As a world religion centered on constructing a new civilization, the Bahá’í Writings call their readers’ attention to the concerns of modernity. “Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in,” wrote Bahá’u’lláh, “and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements” (Gleanings CVI). Therefore it is surprising that Bahá’í scriptures and historiography not infrequently refer to the Middle Ages and the Reformation. This paper will survey the use of Medieval imagery and rhetoric in the canonical Writings and in the work of Bahá’í historians. The presentation will argue that one can define a Bahá’í Medievalism, referring to how the Middle Ages are deployed as points of contrast with modernity and with future stages of society envisioned by the Faith.
Among several examples, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in The Secret of Divine Civilization describes how Pope Sylvester II (c. 946-1003 CE) studied in Islamic Andalucia, and later discussed how Martin Luther challenged the Papacy. The appointed successor of Bahá’u’lláh in this same book also cites “the noted historians of Europe” as depicting “the ten centuries constituting the Middle Ages” as “to an extreme degree, barbaric and dark.” In The Promulgation of Universal Peace, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is quoted as saying “The medieval ages of darkness have passed away and this century of radiance has dawned.”
Shoghi Effendi also uses the descriptor “medieval” pejoratively, describing the reign of the Qajar Shah Áqá Muḥammad Khán as one of “medieval oppression” in The Promised Day is Come. He refers to the madrasihs of the Islamic clergy as having “medieval learning”, “deserted and dilapidated.” Yet Shoghi Effendi in God Passes By also cites a scholar who compares the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár (Bahá’í Temple) in Illinois to “the aspiring lines of the medieval cathedrals toward higher and better things” and to Michelangelo’s Dome at St. Peter’s. As for the Reformation, the Guardian compares the persecution of the Bábís to the Protestant martyrs of Tudor England in “the fires of Smithfield.” The Guardian’s English prose style when translating the sacred Writings also bears possible echoes of the alliteration and diction of Old and Middle English poetry, which he may have encountered during his English studies at Oxford.
The uses of medievalism extend to the Faith’s historiography. In Bahá’í Ethics in the Light of Scripture, Udo Schaefer makes extensive comparisons between Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and Bahá’í theology. Marzieh Gail, who translated Bahá’u’lláh’s mystical text The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys into English, was a medievalist who wrote two books on the Avignon Papacy. This paper will offer further examples of the use of medievalism as a rhetorical counterpoint to the new civilization Bahá’í’s are striving to build. The presentation will also consider the complexities these portrayals of the era create for Baha’i medievalists, given that contemporary scholarship on the era has challenged the “Dark Age” model with a more recuperative view of the Middle Ages.
James Russell is a historian of the book and of reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. He teaches World History as an Adjunct and Dual-Enrollment Instructor at Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona. James completed his doctorate at the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He has worked as an educator at the secondary and post-secondary levels, and has also been an antiquarian bookseller. His research interests include the study of how the materiality of books shaped reading experiences in the age of early print, particularly as attested by readers’ notes, or marginalia.
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