A glowing review of Principles for Progress

Alireza Korangi’s review of Principles for Progress has been published in Persica. “..an absolute gem of a work … and a role model of great translation.”

Update: PDF from the Journal (this corrects some mistakes in the pre-publication text version below)

Click to access korangi-review-principles-for-progress-abdul-baha-mcglinn.pdf

Principles for Progress: essays on Religion and Modernity by `Abdu’l-Baha

 The works in this volume are three of Abdu’l-Baha’s socio-political essays: The Secret of Divine Civilization, Selections from A Traveller´s Narrative and The Art of Governance. There is about 80 pages of introduction outlining the historical setting and the authors and actors that Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha knew. There are also translator’s notes on various textual issues, where a short footnote would not suffice, and an index. The target audience is the same as Abdu’l-Baha’s audience: the Iranian intelligentsia and people in the West with an interest in Persia (Iran). It’s an expensive volume for individuals, but it is 400 pages, most of them in bilingual Persian/English format, making it suitable for the student of Persian, and also for the many Persians who find the literary Persian of the Qajar era difficult to read.

This is the third bilingual book in modern Iranian Studies that I have done, and the second for the Iranian Studies Series. They’ve been well-received.

Order from Leiden University Press (71.50 euros); Amazon USA ($92); University of Chicago ($85) (as at October 2021)

My further description of the book and some images follow …

The future of religions

One of the friends asked:

What is the ideal future envisioned in Baha’i religion? Is it a global order in which the world is composed of many diverse religions, each tolerant of one another, and the Baha’i just one amongst many? Or would the Baha’i be the organizing principle?

750 muskets

[Last revised, April 2019]
Did a regiment of 750 musketmen line up to execute the Bab, in a barracks square in Tabriz, and all miss their target? Early accounts, and those closest to Tabriz, do not say that a whole regiment, or 750 men specifically, constituted the firing squad. Later reports, in the Bahai Writings, do say this. Here’s how Abdu’l-Baha tells the story, in E.G. Browne’s translation):

By one rope the Báb was suspended and by the other rope Aqa Muhammad-‘Ali, both being firmly bound in such wise that the head of that young man was on the Báb’s breast. The surrounding housetops billowed with teeming crowds. A regiment of soldiers ranged itself in three files. The first file fired; then the second file, and then the third file discharged volleys. From the fire of these volleys a mighty smoke was produced. When the smoke cleared away they saw that young man standing and the Báb seated by the side of His amanuensis Aqa Siyyid Husayn in the very cell from the staircase of which they had suspended them. To neither one of them had the slightest injury resulted.
(Abdu’l-Baha, A Traveller’s Narrative, p. 26-7)