A Bahá’í footnote to Gaurav’s seminal “saffron and crescent“
Gaurav’s post on the asymmetry of Hindu and Islamic worldviews deserves a response from the third corner of the room. We are not Hindu and we are not Muslim, though our community emerged from inside the Islamicate and is now demographically clustered in the Indic world. The Bahá’í position on the questions Gaurav raises is not a centrist mush. It is a specific civilisational stance, and it begins with a woman taking off her veil.
We were in Revere earlier this evening, the working-class strip north of Boston that the city has quietly handed over to its Spanish-speaking and Muslim arrivals. The playground was alive. Salvadoran grandmothers, Moroccan mothers, a small republic of children negotiating the slide. What struck us was how many of the pubescent girls already wore the hijab. Not the older women alone, not adults making a choice. Eleven year olds. Twelve year olds.
For most secular observers this registers as a costume detail. For us it lands harder. The hijab is the one piece of Islamic practice against which our faith was built.
In June 1848, in a hamlet called Badasht in northern Iran, eighty one Bábís met to settle a question that had been splitting them for months. Was the Báb a reformer working within Islam, or had he opened a new dispensation that broke the Sharia outright? Quddús held the conservative line. Táhirih did not. She walked into the assembly without her veil. Men fainted. One slashed his own throat in shock and fled the camp wounded. The break with Islam was not announced in a treatise. It was announced on a woman’s face.
A word on who she was, since the present discussion at Brown Pundits has spent its energy arguing about Hazrat Ayesha’s age. Táhirih was an adult. She was a mujtahida in her own right, a poet in Persian and Arabic, trained in the Shaykhí school at Karbala, a peer of the male clerics she debated. Her teacher Siyyid Kázim Rashtí had called her Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, the solace of the eyes, for her scholarship. Bahá’u’lláh gave her the second name at Badasht itself: Táhirih, the Pure One. Four years later the Qajar state strangled her with her own scarf and threw her body down a well. She is reported to have said, before they killed her, that they could kill her as soon as they liked but they could not stop the emancipation of women.
This is why the hijab carries a charge for us that other modest dress does not. We feel nothing in particular when we see a Marwari matron draw her ghoonghat over her face, or a Carmelite in habit, or a married Orthodox Jewish woman with a brunette wig in North London. Modesty as such does not offend us. What the hijab carries, and what those other garments do not, is the specific civilisational opponent against whom our faith defined itself. Táhirih’s gesture was not a vote against cloth. It was a vote against an entire jurisprudential order, the same order in which Kabir, on this very thread, defends chādor aur chārdīwārī as Pakistani cultural patrimony.
We grant that many Muslim women wear the hijab as piety, dignity, identity continuity, or anti-consumer modesty, and we do not contest those readings. Our quarrel is not with the women who choose it. Our query is with the jurisprudential frame that did not historically treat it as a choice. We read Táhirih and we read Kabir and we conclude, without animus, that we are no longer of the same civilisation.
Persianate Pork
The other markers function the same way. We eat pork. Not because pork is nutritious, but because the Qur’anic prohibition is the cleanest possible signal that we are no longer inside the Sharia. We accept progressive revelation. Prophet Muhammad may be the seal of the Prophets but he is not the final one. He is one Manifestation in a sequence that did not close in 632 and will not close with Bahá’u’lláh either. Pork and progressive revelation are real boundaries. The hijab is the founding one, because it was the first to be crossed, and crossed by a woman.
Reverence for Dharma
On the idol question; we find idol worship beautiful. We find the Satanic Verses not so satanic. Al-Lát, al-‘Uzzá and Manát were honoured at Mecca before they were not, and the brief Qur’anic episode in which they were honoured again has always interested us. We read that episode as the road not taken, a moment when the feminine could have been retained. We do not claim Islam should have kept the daughters. We claim that we, looking back, would have. Our sympathy with the Hindu pantheon is not a polite gesture across the table. It is structural.
Allama Iqbal
Allama Iqbal felt this pull, more than his admirers in Lahore tend to admit. In the Javid Nama, his Persian celestial poem of 1932, he places Qurratu’l-‘Ayn in the sphere of Jupiter alongside Hallaj and Ghalib, the noble heretics whose fire he could not look away from. Iqbal flirted with Bábism the way he flirted with Ahmadism, drawn first and then drawing back, because both movements offered a Muslim modernity with prophecy still flowing, and neither could finally be reconciled with the Khatamiyyat he ended up defending. He became, in the 1930s, an architect of the argument later used to expel the Ahmadis from Islam. The poem remained. The verses on Táhirih are among the most generous lines ever written about her by a man outside our faith.
The Ahmadis
The Ahmadi case is worth a paragraph because it is the inverse of ours. Ahmadis are persecuted in Pakistan because they insist they are Muslim. The Shahada itself contains no finality clause. Khatamiyyat is doctrine built around Qur’an 33:40, not the creed proper. Ahmadis recite the Shahada, accept Muhammad as messenger, and are nonetheless legislated out of Islam by the state. Bahá’ís in Iran are persecuted for the opposite reason. The Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2006, on the ID card question, that we are not Muslim. We had asked for that ruling and wholeheartedly agree. That is the point. The Ahmadi tragedy is to be exiled from a house they refuse to leave. The Bahá’í position is to be punished for the house we built next door.
A last thought, because the women’s question and the civilisational question turn out to be the same question. We walk in and out of the Islamicate at our choosing. We are now, demographically and aesthetically, a faith with a Persian spine living in Dharmic civilisational proximity. Theologically we remain Abrahamic monotheists. The proximity is civilisational, not metaphysical.
In abandoning Urdu we returned to Persian, the language in which Táhirih wrote her ghazals and Bahá’u’lláh wrote the Kitáb-i-Íqán. Urdu speakers like to claim their tongue is something apart from the Hindi-Hindu world around it. No Iranian or Levantine reading Mir or Ghalib mistakes the underlying tongue for theirs. Half the week is named for Hindu planets. The grammar is Khari Boli. The Persian and Arabic layer is real and architectural, but it is a layer, not the foundation. Urdu is an Indic language wearing Persian dress.
What we represent, having shed the hybrid, is the older and more autonomous branch of Indo-Islamic civilisation, the one that did not need to pretend it was not Indian in order to feel Persian. Táhirih dropping her veil at Badasht, and a Bahá’í family, of distant Shi’ite Sayyid origins (the Báb himself was a Sayyid and wore the black turban of descent from the Holy Imáms), eating ham at a wedding today, are the same act, a century and a hemisphere apart.
The veil was never only a veil.
The Companion Piece: The Devil Wears Chanel
Well written. I didn’t know these aspects of Bahai faith.
XTM as usual white washing the Bahai
The Bahai are a Shia break away sect whose God is Allah. Their self proclaimed prophet Babs was executed in 1850 by the original Shah’s of the Qajar Dynasty.
The body of Babs was take taken to Haifa, Israel. They have a huge Universal House of Justice, governing body of the Baháʼís, in Haifa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_Faith
It’s really in bad taste to tell someone about their own religion.
XTM is entitled to define his faith the way he wishes.
it is also slanderous tbf
it is also slanderous tbf
Facts are not slanderous
XTM is entitled to define his faith the way he wishes
I am not defining the way XTM wants it.
I am giving the a more complete view
we refer to your completely unfounded and slanderous allegation about the current state of Bahá’í community in Iran and as to their conduct.
That was unacceptable and dangerous use of language for a community that was at risk of genocide in the early ‘80’s and is still under severe persecution through to today.
at risk of genocide in the early ‘80’s and is still under severe persecution through to today.
Not since the 80’s. Since the 1850’s by Shah of the Qajar Dynasty. Babs was executed in 1850
XTM
Why would I want to write falsehoods of Bahais.
You have all the reasons to cover up the association of Bahai with Zionist Israel.eg The huge Universal House of Justice, governing body of the Baháʼís, in Haifa, Israel
Those are available on the internet; the Community was there from the 1860’s.
for a community that was at risk of genocide in the early ‘80’s and is still under severe persecution through to today.
for a community that was at risk of genocide in the early ‘80’s and is still under severe persecution through to today.
for a community that was at risk of genocide in the early ‘80’s and is still under severe persecution through to today.
Persecution does not happen in isolation, there is always a reason
I guess Xi’s actions in Xinjiang are also explainable.
Admin Note: Sbarr this is crossing the line.
you are just asking to be chucked out aren’t you
OK. The threat to dox someone is really going too far. Also, there was no need to bring his spouse into it.
thank you
Might get back to the rest of your post latter on but this part kind of stood out to me. Does the sight of little Sikh boys wearing turbans evoke the same sentiment of concern? What about orthodox Jewish kids in Brooklyn wearing kippah’s, shtriemel and other clothing worn by haredis? Many are even younger than the 11-12 year old Muslim girls you saw wearing hijab.
I don’t know if its fair to conclude that those girls didn’t wear it out of choice, yes they may have been raised to think of highly of it and eventually adopted it out of piety and devotion to the faith but a lot of the Muslim women I speak to in their 20s say they started wearing hijab when they were in middle school out of choice and weren’t pressured by their parents. This also typically the age in America when a lot of Christians get confirmed at church and the age when a lot of Jewish kids have their bar/bat mitzvah’s. Of course one could argue that children are conditioned by their families/communities/cultures/upbringing into what religion they grow up to be and what they think is the right thing to do but then again that applies to literally everything in life from the sports you end up playing because it’s what your dad liked watching or playing himself or the foods you eat or music you listen to or even your political leanings or even they career you end up pursuing, parents have a huge impact on the upbringing of their children so I don’t see why the religious aspect should be singled out. The scrutiny that little Muslim girls and their families get for them wearing hijab seems unfair and other communities are never judged by the same barometer. If anything, proportionally there are far more Sikh boys wearing turbans than Muslim girls wearing hijab.
yes that’s why we examine our own jolt when confronted with the hijab as compared to any other religious attire
In Pakistan, there are quite a few young girls wearing hijab. Some of them are so young it’s hard to argue that they proactively chose it. It was clearly a parental decision. Which in many ways is fine. Parents choose a lot of things for their children.
I do agree with you that the scrutiny that the hijab gets in Western society is in many ways Islamophobic.
To put my own cards on the table: I’m not really a fan of the hijab. As I noted above, my mother has never covered her head. But I don’t feel I have the right to tell others how they should practice Islam.
the hijab is polarising
I think non-Muslims really need to get over the hijab.
You yourself have explained that you don’t feel the same when you see a nun in her habit. And of course you have good reasons for that.
But–in general– a Muslim woman choosing to cover her head because she believes Allah requires her to doesn’t negatively impact any non-Muslim. The hijab is not the burqa.
Women should be free to cover their heads or not.
I just want to clarify my point on chador aur chardiwari.
I don’t personally believe in this. My mother has never covered her head. Neither have my father’s sisters. My mother and my phuppos are all medical doctors. They are emancipated women.
My paternal grandmother didn’t cover her head either. In fact, she wore saris all her life since she was from Agra.
However, I don’t believe that I have the right to impose my personal values on anyone else. It is a fact that most Pakistanis believe that a woman’s place is in the home and it is a man’s duty to provide for his wife and children. I don’t have to agree with this while respecting people’s right to practice Islam as they see fit.
Most Pakistani women don’t even wear the hijab. They wear the duppata. Even my mother (when wearing shalwar kameez) doesn’t go out without her duppata. I asked her why once and she said that her maternal grandmother raised her that way. The duppata is an essential part of the shalwar kameez. Without it, it’s like one is half-dressed.
//Even my mother (when wearing shalwar kameez) doesn’t go out without her duppata.
This is very common in Hindu women of the same generation. Thats the modesty extend of it
I would wager – the gap between Hindu and Muslim women dressing would not have been as much 2-3 generations ago -I still see a lot of older Muslim women wearing the same attire as their Hindu brethren minus the religious marks.
The full body Niqab and even the hijab is much more common among the younger. A lot of that could be due to Gulf money and teachings spreading in subcontinent
presumably modern young Hindu women dress a lot more liberally and modern young Muslim women dress more conservatively (of course there may be Muslim women who dress liberally but don’t stand out)..
yes
In the Pakistani context, a woman going around without a dupatta is considered to be a “public woman”. The dupatta is the mark of being a sharif woman.
Of course, there are upper-class women who just go from chauffeur driven cars into the homes of other members of the elite. They may not need to wear the dupatta. But if you’re going around in the public sphere among the common Pakistani, you need to have your head covered or be prepared for adverse reactions.
I have mentioned before that my mother wears saris.
Shalwar kameez and dupatta is a Punjabi dress. Sikh women in Indian Punjab also wear shalwar kameez and dupatta.
This is more of a cultural thing rather than a religious one.
XTM you live in some idealistic world, completely removed from reality
From a previous post of your
This is also why the divine feminine matters and why we keep returning to it. A civilisation that imagines its goddesses as sovereign does in fact produce women who carry sovereignty in ordinary life.
Indo Aryan Hindus in reality do not treat women as divine. Male Chauvinist Father, Brothers extended tribe want to control their daughter and wives sexuality. Women are not free to express or select their sexual partners. Not very divine, just sexual chattels of menfolk
The same goes Muslims in Northern India. Hence the vitriolic Hindu Muslim animosity
I increasing believe that the purdah culture of North/Northwest India is not some kind of traumatic adaptation to muslim invasion, but mostly a re-articulation of preexisting customs. The northwest is the contact zone with west asian culture, and is somewhat of an ecological extension of it, and we know veiling was practiced in pre-islamic times in this area. The southern and eastern extremes of India and SL aren’t just distant realms, they are ecologically different. Some of the ideas like the feminine divine could have gestated among cultures that later got absorbed into the indo-aryan composite, resulting in the contradiction between outright male supremicism and these other traditions.
Not sure how far back in time you can extend that theory. The Mahabharata describes tribes from these liminal regions (like the Madrakas, Kambojas, and Gandharas) as people fallen from Vedic dignity and with women of relatively loose morals. If we are theorizing, perhaps these liminal regions started reacting to what they saw beyond the borders in Iran and adopted it?
Not particularly. Veiling was a very common phenomenon throughout Eurasia, from ancient Greece to Heian Japan. Usually, veiling was often associated with their own concept of Purdah. It was particularly common among members of the nobility in sedentary cultures, in contrast to their nomadic counterparts, since these societies required close cooperation between women and men for survival, resulting in more equity between genders.
In the case of South Asia specifically, veiling seems to have been a common practice along with the classical purdah from the Mauryan period. Historically, noble women would wear two sets of garments: an antariya, a lower garment often similar to a dhoti, and an untariya, an upper cloth that was a massive piece of cloth that covered the head. Also, it was a requirement for noblewomen to tie their hair up since loose hair was associated with menstruation and having had sexual intercourse. Mind you, the Mauryan power was within the Eastern Gangetic valley rather than the Western Gangetic valley.
There was a somewhat complex racial element to this as well. Groups that were Aryanized or were Indo-Aryan people themselves seem to be more prone to having female noble women veil themselves. Later Dravidian adjacent groups, like the Rashtrakuta, didn’t have veiling, even though they still had restrictions on tying their hair and broader purdah-related restrictions. So, it might just be something that was originally practiced by the Vedic people groups and passed on to their descendants. I remember members of the Namboori brahmin communities in Kerala (who retain a lot of Vedic elements due to religious affiliation with the Purva-Mimsa school) had a kind of veiling, albeit with an umbrella. Nonetheless, this seems to be an upper-class thing and one that was practiced in formal settings, which was as commonly found among low-born women.
Veiling and seclusion were likely elite behaviour, and may not have characterized the entire population. Since it was a familiar practice, when the social conditions emerged for a broader group to adopt it, it was a natural process. There are Islamicate cultures like the central asian turks where seclusion was *not* normal for women and they are depicted as strong, high-agency beings on horseback ect. whereas veiling was expected of elite women in ancient Athens, while sculptures were depicting women in glorious nudity. Thats behind my hesitation to draw conclusions about sartorial modesty in specific areas of ancient or medieval India.
Of course, Sinhala Buddhists are the paragons of virtue when it comes protecting women.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24849699
2013 article.
Stories to gain refugee status in UK
Reminds me of that Pervez Musharraf quote about how he said the honor-revenge Pakistani rape victim ‘got herself raped’ to get sympathy and asylum.
What a horrific thing to say.
Every time I think barr can’t stoop lower, he never ceases to surprise.
did he say that? my Lord what a vile thing for Musharraf to say!
Making idols, especially beautiful ones, is beautiful
Worshipping those idols, not really beautiful but comes across as low IQ.
This is why even the more intellectual snobby braches of Indian religion are against it.
To be honest, it is no different then celebrity worship or brand worship that most of the peasant classes indulge in today.
I understand if you are a peasant, you approve of it. It’s beautiful to make idols, but let’s not pretend its beautiful to worship them.
For example, if you prefer to watch fantasy-movie slop over reading its book version, you are an idol worshipper and you need to be banned from high society.
Appreciate your candidness here, as it doesn’t seem like you are being unnecessarily denigrating. I differ in that I think the psychology of idol worship has several more characteristics, and that even the majority of uneducated, simple people don’t actually believe that the icons have supernatural powers over them. There’s a wider human instinct towards shrine building, and elaborate , symbolic adornment of these spaces. We can be aware that we are imbuing these spaces with meaning by the sincerity with which we build and care for them. This extends to the idols, we can be fully aware that the idol is a way of taking abstractions and reifying them, but also know that if the idol gets destroyed or disrespected, the sky hasn’t fallen. That said, there’s no accounting for taste, and I can also develop a revulsion to people worshiping in a way that feels like its coming from a lower nature. That could be meekness, cowardice, laziness, greed and many other vulgar expressions of the soul. Done with nobility, anything can be beautiful, done with cravenness, anything can be vulgar, no matter how perfectly designed the ritual. At any rate, one can only imagine Islam is a reaction to decadent temple culture in its own way. But again, even the perfectly designed monotheistic elegance of Islam is subject to the imperfections of its followers.
Saguna worship versus Nirguna worship is explained very wonderfully in a lot of Bhakti Literature.
I think my response was more to XTM’s baiting to introduce Al Lat, Al Uzza etc into Islam so it may come across as harsh, but not meant as such towards others.
The older I get, the more I am convinced in my belief that the majority of the people (of any religion) are very similar to NPCs. I am not talking about people on this blog or other similar groups of people willingly having deep discussions online or in real life, but the masses who are uninterested in these things don’t deviate from their initial programming. I know it’s a grim view of humanity but it’s a view that until now has not been proven wrong to me.
Here is what I would say: I agree that people truly believe in something sacred, until the sacred is deintegrated and then people realize it’s not the end of the world. The majority is like this: meek, maleable. The elite decides what is sacred, and the elite decides whether to push back and rouse the majority when the sacred is disrespected, or just let it pass and the majority usually follows.
I personally don’t like many strains in Islam as well: for example I absolutely hate Salafis in Islam for it’s rigidness, it’s emphasis on literalism, absent minded ritualism, lack of aesthetics, general ugliness and inability to reach a higher understanding or develop a wider curiousity about anything outside their programming. They come from the same thought process as evangelical Christians/puritans or even New Atheists.
On the other end, shrine worship in Islam is very similar to base idol worship in Hindu or other traditions. I don’t mind either of these since at least these produce works of art and beauty, but the exploitation of the peasants is very obvious to me in this form of worship. The elite controls the idols/shrines, they earn money and perpetuate their hold, all the while fully knowing all of this is a scam and this can go on for generations..while the common masses are content. They don’t think much, they are told this thing/person has supernatural power so this they believe it.. never question, never curious, never rebel. (You can juxtapose this same on modern societies like the examples I gave about celebrity worship, sports teams, celebrating commercialized holidays etc).
It is truly the opiate of the peasants.
The optimist in me desries that the peasants shun it, the pessimist in me knows they will never.
Elite culture is extremely influential.
In Sri Lanka the LKR is collapsing too and no one seem to care.
New Delhi is weighing several further emergency steps to shore up foreign-exchange reserves and limit the damage from the war in the Middle East.
Higher import bills have driven sharp foreign-exchange outflows, pushing the rupee down to a record low and prompting the Reserve Bank of India to step in and sell dollars.
https://www.zerohedge.com/precious-metals/india-panics-further-tightens-gold-flows-rupee-collapses
In the context of this discussion on the hijab/burqa:
My dad had written a piece back in 2009 for The South Asian Idea called “Burqa: Principle, Prejudice and Preference”. It may be relevant here.
https://thesouthasianidea.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/burqa-principle-prejudice-and-preference/
Incidentally, on that post there is a comment from me which–in today’s context–reads to me as quite “pro-India”: