The Bahá’í Position on Palestine: A Note for the Record

Comments of late have drifted, as they sometimes do here, into territory where the Bahá’ís are invoked as a rhetorical chess piece by people who know very little about them. We believe in free speech, and on this blog more than most, in authorial autonomy; contributors and commenters speak for themselves, and we are not in the business of policing opinion. But because the question of Palestine sits adjacent to much of what has been said, we thought it worth setting down what the actual position is.

One caveat first. When we write or administer here, we do not speak for our Faith in any official capacity. We are members of it. That is the limit of our standing.

The clearest statement of the Bahá’í position comes from the pen of the Beloved Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi, who in July 1947 was asked directly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to clarify the relationship of the Bahá’í community to the country and its political future. His reply, written from Haifa and reproduced in The Bahá’í World, Volume 11, is as close to a foundational text on this question as exists. We quote it at length, because paraphrase would not do it justice.

Letter to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine

On July 9, 1947, Shoghi Effendi received a letter from the chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine requesting a statement on the relationship, which the Baha’i­ Faith has to Palestine and the Baha’i­ attitude toward any future changes in the status of the country. From Shoghi Effendi’s reply, the following paragraphs are quoted in The Baha’i­ World, Volume 11 (1946-1950), pp.43-44.1

HAIFA, ISRAEL—15 July 1947

“The position of the Baha’i­s in this country is in a certain measure unique: Whereas Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Christendom it is not the administrative center of either the Church of Rome or any other Christian denomination. Likewise although it is regarded as the second most sacred shrine of Islam, the most Holy site of the Muhammadan Faith, and the center of its pilgrimages, are to be found in Arabia, not in Palestine. The Jews alone offer somewhat of a parallel to the attachment which the Baha’i­s have for this country, inasmuch as Jerusalem holds the remains of their Holy Temple and was the seat of both the religious and political institutions associated with their past history. But even their case differs in one respect from that of the Baha’i­s for it is in the soil of Palestine that the three central Figures of our Religion are buried and it is not only the center of Baha’i­’ pilgrimages from all over the world but also the permanent seat of our Administrative Order, of which I have the honor to be the Head.”

“The Baha’i­ Faith is entirely nonpolitical and we neither take sides in the present tragic dispute going on over the future of the Holy Land and its people nor have we any statement to make or advice to give as to what the nature of the political future of this country should be. Our aim is the establishment of universal peace in this world and our desire to see justice prevail in every domain of human society, including the domain of politics. As many of the adherents of our Faith are of both Jewish and Moslem extraction, we have no prejudice towards either of these groups and are most anxious to reconcile them for their mutual good and for the good of the country.”

“What does concern us, however, in any decisions made affecting the future of Palestine, is that the fact be recognized by whoever exercises sovereignty over Haifa and Acre, that within this area exists the spiritual and administrative world center of a world Faith, and that the independence of that Faith, its right to manage its affairs from this source, the right of Baha’i­s from any and every country of the globe to visit it as pilgrims (enjoying the same privilege in this respect as Jews, Moslems and Christians do in regard to visiting Jerusalem), be acknowledged and permanently safeguarded.”

Three things are worth drawing out.

“The House of the Báb in Shíráz, one of the most holy sites in the Bahá’í world, was destroyed by Revolutionary Guardsmen in 1979 and later razed by the government” by Baha’i Media Bank.

First, the Bahá’í World Centre sits in Haifa and Akka, in present-day Israel, not by political choice but because that is where the three central Figures of the Faith (Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá) are buried. The siting is theological, not strategic. Bahá’u’lláh was exiled to Akka by the Ottomans as a prisoner of the Sublime Porte; the geography is a residue of nineteenth-century Persian and Ottoman statecraft, not twentieth-century Zionism.

Second, the Faith is officially and constitutionally non-partisan on the political future of the land. Shoghi Effendi was being asked, on the eve of partition, to take a side. He declined, explicitly, and on principle. That principle has not changed in the seventy-nine years since.

Third, what the Faith does ask for is institutional independence: the right of pilgrimage, the right to administer its world centre, the right of Bahá’ís of every nationality (Iranian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian) to access its holy places on the same footing as the Abrahamic faiths access Jerusalem. That is the only political ask, and it is procedural.

Clarification is not partisanship. It is simply the record.