PREFACE

One approaches the vast subject of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s eight-month sojourn in North America, even after a century of hindsight, with trepidation. This was not the visit of a sixty-seven-year-old foreign tourist bent on seeing new places or a religious teacher hoping to cement his fortune and reputation; rather, it was the effort of an almost indescribable man, whose impact on people was superhuman, and who used his newfound freedom from forty years of imprisonment and privation to share his Father’s message of the oneness of humanity and the principles of universal peace with as many North Americans as possible. His exhausting yet exhilarating 239-day trek from coast to coast took him to fifty cities and towns, where he delivered up to four talks a day—about four hundred total—to approximately ninety-three thousand people.ⁱ

On some days, one hundred fifty persons sought private meetings with him. Their accounts are full of tears of joy, intimate conversation—sometimes with a minimum of words spoken—prophetic utterances, and even epiphanies and apparent miracles, such as release from grief and healing from physical illness. Prominent men and women flocked to hear him, invited him into their homes, and asked him to speak at some of their most prestigious venues. His commitment to racial and ethnic equality during an era of legal discrimination and widespread prejudice was demonstrated in talks at an African American church, university, and conference; a Japanese-American church; and a Syrian relief society; and by his encouragement of the first interracial (Black/White) marriage in the American Bahá’í community. His championing of the full equality of women and the inevitability of their acquiring the right to vote was controversial and was often featured in headlines about him. His devotion to the poor brought him to visit four hundred homeless men at the Bowery Mission in New York City and speak at six other settlement houses. His desire to give solace to the sick prompted him to travel for hours to visit ill persons far from the crowd of admirers demanding his attention. Jaundiced newspapermen withheld their cynical barbs and praised his wisdom, genuineness, sincerity, and love. Clergymen turned their pulpits over to him after introducing him to their flocks with great warmth and high praise.

Because of the continued expansion of the Bahá’í Faith, a thorough study of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s journey becomes important for those wishing to know more about this new religion. The Founder of the Faith, Bahá’u’lláh (1817–92), was born in Iran and spent most of His life in exile in the Ottoman Empire. He passed away outside the small city of Acre, in what is today Israel. His claim to be a Messenger of God was expressed in the form of a vast array of books, prayers, and letters—some eighteen thousand works—that described the nature of God and revelation, depicted the spiritual nature of human beings and the need for their continual spiritual and ethical refinement, proclaimed the oneness of humanity and its implications for racial and sexual equality, and outlined principles for the construction of a world civilization. Before His passing, He appointed His eldest son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844–1921) as His successor, gave ‘Abdu’l-Bahá the authority to interpret His texts, and made him Head of the Faith. He established a Covenant with His followers that stated that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was a divinely guided figure and that the Bahá’ís should obey him.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá took up the reins of leadership immediately and was soon coordinating efforts to take the Bahá’í Faith to the United States and Europe. Americans had first heard about Bahá’u’lláh at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, but when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá arrived nineteen years later, knowledge about him was limited, and American Bahá’ís numbered only a thousand or two. Since then, the Bahá’í Faith has sunk its roots deep into American culture, has well over a hundred fifty thousand adherents, and is emerging from obscurity. Academic study of its development is becoming more widespread, and public interest is growing—hence the need for a book such as this one.

After a century of researching ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’ís have not found all the literary sources relating to his trip, though the expanding resources of the World Wide Web present new opportunities for finding rare articles in rural newspapers and references in personal papers. The information already available is staggering: The Promulgation of Universal Peace, a collection of his discourses, has 140 talks; the diary of his companion, Mahmúd-i-Zarqání, describes almost every major event—though sometimes he’s off by a day or even two—and many private scenes and frank comments by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; Juliet Thompson’s diary intimately records his visit to New York and Washington; Agnes Parsons’s diary covers Washington and Dublin, New Hampshire; Howard Colby Ives offers a hundred perceptive pages scattered throughout his memoir; Allen Ward’s 239 Days provides a day-to-day summary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s trip; the Bahá’í periodical Star of the West has contemporary news and lightly edited transcriptions of his talks; over 350 newspaper and magazine articles are available; a score of books have chapters or sections about his visit, including Hasan Balyuzi’s important biography, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: The Centre of the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh; the Ella Cooper Papers in the National Bahá’í Archives in Wilmette, Illinois, have hundreds of pages of unpublished talks by and conversations with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; and hundreds of pages of other unpublished telegrams, letters, diaries, and memoirs reside in the National Bahá’í Archives. The total number of works published about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit may exceed three thousand pages. The crucial source that remains untapped is the archive of the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel, where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s own correspondence is located but is not yet available to researchers. At some point, once this information becomes available, it may force many revisions of our understanding of his North American sojourn.

Equally important to the problem of sources is the interpretation one brings to them. In his epochal history, God Passes By, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani (head of the Bahá’í Faith from 1921 to 1957, its authorized interpreter, and grandson of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá) provides several short passages with incisive judgments about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s purpose, key efforts, and effectiveness. The Bahá’í World Center has offered additional overview in its insightful review of the twentieth century, Century of Light. But individual Bahá’ís have rarely ventured to analyze ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s journey.

When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s feet touched these shores, he had already composed a Will and Testament that outlined how the Bahá’í community would be organized after his death, but little has been written concerning how his plan for the organization of the Faith may have shaped what he did and said in 1912. His other fundamental contribution to the Faith’s future was a series of fourteen letters to the North American believers called Tablets of the Divine Plan, penned in 1916 and 1917. They summoned the American Bahá’ís to take the Bahá’í message to every part of their country and to the entire planet, providing both specific countries, territories, and cities where it had to be established and practical advice about how to disseminate it. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1912 journey constituted preparation for the monumental assignments in Tablets of the Divine Plan, preparation that one can see stretching back nearly a decade further, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá directed the first American Bahá’ís to undertake teaching trips within the United States and internationally.

In addition to these concerns of the internal consolidation and development of the Bahá’í community, no matter how important they may be, there are other questions to consider, such as the impact ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had on American culture and values, his influence on African Americans and women, and his insights about the issues of race, gender, and world peace. A full exploration of those matters must await the painstaking study of the historical context; this work can only offer preliminary observations.

There is also the matter of how Americans became attracted to non-Christian religions and how the growth of the American Bahá’í community relates to the growth of Hindu and Buddhist convert communities, which were founded by visiting Asian religious teachers. Most Americans initially saw little difference between the Asian religious teachers and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; they were unaware of the Bahá’í understanding of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s station, and at first had no experience of his personality or teachings. Their expectations of him were shaped by their earlier experiences. Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, a Hindu religious leader, preceded him by almost thirty years; Swami Vivekananda, Anagarika Dharmapala, and Soyen Shaku (Hindu, Theravada Buddhist, and Zen Buddhist respectively) by almost twenty; Inayat Khan (who introduced Sufism to America), by a year and a half. A comparison of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s travels with their tours of North America highlights many similarities and differences, some of which were caused by the changing times and others by their differing personalities, goals, and resources. One notable conclusion is that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was far more successful at attracting to his religion European Americans (not to mention African Americans, who were significantly attracted to the Bahá’í Faith but were not addressed by the others). ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s success was fostered by twenty years of correspondence with American Bahá’ís and was no doubt assisted by the more open attitudes toward non-Christian religions that the earlier Asian religious visitors helped to create.

In order to explore ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit from all these various angles, the book must serve a diversity of readers. The Bahá’ís constitute the bulk of the book market and naturally are the group most interested in a study of this sort, but my colleagues in the field of religious studies need a good survey and analysis of what is an important and neglected event in American religious history, and there are many members of the public who will want to know about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s character and the way he taught the Bahá’í Faith to others. To satisfy all these audiences is a challenge of high order; to please them may be impossible; but to ignore one in favor of the others would weaken the entire work, for the priorities and needs of all three ultimately are complementary.

One major issue I have wrestled with repeatedly is how to treat the talks of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. While ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s writings are regarded as divine in origin and authoritative in nature, any utterances of his are not so viewed, unless ‘Abdu’l-Bahá reviewed the transcript of the talk for accuracy and approved it. Very few of the talks used in this book fall in that category; they are unauthenticated and therefore less reliable renderings of his words. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke in Persian and was simultaneously interpreted in English. In many cases, a Persian-language secretary took notes or wrote down as best he could the spoken Persian text. Since no formal shorthand existed for the Persian language, it is not known how well the Persian texts were recorded, especially if ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke about biblical terms and persons with which the transcriber may not have been familiar (and therefore would record more slowly). Some of the Persian texts were then revised by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in written form for publication.

In many cases, the English translations were also recorded, sometimes by professional stenographers using shorthand, sometimes in note form. When the English transcriptions don’t agree with the Persian, we don’t know whether the English texts include commentary added by the English-language interpreter, whether the Persian texts are missing something ‘Abdu’l-Bahá really said, or whether ‘Abdu’l-Bahá chose to excise something from the Persian transcripts when they were being prepared for publication. The English transcriptions also went through multiple revisions; the original handwritten notes (which are no longer extant, as far as I know) were typed up, many were edited for publication in Star of the West, and then in many cases Howard MacNutt took the Star of the West pages, hand-edited them (some of these still exist in the archives), had the result typeset, and published them in two volumes, titled The Promulgation of Universal Peace, in 1922. A few other talks that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá regarded as particularly important were revised for English-language publication within weeks of their delivery by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s English-language secretaries, in consultation with him. The second edition of Promulgation, published in 1982, includes at least one new translation of a talk from the Persian-published version. Eleven Persian texts of his talks have also been published in authorized English translations in Mahmúd’s Diary.

Considerable work is necessary to locate the various drafts of the texts and translations and compare them before we have a comprehensive and complete picture of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s spoken message to the West. Because of my limited Persian, the book rarely uses the Persian sources. When researching, discussing, and quoting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talks, I have used authorized English translations from the Persian when they are available. If they are not available, I have used the oldest English translations I could find, usually found in Star of the West magazine or the Ella Cooper Papers. They have a spontaneous, colloquial, and occasionally frank feel to them. Their accuracy and authenticity cannot be checked, but they often contain Persian turns of phrase that are unidiomatic in English, which indicate that they are a fairly reliable record of the interpreter’s rendering of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s words. Unfortunately, they can also be unclear. The translations in The Promulgation of Universal Peace have been my last resort; they are clearer and in elegant, formal language, but often Howard MacNutt has inferred meaning that might not have been intended.ⁱⁱ

As for spelling, the word Bahá’í (including the accents) was standardized among Bahá’ís by Shoghi Effendi in 1923, but before that date, it appeared in a variety of forms (Behai, Bahai, Bahaism, Bahaist), and after that date, numerous spellings have persisted in the academic community based sometimes on technical transliteration systems and other times on archaic spellings that the authors adopted for obscure reasons. This book will preserve the original spellings in documents, when quoting them, and in names (such as Bahai Temple Unity). It will use anglicizations of Middle Eastern names if they were adopted by the individuals under discussion. Otherwise, this work will follow the standard Bahá’í transliteration system, simply because it has by far the most momentum and, because of the World Wide Web, its use is spreading.

A word must also be offered about the term American. In 1912 the Canadian Bahá’í community numbered in the dozens and was in close connection with the thousands of Bahá’ís south of the border. The Canadians participated in the election of the Bahai Temple Unity Executive Board in 1909, the Bahá’í coordinating body for North America, and remained a part of the “national” organization of the Bahá’í Faith in North America until 1948. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá treated Canada as part of the greater North American Bahá’í community, and the word American was often used to include them.

This volume can hope to provide only preliminary observations based on the third of the addresses of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá available in English. Time will bring about many revisions, clarifications, and nuances about the content and meaning of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talks. The footnotes provide all the information that was available to me regarding variant texts, so that readers can make their own study of the talks and future researchers will have a foundation for the next stage of research.

ⁱ “Table of Talks Given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in North America,” author’s personal papers. The table was assembled by combing various sources. Whenever possible, available attendance information was recorded; in other cases it was estimated.

ⁱⁱ When Howard MacNutt produced the first edition of Promulgation of Universal Peace in the years 1919–22, in most cases he started with a copy of Star of the West magazine, pulling apart the various pages and editing on them or rewriting them by hand. His editing for smoothness and clarity often introduced interpretations of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s meaning. He kept the Star of the West’s order even when it was not chronological; for example, the three talks ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gave on April 30 (published in Star of the West, vol. 3, no. 4) start with his evening address to the Bahai Temple Unity convention, which was the last of the three chronologically.