have emerged from an offshoot of Shi’i Islam. The discontinuities between the two far outnumber the continuities which are mainly at the level of thought or theology and course also include the spiritual teachings of love, justice, truthfulness, compassion, etc. found at the core of all faith traditions.

Dear Jack,

“The Baha’i religion … is highly theocratic, paternal, and is a top down hierarchcy.”

Yes the Universal House of Justice is considered to be divinely guided, and free from error specifically when legislating. Is that what you want to say? Or that there is a hierarchy in elected institutions from the international to the local level that baha’is are supposed to take very seriously as an article of faith? Both are correct. Or do you want to imply something else?

It has little no external interest in other cultures or religions.”

I guess with ‘it’ you mean individual baha’is that you have encountered? I cannot argue with that. I do recognize what you say, but on the whole my experience is very different.

>Momen could for example be asked to provide a scan of the page where Adamiyyat makes this claim, or other users could obtain the book and scan it.

Sen, that would indeed be an appreciated course of action on Momen’s behalf, but I believe the problem with doing so lies in the fact that a specific page was never specified in Conolly’s book by anti-Baha’i polemics. To my knowledge, Adamiyyat never went beyond referencing Conolly’s work *as a whole* for his claims, never indicating any particular page(s). What leads me to believe this is that, later on in Momen’s paper regarding conspiracy theories and the Faith, he does note that at least one polemic has also made an assertion linking us to Freemasonry, and he references a specific number of pages (which consistently also lack evidence) to substantiate his statements. I interpret the fact that Momen gets specific with one claim and not the other to mean that the lack of clarity and exactness is indeed a sign of poor scholarship on the part of Adamiyyat and other polemics.

I most certainly don’t mean to sound critical and I apologize if I did anywhere in the above paragraph; I just wanted to clear up that discrepancy.

there’s a section on Adamiyyat’s invention in a new publication,

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback_book/debunking_the_myths/6430166

There’s a Pdf version which is cheap. I flicked through it last night and it appears to be a good summary of the myths and why they are nonsense, largely drawing on work available elsewhere, but now drawn together, put in parallel-column tables, etc which makes it more useful.

Thanks very much for that good piece of text.

What’s surprising is this was ordered by several brothers.

As soon as I initially left a comment I clicked the �Notify me whenever new comments are added� checkbox and currently each time a remark is added I get 4 email messages with the exact same comment.

Cool post ! Thank you for, posting on my blog page man. I’ll message you soon. I didn’t realise that!

Im getting a teeny problem. I cant get my reader to pick-up your rss feed, Im using yahoo reader by the way.