Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Baha'i Faith

Author: Christopher Buck
Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999, 402 pages
Reviewer: William P. Collins

If the Bahá'í Faith has a specialist in comparative religion, it is Christopher Buck. His earlier work, Symbol and Secret: Qur'an Commentary in Bahá'u'lláh's Kitáb-i-Íqán (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1995), was the first full-length English-language study of this particular Bahá'í scripture. Buck's study made more widely accessible within Bahá'í scholarly discourse such existing concepts as the "messianic secret" to denote Bahá'u'lláh's as-yet-undeclared station as a Manifestation of God which is at the heart of the Íqán, and "realized eschatology" to characterise the nature of Bahá'u'lláh's exegesis and revelation.

Buck has made an even more significant contribution with Paradise and Paradigm, the published version of his doctoral dissertation. When a study breaks new ground in Bahá'í scholarship, it is not an easy task to wrap one's mind around its significance. When that study also enters unexplored realms in the entire craft of Religionswissenschaft, appropriate review is made even more difficult. This volume is certainly, from this reviewer's perspective, the best comparative work on the Bahá'í Faith and another religious tradition that has yet appeared, and may serve as a model for future such studies. It succeeds by its depth and its respectful approach to the unfamiliar paradigms of another religious culture. It also succeeds by making explicit a whole range of symbols in the Bahá'í paradigm that are largely unconscious to Bahá'ís themselves.

Buck has created a new methodology in comparative religion termed "symbolic paradigm analysis," and then applied it to the rich spiritual worlds of Persian Christianity and the Bahá'í Faith. He did so by testing a hypothesis: "`Parallels' yield paradoxes of commensurability resolvable by paradigm `logics' within religious systems, resulting in symbolic transformation." The statement boils down to this: two religions may appear to have the same or similar symbols, but the way to understand any real similarities or differences in the symbols' meanings must be found through the religious paradigms within which they are applied. The volume has an initial chapter dealing with the definitions, issues, and problems presented by a comparative study of the symbols and paradigms in two traditions. Buck focuses the main part of his study on the imagery of paradise, and what such imagery signifies in Persian Christianity and the Bahá'í Faith. Buck then proceeds with historical and symbolic profiles of Persian Christianity and of the Bahá'í Faith, each of which is a self-contained and fascinating review.

Buck has framed his argument in a set of parallel overviews of Persian Christianity and the Bahá'í Faith. He sets forth a historical profile and a symbolic profile for each tradition. The historical profiles could not, from a Bahá'í perspective, be carried out on an absolutely symmetrical basis. The primary sources for Buck's historical profile of Persian Christianity are works by Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373 CE) and Aphrahat "the Persian Sage" (d. 345 CE). Ephrem in particular was a significant writer and creator of the symbolic world of Persian Christianity. Neither of these figures, however, makes the kind of divine truth claims that Bahá'u'lláh does. However, from the point of view of value to each tradition, the historical reviews are balanced reviews of source documents for symbolic worldviews. Buck indicates that Persian Christianity is a response to late antiquity, and that the Bahá'í Faith is a response to the crisis of modernity, so succinctly noted by Ninian Smart who wrote of the Bahá'í Faith that, "It is an example of a spiritual revolution which intuitively recognized the global state of world culture before its time and gave religious preparation for this unified world."[1] Buck's historical profile of the Bahá'í Faith is uniquely arranged around the framework of Bahá'u'lláh's Lawh-i-Bishárát, and the notion that Bahá'u'lláh's reforms involve desacralization of certain constraining religious formulae of the past, and sacralization of certain social notions that might be viewed as secular. For instance, Bahá'u'lláh abolished holy war, confession to anyone but God, and the destruction of books; yet on the other hand, He made sacred such concepts as interfaith amity, constitutional monarchy, and the pursuit of peace. It is possible to think of the Bábí-Bahá'í movements as a "response" to modernity if it is thought of as arising out of purely social, psychological and historical forces, and indeed works by Cole and Amanat take this view.[2] There is another perspective that might also have been pursued by Buck — the extent to which the works of Ephrem or the scriptural works by Bahá'u'lláh may have reflected an impulse to remake or repossess worlds that had moved out of old paradigms into new ones. There is a mythic belief in the Bahá'í Faith that the advent of Bahá'u'lláh set in motion, invisibly, the changes that have made the modern world. That world must now be sacralized. In that sense, rather than being a response to modernity, the Bahá'í Faith would be viewed as the instrument for infusing into the modern world the holiness that it needs in order to operate on a moral and ethical plane. In emphasizing the particular points made by Bahá'u'lláh in the Lawh-i-Bishárát, Buck may have selected a text that tends to be less concerned with the mysticism and personal devotion central to other of Bahá'u'lláh's works.

The symbolic profiles are extremely interesting and less constrained by the framework that Buck placed on his historical profiles. The symbolic profiles have a single framework to facilitate comparison. Each profile notes the key scenarios, root metaphors and symbolic paradigm of the religion being treated. The scenarios and metaphors are classified as either doctrinal, ritual, ethical, experiential, mythic or social. Buck comes up with the following symbols that he compares:

The volume concludes with chapters that review and draw conclusions about paradise similarities and paradigm differences. It is not possible to do justice to Buck's conclusions in a short review, but in summary, the similar symbols in Persian Christianity and the Bahá'í Faith are ensconced in two different paradigms about soteriology (the theology of salvation). According to Buck, Persian Christianity's paradigm is sacramental; the Bahá'í Faith's is a paradigm about unity. Therefore Jesus, as "the Way" in Persian Christianity, achieves God's purpose of providing sanctification and immortality through the Eucharist — a notion totally absent from the Bahá'í notion of prophetic history exemplified by Bahá'u'lláh as "the Promised One" who is the return of the bounty and perfections of Jesus, and whose purpose is unific rather than sacramental. The book argues persuasively that the Bahá'í Faith seeks a more collective salvation of humankind on a broader plain of unity, rather than on the sacramental and/or individual level of Persian Christianity and Christianity generally. This is an important foray into the deeper realm of each religion's framework of understanding. As even a cursory glance at the tables of key scenarios and root metaphors will show, there is a deceptive similarity to the symbols. Rather it is the underlying meaning, the ultimate concern, of each religion that must be uncovered through the symbols.

If there is any criticism to make of this work, it is that the Bahá'í Faith and Persian Christianity surely have paradigms that are of greater complexity than Buck was able to convey in the limited structure of his book. Buck uses an operational definition of "sacrament" as a priest-mediated sign or symbol of a spiritual reality. Although it could be argued that the Bahá'í Faith has formal religious acts that are symbols of a higher spiritual reality, and that observance of them contributes both to individual well-being and to unity of the community, they are not sacraments in this stricter sense. While the unity paradigm is the overarching frame of symbolic interpretation, there are incorporated in the Bahá'í Faith elements of other paradigms such as those of individual salvation (a Christian paradigm), family salvation (a Mormon paradigm), and the like. Nevertheless, as Buck demonstrates, the unity paradigm is the high-level prism through which Bahá'ís give everything else colour.

An additional benefit that this work affords to the Bahá'í community is the opportunity for profound learning about Christian communities of Iran that are relatively unknown in the west. The discovery of a Christian world unlike the one we know is refreshing and challenging. That Persian Christian symbols resonate with Bahá'ís is a startling discovery. Such symbols simultaneously carry some different meanings as mediated by the Persian Christian and Bahá'í paradigms. Bahá'ís therefore owe three debts to Christopher Buck's Paradise and Paradigm. First, that we perforce had to absorb the symbolism of an unfamiliar faith community. Second, that we then had the opportunity to see our own symbolic worldview with new eyes. And third, that we have before us a new model of comparative religious studies for reading symbolic similarities in light of paradigmatic differences.

The larger dimension of Buck's work is its contribution to the study of religious mythology in the broad sense of the universe of metaphors, analogies, signs, symbols, and stories that make up the cosmologies and worldviews of human beings. That there are similarities in symbols, but differences in the paradigms ("myths"), of two religions means that the created world affords us symbols that can be recycled and yet can be understood in an infinite number of ways. For this very reason, the scholar and the believer are presented with problems of interpretation that suggest a need to guard against two extremes. The well-known mythologist Joseph Campbell described these extremes as:

... the positivistic...represented, on the one hand, by religious experiences of the literal sort, where the impact of the daemon, rising to the plane of consciousness from its place of birth on the level of the sentiments, is taken to be objectively real, and on the other, by science and political economy, for which only measurable facts are real... Whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted...[and] whenever it has been dismissed as merely priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.[3]

Paradise and Paradigm avoids these extremes. It is a work of scholarship that can see clearly from outside, and yet impart inner truth. It treats, with tremendous respect, accuracy and courtesy, two religious traditions. It catalogues, with objectivity and due regard for faith and science, the symbolic universes of Persian Christians and Bahá'ís. For that reason, I believe that this tool will inspire a wealth of better studies and sound dialogue with other religious traditions, and will help those who are Bahá'ís to understand more deeply the mythic and symbolic universe of their own faith.

1. Ninian Smart, The World's Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 480.
2. Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Bahá'í Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), especially as stated in the introduction. Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), particularly the epilogue.
3. Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology (New York: Penguin, 1962) 27.

Unofficial Bahá'í Lore

Author: David Piff
Publisher: George Ronald, Oxford, 2000, 584 pages
Reviewer: Iarfhlaith Watson

Never judge a book by its cover. There is something unappealing about this book's cover, its size, and title. Yet, when I began to read I found it to be a most enjoyable book. I did hesitate at my enjoyment, however, and wondered if there was something risque about its content that appealed to me. I pushed that thought aside and read it over a short period of time and found it not to be the boring tome that I had initially expected.

What is Bahá'í lore? According to David Piff, Bahá'í lore is unofficial information within the Bahá'í community. This unofficial information comes in various guises, such as gossip, rumour, hearsay, etc. Piff does not discuss the vast differences between these types of unofficial information. Sociologically, it would be interesting to come to some understanding of these differences and how they are related systemically in different ways to the worldview of Bahá'ís. For Bahá'ís, it would be interesting to have a line drawn between spiritually acceptable forms of unofficial information and the more destructive forms usually referred to as backbiting.

Related to the differences within unofficial information is the question of the accuracy of some of these claims. Bahá'ís would be interested, where possible, to know the source of the information and how it relates to the official version. The closest Piff comes to this is to argue that while Bahá'í lore is naive, unnuanced and inconsistent, it is closely related in theme and content to official teachings. It is clear, however, that he wasn't interested in the origin or accuracy of the information, but rather, in its function in constructing a Bahá'í worldview. I do not find this satisfactory. A single individual, by and large, reports each rumour. There is no evidence that these "rumours" are not isolated instances of misunderstandings that are then conveyed to the author by another individual without corroboration. There are many instances where the "lore" is inaccurate. One respondent claimed that "you have to do ablutions with cold water" (174), yet, in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Bahá'u'lláh said that, "Warm water may be used in times of bitter cold". Curiously, the same respondent reported that, "You have to do them with hot water" (174). Another respondent reported that "heavy petting and everything else short of actual intercourse is permissible for unmarried Bahá'í couples" (278) and also that the marriage of a couple whom had engaged in premarital sex is "foredoomed" to failure (277). She also reported that, "If you begin breakfast before the sun comes up, you can finish eating after the sun comes up without having broken the fast," even though Bahá'u'lláh stated in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas that to fast means to "Abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sundown." This leads to two problems. First, these individual misunderstandings cannot be defined as community lore if they are confined to individuals. Second, where some of the information appears relatively accurate and believable and other information appears completely inaccurate, and perhaps even hurtful backbiting, there is a blurring of the distinction between the acceptable and the unacceptable and between truth and falsity. To a certain extent the truth is made false and falsity made true.

This blurring is evident not only between the different types of information, but also between unofficial and official Bahá'í information. There is no marker laid down around the accuracy or inaccuracy of unofficial information relative to official Bahá'í information and especially to the Bahá'í writings. The impression is left that there is an unofficial Bahá'í tradition and that it is an accepted part of Bahá'í doctrine.

The original aim of the research was "to identify misinformation within popular Bahá'í discourse" (8). Although my comments above make it clear that I regret that the author did not retain at least some of this original intent, I am extremely interested in what the research became — "an effort to investigate how the discourse of the community, regardless of its canonical accuracy, contributes to and reflects the process of creating a Bahá'í world view and reinforcing Bahá'í self-understanding" (8-9). This sounds like a most welcome contribution to the sociological study of the Bahá'í Faith.

In the main chapters of the book Piff outlines Bahá'í lore around a number of "topics." These chapters deal with lore around Bahá'í teachings, enemies of the Faith, conversion, important figures in the Faith, celebrities, and unofficial interpretation by Bahá'ís of world events, especially of an impending catastrophe. In discussing these topics Piff attempts to explain the existence of these "rumours."

Piff's descriptions and explanations are generally appealing and sensible. For example, he claims that rumours about Bahá'í teachings occur as a result of a lack of information. The most pertinent example is the discourse surrounding the Kitáb-i-Aqdas before it was fully published in English in 1992. He claims that this discourse, which surrounds some problematic areas of Bahá'í history, functions to alleviate uncertainty. There is, however, a clear need to justify these discourses and support them with evidence. For example, he claims that anecdotes about dire consequences for enemies of the Bahá'í Faith serve to control the Bahá'ís and allows them to safely ignore criticism.

In the penultimate chapter Piff outlines six functions of Bahá'í lore. These are to validate the "charisma" of the central figures and institutions of the Faith; to humanise the central figures and Bahá'í leaders; to reinforce community boundaries; to establish and sustain Bahá'í identity; for community self-education; and testimonies of Bahá'í living. While these may or may not be valid explanations of the functions of these discourses, I would need to see how these functions relate to the aim of the research, which was "to investigate how the discourse of the community...contributes to and reflects the process of creating a Bahá'í world view." As it stands, the research outlines the rumours and a number of functions they perform without analysing how the discourse performs these functions. It is perhaps a rather functional, tautological and teleological argument — the Bahá'í community needs this lore, therefore it exists.

Piff's work would have been stronger if he had retained some of his original intention and addressed the issue of misinformation. More importantly this research would have benefited from an in-depth sociological analysis of the context from which this lore emerges. This lack of context, this lack of critique of the content of the rumours is the most important limitation of this work. Finally, I am also critical of the conclusions. It is unremarkable to argue that Bahá'í informal discourse is an unofficial version of the Faith. Second, he claims that both the official and unofficial discourses serve the needs of the community. I have argued above that this argument is flawed. Moreover, the author's claim that there is a cognitive and attitudinal correspondence between unofficial and official information would require assessing the misinformation of the unofficial discourse. Even so, Piff's research is an initial foray into an interesting and fruitful topic that makes an important contribution to the sociology of the Bahá'í Faith as well a being an enjoyable — if unsatisfactory — read.
 

Shoghi Effendi in Oxford

Author: Riaz Khadem
Publisher: George Ronald, Oxford, 1999, 173 pages

Her Eternal Crown, Queen Marie of Romania and the Bahá'í Faith

Author: Della L. Marcus
Publisher: George Ronald, Oxford, 1999, 319 pages
Reviewer: Lil Abdo

It is always a pleasure to see the publication of new literature concerning the history of the Bahá'í Faith in the west. It is especially welcome when the subject matter has not previously been the subject of full scholastic scrutiny. It is undeniable that there is a need for a scholarly biography of Shoghi Effendi but sadly Shoghi Effendi in Oxford does not answer this need. In his preface, Khadem points out that his research "had produced only fragments, tiny pieces of information not sufficient to make a book" and in this he is quite correct. His research has produced some interesting information, but as he fails to analyse it or place it in context it remains hidden amongst gratuitous information and long extracts from published sources. He states in the introduction that the book is aimed at ordinary Bahá'ís and consequently written in a simple style using Bahá'í terminology. In fact it is written in what comes across as Bahá'í-jargon, which would reduce even the most objective biography to hagiography.

The book starts with a introductory background to Shoghi Effendi, which closely follows Ruhíyyih Khánum's biography Priceless Pearl and, despite interviews with Dr Mo'ayyid in 1970, it adds little new information. Mo'ayyid recalled Shoghi Effendi's happiness at transferring from the Catholic boarding school in Beirut to the Syrian Protestant College, thus confirming his unhappiness at the former establishment documented in Priceless Pearl. However, no comment is made to enlighten the reader about the cause of his unhappiness. In describing Shoghi Effendi's time at the Syrian Protestant College, Khadem produces a number of lists. He lists the courses Shoghi Effendi took and the terms in which he took them, the names of the professors and their assistants who taught the courses, and the names of the people who graduated with Shoghi Effendi and the towns from which they came. The problem is that as he gives no indication to the relative importance of these individuals to his subject, we are left unaware of any influence they may have had or what role they played. Whilst this raw data might prove useful to later researchers and as such could have formed an appendix, in its present form it is no more enlightening than listing the people with whom he shared a dentist or waited for a bus. In the period between his leaving the Syrian Protestant College and going up to Oxford, Shoghi Effendi worked for `Abdu'l-Bahá translating tablets and supplications. Again we are supplied with lists of recipients of tablets but with no indication to their importance. Where the content of the tablet is reproduced it may tell us something about `Abdu'l-Bahá or the recipient, but nothing about the translator. A large part of this section comprises diary letters of Shoghi Effendi published in Star of the West. Although, these provide a fascinating insight into the activities of `Abdu'l-Bahá, they shed no light on their author as they are purely descriptive. The only insightful comment is about Shoghi Effendi rather than from him, when `Abdu'l-Bahá's comments to Dr Fallscheer are reproduced from Priceless Pearl.

The move to Oxford generally changes the pace of the narrative for the better, and introduces new material. Even so, the author fails to point out the strong connection between the Persian literati and Oxford that originated from the sending of Persian students to western universities by Nasru'd-Din Shah. Khadem points out that Oxford had been "blessed by the footsteps of the Master" (which is "Bahá'í-speak" for `Abdu'l-Bahá went there), but he does not mention that `Abdu'l-Bahá went there to meet Professor Thomas Cheyne, and later the same day, to address Manchester College. Eminent members of Manchester College were Philip Wicksteed and Estlin Carpenter. The latter was married to a prominent Bahá'í, Alice Buckton, and therefore Carpenter was well aware of Bahá'í movement. [For more information on Buckton, see page 129 in this issue - Eds.] In his Essex Hall lecture of 1895 Carpenter had discussed the Bab and the Babi movement at length and in a footnote to the published transcript he adds, "The late Master of Balliol once told me that he thought Babism might prove the most important religious movement since the foundation of Christianity."

Although Cheyne was dead and Carpenter retired by the time Shoghi Effendi was in Oxford, it is clear that the choice of Oxford University for his studies was far from random. However, the lack of contacts less than a decade later indicates a decline in Bahá'í influence in academic circles. Shoghi Effendi's admittance to Balliol College was not straightforward. Khadem uncovers his original registration was in a non-college institution affiliated to the university known as the non-collegiate delegacy. He reproduces letters from Shoghi Effendi indicating his concern and anxiety about his failure to gain entry to Balliol, as well as correspondence between the college and the non-collegiate delegacy. It would seem that Shoghi Effendi was the hapless victim of administrative incompetence and university bureaucracy — a situation with which many can empathise. His reaction to this situation and his perseverance in the face of adversity are a fascinating insight into the character of the man who would become Guardian. No less fascinating are the memoirs of Shoghi Effendi's contemporaries at Balliol. Khadem approached 205 men who went up to Balliol between 1918 and 1921, and received 135 replies of which 52 contained information or recollections. These form the most interesting part of the book. These Balliol men, none of whom were or became Bahá'ís, offer a unique picture of Shoghi Effendi. In one of the few passages of analysis, Khadem speculates on the difficulties Shoghi Effendi would have faced fitting in with the English upper class ethos of Oxford. This indeed must have puzzled him as none of the British Bahá'ís were Oxonians and only Esslemont a university graduate. It is a pity that so few of these reminiscences are reproduced or discussed.

For the rest of the description of Shoghi Effendi's stay in England, Khadem relies mainly on published sources, arranged in a chronological narrative that will be interesting reading for his target audience of "ordinary believers." The final chapter is simply repetition. For some reason the Bahá'í jargon is even denser in this chapter and it is liberally sprinkled with "radiant youth," "beloved" this and thats. Why Bahá'í authors still insist on using this type of language is beyond me — if they think it adds dignity either to their work or its subject they are mistaken — it just sounds peculiar. Overall this book has the feel of diligent research hurriedly edited into an overlong book with too much padding.

It is interesting to consider how in the early years of the last century the Bahá'í teachings spread in so many environments. For different reasons and by different means, Khadem discusses how people become aware of things Bahá'í in Oxford colleges, and Della Marcus in Her Eternal Crown, Queen Marie of Romania and the Bahá'í Faith explores how the religion first came to attention in the royal palaces of the Balkans. I must confess that prior to reading this book I was woefully ignorant of the story of Queen Marie. I had encountered the denial of her involvement in the Bahá'í Faith by her daughter, Princess Ileana, in William Miller's book The Bahá'í Faith: its history and teachings. This caused me to peruse the index of a couple of biographies of the queen and finding no mention of the Bahá'í Faith therein, conclude that the queen had probably made a few polite remarks in response to overtures from Bahá'ís. Consequently, I relegated Queen Marie, along with Cher and Mr Spock, to the netherworld of Bahá'ís whose credentials are entirely composed of the wishful thinking of Bahá'ís. However, Della Marcus' book totally refutes any denial of Queen Marie's involvement with Bahá'ís. It is somewhat odd then that it does not mention the fact that these denials exist. This gives the book a rather unbalanced stance and does not allow the author to develop the thesis. Had Marcus started by pointing out that critics of the Faith had dismissed Queen Marie's involvement and that most biographers had ignored it, it would have given her the opportunity to discuss some very interesting questions. Questions such as: why should Princess Ileana, herself once very interested in the Bahá'í cause, make such a denial, or if Queen Marie totally accepted the Bahá'í teachings (insofar as she understood them), did she ever reject Christianity of the authority of the Church? The answers to these unspoken questions are curiously to be found in the introduction where the "evolutionary" process of the development of the modern Bahá'í Faith is explained but not related to the subject matter of the text. It is pointed out that the prior to the 1940's when incompatibility of membership of the Bahá'í Faith with other religious bodies was made clear many Bahá'ís had "dual memberships," but how that affected Queen Marie and Princess Ileana is not discussed. In my opinion the queen and her daughter totally accepted the Bahá'í movement, which was a supplementary religious movement requiring no conversion experience, but did not embrace the Bahá'í Faith as an independent religion.

Marcus, however, does not set out to provide analysis, but rather to reproduce the correspondence and diary entries concerning the queen's involvement with the Bahá'í teachings and with Martha Root. This she does admirably, although the text is sometimes repetitive when, for example, the same incident is described in a diary entry, a letter, and an article in Star of the West. The problem with this approach is that the reader is not given any kind of context or comparison, so whilst Queen Marie's acceptance of Bahá'í Faith, her relationship with Martha Root, and her desire to visit Shoghi Effendi are proved beyond doubt, there is no information about other interests she might have had — did she, for example, also correspond with Theosophists or Christian Scientists?

The importance of this book is that no future biographer will be able to ignore the importance of the Bahá'í message in Queen Marie's life. Some interesting light is shed on the domestic life of European royalty in the first half of the last century. It does not seem to have been a pleasant existence, and Marie was subjected to restrictions, financial constraints and family dysfunction. Superficially the queen's friendship with Martha Root seems surprising, but Root must have been a wonderful antidote to the intrigues of the court. Root's "handling" of the queen is also interesting — she reports directly to Shoghi Effendi and he intervenes directly only when required. His correspondence with Root indicates his trust in her abilities and the care with which they planned their relationship with the queen. It is no doubt significant that other Bahá'ís did not approach Queen Marie and that, on her tour of North America, the American Bahá'í community communicated with her only by sending flowers. Clearly the Queen's relationship with the Bahá'í Faith had to be carefully managed.

The role of kingship and Bahá'u'lláh's writings to kings and rulers are explained in the introduction, as well as the importance of monarchical acceptance of the Bahá'í Faith. This book will be useful in re-examining this aspect of the writings particularly in England where the House of Windsor has begun to look rather unsteady. Whilst the conversion of Saxon warlords might have worked for the Christian missionary saints, how useful would a strategy of canvassing royalty or the aristocracy be in a more egalitarian society? Overall this book makes a useful contribution to the literature on the history of the Bahá'í Faith. It allows its subjects to speak for themselves and, whilst it is short on analysis, it raises a number of interesting points that can be pursued in further work.