https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2

Scrutinizing the literature of a modern religious movement this article argues that postcolonial theory can effectively be brought to the analysis of religions and religious writing. The case study focuses on the way in which colonialism impacted the
Bahai faith in a specific and formative way, causing its leadership to present aspects of the faith’s development by employing the codes of Western Orientalism. Drawing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century European orientalist texts composed
either about their own faith, or the Islamic society out of which it grew, the article demonstrates how these led Bahais “themselves [to]… adopt [..] an essentially Orientalist vision of their own community and of Iranian society”. Edward Said’s
Orientalism throws light on an enduring situation in which mutual othering has crossed from culture and religion into politics, however since the late 1990s critics have demonstrated that Orientalism can function in more varied ways than Said allowed.
Finally, the possibility is discussed as to whether there can be such a thing as a postcolonial Bahai scholar....
On the level of its propagation in the West in the twentieth century the foundational Bahai narrative operated within the orbit of the dominant Western discourse of its time, mimicking what many of the intelligentsia of Western countries had been saying
for a long time with respect to the Islamic Middle East and other Muslim populations. Electing to write from a self-imposed self-orientalizing perspective not unusual among modern Western intellectuals, Shoghi Effendi accessed Orientalist tropes to help
him structure a binary religious narrative in which followers of the new revelation were opposed and persecuted by those entrenched in the previous, superseded one. In it, the Bahai faith incorporates modern socio-religious beliefs in a messianic program
of reform, while Shiism remains in the grip of an inexorable decline presided over by an entrenched and reactionary “clergy”. Bahais acquired from the secular Christian-Enlightenment project a civilizing mission bringing progress and modernity to a
Persia still coming out of its “medieval” backwardness, only instead of bringing Christianity they were re-releasing the power of the Bahai revelation in the benighted land into which it had been born. Its enemies, on the other hand, opportunely
denied Bahais were followers of a religion, but branded them a political movement created by colonial powers to divide and weaken Muslims. Separating Bahaism from its Shii roots and activated in the context of its struggle with the Shii ulama and anti-
Bahai Iranian intellectuals, the Bahai discourse is in reality constructed for and directed to a Western audience. In reporting the Bahai community as a movement from which a defunct Islam has been erased, but containing within this report a view of
Islam that employs Orientalist tropes, such a narrative cannot be dissociated from but must be viewed as a functioning sub-discourse of Orientalism. As regards the situation of the Bahai faith’s self-presentation as a religious movement that campaigns
against the human rights deprivation of its followers and advocates world peace while retaining at the same time a formative Orientalist element, the outcome is what postcolonialists call aporia (Greek: “irreconcilability”). This is dangerous for a
religious community to be party to, especially in the twenty-first century with rising trends of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism across the world. Under this apprehension the article makes the argument that Bahais divest themselves of the Orientalism of
their foundational narrative in the cause of better promoting their positive message of world unity."

Keywords: postcolonialism; Bab; Bahai faith; Orientalism; self-orientalizing; modernity; Shoghi Effendi

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