Memorials of the Faithful

MEMORIALS OF THE FAITHFUL: REVISITED

With penetrating and an apparently casual detail, with a crisp and for some a dry style, with an emphasis on the compression of facts; with vivid images, usually not more than three or four pages, wit, a concision of explanation or commentary, with a specific point of view, a style of biography has continued from classical times into the twentieth century. This is biography in miniature. It has a certain bias toward the person over the event, toward art as smallness of scale, toward structuring the confusions of daily life into patterns of continuity and process. There is a broad intent to sustain an interpretation or characterisation with facts teased, coloured, given life by a certain presentation and appraisal. For facts about the past are no more history than butter, eggs, salt and pepper are an omelette. They must be whipped up and played with in a certain fashion. -Ron Price with appreciation to Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution," Biography, Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.
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Nadel goes on to say that the "recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform."1 Freud said the recreation of a life, the getting at the truth of a life, can not be done; and if someone does do it, as inevitably biographers try, the result is not useful to us.2 People have been trying to write about the lives of others for millennia and, even if Freud is right, they will probably go on doing it. ‘Abdu’l-Baha gives the exercise a parting shot, to put it colloquially, in the evening of his life. His work, Memorials of the Faithful, is squarely in the tradition Nadel describes above: commemorative, didactic, ethical, psychological. His is a work of art as well as information, a work of pleasure as well as truth. His is a work of selection, as biography must be if the reader is not to be snowed in a mountain of useless detail.

He unravels the complexities of seventy-seven lives and in doing so he answers the questions of one of 'Abdu'l-Baha's contemporary's, the British writer Virginia Woolf: ‘My God, how does one write a biography?’ and ‘What is a life?’ If one can not answer these questions, Woolf wrote, then one can hardly write a biography.3

The act of reading Memorials of the Faithful is an opportunity to see how ‘Abdu’l-Baha answers these seminal questions about life, how He answers them again and again in the more than six-dozen of His biographies in miniature. Biographers and autobiographers arguably have one freedom, a freedom that overrides the genetic and social forces that determine so much of human life.4 It is the freedom to tell the story, the narrative, the freedom to explain a life, any life, even one’s own life, to themselves and others the way they desire. This freedom is part of that active force of will that ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in his pithy summation of the historic philosophical issue of ‘freewill and determinism,’5 is at the centre of all our lives.

Of course, it is incontrovertible that what has happened in a life has happened. There is no going back to change any one of the events, decisions or results. Life bears the stigmata of finality. There has been a relentless succession of facts, at once inflexible and in some ways arbitrary. All story-tellers are slaves to these facts, if their story is to enjoy the imprimatur of truth. Even bacon and eggs can not get away from these basics. You can't make a pork pie from these ingredients.

Charles Baudelair, a nineteenth century French poet who some say was the first poet to powerfully represent modern man, and who argued that the journey of human beings through life in a satisfactory way simply eludes us, once wrote that a biography "must be written from an exclusive point of view....a point of view which opens up the greatest number of horizons."6 There are many ways in which one could define 'Abdu'l-Baha's point of view in this subtle and deceptively simple book. The point of view is that of a lover of Baha’u’llah, one who wants to be near Baha’u’llah, one who wants to serve Baha’u’llah. The point of view is really quite exclusive. All the men and women in this biographical pot-pourri were lovers of the Manifestation of God, the most precious Being ever to walk on this earth; and they all had some relationship with Him during the forty year period of His ministry: 1852-1892.

Restlessness is a dominant theme, a strong characteristic, of the lives of many people 'Abdu'l-Baha describes. They 'could not stay quiet', 'had no rest', were amazingly energetic', 'awakened to restless life', plagued by yearning love'. Nabil of Qa'in was 'restless, had no caution, patience or reserve'.7 Shah Muhammad-Amin "had no peace" because of the love that smouldered in his heart and because he "was continually in flight'.8 This restlessness 'Abdu'l-Baha sets down among a galaxy of other qualities and a multitude of other people. Some of the most outstanding believers had this restlessness. Tahirih was 'restless and could not be still'.

The quality of quietness is also valued highly. One does not have to be a great talker to attract the attention of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Quietness also has its place in Baha'i community life. There are people who are 'inclined to solitude' and keep 'silent at all times'. They possess an 'inner calm'. They are souls 'at rest'. In a community that highly values the social dimension of community experience such people often have a more difficult time.

The gregarious types and the types who keep to themselves are part of this quintessential dichotomy, a dichotomy that was as much a part of 'Abdu'l-Baha's world as it is our own, although there seems to be a slight preponderence of the gregarious person in this last major book of 'Abdu'l-Baha's. Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad both kept to themselves and "away from friend and stranger alike".9 Mirza Muhammad-Quli "mostly...kept silent". He kept company with no one and stayed by himself most of the time, alone in his small refuge".10 The more sociable type, like Haji 'Abdu'llah Najaf-Abadi, "spent his days in friendly association with the other believers."11 Ismu'llahu'l-Asdaq "taught cheerfully and with gaiety".12 "How wonderful was the talk,"says 'Abdu'l-Baha of Nabil of Qa'in, "how attractive his society".13

In Memorials of the Faithful there exist all of the archtypes that psychology's various personality theorists have given us in this century. In addition to Jung's introvert and extrovert, there is the artist, the suffering artist-soul within us all, Mishkin-Qalam. He survives in all his seriousness, as we might, with humour. There are the types who William James describes in his Varieties of Religious Experience: the personality constitutionally weighted on the side of cheer and its opposite, the somber, more reflective even melancholic type. The two carpenters, Ustad Baqir and Ustad Ahmad were examples of the former.14 The examples we find of the latter were often the result of the many difficulties these lovers of Baha'u'llah were subjected to and wore them "to the bone."15 I'm confident that 'Abdu'l-Baha knew there would be many generations of servants to the Cause who would also be worn to the bone from time to time in their efforts to bring into being this new world Order.

‘Abdu’l-Baha addresses all of us, all of us on our journeys while He describes many of those He came to know in His life. For He is describing not only the lives of these men and women in the nineteenth century, He is describing us in our time. He is addressing us on our own travels, on our own turf. He addresses the restlessness in us all. He speaks to us in our victory and our loss. He speaks about what Michael Polanyi calls the tacit dimension, the silent root of human life, which is difficult to tap in biographies, the inner person. This private, this inner person, is the one whom He writes about for the most part. He sets this inner life in a rich contextualization, a socio-historical matrix. He describes many pilgrimages and you and I are left to construct our own.

We all must shape and define our own life. Is it aesthetically pleasing? Intellectually provocative? Spiritually challenging? ‘Abdu’l-Baha shapes and defines these lives given the raw-data of their everydayness added up, added up over their lives as He saw them. How would He shape my life? Yours? How would we look in a contemporary anthology of existences with ‘Abdu’l-Baha as the choreographer and the history of our days as the mise en scene?

For He is setting the stage, the theatre, the home, for all of humanity. The extrovert is here, the introvert, those that seem predisposed to cheerfulness and those who seem more melancholy by nature. All the human dichotomies are here, at least all that I have come across in my own journey. They are the characters which are part and parcel of life in all ages and centuries, all nations and states, past, present and, more importantly, future. Here is, as one writer put it, the rag-and-bone-shop, the lineaments of universal human life, the text and texture of community as we all experience it in the crucible of interaction. Of course, the setting is not New York, Sydney or Hobart in the year 2000, the setting is the life and times of His Father and the response of individuals to the new Revelation in the years 1852 to 1892.

Memorials of the Faithful is what might well be this age’s Canterbury Tales, that compendium of personalities who exemplify, as William Blake once put it, "the eternal principles that exist in all ages."16 We get a Writer Who delights in other people but Who has an active and incisive mind, a practicality that He brings to bear on what are often difficult personalities. He dwells only on the essentials; His purpose is inveterate; His feelings sincere and intense; they never relax or grow vapid during His cursory analyses. He is exquisitely tender, but clearly wily and tough to survive in the burly-burly life of exile, prison and the unbelievable difficulties He had to bear along life’s tortuous path. He is also, or so it would appear, easy to please.

The heroic age was coming to a close when ‘Abdu’l-Baha put His pen to paper; and it was over by the time the Haifa Spiritual Assembly published this His final book. ‘Abdu’l-Baha had played a prominent role in the epic that was the heroic age. He played a dominant role in writing that epic’s story. Memorials of the Faithful is an important part of that epic. This epic tradition was quintessentially oral and quinessentially written. A written tradition par excellence had begun and a new religion was firmly rooted in a printed, a holy, text.

Since The Growth of Literature by the Chadwicks(1924-1926) the heroic epic has been seen in epic studies "as a cultural rather than a literary phenomenon."17 The Baha’i epic has grown out of a complex and fascinating set of cultural conditions. Indeed ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s work has contributed to the resolution of problems involving the relationship, the transition, between oral narrative and written text. But this relationship is a question to occupy epic enthusiasts and is not our principle concern here.

Within about twelve months, perhaps even less, of completing this last of His books, ‘Abdu’l-Baha had begun His Tablets of the Divine Plan, the action station within which the community He was addressing could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His Memorials of the Faithful. Like The Will and Testament, though, it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book.

We are approaching, though, in the next two decades the end of the first century of the Formative Age. Perhaps the time has come to begin to seriously grasp the implications of these shining pages of ‘Abdu-l-Baha and His interpretive genius. For they have a great deal to tell us about love and unity in the community, in a process of community building that the Universal House of Justice says we have only begun.18

FOOTNOTES

1 Ira Bruce Nadel, "Biography as Institution", Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1984, pp.13-66.
2 Sigmund Freud in Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay, W.W> Norton and Co., NY, 1988, p.xv-xvi.
3 Virginia Woolf in Nadel, op. cit., p.141.
4 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, 1978, p. 198.
5 Arnold Ludwig, How Do We Know Who We Are? Oxford UP, Reviewed in New Scientist, 8 November 1997.
6 Charles Baudelair in Baudelair, Claude Pichois, Hamesh Hamilton, 1987, London, p.xiv.
7 'Abdu'l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithfulm Wilmette, 1970, p.
8 ibid.,p.51.
9 ibid., p.46.
10 ibid.,p.73.
11 ibid.,p.71.
12 ibid.,p.6.
13ibid.,p. 53.
14 ibid.,p.73.
15 ibid.,p.96.
16 William Blake in Geoffrey Chaucer: Penguin Critical Anthologies, editor, J.A. Burrow, 1969, p.82.
17 Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, editor, Felix J. Oinas, Indiana UP, London, 1978, p.1.
18 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1996.

Note: An edited version of this article appeared in the Newsletter of the Association for Baha'i Studies (English Speaking Europe), Associate Issue 35, Summer 2001. The article here is a revised draft for the Tasmanian Baha'i Summer School 2004.

APPENDIX A

The following material was obtained from Derek Pearsall's The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, chapter 6. In this book Pearsall informs us that the whole organization of Chaucer's narrative is in the intersticies of a world of ecclesiastical routines and needs. 'Abdu'l-Baha's narrative, played as it is in the lives of seventy-seven souls, exists in the intersticies of lives transformed by a manifestation of God. Instead of ehe ubiquity of the Christian Faith and its practices we have a new religion emerging in the soil of people's lives. Both books gives us a narrative of faith. Women are dominant in Chaucer and men in Memorials of the Faithful. Both books provide us with a spiritual journey. There is a gusto and carnivalesque spirit, a contempt for marriage and sexual urges, in Chaucer while none of this is to be found in 'Abdu'l-Baha's work. The is no sense of social and moral commitment in Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's London is a turbulent and dangerous place; so too in 'Abdu'l-Baha'is world. He writes of the domestic world rather than the politics of power. Both men possess a remarkable acuteness of observation; there is little of the sense of outrage. Chaucer makes a magpie-like raid on scholarly texts, perhaps more from conversations. The pilgrims are infinitely various.

The sense of dramatic vitality is so strong the temptation to read the tales as principally an expression of the characters of their tellers is strong. Chaucer is a self-concealing and evasive character. His audience in the imagination is "a miscellaneous company, of lettered London men, to be appropriately scandalized and delighted by the Wife of Bath and the fabliaux, flattered by the invitation to share in a gentleman scholar's easily carried burden of learning and intrigued by the novel expose of London low life in the Cook's Tale. The audience is, probably exclsuively an audienc eof men. The Canterbury Tales are Chaucer's maturer reflections upon the life of men and women is society and in the Christian faith written in the last decade of his life. (1387-1400) He was almost entirely occupied with writing 'The Canterbury Tales' in the last decade of his life.

He refrained from direct allusion to public events and it is difficult, unsafe, to make any deductions about specific connections between life, works and times. Some scholars prefer to see his work as chaotic and inexplicable.
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