Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage

B A H Á’ Í C H A I R F O R W O R L D P E A C E L E C T U R E S A N D E S S AY S 1 9 9 4­­­- 2 0 0 5

RE TRIEVING OUR SPIRITU AL HERITAGE

by S U H E I L B U S H R U I

B A H Á’ Í C H A I R LECTURES AN

RE TR O SPIR HE R by

S u h e i l

B u s h r u i

Foreword by John Townshend Introduction by John Grayzel Edited by Michael Dravis

by S U H E I

Bahá’í Publishing 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091-2844 Copyright © 2012 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States All rights reserved. Published 2012 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ 15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bushrui, Suheil B. Retrieving our spiritual heritage : Baha’i Chair for world peace: lectures and essays, 1994–2005 / by Suheil Bushrui ; foreword by John Townshend ; introduction by John Grayzel ; edited by Michael Dravis. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61851-016-7 1. Bahai Faith. 2. Religions—Relations. 3. Religious ethics.

4. Religion and culture. 5. Values. I. Dravis, Michael. II. Title.

BP375.B87 2012 297.9’3—dc23 2012018634

Cover design by Andrew Johnson Book design by Patrick Falso Additional editorial work by Christopher J. Martin

In memory of Judge Jim Nelson and in honor of his dear wife, Judge Dorothy Nelson, without whose joint efforts the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland would never have been established or consolidated.

Contents Foreword by John Townshend................................................. 1 Introduction by John Grayzel................................................. 7 1 / Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage:.................................. 23 A Challenge of Our Time 2 / The Spiritual Foundation of Human Rights.....................61 3 / A Response to the President of Ireland............................91 4 / World Peace and Interreligious Understanding. ..........101 5 / Education as Transformation:.........................................111 A Bahá’í Model of Education for Unity 6 / Globalization and the Bahá’í Community.......................131 in the Muslim World 7 / The Unity of Vision and Ethic:...................................... 143 Values and the Workplace 8 / Environmental Ethics: A Bahá’í Perspective.................. 163 9 / ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Spiritual Foundation................... 197 of the American Dream 10 / The United Nations and World Order. ...................... 223 vii

c o nt e nts

11 / The Ethics of Globalization: A Bahá’í Perspective...... 249 12 / The Opening of the Academic Mind:............................ 271 The Challenges Facing a Culture in Crisis 13 / Heritage: Poetry and Archeology.................................313 as the Common Language of the Past, the Present, and the Future 14 / An Address Given at The House of Lords.................... 337 Notes......................................................................................341

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Foreword

John Townshend Dean, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences University of Maryland It is my great pleasure to contribute the Foreword to this important collection of lectures and essays by Professor Suheil Bushrui, formerly the founding holder of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace (1993–2006) and, currently, the founding holder of the George and Lisa Zakhem Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace (2006– present). From an institutional perspective, Professor Bushrui more than assured his legacy when he chose to crown his distinguished, nearly 60-year vocation as a teacher by launching, financially securing, and consolidating not just one but two academic peace chairs. The work of these chairs in the areas of teaching, research, and development has been of incalculable benefit to the University of Maryland community—faculty, administrators and, above all, students.

From an intellectual perspective, over the long arc of his career Professor Bushrui has authored an impressive body of scholarship in fields such as Anglo-Irish literature, the life of Kahlil Gibran, and Bahá’í studies. These works constitute, in effect, a bequest to 1

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his students and the wider world, and it is therefore fitting that a selection of his lectures and essays dating from his tenure at the Bahá’í Chair has now been gathered together, for the first time, in the pages of this book.

Viewed collectively, I believe that the great and enduring worth of Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage resides in its broad focus on the value of values.* For Suheil Bushrui, values—which he defines as ageless principles like the duty to love our neighbors—serve as indispensable connectors bracing the frame of society on all levels: individual, community, national, and global. From his perspective, values, or more specifically shared values, can help religious communities achieve internal and external reconciliation through mutual understanding. In this sense, interfaith dialogue based on the identification and dissemination of shared values is an essential prerequisite for the construction of a viable world order in the twenty-first century.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, in Retrieving Our Spiri­ tual Heritage Professor Bushrui argues that values are “shared” in two critical senses: first, they can enable diverse communities to cohere into a harmonious whole; and second, they are bridges between humanity’s present and past. Ancient values like tolerance, having withstood the test of time, still resonate today. In short, as I interpret the essays that follow, they point to the need to emphasize values as a means of creating a cultural unity for today and a

* This phrase is borrowed from the title of a festschrift produced in honor of Professor Bushrui: The Value of Values: The Word, The Spirit, and The World, ed.

Mehrdad Massoudi (College Park: University Press of Maryland, 2005).

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temporal unity between humanity’s history and its contemporary experience.

From the vantage point of academia, social scientists would do well to attune themselves to the importance of values as explicated in Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage. If nothing else, receptivity to the values-based approach championed by Professor Bushrui can help scholars explain the world with added depth and nuance. For example, in public remarks delivered in the last few years—and, therefore, not included in the present collection—Professor Bushrui has asserted that the economic turmoil wracking countries worldwide is not, at its root, a financial crisis but rather is a values crisis. In this reading, the financial disaster is a symptom not the cause, and the long-term solution resides in a recommitment to ethical values by leaders in all walks of life—including politics, business, and education.

Can a focus on values actually help chart a course out of crisis?

During the 1980s, in Lebanon, Professor Bushrui had the opportunity to test this very question. In that period, he served as senior adviser for cultural affairs to Lebanon’s president, Amine Gemayel.

Years later, President Gemayel praised Professor Bushrui’s work in these terms: As my principal Cultural Advisor, Professor Bushrui’s dedication to ethical and spiritual values impressed everyone he worked with, whether in the Presidential Palace, the universities, or society at large. He gained unique credibility among Lebanon’s diverse confessional communities by dint of his sincerity, objectivity, and commitment to national unity.

Even when dealing with the most sensitive matters, Profes3

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sor Bushrui conducted his mission with singular subtlety and effectiveness. His work in the field of conflict resolution and inter-cultural reconciliation has been outstanding and recognized as such internationally. It was during my Presidency that the Republic and people of Lebanon recognized Professor Bushrui’s extraordinary gifts of mind and spirit, academic achievements, and great services to the country by awarding him the Lebanese Order of Merit.

After helping Lebanon navigate through its tribulations, Professor Bushrui moved on to the relative quiet of the University of Maryland, where he actively shared a vision of peacemaking with universal relevance. During the years covered by Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage (1994–2005), the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace under his leadership accrued an exceptional record of achievement.

The Chair, for example, received national and international recognition in the form of awards and appointments. It organized conferences and seminars, many of them in collaboration with prominent institutions, both academic and non-academic. Professor Bushrui was invited to speak at numerous prestigious venues, such as the European Parliament, the British House of Lords, and the Prince of Wales’s Foundation. The Chair presented and circulated a series of Annual Lectures, each delivered by a well-known personality and addressing a major issue of global concern. Finally, the Chair produced well-regarded publications on a wide variety of topics related to its mission and offered award-winning courses at the University of Maryland. The Chair’s flagship undergraduate course, “The Spiritual Heritage of the Human Race”—which is still offered to this day—received the first Temple of Understand4

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ing Interfaith Education Award for outstanding work in the field of interfaith education.

For those such as myself who are privileged to know Suheil Bushrui personally, it is gratifying that those values which informed Professor Bushrui’s work as holder of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace are the same values illuminated so lucidly in Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage. This collection, then, is both an intellectual record of a specific time and a guidebook for meeting the challenges of times to come.

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Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage: A C h a l l e n g e o f O u r Ti m e Th e I n a u g u r a l L e c t u r e o f t h e Bahá’í Chair for World Peace

Introductory Note This lecture was originally published as “Retrieving Our Spiritual Heritage: A Challenge for Our Time,” (College Park, MD: The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, 1994). It was delivered on 3 March 1994 as the first in the Annual Bahá’í Chair for World Peace Lecture Series orga­ nized under the auspices of the Center for Interna­tional Development and Conflict Management. It is printed here in an extended form, with the restoration of some pas­sages and quotations omitted in the spoken text on account of time constraints.

The paper, in its entirety, owes its life, inspira­tion, and phraseology to the writings of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, and to the state­ments of the Universal House of Justice, particularly 23

r e tri e ving o ur spiritual h e ritag e

the message entitled The Promise of World Peace (Wilmette, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985). Most of the Bahá’í terminology and phrase­ ology in English derive from the two sources mentioned above. The author freely used such terminology and phraseology without full docu­ mentation in order not to cre­ate a text that may prove cumbersome for the general reader.

The lecture itself is a direct response to President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Address of 25 January 1994, in which the President sug­ gested that the nation’s problems are “rooted in the loss of values,” and called for the nation to “change from within.” This crisis in values and the need for transformation demand a spiritual regeneration that tran­ scends all racial, religious, and social barriers and divisions.

By his remarks, President Clinton drew attention to what had be­ come widely recognized as a national debate on values and on the need for inner transformation on the part of the nation. The University cannot, by virtue of its respon­sibilities and mission, remain outside this debate. The fol­lowing pages may be regarded as a contribution to the debate, and as an attempt on the part of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace to create a forum within the Univer­sity for a serious and thoughtful exchange of ideas on the subject by students, faculty, and members of the public.

I Behold the disturbances which, for many a long year, have afflicted the earth, and the perturbation that hath seized its peoples. It hath either been ravaged by war, or tormented by sudden and unforeseen calamities. Though the world is encompassed with misery and distress, yet no man hath paused

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a chall e ng e f o r o ur tim e

to reflect what the cause or source of that may be. Whenever the True Counselor uttered a word in admon­ishment, lo, they all denounced Him as a mover of mischief and rejected His claim. How bewildering, how confusing is such behavior! No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united.

—Bahá’u’lláh1 Our world is filled with calamities, chaos, and convul­sions. We are in the eye of a storm, encompassed on all sides by fearful evidences of its power and fury. The complex nature and rapid pace of the dramatic changes that ceaselessly unfold before our eyes often make it dif­ficult for us to understand the global society we inhabit. Now as never before, through developments in media, communications, and information technology, we witness the crushing realities of life in other quarters of the globe, and hear the anguished cries of a suffering humanity. Environmental vandalism, extremes of poverty and wealth, suffocating mechanization, population explo­ sions, war, disease, hunger, injustice—these are the grim specters that parade before us and which, palliated though they may be by the anesthetizing effect of the mass media, must increasingly engulf every one of us, fellow-citizens as we all are of a single shrinking neighbor­hood, the emerging global village, our planet Earth.

The recent widespread resurgence of fundamentalism, racism, and nationalism are grim reminders of just how fragile and unstable is this world of ours. Humanity is at war with itself on every front. A world that spawns intolerance, ignorance, exploitation,

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fanaticism, ter­rorism, corruption—this is a world poised for self­ destruction. The prevailing world order is lamentably defective and is incapable of exorcising the specters of war, hunger, and disease.

Throughout the course of this century, human life has been revolutionized by changes on a vast and un­precedented scale. The extent of our technological attainments is stunning. We can, on the one hand, explore into the far reaches of space, and on the other delve into the innermost heart of the atom. For the first time in human history, we are able to view our planet from limitless space.

Who is not moved when he sees the breathtaking photographs of this ineffably beautiful and fragile habitation of ours as it appears from outer space? To Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut, the view of our planet was a glimpse of the divine.2 Science shows us that our planet is sustained by an intricate and mysterious web of interdependency. There is an overarching unity and within its compass all things are connected.

In the past, profoundly aware of these delicate webs of relationship, the indigenous peoples of the world lived harmoniously with their surroundings. The impact of European civilization in its voracious, savage, and contemptuous disregard for these ancient cultures has, however, had a devastating effect. In 1855, after the American government had violated a treaty promising his people land, Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe addressed these words to the then President of the United States, emphasizing the sanctity of the land to his people: Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every clearing and wood, is holy in the memory

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