Bahá'í History: July 19. On this date in 1986, "the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States formally dissolved the Local Spiritual Assembly (LSA) of the Baha'is of Los Angeles, then a community of some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha'i communities."

July 19. On this date in 1986, "the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States formally dissolved the Local Spiritual Assembly (LSA) of the Baha'is of Los Angeles, then a community of some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha'i communities."
Juan Cole's article "Race, Immorality and Money in the American Baha'i Community: Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly", published in the journal Religion, "analyses the dissolution of the Baha'i local assembly of Los Angeles in 1986–88 by the National Assembly. Official explanations for this move focused on lapses in morality and administrative discipline, but local interviewees, as well as some official pronouncements, suggest that the conflict had two roots: the globalisation of the community and resultant ethnic conflict among whites, African–Americans and newly immigrant Iranians; and national/local conflicts over power and money. Low-information elections, the unaccountability of elected officials, censorship and difficulties in acknowledging social conflict were the causes of these episodes in the Baha'i religion."

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Race, Immorality and Money in the American Baha'i Community:

Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly

Juan R. I. Cole

Abstract

This article analyzes the dissolution of the Baha'i local assembly of Los Angeles in 1986-1988 by the National Assembly. Official explanations for this move focused on lapses in morality and administrative discipline. But local interviewees, as well as some official pronouncements, suggest that the conflict had two roots: The globalization of the community and resultant ethnic conflict among whites, African-Americans and newly immigrant Iranians; and national/local conflicts over power and money. The article concludes that low-information elections, the unaccountability of elected officials, censorship, and difficulties in acknowledging social conflict, make for such episodes in the Baha'i religion.

�� Where could Iranian-Americans, African-Americans and whites meet regularly for worship, negotiating each other�s very different value system in the globalized world of diasporas and New Religious Movements?�� The answer is, in the Baha�i community of Los Angeles.� An analysis of a crisis in that community will tell us a great deal not only about the Baha�i faith but about how an immigrant faith that has attracted many converts deals with the resultant communal tensions.�� On July 19, 1986, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha�is of the United States formally dissolved the Local Spiritual Assembly (LSA) of the Baha�is of Los Angeles, then a community of some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha�i communities. The national authorities replaced the disbanded local assembly with a six-person administrative committee that was to report directly to the national Baha�i headquarters in Wilmette, Illinois, so that in effect the national body took direct control of the affairs of the Baha�is of Los Angeles. This action was thought by local Baha�is at the time �unprecedented.� [1]� Although local assemblies are routinely dissolved, it is usually because their members have flagrantly broken Baha�i law, which, with perhaps one exception, was not the case here.�� Why, then, did the NSA act in such a direct and forceful fashion?� What goals did the national body wish to accomplish through this intervention?� What problems had the local spiritual assembly faced that the national body felt it simply could not deal with?� Three admitted major areas of concern later emerged, having to do with finances, race relations, and immorality.� Other sources suggest that concern for the power and primacy of the national assembly played a part. Which, if any, of these causes was determinative?

�� The Baha�i faith came to the U.S. in the 1890s from the Middle East, where it had been founded in 1863 by an Iranian notable and prophet, Baha�u�llah (1817-1892).[2]� He taught the eventual advent of world peace, the need for collective security, the unity of humankind, the unity of the religions, and the need to replace absolute monarchy with parliamentary, constitutional government.� His son, `Abdu�l-Baha (1844-1921), came to the U.S. in 1912-1913 to help spread the religion, and he was succeeded by his grandson, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, 1921-1957.[3]� From the 1920s, the relatively liberal, freewheeling early American Baha�i community, which had no clergy, began to be transformed by the religion�s leaders into a much more disciplined, organic sort of body.� It was demanded that all publications of Baha�is about their religion must be vetted by the Baha�i assemblies at the appropriate level.� Baha�is were gradually forbidden to utter any public criticism of their religious bodies� policies or decisions.� The collective, nine-man international head of the religion from 1963, the Universal House of Justice came to be considered infallible in all its doings by most American Baha�is. The American community probably now consists of about 60,000 adult believers, though the authorities claim twice that number of adherents.� The Los Angeles community dates from the early twentieth century, and is the burial site of Thornton Chase, widely regarded as the first American Baha�i.

�� As Mike Davis has contended, Los Angeles is a city of contradictions and contrasts, above all between the poor and the rich, but also ethnically and occupationally.[4]� Nowhere is this axiom more true than in the sphere of religion.� Most of the world religions are active in the city, and ethnic religions abound.� Its population now over nine million, swollen by a century of astonishing immigration rates, Los Angeles county is a place where 106 languages are spoken and persons of Western European descent are a minority. The reality of immigration presents enormous difficulties for religious communities.� In the words of John Gregory Dunne, �Everyone was an alien, the newcomer never an exile.� In such an environment, the idea of community did not naturally flourish, since community by definition built on deposits of shared experience.�[5]� Conflicts abound between members of distinct waves of immigration, and between social groups whose relative importance had shifted in the New World.� The Sri Lankan Buddhists of� Los Angeles experienced a bitter schism in the 1970s over lay versus monastic control of the community.[6]�� Shi`ite and Sunni Muslims uneasily coexist in some Los Angeles mosque congregations.[7]� It is therefore no surprise that the Los Angeles Baha�i community should experience difficulties that arose in part from the immigration of an ethnically distinct group of believers.

�� This study is based in part on unpublished interviews and drafts done by anonymous reporters for the short-lived Baha�i magazine, dialogue, which was forbidden to publish these materials by the NSA, as well as upon follow-up interviewing with members of the Los Angeles Baha�i community (I was myself a member of the Southern California Baha�i community during the period 1979-81 and 1983-1984). [8]� To understand the following events it is necessary to have some notion of Baha�i power structures, which are lay and either elected or appointed by elected bodies. The nine-member local spiritual assemblies are elected directly, without nominations or campaigning, by secret ballot and universal adult suffrage among all the registered believers in a particular municipality or other civil unit.� Local communities meet every nineteen days at �feast,� actually a combination worship service and church business meeting that is closed to non-believers. The National Spiritual Assembly (NSA) is indirectly elected, insofar as individual Baha�is vote every fall for a delegate to the annual April National Convention, where the delegates elect the nine-member national body.� Every five years since 1963, the national spiritual assemblies of the world have elected an international or �universal� house of justice, with its seat in Haifa, Israel, which is the religion�s highest executive and legislative body.� Baha�i governance is characterized by an episcopal ecclesiastical structure and by demands for conformity and obedience to �the Covenant.�[9]� The authoritarianism characteristic of the upper levels of the organization, however, is in contradiction with the relative freedom believers usually exercise at the local level in creating Baha�i subcultures and electing local officers. The NSA intervenes occasionally to dissolve any local spiritual assemblies, the members of which it deems morally corrupt (or, it is alleged, which are thought insufficiently loyal to the national).� The Los Angeles assembly faced many unique problems, given the unusual and vast geography of the city, the relatively large size of the community (in U.S. Baha�i terms), and the need for feasts to be held in thirteen area locations.� These area feasts perpetuated ethnic and economic divisions of long standing.

�� The announcement of the dissolution of the Los Angeles local assembly was made to a large convocation of believers at the recently-completed Baha�i Center, by then NSA member James Nelson, a Reagan-appointed Los Angeles municipal court judge.� The initial reasons given for this step had to do with what was felt to be widespread immorality in the community and the local body�s refusal or inability to deal with it.� Nelson announced,

The Local Spiritual Assembly . . . has found itself disabled from performing the functions of guiding the community in taking care of its administrative affairs.� Over too long a period, instances of bad behavior in the community have gone unrecognized or, if recognized, uncorrected . . . This runs the gamut from fraud and corruption to gambling, to sexual deviations, to---well, all of the things that can possibly go wrong, including drug abuse�things which every urban society has in ample measure and to which our community is not immune.[10]

In fact, immorality was only one of a number of concerns that drove the dissolution, and it, like the entire event, was deeply entwined with ethnic conflict in the community.� That is, Nelson�s casting of the issue as one of simple morality and local capitulation to it had the effect of universalizing the conflicts and stripping them of their rootedness in financial difficulties and in identity politics among Baha�is in the city.�

�� The immediate reaction of the old local spiritual assembly members was shock and disbelief.� Lois Willows, who had been the corresponding secretary, observed, �I�m sure we didn�t do as good a job as we should have, but we did as good a job as we could have . . . My feeling is our problems were no grater than those encountered in other large communities in the United States.�[11]� Most former LSA members, including all four Iranians, declined to speak for the record.� Manila Lee, a long-time member of the local assembly and a respected elderly African-American school teacher, had resigned from the assembly in mid-April, 1986, but because that body was slow to announce her departure she was reelected on the twenty-first of that month anyway.� Lee thought the dissolution �should have been done a year ago.�� She recalled a closed ninety-minute meeting of seven members of the NSA with the Los Angeles local assembly held to discuss the decision to dissolve the local body, chaired by James Nelson.� �One assembly member asked, �What about our prestige?�� she reported.� �Nelson replied, �Your prestige is way down.�� She criticized some members for �looking for prestige,� but this reaction seems too unsympathetic.[12]�� It was perfectly understandable for the elected members of the Local Spiritual Assembly to be concerned about what the dissolution would mean for their reputations in the local Baha�i community.��

�� Nelson�s oral declaration of the dissolution was followed up by a letter to the Baha�is of Los Angeles from Robert H. Henderson, the full-time secretary-general of the NSA.� Henderson, an African-American former businessman elected to the national body in 1984, was from a Baha�i family and was brought up in Los Angeles.� These events therefore had special meaning for him, though he had left the city some time previously.� Henderson wrote that �after prolonged and agonizing consultation� the NSA had �concluded that the situation� required �remedial action.�[13]� The first step was the July 19 dissolution of the local assembly.� He added, �the major reason for this regrettable but necessary action was the inability of the Spiritual Assembly to cope with the demands of the administration of the community�s spiritual and operational affairs . . ."� He explained that in order to revitalize the community, the NSA had appointed an �administrative committee,� to which local believers were to give their �wholehearted support and cooperation.�� He concluded by quoting a letter of Baha�i holy figure `Abdu�l-Baha to the early Los Angeles Baha�i community, in which he urges them to promulgate the religion, and to remain firm in �the Covenant� (most Baha�is interpret the covenant as unswerving obedience and submission to the Baha�i ecclesiastical authorities).

�� The members of the six-person �administrative committee� that the NSA put in charge of the Los Angeles community were hand-picked from neighboring communities.� But one problem in addressing the issue entirely through outsiders, with local elections in abeyance, was that there would be no obvious way to train potential new Local Spiritual Assembly members from within Los Angeles. In order to aid in the creation of a new cohort of potential leaders, the NSA in August of 1986 appointed a �Council of Nineteen� local Baha�is to �oversee the day-to-day teaching, administration, finance, consolidation and proclamation activities of the Los Angeles Baha�i Community.�[14]� At the Feast of Asma� on 19 August, long-time NSA member Firuz Kazemzadeh (and then professor of Russian history at Yale University) was asked when fresh elections for an LSA would be held and replied that it �perhaps will be determined through a process of consultation between the Council of 19, the administrative committee, the community at large and the NSA.� It cannot be decided locally.� It will be decided jointly.�[15]� Dialogue interviewed Mark Sisson, who had served on the Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles from 1983 till 1984, when he had resigned in frustration, and who was the only former LSA member to be appointed to the Council of Nineteen.� He explained that �The Council of 19 are trainees, as it were, in preparation for assembly members.�[16]� It was expected that local Baha�is with leadership potential would be rotated onto the Council of Nineteen to create a wider base of administrative experience.� Sisson expressed concern, however, about the publication of the pictures of the Council of Nineteen on the cover of the September issue of the Los Angeles Baha�i Journal.� In Baha�i elections, campaigning and canvassing are supposed to be strictly forbidden, and this photograph appeared to many to function as a subtle campaign poster.� Sisson admitted,

This is a concern of many of the council members themselves.� And this has been voiced by myself and others.� I�ve been really concerned about this issue . . . I was very uncomfortable with the fact that our pictures were plastered all over the journal.� I am concerned with the fact that we are constantly referred to as council members before the community at large.� However, it is premature to say whether or not the outcome will be . . another crude form of electioneering.� It will result in that if the Baha�i community at large does not pursue their individual and independent responsibility as active members of the community.[17]

In fact, the techniques of subtle campaigning had long been mastered by several members of the NSA, who had become perpetual incumbents, so the spread of these tactics to a large urban community is not surprising.

�� Around the same time as the Local Spiritual Assembly was dissolved, one of its members, an Iranian refugee and ex-academic, faced possible Baha�i administrative sanctions over alleged financial irregularities in his business.� This simultaneity of charges raised the question of whether the businessman�s actions had helped precipitate the NSA�s intervention.� A dialogue correspondent wrote to Anna Lee Strasburg, head of community affairs at the national Baha�i center in Wilmette, Ill., asking, among other things,� whether it were true that:� 1) the NSA discussed the possibility of dissolving the LSA of Los Angeles as early as 1983; 2) the Universal House of Justice advised the National Assembly not to postpone the dissolution;� 3) the timing of the sanctions against the Iranian businessman and the dissolution of the LSA was coincidental.[18]� That these questions were being widely posed in the community at the time demonstrates that local Baha�is were seeking to establish some timeline and chain of authority for the dissolution.

�� Only months later, on March 14, 1987, did the general community receive a more extended explanation of what had happened, during a talk given at the local Baha�i center by NSA Secretary Robert Henderson.[19] ��He expressed regret that the NSA had felt forced to intervene, acknowledging that Baha�i values favored emphasizing the good points in an individual or body.� (Most Baha�is have a strong commitment to internal peace and quietism, and condemn backbiting or internal conflict, which might lead them to be uncomfortable with the hardline NSA actions.)� He went on to give three categories of serious problem with local administrative functioning that had precipitated the crisis.� The first was administrative and financial.� The Local Spiritual Assembly had become disorganized, even though the NSA had around 1983 appointed an executive committee to work with it.� For several months prior to the July 1986 dissolution, the local assembly of Los Angeles had neglected to keep minutes, leaving no permanent record of decisions.� Beginning in the late 1970s, the NSA had required all local assemblies to submit copies of its minutes for spot-checking at the national headquarters in Wilmette, Illinois, as a means of national oversight over local affairs. Henderson complained that the lack of minutes allowed individual LSA members to voice opinions not necessarily consistent with the majority, and allowed informal decision-making �outside the chambers of the assembly.�[20]�

�� The Local Spiritual Assembly�s financial situation had, Henderson explained, become perilous.� The Baha�i bookstore had incurred a $35,000 debt to the Baha�i Publishing Trust (an organ of the NSA), with poor bookkeeping and no effective plan to pay it off.� He alleged that evidence of pilferage had been ignored, and that the bookstore continued to operate at a loss of $1,000 per month.� The debts to the Baha�i Publishing Trust were sufficiently large that steps had had to be taken to avoid allowing them to push it into financial instability.� He added, �The financial affairs of the community were in complete disarray.� The community would have gone into bankruptcy had not certain dramatic actions ultimately been taken by the NSA through the agency of the administrative committee . . .�[21]� The NSA had appointed an executive committee of hand-picked experts to advise the Los Angeles assembly on how to reorganize its affairs, but the latter had proven �contentious� declined to take direction, even though public disagreement with higher authority is greatly disparaged among Baha�is.� A member of the LSA confirmed the financial problems, saying that by spring of 1986 less than 125 members out of the 1200 adults were contributing to the national fund because they had lost faith in the local leadership.[22]� The great expenses incurred in the building and opening of the new Baha�i center in 1983 appear also to have discouraged local congregants, insofar as they were continually dunned for increased sacrifices, with no end in sight.� Henderson did not mention the fall-off in contributions.� As we shall see below, another major money-maker for the Los Angeles community was the rental of space to a medical clinic, the collection of which the disorganization of the local assembly ultimately made impossible.� What should have been a major profit center for the national assembly had ceased contributing to Wilmette and, indeed, threatened to require investment from the center to cover local shortfalls.

�� The second general area of problems, Henderson said, had to do with the deterioration of the �social and spiritual life of the community.�� He used these words as a code for race relations and immorality.�� The Los Angeles Baha�i community consisted of about 300 African-American adults and 500 Iranians, with most of the remaining members being white (there were only two or three Latino families and no East Asian ones).� Henderson alleged that the Iranian Baha�i immigrants had not been greeted with sufficient warmth into the Los Angeles community, giving the example of the enthusiastic and self-sacrificing manner refugees from Karachi had been accepted by an Oregon community.� Another of his concerns in the area of social and spiritual dysfunction had been violations of Baha�i laws against gambling, drinking, drug use, extramarital sex, shady financial dealings, and tax evasion.� Henderson complained that most in the community had been unwilling to report such violations, where they knew of them, to the Local Spiritual Assembly.� And the assembly, even where it did learn of such behavior, had refused to take any action.� Here, two central traditionalist Baha�i norms had been violated.� There is a strong sense among conservative Baha�is that one should �report� to the authorities any behavior or speech of another Baha�i that seems out of the ordinary, that every believer should serve as a spy on all the others.� The second is that public immorality as defined by Baha�i law should be investigated by the local assembly, that the perpetrators should be cautioned, and, if they continue in the activity, they should be disfellowshipped (in Baha�i terminology, their �administrative rights� should be removed).� Those so disfellowshipped cannot attend the �Feast�--held every nineteen days, cannot vote, stand for election, give money to the religion, or even give a public talk on the Baha�i faith.� Henderson�s second complaint, about race relations, had to do with the African-American Baha�is.� He reminisced that in his childhood he attended the old Baha�i center on New Hampshire Avenue and that �this community was a model of interracial fellowship and unity that went way beyond anything being done anywhere, I am convinced.�[23]� He complained that this achievement had been lost, and that �gradually, the non-white members of our community began to feel estranged.�� Black Baha�i attendance at community affairs and worship meetings had somewhat declined in the 1980s.� Others at the time questioned Henderson�s idyllic portrayal of race relations among Los Angeles Baha�is in the 1950s and 1960s.

�� The final category of problem according to Henderson was a persistent set of conflicts among the members of the Los Angeles local assembly.� �Individual members of the assembly were engaged in gossip about the assembly�s affairs and engaged in public backbiting about the unwisdom of this decision and that decision.�� He stressed that the Baha�i norms called for unswerving and silent obedience even to decisions of the assembly with which one disagrees.� He further alleged that electioneering had occurred, in addition to the problem of �informal decision-making� and �backbiting.�� Criticism of a Baha�i institution by a Baha�i is considered a serious offense, and even if private can sometimes result in the loss of administrative rights.�� For it to emanate from a member of an institution was even more threatening.

�� Henderson concluded by blaming the problems not only on the nine members of the local assembly, but on the entire community, in part for not following the LSA.� He said that there would be no election in Ridvan (April) of 1997 for a new Local Spiritual Assembly.� When asked by an audience member what needed to be done, Henderson replied that during his four years on the national assembly he had seen other local spiritual assemblies dissolved, and had seen other local communities �restored.�� He said that the ethnic problems had to be resolved, and that the blacks, Iranians and Hispanics had to be brought back together as parts of the family, and that the community members had to engage in �putting the faith first,� devoting themselves to proselytizing (�teaching� the faith), and �build bridges of understanding, connections from one heart to another.�[24]

�� Henderson�s account of why the local assembly had been dissolved was challenged at the time and by my Angeleno interviewees years later.� The first gap in the explanations given has to do with the issues of power, control, and conflicts between local assemblies and the NSA.� The Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles had had a long-standing reputation as insufficiently obedient to the national body, as too willing to take the initiative and to strike out on its own.� In the 1970s and until the early 1980s its members had been relatively youthful and probably affected by the youth culture of the 1960s, which was despised by conservatives in Wilmette.� Under this group the decision had been taken to build a new Baha�i center on the edge of a middle class black neighborhood, a project guaranteed to divert substantial resources to local needs, which was therefore disliked by some NSA members.� Although this group of young people was perceived as somewhat maverick by Wilmette, they were also acknowledged to be relatively efficient and intelligent about avoiding a complete breakdown in relations with the national body.� In the 1980s an older group of leaders was elected, including several Iranian-American expatriates.� These leaders maintained the tradition of relative local autonomy, but were less adept politically.� They inherited all the problems of finances and staffing related to the opening of the new local Baha�i center in 1983, and appear to have been unequal to the challenge.� In 1984, Robert Henderson was mysteriously elected to the NSA (in a way filling a slot vacated by his mother, Wilma Ellis), and he became its paid, full-time secretary-general.� He was concerned, in tandem with authoritarian older members of the national assembly such as Firuz Kazemzadeh (who later married Ellis) and James Nelson, to assert the authority of the NSA over local bodies.� To that end, the NSA ordered the dissolution of a number of local spiritual assemblies, and threatened others, such as San Francisco, with this step.� They imposed national control by means of appointed �Administrative Committees,� and took advantage of their moment of local power subtly to promote candidates for local office who were acceptable to them.� The failure of a local spiritual assembly to contribute any substantial sums to the national fund may well have helped determine which local bodies were dissolved.� Certainly, Los Angeles was by 1986 sending on only risible contributions to Wilmette.

�� With regard to the finances of the Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles, Henderson�s account appears to have put unusual emphasis on some factors but to have ignored others entirely.� His assertion that the Los Angeles Baha�i bookstore was $35,000 in debt was challenged by Manila Lee, the manager, as being an old figure much larger than the actual debt in 1986.� It was also alleged that this �debt� in fact included large amounts of book stock, which should rather have been counted as capital.� In addition, Lee complained that the Baha�i Publishing Trust had refused to give her the sort of discounts routinely offered to other Baha�i communities, which exacerbated her difficulty in running the bookstore profitably.� Although outside observers do agree that the bookstore was not run in good capitalist fashion, with Lee too willing to give away materials to those who pled inability to buy them, it appears that Henderson greatly exaggerated the bookstore�s straits.� On the other hand, he did not mention on this occasion the rent from the medical clinic, which had its offices in a building at the new Baha�i center complex and paid on the order of $5,000 per month.� The local assembly very badly mismanaged this office complex, leading the physician renter to refuse to pay, and ultimately provoking a lawsuit that he won.� Since the rent from the clinic was required to cover the costs of staffing the new Baha�i center, inability to collect it threatened in the most dire manner the finances of the local assembly.� This issue, which Henderson elided, was far more important than the bookstore.� Finally, the local assembly had decided to lend one of its members, an Iranian businessman with very shaky finances, $40,000, a step that had led one alarmed member of the assembly to contact Wilmette, which in turn led to the dissolution.� Henderson did not mention this incident.� One interviewee, responding to Henderson�s charges of incompetence against the LSA, said that he was confused when the secretary then insisted that among the problems had been the failure of the local community to follow its local assembly.� Why, he asked, should the community have followed a body so maladroit as to require dismissal?

�� With regard to race relations, Henderson�s account oversimplified an extremely complex dynamic.� The legal framework that permitted significant Iranian immigration was the 1965 change in immigration laws abolishing unequal country quotas, but the actual motivation for most Iranian immigrants to Los Angeles before the 1978-79 Revolution was largely economic.� Because of turbulence and then revolution in Iran in the 1970s, impelling emigration, the Iranian population of Los Angeles increased six-fold in that decade, and although it grew at a smaller rate in the 1980s, its rate of growth was still far higher than for other Middle Eastern groups. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of Iranians in Los Angeles grew from only a few thousand to 76,000 (29 percent of all the Iranians in the country).�� Indeed, of 285,000 Iranians in the U.S., 100,000 or over one-third lived in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.�� Jewish and Baha�i Iranians were most likely to be political refugees, whereas Muslims (for the most part actually secularists) tended to be economic immigrants.[25]

�� There had for some time been a few Iranian Baha�is in Los Angeles, mainly as a result of chain migration (following family and friends), though some were drawn by UCLA or business interests.� The arrival of several hundred Iranian Baha�is who fled from persecution at the hands of the Khomeinists from 1979 forward, however, changed the community enormously.� Some twenty percent of the new arrivals did not speak English well enough to conduct committee business in it, and wanted everything that occurred at meetings to be translated into Persian, which alienated the English speakers.� American Baha�is sometimes found the Iranian Baha�is cliquish (many of them were members of extended clans and so interrelated), and complained that the many wealthy among them tended to over-dress and to introduce class distinctions into Baha�i social relations.� Iranian Baha�is were instructed to follow American Baha�i practices, such as not rising to their feet for certain kinds of prayer.� For their part, many Iranian Baha�is felt a certain superiority to American converts, convinced that they knew better what the Baha�i faith was, though in fact many of them confused their folk customs with the high scriptural tradition.� �Persian Baha�is, in turn, take joy in pointing out, in an equally patronizing way, the faults of Western Baha�i practices, such as the inconsistencies in the observance of the Baha�i calendar and the omissions in Baha�i laws of marriage and burial.�[26]� All these things were a bit off-putting to both sides.� The overwhelming predominance in the 1980s of Iranian Baha�is in many Southern California Baha�i communities such as Santa Monica led to a drastic fall-off in the participation of American Baha�is in community events and a slowing of conversions to the religion.� (Santa Monica had had perhaps 15 Baha�is in the 1970s, many of them white converts from the youth culture with a New Age orientation; by 1981 it had some 100 Baha�is, almost all Iranians, and many of the converts had ceased participating in community events).� Contrary to what Henderson implied, the Los Angeles community, in part because of its sheer size, did much better at integrating the Iranians.[27]�

�� Manila Lee observed, �We had started (assimilation) programs around 1980-1981, and the assembly was very careful to appoint mixed committees, mixed as far as Persians and Americans.�� This effort, she said, had fallen into neglect in 1983, at a time when the local assembly was putting all its energies into the move to the new Baha�i center, preoccupied by the minutiae of financing and construction.� Lee added, that by that time,

there was no systematic plan to assimilate anything . . . we didn�t devise any means.� We lost white Americans who felt that the Persians were aggressive and encroaching and felt they heard too much translation (at feast) and all the petty excuses.� They felt that the Persians were clannish and then the objection came that the Persians were class conscious . . .� I just think we missed the mark entirely on assimilation.� We had very little development of any ethnic programs.[28]

Not only did the local Baha�i community not always work hard enough at assimilation, one contemporary Iranian-American observer suggested that Iranian Baha�is had substantial reasons not to assimilate.� (The question of whether assimilation was even a good goal does not seem to have arisen in official Baha�i discourse).� The large Iranian immigrant community of Southern California, tens of thousands strong, offered social and cultural services not available elsewhere, including cultural functions, Persian-language media, and commercial and economic services and opportunities.� These networks with non-Baha�i Iranian immigrants helped overcome feelings of homesickness and of alienation in the new, surreal setting of the city of angels, as well as helping these businessmen, shopkeepers and service workers deal with the temporary downward mobility that is the lot of most immigrants.� He felt that �historically, immigrant groups with more extensive ethnic networks, such as the Chinese and Koreans of Los Angeles, have had a greater chance for economic success in the United States.�[29]� These observations are corroborated by social scientists who have found that Middle Eastern immigrants to Los Angeles are unusually likely to be entrepreneurs, self-employed, or professionals (especially the Iranians among them) and that they proved especially resistant to assimilation, tending to congregate in their own areas within white neighborhoods.� Iranian Jews and Armenians also retained a distinct Iranian identity rather than melding in with local Jews and Armenians. [30]�� Unlike the Iranian Jews of Los Angeles, who began constructing their own synagogues, Iranian Baha�is were forced by Baha�i law to attend the feast designated for their part of the city, and were forbidden to hold separate meetings or build separate buildings, on pain of being shunned.

�� The exclusion of a fair number of Iranian Baha�is, moreover, was the fault of the international and national Baha�i authorities, who adopted policies signaling that the Iranian refugees were not supposed to be in Los Angeles.� Around 1981, Ruhiyyih Khanum (n�e Mary Maxwell) Rabbani, a Hand of the Cause or lay bishop, spoke to the community harshly, upbraiding them for settling in a such a decadent urban center, implying they should never have left Iran, and that if they had insisted on doing so should at least have had the decency to settle as missionaries in some remote village of the global South.� Many traditionalist Baha�is believe that cities are in imminent danger of evaporation.� When someone from the audience asked where they should have settled instead, she replied in Persian that it was self-evident: �Khar kih nistid� (�you are not asses�).� Many Iranian Baha�is came away from the meeting angry.� One Iranian-American observer pointed out that most Iranian Baha�is who settled in Los Angeles did so �to be close to family members,� or for �economic opportunities.�� Nevertheless, he noted, �repeated admonitions from Baha�i leaders and institutions about the dire consequences of living in Los Angeles has led to considerable confusion, thus making assimilation seem even less desirable to them,� and� added that �their choice of domicile has become a religious question� which led to a �strong sense of guilt associated with their settling in Los Angeles.�[31]�

�� The Baha�i authorities also adopted from 1983 a punitive approach to any Baha�is who escaped from Iran through the Tehran airport, since it was known that they could only have gotten visas to fly out by claiming to be Muslims.� These were disfellowshipped for at least a year upon their arrival in the U.S. in 1983-1986 (the term was even longer in the late 1980s), and many so punished for preserving their lives became disaffected and fell away from the religion.� The Universal House of Justice in Haifa felt that allowing such paper apostasies as a means of fleeing Iran might lead to a fatal weakening of Baha�i identity, and had to be strictly sanctioned.� (Escapees across the Baluchi desert into Pakistan were more acceptable, even though they had broken the law to cross the border without a visa).� Henderson and the U.S. NSA had zealously pursued punitive measures toward those who flew out of the airport, rather as if the Jewish rabbis in the early 1940s should have rigidly excommunicated any Jew who eluded Hitler by pretending to be a Catholic.� The Los Angeles LSA was notorious for overlooking these apostasies under duress and recognizing escapees as Baha�is in good standing (provided two other Baha�is could vouch for their membership in the community), so that it was ironic that it should be berated by Henderson for mistreating the Iranian Baha�is.�

�� Finally, the Baha�i national electoral system, with no formal campaigning or nominations wherein the top nine vote-getters win, is extremely vulnerable to bloc voting by a distinct group.� The U.S. NSA appears to have been worried that the large influx of Iranian Baha�is would create a new voting bloc and throw up candidates for national election, displacing current members.� In response, the NSA acted behind the scenes to close down regular scripture study sessions hosted by popular Iranian immigrant lay preachers, who were becoming prominent and therefore had a chance of being elected to the NSA.�� One contemporary writer observed,

Unlike their Jewish and Armenian compatriots, who have at times been encouraged by their leaders to preserve their traditions by means of separate meetings from their host communities, Persian Baha�is have come under considerable pressure to quickly integrate and adapt to the ways and practices of American Baha�is.� In the past five years, Persian meetings have been discouraged or banned (with the exception of memorial gatherings and fund raisers) while local Persian affairs committees have been dissolved on more than one occasion.[32]

�These actions were so successful that from 1978 when the influx of some 12,000 Iranian Baha�is began, till the eve of the twenty-first century, no Iranian Baha�i immigrant from the wave of the 1970s and 1980s was ever elected to the NSA.� That many Iranian Baha�is felt unwelcome was therefore not only the result of local Los Angeles actions.

�� With regard to the issue of immorality, what Henderson did not say was that many of those implicated in immorality were wealthy Iranian businessmen who brought with them the norms of behavior of the Pahlavi elite in Tehran under the shah.� The Tehrani Baha�i community had been thousands strong and some of them had been tightly connected to the shah and his business class.� As members of what had become an ethnic religion in Iran, they were defined in their original society by what families they came from, not by �Baha�i� behavior.� In a setting such as the United States, however, where most believers are converts, behavior becomes a crucial marker of identity. The concern about drinking and drugs was corroborated in an interview with dialogue given by former member of the Local Spiritual Assembly, Manila Lee:� �There were instances of� violations of Baha�i laws that were reported to the assembly, but the assembly failed to act . . . And then, there were some out and out cases of drunkenness that, for some reason, would die if they came to the assembly.�[33]� Of course, Americans may also have been among the transgressors of conservative Baha�i norms, but most of the talk in the early 1980s, often in Persian so as to keep it secret, was about Iranian lapses.�

�� The African-American population of Los Angeles was also undergoing enormous changes 1970-1990, during which the black population grew from about 744,000 to 927,000.� The city witnessed among the greatest rates of residential desegregation in the country during this period, with the dissimilarity index dropping from .90 in 1970 to .73 in 1990.� African-Americans became substantially more educated, and even though their earnings continued to trail those of whites and Latinos, they made the most economic improvement in this period.� Mayor Tom Bradley (in office 1973-1991) served as a symbol for this advance.� Even more than among most ethnic groups, however, African-Americans witnessed a severe bifurcation between an increasingly educated and well-off middle class and an increasingly poverty-stricken underclass.[34]� The black Baha�is tended to belong to the upwardly mobile middle class that was making such strides in this period.� Although there were problems with African-American Baha�i participation, it is not clear that these were greater than the fall-off in white attendance and giving.� The new Baha�i center was a refurbished bowling alley on the edge of a middle class African-American neighborhood, after all.� In her dialogue interview, Manila Lee traced the alienation of some African-American Baha�is to early 1984, when the new Baha�i center opened, a new staff was hired to run it, and committees were reshuffled.� The new staff was �all-white,� and African-Americans felt they had been excluded from responsible positions, especially from the financial management committee, and it had been alleged to Lee by one African-American that the whites had said blacks �don�t know anything about financing.�� She said that �blacks . . . where they�re a minority in the United States . . . are very sensitive to people�s leadership if they feel there is any basic racism,� and that the number of African-Americans who attended feast began dwindling, and those who had been active members gradually became inactive.[35]� Other African-Americans living in Los Angeles at that time also remarked that they perceived the Iranian immigrants to have brought with them prejudices against blacks, and that some of the alienation stemmed from the new mix of ethnicities in the community.[36]� Interestingly, this dynamic among non-whites was not mentioned by Henderson as a problem.� In addition, some of the 300 black Baha�i Angelenos allege that Henderson exaggerated their disaffection at that point, saying that they participated faithfully in the Gospel choir, the Sunday services at the Baha'i center, and as members on the local assembly.

�� The attempt of the NSA to intervene in local Los Angeles affairs ultimately failed.� At the Southern California district convention in October, 1986, the attendees passed a resolution with overwhelming support asking the NSA to dissolve the Administrative Committee and permit new elections for a Local Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles.� Members of the committee who were present at the convention asked that the convention�s request be sent to the Administrative Committee itself rather than to the national assembly, but this suggestion was voted down.� One interviewee recalls, �A lot of people there felt that something was wrong about having an appointed committee running the community, regardless of the fact that the NSA has appointed it and the UHJ had approved it.�� Another interviewee said of the Administrative Committee that they were �administrative types who all lived outside of Los Angeles,� and were �held in contempt� by the local community.� Even when Universal House of Justice Member Glenford Mitchell visited Los Angeles in this period, he was testily asked when the community would get its assembly back.� The interviewee remembered, �He was kind of flustered by the question and followed the party line that it was up to the local community, that if they met some (unstated) standard, the Assembly would be restored.�� Baha�i scriptures recommend parliamentary governance, and U.S. Baha�is see power exercised by unelected individuals as illegitimate.

�� By March 19, 1988, the NSA had become convinced of the failure of their highly interventionist experiment, and seven members of its members were flown to Los Angeles for a meeting at the Baha�i center to announce that annual elections for the Local Spiritual Assembly would be resumed that April.� Only about 200 of the community�s some 1200 adult members attended the meeting, which seems likely to have been meant as a sign of local disgruntlement.[37]� Henderson said that many of the �mechanical� administrative problems had been corrected.� He was referring at least in part to the financial situation, both of the local treasury and of the Baha�i bookstore:� �I remember meeting with the auditors of the NSA.� They wanted us to write off the debt of the Los Angeles bookstore as a bad debt.� And, we said, in Baha�i terms, there�s no such thing as a bad debt.� Even if I don�t have the ability to pay now, I�m spiritually obligated to pay.�[38]� He noted that the bookstore debt� of �nearly $40,000� was �repaid in full� and it was now operating in the black.� He also said that the bills of the Los Angeles Baha�i community had been paid off, even though this effort had been impeded by the previous poor record keeping and financial disarray. Even the permit to hold meetings at the Baha�i center had lapsed, and until renewed the gatherings there had been technically illegal.� He continued to have financial concerns, since although the community broke even, it did so in large part because of the rent it received from the medical clinic.� He said that without the rental income, the Los Angeles community would run an annual deficit of between $70,000 and $100,000.� �That is, if we were solely relying on contributions from the members, we would not be able to meet our financial responsibilities.�� He complained that only about 200 Baha�is regularly contributed to the local fund.� �That is just not enough.�[39]� He also had concerns about attendance at the nineteen-day feast, which had jumped to 700 or about fifty percent soon after the assembly dissolution, but �now averages 450� with some feasts as low as 350.� He noted that there had been 50 conversions (�declarations�), and that a �black teaching task force� (for proselytizing among African-Americans) was operating, and that work still needed to be done on �assimilating� the Iranians.

�� Pressed on what had gone wrong, Henderson admitted, �Part of the (problem) is that we don�t know how to do this.� We don�t know about the process of building a Baha�i community in a metropolitan environment.�[40]� As an urban businessman, Henderson was well aware of the general Baha�i bias against cities, which had ill fitted the religion for a place like Los Angeles.� James Nelson, the municipal court judge, promised that an advisory council appointed by the NSA would work with the newly elected Local Spiritual Assembly.� He emphasized the spiritual and moral challenges.

�� It is clear that Kazemzadeh had a rather different reading of the problems than did Nelson or Henderson. Though he did not use these terms, he saw them as rooted in a lack of what Marxists would call party discipline.� His remarks at the March, 1988 meeting are worth quoting in full:

Friends, in our anxiety to improve the functioning of our institutions, we must not forget certain essential principles on which these institutions are built.� Accountability can mean many things but if the question of accountability is put in the context of current practices of democratic nations, of the United States, for instance, that accountability does not exist in the Baha�i community.� Shoghi Effendi has said very clearly that the Baha�i system combines the elements of various systems.� The election is our democratic process, but the assemblies function as aristocracies.� They are not accountable to the electorate.� The consultation of the assembly is not open to the public unless the assembly wishes to consult with someone or some group of people on some specific subject.� Otherwise, they consult in privacy, so that they would not be inhibited, so that they would not curry favor.� Because if you are going to have a meeting of the assembly here on stage, the temptation of the members of the assembly to play to the gallery will turn the assembly into the Congress of the United States.� That is not the Baha�i way of conducting the business of the institutions.� Shoghi Effendi did not permit the NSA to have a stenographer present at its deliberations . . .� It also must be stated that, within the Baha�i community, there are individuals, and sometimes they even become groups, who do question the activities of the Baha�i institution.� They are welcome to raise those questions in Nineteen Day Feasts.� They are welcome to take those questions, objections, wishes, to higher institutions.� If somebody is dissatisfied with a local assembly, he is not prevented from appealing to the NSA and actions of the NSA can be appealed to the Universal House of Justice.� It is something else when whispering campaigns or petitions are sent around for signatures objecting to the activities of the institutions.� That also may be something which is countenanced by American democracy but has nothing to do with the Baha�i Faith.� We must always remember that our institutions are an unusual and unique combination of theocracy in the best sense of the term with democracy.� The institutions of the Baha�i Faith have not been created by us, the institutions have been created by God.� The membership is filled by us.� We have the privilege of assigning who is going to be on the institutions, but the institutions themselves are the expression of God�s will, communicated to the world through a divine manifestation.[41]

Kazemzadeh clearly has a firm vision of the Baha�i institutions as a sort of elective dictatorship, unchallengeable, beyond public criticism, and to be unhesitatingly obeyed.� Nor is it to be responsive to community concerns, which would be a capitulation to public opinion.� More worrisome, he wanted to see this system become the civil government.

�� Again, there were dissenters from the image painted by Henderson and the other members of the NSA.� Some alleged that not only had the bookstore had never actually been in as much debt as he said, but that it was only shown to have been put in the black by now counting book stock as assets rather than as debt (and, of course, some of the stock had sold during the two years of hiatus).� The Baha�i Publishing Trust retroactively extended to the Administrative Committee the sort of discounts they had denied to the old assembly, making paying off the debt much easier.� It was also alleged that income from sources other than contributions was not reported at feast 1986-1988, making the financial situation look much more dire than it was.� Henderson was silent about the problems that underlay the lawsuit over the clinic (which was eventually settled for $100,000), and most Baha�is never learned of it.� The number of conversions Henderson cited as evidence of a recovery actually was unimpressive.� Conversions had fallen to 80 in 1983, to 50 in 1984, and to 39 in 1985, numbers that, in the wake of the large conversions of the 1970s, had seemed to Manila Lee �terrible.�� She would not have been impressed with the 50 conversions garnered in 1987.[42]� Although many Angeleno Baha�is agreed that the old assembly had become directionless, the real question for them was whether the NSA�s intervention had had good results or bad.� One of my interviewees, felt that under the Administrative Committee local morale was actually further undermined� in ways that caused long-term damage to the community.� When elections were held in April, 1988, three or four of the former members of the local assembly, including Lois Willows, were returned to office, which some saw as a vindication of the body that had been dissolved.

�� Although Henderson and other members of the NSA fore-grounded, in their explanations for why the local assembly was dissolved, issues in immorality and race relations, I believe that these considerations were subsidiary to power and money.� Although immoral behavior is considered very serious in the Baha�i community, it would not normally impel the dissolution of a local assembly unless the assembly members themselves were persistently guilty of it, something not charged in Los Angeles.� As for race relations, there is no reason to think these were substantially worse in Los Angeles than in other big urban Baha�i communities of that period, and there are enough inconsistencies in Henderson�s story of Iranian refugees rebuffed and a vastly diminished African-American presence to raise serious questions as to whether these alleged situations even existed, much less forming causes for dissolving a local spiritual assembly.� Other eyewitnesses appear to have perceived the situation very differently, with the Los Angeles local assembly exceedingly accommodating of Iranian escapees (perhaps too much so for Wilmette�s taste), welcoming them into the community and refusing to punish their peccadilloes, with continued substantial black presence despite some hurt feelings provoked by both white and Iranian insensitivity, and with the major change being dramatically decreased white participation in many community affairs as a result of frustration over issues such as culture shock at the influx of Iranians.� But other communities, such as Santa Monica, suffered from much worse declines in non-Iranian participation than did Los Angeles.

�� The issue of disunity on the local assembly was more serious, insofar as it threatened to undermine what Baha�i administrators often privately refer to as �party discipline.�� Kazemzadeh appears to have been particularly concerned that constituencies may have developed in the community, to which some members of the local assembly were consciously playing, a major sin in Baha�i governance. The local assembly�s disunity was more likely an enabling factor in the dissolution than a causative one.� That the local leaders were not getting along guaranteed that there would be no united opposition to the NSA plan of taking control of the local administration.

�� Henderson�s own ambitions must be taken into account, as well.� He had become secretary general of the national assembly 1984, after his company went under in Atlanta.� The position of secretary has tended to be held for life or until election to the Universal House of Justice.� In the hard-line Baha�i political culture of the top administrators, success required him to demonstrate an ability to impose his will on the national community.� The dissolution of a number of local assemblies early in his administration, and the threats made to others, functioned as a means for him to assert and consolidate national control.� In Los Angeles, the opportunity presented itself to displace a cohort of local leaders who had proved overly independent, and to replace them with hand-picked loyalists of the sort appointed to the Administrative Committee and the Council of Nineteen.��

�� Money was probably even more important than power.� Henderson�s various remarks on the economic situation contain strong clues as to the NSA�s most pressing motivation in seeking to resolve the community�s leadership problems. Local contributors to the Baha�i fund had slipped to only 125 out of 1200 adults as a result of lack of trust in the local assembly�s leadership, which reduced the NSA�s receipts from the Los Angeles community to almost nothing.� The poor management of the clinic�s office space, resulting in missed rent payments worth several thousands of dollars a month, and ultimately a lawsuit that had to be settled by the NSA for $100,000, was even more serious than the decline in giving.� It threatened the ability of the local community to continue to staff the new Baha�i center and perhaps even raised the specter of requiring substantial contributions from the NSA to keep it open.� The mismanagement of the local assembly by spring of 1986 seemed very possibly poised to cost the NSA tens of thousands of dollars if it were allowed to continue.� Henderson draws a full-time salary and perquisites, including free rent and upkeep at the nine-bedroom mansion that also serves as the secretary�s administrative headquarters, and some have estimated his package, in cash, kind and perquisites, as worth over $150,000 a year (such information is carefully withheld from the Baha�is).� Four others among the nine NSA members drew stipends for their services on that body.� The NSA was perpetually in need of money, and was usually in debt, often avoiding substantial indebtedness only because of bequests.� Individual members of the National Assembly depended on the national fund.� To have a major urban Baha�i community like Los Angeles, full of wealthy business people and professionals, become a substantial drain on national finances rather than a major profit center, threatening national finances, clearly could not be allowed.� It is not clear what resources were sent to Wilmette from the Los Angeles community by the appointed Administrative Committee in 1986-1988, but Henderson said that the alleged bookstore debt of $35,000 was completely paid down, and this figure may indicate the scale of such transfers.

�� Nor could the problem have been solved locally.� Current rules make it impossible for a local community to exercise effective oversight over its assembly, which members are not allowed to criticize publicly, and to which unswerving obedience is inculcated.� One particularly active feast was aware of the problems in LA, and even drew up a plan to resolve them, but the local assembly declined to implement it, and there was nothing those 200 more informed believers could do about it.� The major obstacle to dealing with these sorts of problems by a large, urban Baha�i community such as Los Angeles, is the electoral system.� The extremely low-information elections, the manner in which nine persons each with only a handful of votes can be elected if their tallies are higher than all the others, the tendency of the system to perpetuate incumbency in larger communities, the lack of reporting requirements on the precise use of funds in the budget or other means of judging the performance of the incumbents�all of these features of the system militate against local electorates finding solutions for dysfunctional local assemblies.� The alternative, of having the NSA intervene from above to fire LSA members at will, has the severe disadvantage of lacking in legitimacy in the eyes of rank and file Baha�is.� These problems, however, cannot be addressed in a thoroughgoing manner in the terms of contemporary Baha�i discourse, which is why the planned dialogue magazine article on the dissolution was never allowed to appear.� No trace of the events I have discussed remains outside the memories of the participants, and that there might be systemic problems was disallowed by all the officials involved, who chose instead to speak of lapses in personal morality.� Norman Klein called his book on Los Angeles The History of Forgetting.� If he is right, Baha�is are perfect Angelenos.

�

Notes

[1] Bob Ballenger/Steve Scholl, 21 July 1986, Dialogue Magazine Archives (hereafter DMA).

[2] Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha�i Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Peter Smith, The Babi and Baha'i Religions:� From Messianic Shi`ism to a World Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[3] Robert H. Stockman, The Baha'i Faith in America , 2 vols. (Wilmette, Ill. and Oxford: Baha'i Publishing Trust and George Ronald, 1985-1995); R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram, Music, Devotions and Mashriqu�l-Adhkar: Studies in Babi and Baha'i History Volume 4 (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1987).

[4] Mike Davis, City of Quartz� (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); see especially chapter one, �Sunshine or Noir,� and chapter six, �New Confessions;� and Norman M. Klein, The history of forgetting : Los Angeles and the erasure of memory� (London� and� New York : Verso, 1997).��

[5] John Gregory Dunne, �Angels of L.A.,� New York Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 9 (May, 1998), p. 17; this article is also the source for the statistics cited.

[6] Paul Numrich, �Schism in the Sinhalese Buddhist Community of Los Angeles,� forthcoming.

[7] Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).

[8] For the story of dialogue Magazine see Juan R. I. Cole, �Press Censorship in the Baha�i Faith and the dialogue Affair.� forthcoming.

[9] Juan R. I. Cole, �The Baha�i Faith in America as Panopticon, 1963-1997,� Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 37, no. 2 (June, 1998), pp. 234-248.

[10] Transcript of tape of James Nelson speech, 19 July 1986, DMA.

[11] �L.A. LSA Reaction,� typescript, summer, 1986.

[12] Manila Lee in Ibid.

[13] Robert C. Henderson/Baha�is of Los Angeles, California, 21 July 1986, DMA.

[14] �Aftermath,� anon. typescript, circa August, 1986, DMA.

[15] Kazemzadeh quoted in ibid.

[16] Sisson quoted in ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Richard Hollinger/Anna Lee Strasburg, 23 September 1986, DMA.

[19] �Robert Henderson Talk,� Los Angeles Baha�i Center, 14 March 1987, partial transcript.� DMA.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22]Manila Lee quoted in� �The Decline and Fall of the Los Angeles Local Spiritual Assembly,� typescript, 1987, DMA.

[23] �Robert Henderson Talk,�

[24] �Robert Henderson Talk,�

[25] Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Claudia Der-Martirosian, and Georges Sabbagh, �Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant,� in Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds., Ethnic Los Angeles� (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), pp. 350-352; Mehdi Bozorgmehr, �Iranians,� in David W. Haines, ed., Case Studies in Diversity: Refugees in America in the 1990s� (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996), pp. 85-103; for this point see pp. 92-93; idem, �Internal ethnicity: Iranians in Los Angeles,� Sociological Perspectives 40, no. 3 (1997):387-408; and for a textured overview see Ron Kelley, Jonathan Friedlander, and Anita Colby, eds., Irangeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993)

[26] �The Persian Baha�is of Los Angeles,� typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.

[27] Kelley, et al., Irangeles, pp. 125-131.

[28] Lee in �L.A. LSA Reaction,� summer, 1986.

[29] �The Persian Baha�is of Los Angeles,� typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.

[30] Bozorgmehr et al., �Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant,� pp. 359-373; Bozorgmehr, �Iranians,� pp. 98-101.

[31] �The Persian Baha�is of Los Angeles,� typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.

[32] �The Persian Baha�is of Los Angeles,� typescript, summer, 1986, DMA.

[33] Manila Lee quoted in �Decline and Fall.�

[34] David M. Grant, Melvin L. Oliver, and Angela D. James, �African-Americans: Social and Economic Bifurcation,� in Bozorgmehr and Waldinger, Ethnic Los Angeles, pp. 379-411.

[35] Lee in �Decline.�

[36] Personal communication from an African-American Baha�i of Los Angeles, Dec. 3, 1997.

[37] �LA/LSA Restored: NSA Meeting in L.A. 19 March �88,� typescript transcript, DMA.

[38] Henderson in Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Henderson in �LA/LSA Restored: NSA Meeting in L.A. 19 March �88.�

[41] Kazemzadeh in �LA/LSA Restored: NSA Meeting in L.A. 19 March �88,� typescript transcript, DMA.

[42] Lee in �Decline.�

The response of Dr. Robert Stockman may be found here: Stockman Response

(That of Dr. Mike McMullen is not yet online).

Religion (2000) 30, 2:141-147 doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0242, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com

Response

JUAN R. I. COLE

�� My thanks to Mike McMullen for his comments on the article, and for his kind words on some of its strengths. I have found his own work on the Atlanta Baha�i community very useful. However, the purpose of this exchange is surely the somewhat un-Baha�i-like task of addressing our differences. First of all, I should signal to academic readers why I think my article might be problematic for conservative Baha�is. The Baha�i culture is utopian, and Baha�is often wish to present the inner workings of their community life as perfect. They see their administrative order as an alternative to the politics of the corrupt �old world order�, which is under the control of powerful individuals and marred by individualist selfishness. That some of these same forces are at work within their own administration is therefore a proposition they find difficult to entertain.

�� Moreover, a great deal of work goes into preserving the utopian point of view. In my experience, Baha�i governance structures are deliberately kept opaque. Conservative Baha�is are very skeptical that anything serious can even be known about their governance processes outside official pronouncements. Baha�is are discouraged from speaking of community governance issues except in carefully controlled venues. Baha�i authorities, who surround themselves with an aura of divine guidance, keep believers in line by appealing to the welfare and unity of the community, and if these appeals fail then implicit or explicit threats of disfellowshipping and even shunning are invoked. Non-Baha�is are not allowed to attend the nineteen day feast, the main �business meeting� of the local community, or the national convention held in April each year in Wilmette. (Among religious bodies of any size in the U.S., the annual Baha�i national convention is the only one from which journalists are systematically excluded). Such a closed �political culture� makes the gathering of quantitative information extremely difficult, if not impossible. Two friends of mine in the Los Angeles community who did attempt to conduct a poll some years ago were instructed to desist by the local spiritual assembly (LSA), and I frankly do not believe such research would be allowed. That is, the Baha�is would be ordered by their authorities not to cooperate with it. The lack of quantitative evidence is, in short, hardly my fault, but would bedevil anyone who took up this sort of subject. Indeed, as I made clear, the very publication of articles about the incident was also forbidden by Robert Henderson, so asking for quantitative data in addition seems unrealistic. On the other hand, historians very seldom have the sort of complete set of quantitative information available to contem- porary, synchronic disciplines like sociology, and we have developed techniques to compensate for this. I do not think it terribly controversial, for instance, to suggest that when only two hundred out of 1200 local Baha�is showed up to see the national spiritual assembly (NSA) members in 1988, this poor attendance was a sign of disgruntlement with that body, given much higher attendance rates at other events.

�� Given the deliberate opaqueness of Baha�i culture and contemporary history, what is remarkable is that I gained access to dozens of documents on this issue from various key players, which survived in the Dialogue magazine archives. I therefore have what is, from a historian�s point of view, a very solid documentary base. It includes interviews with local assembly members and verbatim transcripts of in-house speeches by Baha�i officials; a sort of evidence that is almost never available for writing about the contemporary

_ 2000 Academic Press 0048�721X/00/000000+00 r 35.00/ p. 141

Baha�i community. It should also be remembered that I was myself a Persian speaking Baha�i in the Los Angeles area periodically between 1979�1984, attended feast there and had a large network of friends from all the major ethnic groups. So although I was not living there at the time of the dissolution, I knew a great deal from first-hand experience about the conditions that precipitated the crisis. I also had telephone conversations and correspondence at the time with Baha�is present.

�� McMullen�s conclusion that my documentary base for the article is inadequate to the task thus seems to me overdrawn. The unpublished articles prepared for Dialogue magazine on the dissolution involved interviews with dozens of key participants. Since the Dialogue staff consisted of professional journalists and young academics, the interviews were conducted professionally (a conclusion bolstered by the obvious quality of information and clarity of writing in the reports). I used many letters from and to Scholl and others, including letters generated by the NSA, and also speeches by its members. This amounts to an extensive set of documentation, not �a few anonymous reports�. As McMullen knows, I had to keep some of my informants anonymous because they might otherwise be disfellowshipped for speaking to me about the incident. For that reason I cannot identify the �outside observers�, or the other persons for whom he demands names. Indeed, I am afraid that some friends of mine who did not cooperate might nevertheless be punished for this article because of guilt by association. My informants were friends made when I was a member of the Southern Californian Baha�i community in the early 1980s, but they are not well known in the Baha�i community. Any anthropologist who worked in a village would be in the same position if he thought his ethnographic field report might in any way harm the villagers, and preserving respondents� anonymity simply does not invalidate social science findings. All that said, I would be the first to admit that it is desirable that contemporary historians mine a greater quantity and diversity of sources in coming to further conclusions about the history of the Los Angeles Baha�i community since 1980. My point of view on the matter is only one of several possible views, and it derives from the particular cache of information and social networks to which I had access, as well as my own experiences in southern California. I think these sources sufficiently solid and broad to allow us to come to some conclusions about what happened and why, but the narrative will surely be nuanced by further information. I am the first social historian to attempt a focused journal article on the inner politics of the contemporary American Baha�i community, and the endeavour has all the drawbacks of a pioneering attempt. It also has the virtue, in my view, of laying issues and a data set on the table for social scientists to argue about; issues and data that had been wholly absent from the scholarly record (and, indeed, from virtually any sort of record). The lack of academic literature on the contemporary Baha�is is astonishing if one considers that we claim a U.S. membership size similar to that of the Quakers and Unitarians, and have been established in the country since the 1890s! I would welcome it if McMullen, Stockman and others would conduct further research on these events and offer alternative interpretations of the data. That is a very different matter, however, from simply accepting official explanations and relying on an idealised portrait of Baha�i community functioning.

�� As I said in my article, the Los Angeles community did better in integrating the Iranians into the pre-existing community than did many others. Often in California the previous small American community was simply swamped by the newcomers, and as a result, many of the Americans left the faith. Where there were only a handful of Iranians in a fair-sized U.S. community, they often felt somewhat alienated. I have seen these

142 J. R. I. Cole

phenomena with my own eyes and they regularly crop up in the e-mail interviews I have been conducting with dozens of Baha�is and ex-Baha�is. Los Angeles was special in having whites, African�Americans and Iranians in roughly similar proportions and in retaining all three groups. I do not understand why McMullen thinks that I glossed over Baha�is being governed by values that stress unity, since I say that explicitly. There are different models for unity in the Baha�i community, however. Some Baha�is stress unity in diversity, others stress conformism. Iranian Baha�is at times were not allowed by the Baha�i authorities even to have all-Persian meetings. That is, the kind of unity stressed by the Baha�i authorities in this case appears to me to be a demand for uniformity and regimentation rather than a unity in diversity.

�� In the sociology of religion, an episcopal ecclesiastical structure refers not necessarily to the presence of bishops but rather to the presence of hierarchy as opposed to go-it-alone local religious bodies. I disagree entirely about the absence of the lay equivalent of �bishops� or the claim that they have no authority. The individuals appointed Hands of the Cause of God expelled adherents judged to be schismatics from the Baha�i faith in the 1960s and caused them to be shunned, which seems to me the exercise of quite central authority. Nowadays the members of the Continental Boards of Counsellors, especially including those at the International Teaching Centre in Haifa, claim the authority to interpret the Baha�i covenant and to threaten individual Baha�is with excommunication for publicly expressing the views at variance with their conception of �orthodoxy�. Since they advise the house of justice on such shunning, these claims are credible. Shunning is the central control mechanism in the Baha�i system, and the advisers on its use are the counsellors and their subordinates. It simply is not true that they exercise no authority and, indeed, liberal Baha�is often live in terror of them.

�� While it is true that conservative Baha�is object to categorising Baha�is as liberals or conservatives, as gentle or hard-line, for a sociologist to suggest that such divisions do not exist in the community is frankly bizarre. Conservative Baha�is believe it is wrong to criticise the Baha�i institutions publicly. They support the NSA�s right to act as it pleases, even arbitrarily. They firmly support the demand that everything written by Baha�is about their religion be subject to in-house censorship (�literature review�). They believe the House of Justice is infallible in all its doings. They believe that women should not be allowed to serve on the Universal House of Justice. They are convinced that civil governments will eventually be supplanted by the Baha�i institutions, which will rule as a theocracy. Shunning heterodox Baha�is or �covenant breakers� is central to their religious identity. They are fiercely anti-intellectual and often consider indepen-dent thinking a sign of �covenant breaking�. They are scriptural literalists, preferring any statement in the Baha�i scriptures to the findings of scientists or historians. In contrast, liberal Baha�is believe that the Baha�i institutions are still embryonic and often act immaturely, and that criticising them for the arbitrary exercise of power is good and necessary. They tend to protest when a Baha�i governing body appears to over-reach its scriptural authority. They are uncomfortable with censorship and often quietly decline to cooperate with it. They believe the Universal House of Justice�s authority to be limited to legislation, and admit the possibility that women will eventually serve on that body. They see Baha�i institutions as complementary to civil governments, and reject the belief in a future theocracy. They are uncomfortable with the practice of shunning. They admire the intellectual life, and are not afraid to think independently. They believe that where science and scripture are in apparent conflict, science should be preferred, and they generally reject a literalist approach to scripture.� I

Response 143

I am just giving a few illustrative differences. This divide between liberals and conserva -tives was not central to the Los Angeles crisis, though it did colour perceptions of that event on both sides. It is also possible that the dim view taken by liberal Angeleno Baha�is to the NSA�s intervention in 1986, and the young liberal intellectuals� desire to report on these events, were among the factors that began to convince the hard-liners in the NSA and in Haifa that a concerted effort had to be made to chase Baha�i liberals and intellectuals out of the religion.

�� That both sets of views not only existed in the community then but continue to do so is quite obvious (and on a scale that could in fact be quantified if someone cared to do it) on the talisman@indiana.edu Baha�i discussion list run by Professor John Walbridge from Indiana University in 1994�1996 (available in part at http://www-personal. umich.edu/~jrcole/talisman.htm), as well as on subsequent e-mail forums such as talk.religion.bahai, available and searchable at www.dejanews.com. Denying that these deep divisions even exist functions for some conservative Baha�is as a way of drawing the veil over how power actually works in the community. With regard to how frequently local assemblies are dissolved, I relied on Robert Henderson�s own testimony. He said,

I�ll tell you that, in my experience, I have been a member of the national assembly now for, I think, four years. And I have seen the national assembly dissolve other local assemblies. And I have seen them restored. I�ve seen the national assembly restore those communities. And, what was happening was evident to both the people on the local level as well as it was to the national assembly. (�Robert Henderson Talk,� Los Angeles Baha�i Centre, 14 March 1987, partial transcript, DMA).

If the secretary general had seen several other local assemblies dissolved in the course of only a few years, then assemblies were being impeached more often than is usually recognised. Since the disbanding of small local assemblies would not be known beyond their locality, and since Henderson�s censorship apparatus prevented the publication of such news, such steps could be taken in relative secrecy. I do not believe that the Baha�i authorities would release information about frequency and numbers, but assemblies are dissolved. I know one was impeached in Pennsylvania in the early 1970s because its chairman was overly charismatic and sectarian. The NSA was planning the dissolution of an assembly in Arkansas because it had gay members in 1982 when one of its members, Allan Ward, was unexpectedly elected to the national body. He was not allowed to take his seat on the NSA, which destroyed his national reputation. There is another possibility, of course, which is that Henderson was lying when he made the above statement to the Los Angeles Baha�is. Why would he do that? He may have wished to make it seem that the NSA action was more routine than it then appeared, as a way of legitimising it. He may have wished to project the image of a powerful leader who had intervened in several local communities. If he was lying, then McMullen and Stockman are correct that the Los Angeles incident was unusual. If they are not in a position to know for sure, however, then I can hardly be expected to, nor do I see how they can blame me for taking seriously a public, official pronouncement of the secretary general of the organisation. Here again the very opaqueness of Baha�i governance to public scrutiny serves as a powerful control mechanism, provoking constant anxiety and uncertainty about what is really possible.

�� Henderson�s election as NSA secretary in 1984 is mysterious because he simply did not have a national reputation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was known to be the son of Wilma Ellis, who herself had served on the NSA until she was made a

144 J. R. I. Cole

continental counsellor, and who married long-time NSA member Firuz Kazemzadeh four years later. One knowledgeable Baha�i working in the U.S. national Baha�i centre in 1983 told me that he and the other staffmembers were surprised by Henderson�s election because they had never heard of him. As for my assertion that the NSA decided in the end that the dissolution had failed as an experiment, I believe this conclusion was justified by their having ended it after only two years and having refrained from acting in this way with the other major urban communities, many of which had similar problems.

�� I have some disagreements with McMullen�s sketch of the development of Baha�i authority structures, which I think is unhistorical and contains several errors. He attributes several positions to �scripture� which are nowhere to be found there. A �freedom of speech� that is limited to carefully controlled administrative venues is no freedom at all. Even in the Communist Party or the army a subordinate can express critique internally. The mark of true freedom of expression is that it can occur outside channels without being branded subversive, and I am afraid that such freedom is entirely lacking in the Baha�i administration. Although the Baha�i electoral system can produce turnover in small communities, the bigger the community, the more likely it is that it will produce incumbents who cannot be unseated as long as they continue to be available as candidates every year. This phenomenon is obvious at the national level in the U.S.

�� I thank McMullen very much for his important point that experience of the Los Angeles Baha�i community with ethnic diversity has been one of learning. As someone who knew the community fairly well in the 1980s, I have a keen appreciation for the hard work that the rank and file often did in attempting to overcome their differences. Indeed, there were several Iranian LSA members already in the mid-1980s. The real questions are whether the NSA�s intervention in local affairs helped or hindered this process; whether the damage to local reputations and morale was justified; and whether the Baha�i administration is flexible enough to resolve community problems in the long run.

�� I am also grateful to Robert Stockman for taking the time to respond. I shall mainly concentrate on those remarks that do not replicate McMullen�s observations. For that reason I shall not elaborate here on my defense of the quality and quantity of the documents in the Dialogue magazine archives, nor my evidence (from Henderson himself) that local assemblies are regularly dissolved. Stockman paradoxically appears to doubt both that Henderson forbade the publication of the Dialogue report on the Los Angeles crisis, and that his reasons for doing so were anything other than questions of quality. Fortunately, I have a copy of the letter Henderson sent to the relevant Dialogue editor, dated June 30 1987. He wrote,

�This letter is to confirm our telephone conversation today, in which you were advised that the National Spiritual Assembly declined your request for permission to publish the article entitled �Roots of Crisis: Background on the Dissolution of the LA Assembly�. As I explained to you, the situation is still being worked on and a complete set of the facts pertaining to the dissolution is unavailable and an objective report of the case cannot be written. Furthermore, publication of the article, as currently presented, could harm individuals and impede the efforts of the institutions now laboring to rebuild the spiritual foundation of the community.�

It is clear from this letter that the censorship was ordered for institutional purposes and not because of poor reporting. Nor would it have been proper in a true civil society
Response 145

organisation for Henderson to decide whether reporting on him was of sufficient quality to warrant being published.

�� I do not deny that the documentary base for the article would be strengthened by access to confidential records such as the deliberations of the NSA. To suggest that we cannot know anything without knowing everything, however, is a Hegelian fallacy. The long speeches by three NSA members that survive in transcript in the Dialogue archives go a long way toward revealing their mindset and motives. Henderson�s office has not cooperated with my requests for documentation for my historical work since 1996, and I believe Stockman knows very well how unrealistic is his suggestion that he would have been willing to be interviewed by me for this article. I completely disagree with the charge that official reasoning for the dissolution of the assembly is �imperfectly represented� or that information about institutional reasoning is �completely absent�. Given the extensive analysis to which I subject a number of the official speeches and the lengthy quotations from them I present, such an accusation seems to me wholly unsubstantiated. I think what is really being objected to is that the official point of view is not the only one being presented. It is a feature of official Baha�i discourse that minority and dissident points of view are vigorously suppressed in public documents and discourse, a convention that my article disrupts. (Here is another resemblance between Los Angeles culture and the Baha�i administration: both tend to be dominated by a sort of boosterism that insistently denies the problematic aspects of their projects.) That Stockman can draw a counter-narrative from the article whereby he justifies the NSA�s intervention suggests to me that, contrary to his allegations, I have done a very good job of presenting the full range of evidence, including official reasoning and motives. We shall simply have to disagree about whether Baha�i officials engage in subtle campaigning and manipulation of elections. Baha�i elections are conducted without nominations or overt campaigning, and many Baha�is believe that the results of the polls are divinely appointed. In fact, there are always informal candidates, and incumbents are especially likely to be re-elected in larger communities and nationally. Appointing a Baha�i to a highly visible committee and then printing the person�s name and picture in an official organ are obvious means by which the administration has long influenced the outcome of national elections. The techniques used with the Council of Nineteen were similar. Appointing only nine members would have been too much like a formal nomination procedure to be seen as legitimate. Moreover, it was desirable that a larger pool of future candidates be anointed and given some experience, since LSA members sometimes move out of their localities, creating vacancies. That the publication of the council�s picture seemed very much like campaigning was an observation guiltily made by one of the council members themselves, and does not originate from me. At the time the photograph was published it was entirely possible that elections would have been held sooner than they actually were.

�� With regard to the importance of money, Stockman�s remarks, including his footnote, appear to me less than forthright. He continues to elide the fact that Henderson�s substantial salary and perquisites, as well as stipends and perquisites bestowed on some other members of the national assembly, were and are carefully hidden from the public, including the Baha�i public. That the NSA is audited is irrelevant to this consideration because these payments are not illicit, whatever their exact ethical status or propriety, and so they would pass auditing. (Congressional junkets are also not illegal, but they can be questionable; they could not be questioned, of course, if they were not reported, or if congressmen declared themselves �not accountable� to the public.) In any case, many elements of the national budget are fixed

146 J. R. I. Cole

expenditures, including upkeep of buildings, payment of salaried employees, and so forth. It is precisely the NSA stipends and perquisites that would get squeezed in any budget crunch, and were therefore at risk from episodes like the declining rate of giving to the Baha�i fund in Los Angeles. Stockman�s suggestion that the steep decline in local giving in Los Angeles may have been partially offset by a rise in contributions sent directly to the NSA appears to be pure speculation (which is surprising, given that he should be in a position to confirm or deny such a phenomenon). It seems to me unlikely that persons disillusioned with Baha�i governance retained enough faith in the NSA to send substantial monies (which they had withheld from their own local community) two thousand miles away. Remember, too, the low attendance at the meeting with the NSA in 1988.

�� Stockman ends his critique by pointing to a number of things he says the article does not do, including comparing the Los Angeles situation to others across the country or looking at the entire period from about 1980 to the present. Since it was never my intention to accomplish these goals in this piece, however, I can hardly be faulted for failing to achieve them. (Nor, as Stockman knows, would the Baha�i authorities make available the documentation necessary for such tasks.) As for Los Angeles itself, since Henderson attempted to prevent any detailed public record of the crisis in the Baha�i community of Los Angeles from being published, it was heretofore impossible to gauge the long-term success of the community in dealing with its ethnic problems. Any such success, after all, could only be evaluated in the light of the issues that arose in the 1980s. I do maintain that Baha�is have on the whole had a (forced) amnesia about such problems. That I have provoked the Research Office of the NSA of the Baha�is of the United States into at least acknowledging publicly and in print that some version of these events did occur seems to me a major step forward in preparing for the sort of assessment for which Stockman now calls.

Response 147

Note: This file contains the original diskette of the paper, and does not reflect copy-editing and other late authorial and editorial changes in the published article, to which it is therefore not quite identical. - JRIC

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Bahá'í History

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

July 19. On this date in 1986, "the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States formally dissolved the Local Spiritual Assembly (LSA) of the Baha'is of Los Angeles, then a community of some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha'i communities."

The response of Dr. Robert Stockman may be found here: Stockman Response

(That of Dr. Mike McMullen is not yet online).

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Wednesday, April 11, 2018

July 19. On this date in 1986, "the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States formally dissolved the Local Spiritual Assembly (LSA) of the Baha'is of Los Angeles, then a community of some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha'i communities."

The response of Dr. Robert Stockman may be found here: Stockman Response (That of Dr. Mike McMullen is not yet online).

To Scholarly Papers on the Baha'i Faith To Translation Page To Baha'i Studies To Talisman J. Cole Home Page

No comments:

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The response of Dr. Robert Stockman may be found here: Stockman Response

(That of Dr. Mike McMullen is not yet online).

To Scholarly Papers on the Baha'i Faith

To Translation Page

To Baha'i Studies

To Talisman

J. Cole Home Page