Background Information on the Kalimát Press Petition
The Bahá’í Faith is perceived by most people — Bahá’ís and non-Bahá’ís — as a generally liberal religion, far closer to the Unitarian-Universalists than to the Southern Baptists. Yet over the last 30-40 years the governing institutions of the Bahá’í Faith have become ever more conservative in nature and in many ways are adopting strict control mechanisms on Bahá’ís to maintain a form of Bahá’í fundamentalism.
Bahá’í fundamentalism is an odd development. The scriptures of the Bahá’í Faith are generally progressive — calling for cooperation and understanding among faith communities, equality of the sexes, promotion of the oneness of humanity, the harmony of science and religion, the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty, support of the United Nations and international order. In contrast to this liberal dimension, the Bahá’í community, especially through its conservative administrative order, promotes theocracy, forbids women to serve on the highest elected offices of the religion, defines homosexuality as a psychological disorder, forbids Bahá’ís to join progressive groups like Amnesty International or the Interfaith Alliance, requires Bahá’ís to stay aloof from controversial political issues, requires mandatory pre-publication censorship of all that individual Bahá’ís seek to publish about their faith, has implemented internal spying on suspected believers, exercises administrative expulsion of Baha’is, and threatens shunning of Bahá’ís who are targeted as "internal enemies."
Kalimát Press has been a leader in Bahá’í publishing since its founding in 1978. It has experienced a series of conflicts with the Bahá’í administration over its attempt to publish academic studies of the Babi and Bahá’í religions. Although Kalimát Press has faithfully followed the demand of the Bahá’í administration to submit all works by Bahá’ís to pre-publication censorship, the process of pre-publication review and censorship has created tension between Kalimát Press and the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States. The Universal House of Justice, the international head of the Bahá’í Faith based in Haifa, Israel, has been drawn into these disputes and has also expressed its dissatisfaction with Kalimát Press's agenda to foster Bahá’í studies.
Besides works by Bahá’ís published under the Kalimát Press imprint, other academic books from Bahá’í and non-Bahá’í publishers are distributed by Kalimát to their main market: the American Bahá’í community. These distributed titles include books on Islam and Iran. A handful of books written by non-Bahá’ís, former Bahá’ís, or liberal Bahá’ís published by university presses or self-published has triggered the National Spiritual Assembly's call for a boycott of all Kalimát Press titles.
The offending titles appear to be the following:
Juan Cole's Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Bahá’í Faith in the 19th-Century Middle East (Columbia University Press).
Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 (Cornell University Press).
William Garlington, The Bahá’í Faith in America (Praeger Publisher).
Sen McGlinn, Church and State: A Postmodern Political Theology. Book One (self published, MA thesis, University of Leiden).
All of these books have received positive reviews and are not particularly radical. Each of them does however rub against popular Bahá’í beliefs and the favorite theological views of conservative members of the Bahá’í leadership. For example, Sen McGlinn's book provides an exhaustive examination of Bahá’í texts, from Bahá'u'lláh to Shoghi Effendi, on Church-State relations and makes the case that the Bahá’í founders did not expect a Bahá’í theocracy to emerge in some distant future. Mr. McGlinn was subsequently expelled from the Bahá’í community by the Universal House of Justice for publishing his research. The Universal House of Justice complained that the author was attempting to impose his theology on the Bahá’í community. McGlinn was expelled from the Bahá’í community without a hearing or any semblance of due process.
Shortly after the expulsion of Mr. McGlinn, the boycott of Kalimát Press was announced.
For more background on Bahá’í fundamentalism and the liberal-conservative debates within the Bahá’í community, see the following articles available on the web:
Karen Bacquet. "Enemies Within: Conflict and Control in the Bahá’í Community" Cultic Studies Journal. Vol. 18 (2001): 140-171.
Juan Cole, "The Bahá’í Faith in America as Panopticon, 1963-1997" Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 37, No. 2 (June 1998): 234-248
Juan Cole, "Fundamentalism in the Contemporary US Bahá’í Community" Review of Religious Research, Vol. 43, no. 3 (March, 2002):195-217.