Religion, Orientalism and Modernity: Mahdi Movements of Iran and South Asia

345 Pages·2022·4.832 MB·English

by  Geoffrey Nash

Religion, Orientalism and Modernity
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Edinburgh Historical Studies of Iran and the Persian World
Published in association with Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali, Founder and Chair,
Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute
Series General Editor: Stephanie Cronin, Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Research
Fellow, University of Oxford
Series Advisory Board: Professor Janet Afary (UC Santa Barbara), Professor Abbas
Amanat (Yale University), Professor Touraj Atabaki (International Institute of
Social History), Dr Joanna de Groot (University of York), Professor Vanessa Martin
(Royal Holloway, University of London), Professor Rudi Matthee (University of
Delaware) and Professor Cyrus Schayegh (The Graduate Institute, Geneva)
Covering the history of Iran and the Persian world from the medieval period to the
present, this series aims to become the pre-eminent place for publication in this
field. As well as its core concern with Iran, it extends its concerns to encompass
a much wider and more loosely defined cultural and linguistic world, to include
Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Xinjiang and northern India. Books in the
series present a range of conceptual and methodological approaches, looking not
only at states, dynasties and elites, but at subalterns, minorities and everyday life.
Published and forthcoming titles
The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad
Hamid Dabashi
The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination
Rebecca Ruth Gould
Religion, Orientalism and Modernity: Mahdi Movements of Iran and South Asia
Geoffrey Nash
Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900
Kevin L. Schwartz
Muslim–Christian Polemics in Safavid Iran
Alberto Tiburcio
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ehsipw
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Religion, Orientalism and
Modernity
Mahdi Movements of Iran and South Asia
Geoffrey Nash
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Geoffrey Nash, 2022
Cover image: The Knighting of Abdul Baha, Haifa, Palestine, April 27, 1920, courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons
Cover design: Bekah Dey and Stuart Dalziel
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The right of Geoffrey Nash to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Notes on Transliteration viii
1 Introduction 1
2 Contexts and Issues 25
3 Race and Religion in Gobineau’s Persia 45
4 Ernest Renan’s Search for a Religion of Modernity 69
5 Edward Granville Browne and the Writing of Babi Narratives 96
6 Empire and Orient: Baha’is in Russian Transcaspia and Palestine 123
7 Orientalism and Modernity in Baha’i and Ahmadi writings 156
8 Muslim Responses and a Future for Mahdi Movements 212
Notes 237
Bibliography 296
Index 320
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Acknowledgements
Since Richard King’s excellent study Orientalism and Religion opened up
postcolonial readings in the field of religious studies, to my knowledge his
approach has yet to be applied to the three movements from the Islamicate
world under review here. I began to collect the materials incorporated into
the present book for a seminar entitled ‘Can Religions make Peace?’ held at
Goldsmith’s, University of London in 2002. However the gestation period
for the issues it debates stretches back a further twenty years to the time
when, as a post-doctoral researcher, I published a short book on the persecu-
tion of the Baha’i community of Iran. Six years after this appeared, Dr Denis
MacEoin referred to it in an article dealing with a similar topic, pointing out
my representation of Shi‘i Islam as typical of ‘the way in which the Baha’is
themselves have adopted an essentially orientalist vision of their own com-
munity and of Iranian society’. It is to Denis that I owe much in terms of the
development of my thought on the subject on which this book is based. That
is not, however, to lay the blame on his shoulders for some of my views on
the modern Middle East over which he and I are now likely to diverge. None-
theless, Denis’s work on the Iranian Babis and Baha’is, substantively present
in his collection of essays The Messiah of Shiraz, has to be the foundation on
which any critical evaluation of the topic area covered in my work would still
need to build.
Similarly, but for different reasons, the scholarship of Dr Moojan Momen
has also been vital to my work. From his readings of Baha’i history I also
diverge but for my part there is nothing lost when it comes to the respect I
hold for the honesty behind the positions he holds. His painstaking accumu-
lation of detailed and extensive knowledge on Baha’i and Shi‘i history and
their major themes is indispensable for any researcher on these topics. I also
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acknowledgements | vii
owe a great debt of thanks to Dr Stephen Lambden and Dr Seena Fazel both
as scholars and for the seminars in Baha’i studies which they have organised
and which I have attended in Newcastle and Oxford, respectively.
Portions of this book have been delivered as papers at these seminar series.
Part of Chapter 4 was published as ‘Aryan and Semite in Ernest Renan and
Matthew Arnold’s Quest for the Religion of Modernity’, Religion and Literature,
46.1 (2014), pp. 25–50.
To the library staff at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Univer-
sity of London where I spent many hours researching this book I owe thanks,
and I am very grateful too to Dr Amina Yaqin for her collegiate spirit in help-
ing me during my period as Research Associate at SOAS.
I would also like to thank Dr Reza Zia-Ibrahimi, an outstanding repre-
sentative of a younger generation of scholars of Iranian cultural history, who
gave his support at the proposal stage and whose perspectives have been of
great help to me.
To Daniel O’Donoghue for his fine translations of Gobineau and the spe-
cial insight he has brought to the Frenchman’s thought-world, I am greatly
indebted. Thanks are also due to Dr Peter Shambrock and Dr Moya Tönnies
for supplying material on, and helping me to improve my understanding of,
Britain’s role in Palestine during the Mandate period.
To my dear friend Dr Khalil Rashidian formerly of Durham University,
I am greatly indebted for the hours and years during which I have been able
to share his insights and imbibe his deep love of Iran and its culture.
Lastly, all my love goes to Mina, for her longsuffering endurance of my
engagement in a project of which she, in her innate state of enlightenment,
is beyond the need.
Durham, England
May 2021
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Notes on Transliteration
Arabic words feature in large numbers in Persian and Urdu. In the main,
spellings of proper names are used as they commonly appear in the literature,
for example, Khwaja Kamaluddin, Bashiruddin Ahmad, Maulana Muhammad
Ali, Mohammad Reza, Quratul Ayn, Rashid Rida, Abdul Hamid, Al-e Ahmad,
Nizam-i Nau, Ahmadiyya, Suleymaniya, taziya. Diacritics are largely omitted,
so ‘Abdu’l-Baha is written Abdul Baha; ‘Ali Shari‘ati is Ali Shariati; but they
are retained in Baha’i, Shi‘i, and a few other cases. Transliterated words are
italicised only when unfamiliar to the general reader, for example, mashriq
al-adhkar, mazhar-i ilahi, mubahala, risalih, but jihad not jihad; ulama not
ulama; umma not umma.
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Nothing can be less philosophical than to apply semi-criticism to narratives
conceived [of as] beyond all criticism.
Ernest Renan, The Future of Science, pp. 42–3
For ‘Orientalism’ consists of those Western knowledge practices in the mod-
ern era whose emergence made possible for the first time the notion of a
single world as a space populated by distinct civilizational complexes, each
in possession of its own tradition, the unique expression of its own forms of
national ‘genius’.
Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures, p. 24
Fundamentalists are not, however, very receptive to the notion of limita-
tions, nor to their belief system having to be updated to take account of
historical change.
Stuart Sim, Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age of Dogma, p. 165
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