The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898-1948

By Will C. van den Hoonaard

What binds together Louis Riel’s former secretary, a railroad inventor, a Montreal comedienne, an early proponent of Canada’s juvenile system and a prominent Canadian architect? Socialists, suffragists, musicians, artists—from 1898 to 1948, these and some 550 other individual Canadian Bahá’ís helped create a movement described as the second most widespread religion in the world.

Using diaries, memoirs, official reports, private correspondence, newspapers, archives and interviews, Will C. van den Hoonaard has created the first historical account of Bahá’ís in Canada. In addition, The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898-1948 clearly depicts the dynamics and the struggles of a new religion in a new country.

This is a story of modern spiritual heroes—people who changed the lives of others through their devotion to the Bahá’í ideals, in particular to the belief that the earth is one country and all of humankind are its citizens.

Thirty-nine original photographs effectively depict persons and events influencing the growth of the Bahá’í movement in Canada.

The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898-1948 makes an original contribution to religious history in Canada and provides a major sociological reference tool, as well as a narrative history that can be used by scholars and Bahá’ís alike for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781554587063

Will C. van den Hoonaard

Will C. van den Hoonaard is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. He has authored numerous books including The Seduction of Ethics and, most recently, co-edited The Ethics Rupture. He lives in Fredericton.

Book preview

The Origins of the

Bahá’í

Community

of Canada, 1898-1948

Will C. van den Hoonaard

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Van den Hoonaard, Will C.

    The origins of the Bahá’í community of Canada,

1898-1948

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-88920-272-9

1. Bahai Faith - Canada - History. I. Tide.

BP355.C3V3 1996     297’.093’0971      C95-933178-6

Copyright © 1996

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

Cover design: Leslie Macredie

Cover illustration: Decorative Landscape by Lawren S. Harris

                                (courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada [#36813])

Printed in Canada

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

Dedicated to

Rowland A. Estall,

J. Jameson and Gale Bond,

Nicholas and Jessica Echevarria,

and Keith and Janet Eldridge

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used to Indicate Archival and Other Sources

One

Introduction

Part One

Early Dependence on Liberal Protestantism

Two

Early Stirrings

Three

Spiritual Roots and Early Conversions, 1899-1911

Four

‘Abdu’1-Bahá and the Press in Canada, 1912

Part Two

Formation of Community Identity, 1913-37

Five

Changing Styles of Recruitment: The Montreal Community

Six

Early Ethnic Involvement

Seven

The Literary Circle of the Toronto Bahá’ís, 1913-37

Eight

Tentative Anchorings in Atlantic Canada, 1913-37

Nine

Retinence in the Canadian West, 1913-37

Illustrations

Part Three

Organization and Community Boundaries

Ten

Changing Styles of Organization and Boundary Maintenance

Eleven

On Spreading the New Religion, 1937-47

Twelve

Opportunities and Constraints of Community Growth, 1937-47

Thirteen

Religion, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity

Part Four

Relationship to Canadian Society

Fourteen

Opposition, Recognition, and World War II

Fifteen

Building a National Bahá’í Community, 1947-48

Sixteen

Social and Cultural Adaptation in the Canadian Setting

Appendixes

Appendix A

Summary of Items Appearing in the French- and English-Language Press on the Occasion of‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Visit to Canada, 1912

Appendix B

Statistical Overview of the Canadian Bahá’í Community, 1898-1948 (April)

Appendix C

Bahá’í Community Profiles, 21 April 1937-20 April 1947

Appendix D

Chronology of Important Canadian Bahá’í Dates

Appendix E

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I owe a special debt of gratitude to those whose lives were directly the subject of this research and particularly to those who were interviewed for this book. Their names appear in the bibliography. Among the scholars to whom I am particularly indebted, I include Dr. A. David Nock, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and Dr. Robert H. Stockman, Director of the Office of Research, Bahá’í National Center, Evanston, Illinois. There are other scholars who have assisted me: Dr. Donald Smith, Professor of History at the University of Calgary, and Dr. P.M. Toner of the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John. There is also a particular group of Bahá’í scholars who have also contributed to the successful completion of the book: Dr. Sandra Hutchinson, Dr. Richard Hollinger, and Dr. John Walbridge. Scholarly credit should also be extended to the anonymous reviewers who read the earlier drafts on behalf of the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme and Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

I am indebted to: Mrs. Rosanne Buzzell, Archivist of the Eliot Bahá’í Community, Maine; Dr. Roger Dahl and Mr. Lewis Walker of the National Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, Illinois; Mr. Joseph W.P. Frost of Eliot, Maine; Mr. Golgasht Mossafa’i of Montreal; Mme Margot Léonard; Mr. John Taylor, the Hamilton Bahá’í Archivist; Mrs. Michelle Cooney; Julian Lebensold of Baie d’Urfé Mrs. Susanne Tamas of Ottawa; and Dr. Margaret Deutsch, a devoted Ottawa-area doctor.

After finishing the first draft of the manuscript, I asked two circles of Bahá’í readers, old and young, to carefully read it for tone and factual accuracy: Mr. Don Dainty, Mrs. Dianna Dainty, Mrs. Helen Andrews, Mr. Andrew Andrews, Ms. Linda O’Neil, Dr. Phyllis Perrakis, Mr. Stephen Thirlwall, and Mrs. Nathalie Thirlwall. I have purposely selected these two circles of readers, using age and gender as criteria for making my choice, in the hopes of their pointing out biases in my approach to writing this social history: they did not disappoint me; and I am grateful for their assessments of my biases that had inadvertently found their way into the initial draft. I was thus able to carry out further revisions with the help of their wise and thoughtful comments and enthusiastic support of the project. I have also found Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and particularly its director, Ms. Sandra Woolfrey, very encouraging. Ms. Woolfrey has been singularly kind and helpful in guiding the work from the earliest stages of manuscript preparation and submission to placing the final iota of the manuscript. Ms. Carroll Klein at the Press made it possible to scale the last mountain for any published scholarly endeavour: copy editing. I am also delighted to have had an opportunity to work with Leslie Macredie, who designed the cover.

Mr. James Kerr, now a reference librarian at the University of New Brunswick, and Ms. Suzanne Webster provided invaluable help as research assistants, as did Ms. Kim Naqvi at the Bahá’í National Centre in Thornhill, Ontario. Mr. Peter Waddell also served as an assistant during a few months in the summer of 1991. I am pleased that the John Robarts Memorial Fund of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada has provided the funding for publishing the photographs in this book. Ms. Marta Wojnarowska of the University of New Brunswick Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering was kind enough to prepare the map outlining ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to Montreal in 1912. Mr. Daryush Naimian of Fredericton provided a generous amount of time in making the necessary productions of the photographs.

I also wish to express my heartfelt appreciation to the University of New Brunswick for its offer of important resources to conduct this research. The Dean of Arts, Dr. Peter Kent, provided a grant to allow Ms. Linda O’Neil to edit the manuscript. The Association for Bahá’í Studies in Ottawa offered an office for my use during my sabbatical year, permitting me to complete the work in peace. The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada offered me unrestricted access to their archives and membership records, and have been unfailing in their warm encouragement and wholehearted support.

I owe a further debt of gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing in 1990 a generous grant in support of the research project. The Arts Publications Fund of the University of New Brunswick provided funds for the rental of the Lawren S. Harris painting gracing the cover. A grant from the John Robarts Memorial Fund contributed to the costs of reproducing the photographs.

Finally, there are individuals who have, in my view, contributed significantly to the intellectual underpinning and completion of the book: Dr. Michael Rochester of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Dr. David Sudnow of the University of Arizona, Professor Jameson Bond, formerly of the University of Windsor, Mrs. Gale Bond, Mr. Hubert Schuurman, Mrs. Suzanne Schuurman, Mr. David Hofman, and Dr. Ross Woodman. Ms. Lynn Echevarria-Howe was unwavering in her encouragement.

The place where scholarly habits and intellectual goals meet, however, is in the circle of one’s family and friends. My children, Lisa-Jo, Lynn, and Jordan were unfailing in their support by making room for this project in their tender lives. I would like to assume that the excitement of discovery and the sharing of stories (perhaps too frequently) were met without a murmur of complaint.

Dr. Deborah van den Hoonaard performed the critical and most helpful task of trimming, cutting, and streamlining a manuscript which contained a medley of minutiae. She lovingly urged the work to completion, while completing her own doctoral work in sociology. I benefited from her advice as well as her editorial and academic insights. On a more personal note, she sustained the hardships of research that seem, of necessity, to attend a family of scholars, marked by frequent travel and periods of monastic isolation. During the ten years of research, she was selfless in her support, knowing that Bahá’ís might derive inspiration from this first history of their religion in Canada.

Abbreviations Used to Indicate

Archival and Other Sources

Unpublished Archival Materials

Bahá’í Membership Lists

BEL         Bahá’í Enrolment List, 1894-1900, NBAUS.

BHRC     Bahá’í Historical Records Cards, NBAUS.

BML 1    Bahá’í Membership List, 14 April 1913, AL, Box 27, Folder 18.

BML 2    Bahá’í Membership List, 21 March 1916, AL, Box 27, Folder 67.

BML 3    Bahá’í Membership List, 10 Nov. 1921, AL, Box 27, Folder 53.

BML 4    Bahá’í Membership List, 1 October 1920, AL, Box 27, Folder 38.

BML 5    Bahá’í Membership List, March 1922, AL.

BRC        Bahá’í Registration Card(s), NBAC.

van den Hoonaard (1992a) Membership List of Early Canadian Bahá’ís, 1895-1948, 145 pp.

Other Sources

The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898-1948, also relies heavily on three other sources of information, namely, correspondence, interviews, and published materials. When wishing to know the source in full, the reader is advised first to consult the Bibliography at the end of the book. Unable to locate the reference there, he or she is advised to consult the references under Contemporary Correspondence and Communications or Interviews in Appendix E.

One

Introduction

During the third week in September 1893, a woman and her two daughters, aged thirteen and ten, boarded a Canadian Pacific Railway train in London, Ontario, and undertook a journey to Chicago¹ that would eventually result in the first stirrings of the Bahá’í Faith in Canada. Esther Annie (Mrs. Jonathan) Magee and her daughters, Edith and Harriet, belonged to a prominent family in London, Canada’s City of Parks. The round-trip fare of $9.30 was a small sacrifice to attend the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The Parliament had gathered together the widest possible array of religious leaders, including Hindu and Buddhist representatives. It paralleled the World’s Columbian Exposition, also held in Chicago, to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Columbus (London Free Press, 6 September, p. 7, and 19 September 1893, p. 3).

The World Exposition had captured the hearts and minds of Ontarians, including Londoners. More than 2,000 people from Ontario attended, and, on a typical day, some twenty people from London could be found boarding the train to Chicago. Toward the closing of the Exposition, a local London agent sold sixty-two train tickets in one day. Vast amounts of money were withdrawn from local banks to pay for these journeys, amounting to $40,000—approximately $4,000,000 in today’s terms (London Free Press, 2 September, p. 7; 26 September, p. 6; 2 October, p. 3; and 11 October 1893, p. 2).

In addition to attending the World’s Parliament of Religions, the Magees also had a personal interest in going to Chicago, for Guy Magee, Esther Annie’s brother-in-law, a prominent journalist who was covering the Parliament of Religions, lived there. All the Magees, including Guy, had been raised in an atmosphere of tolerance and universality; Guy’s interests included comparative religion (1893: First Canadian Bahá’í, 1979: 12).² It is not clear which member of the Magee family first heard, on a rainy Saturday in Chicago, 23 September 1893, the name of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh, from a paper read at the Art Institute of Chicago on behalf of the Rev. Henry Jessup, a Presbyterian missionary in Syria (Jessup, 1893: 1122-26). But it was probably Harriet Magee who first heard of the Bahá’í Faith at the Art Institute of Chicago.³

Ninety-nine years later, in 1992, the Bahá’í community of Canada marked the 100th anniversary of the passing of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-92). Canadian Bahá’ís, however, emerged from the early history of their community with virtually no published record of its beginnings or development from 1898-1948.⁴ My goal in writing The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898-1948 is to fill that gap. The first approach of the book is an empirical and historical one. My second consideration is sociological, as I try to delve into the social processes that attend the establishment of a non-Western religious movement in a Western setting.

The book is intended to be a faithful record of the struggles of the generation of the half-light (Shoghi Effendi, 1974a: 168). It is the story of individuals, and of an emerging national religious community, who are extricating themselves from the womb of a travailing age and who have set their eyes on a vision of the oneness of humanity that is appearing on the horizon of history (Shoghi Effendi, 1974a: 168). Like any struggle, the advances were marked by crises and the formation of an individual and collective identity that shared the characteristics of both the old and the new. Old allegiances marked by previous religious, societal, ethnic, and class identities seemed so strong as to inhibit the shaping of a new society based upon the ideals of human unity. New allegiances to the Bahá’í vision of unity seemed too fragile at times to make a permanent mark in the Canadian social landscape. Yet something new was forged, despite the setbacks, the old allegiances, and the dimly recognized vision.

One might be hard pressed to justify a book-length treatment of the topic. The Bahá’í community in Canada is still relatively small (ca. 15,000 in 1993) and has been rather silent about the contributions its members make, both individually and collectively, to the larger society.⁵ Canadians have grown accustomed to identifying a religious community with the stately churches of the major Christian denominations, the lively sermons of fundamentalist Christian groups, or the precarious existence of urban cults. A religion that falls outside these familiar markings falls prey to both public disfavour and scholarly neglect. A study of the Bahá’í Faith in Canada is, therefore, a timely undertaking, intended to illuminate reality and dispel myth.

The Bahá’í community has lodged itself in Canadian society and has derived sustenance from it. As elsewhere in the world, the Bahá’ís in Canada have travelled a long road to achieve legal recognition. Bahá’í marriage ceremonies are now legally recognized across Canada as a matter of course. The Canadian national Bahá’í governing body was incorporated by an act of Parliament in 1949, and legal incorporations of local governing councils have become common occurrences in Canada, as has the granting of Bahá’í Holy Days to school children. Governmental refugee agencies have cooperated with Bahá’í refugee programs that have helped settle 2,000 Iranians in Canada since Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. In the field of education, Bahá’ís have promoted the teaching of comparative religion in schools, and have set up a secondary school on Vancouver Island, offering an international, non-denominational baccalaureate. In aboriginal affairs, a number of Bahá’í-sponsored social and economic development programs on Prairie reserves have attracted attention; in the Yukon, Bahá’í programs have focussed on alcohol-awareness and alcohol-reduction programs. The procurement of funding from the Canadian International Development Agency by Bahá’í agencies for Third World development projects illustrates additional bridges between the Bahá’í community and the main culture. Finally, on a wider plane, there is a multicultural interest in minority religious communities, as exemplified in several court cases involving schools and the rights of children from non-mainstream religious life in Canada. Thus, there is a need for factual and sociological knowledge about the history, teachings, and development of the Bahá’í community.⁶

Transplantation Studies in the Sociology of Religion

My story is about the origins and early life of a non-Western faith transplanted into a Western setting (i.e., Canada). It will be useful first to consider some of the themes and findings of other studies that have considered the social process of adaptation and development of transplanted religions. Not many scholarly treatments of the sociology of religion deal with, or have devoted much space or attention to, new, transplanted religious movements (more particularly, non-Christian religions) settling in alien environments.⁷ One of the earliest sociological studies of this genre was Lofland’s Doomsday Cult (1966), a study of the Moonies. There have been others since then: Larry D. Shinn’s The Dark Lord (1987) about the Hare Krishnas, as well as another detailed study of the Moonies by David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr. (1979). However, other treatments seem sparse. Bryan Wilson, for example, devotes only three paragraphs in The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism (1990: 222-23) to the spread of new religious movements from their native cultures to others. He not only speaks of the success of new Western religious movements in non-Western societies but also of the limited appeal of non-Western movements in Western society. Stark and Bainbridge (1985) discuss five groups, three of which are non-Western (although they do present some valuable Canadian data on new religious movements). Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992: 239-44) discuss non-Western religious groups in the context of the nature of four religious eruptions in the twentieth century, two of which apply to transplanted religions, namely, the eruption of religious novelty in the 1960s and early 1970s,⁸ and the sudden influx of Eastern faiths at the same time, in conjunction with the efflorescence of the counter- and youth culture (e.g., Needleman and Baker, 1978; Wallis, 1984; Bryan Wilson, 1981). Such scholarly works involve a narrow band of kinds of transplanted religions selected for analysis. In particular, they explore the new religious movements over a short time frame. The diversity of transplanted religious groups that have found a home in Western society is not something than comes to mind when reading such studies.

When we look at the diversity of Canada’s transplanted religions, it is important to distinguish among several kinds of non-Western religious movements. There are those based on immigrant ethnic populations, such as Sikhs in British Columbia and Buddhists in Alberta (Coward and Kawamura, 1978) and the Japanese in Canada (Mullins, 1989),⁹ and those, like the Bahá’ís, whose national membership is mainly derived from recruits in the host society. Stark and Bainbridge (1985) would add another kind: imported cults that do not even have branches in the countries from which their founders came.

In an effort to explain the establishment (and the lack of growth) of transplanted religions, conventional studies are more likely to consider the why, rather than the how.¹⁰ We learn the various reasons why non-Western religious groups can, if at all, establish themselves in such new Western settings as Canada. For Wallis, new faiths offer an alternative to the anonymity, impersonality, achievement-orientation, individualism, and segmentation of modern life, or are a response to the pervasive features of advanced capitalist societies (1982: 228). In a similar vein, Anthony and Robbins (1982: 243) see the emergence of contemporary new religious movements as a response to moral ambiguity, and as an attempt to rediscover clearly fixed moral meanings for daily living. On a broader scale, but still looking at answers from the same perspective, scholars query the new religions’ functional relevance in a changing society.¹¹

Scholars, moreover, are also likely to focus their discussion on whether it is more useful to look at new religions as a social product or as revelation.¹² They also explore new religions within the framework of the cult-church-sect typology,¹³ the social-psychological aspects of membership,¹⁴ or the existence of new religions within the context of a religious economy that is multicultural and multifaith.¹⁵ Of these approaches, The Origins of the Bahd’i Community of Canada, 1898-1948 finds greater affinity with issues that make sociological sense of a new religion in terms of its wider relationships with the society in which it is born. Such an approach, however, does not preclude other perspectives, such as a revelatory one, because the sociological search is for empirical and contextual data and does not deal with the motivational or supernal dimensions of religious life (except insofar as we study these dimensions when they enter into the realm of social discourse).

My purpose in giving a bird’s-eye overview of the various approaches to the study of new religions in Western society is not to expound on the high and low points of this research. Rather, my goal is to designate the relationship of my own work on the Bahá’ís in Canada to these scholarly efforts. We now need to pull together some of the ways in which The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898-1948 makes a distinctive contribution to the sociology of religion. First, it does so by offering a historical account of how a non-Western religious community has become established in its host setting. The study involves a time span of fifty years, a much longer time period than is the case for many other studies. This long-term approach allows us to move away from the ^historical conception of movements that is characteristic of contemporary studies.

As Skocpol (1984: 361) suggests, we also need to relate historical changing forms of collective action to wider social processes. When new religious movements do settle into the host society, we see a chain of interactions that involves the movement’s ability to adapt its methods of propagation to new circumstances and its ability to absorb and take into account elements of the host society. There have been, as it turns out, too few studies that explore the ability of transplanted religious movements, despite Gelberg’s claim (1991: 161) that a study of the process of their indigenization has much research value.¹⁶ Such an approach calls for a closer consideration of the ties between the new religious movement and the wider society. Colin Campbell (1982) suggests that we can generate a satisfactory understanding of the growth of religious movements when our attention is directed away from internal features [of the new religion] . . . towards the wider social and cultural environment (ibid.: 236). Bryan Wilson (cited by Wallis, 1984: 6) advises us that we must always consider the empirical circumstances of given cultures, of geography, and of history when looking at new religious groups. The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada examines the process of culturally embedding the Bahá’í community in Canadian society and explores the empirical linkages to mainstream culture, rather than researching the appeal and teachings of the transplanted religious movement.

The general dissatisfaction with some of the above-mentioned approaches does not diminish when we turn our gaze to scholarship on the Bahá’í Faith in North America, which has been coming to the fore only since the mid-1980s. Two of the more thorough accounts of Bahá’í history in North America (Stockman, 1985 and 1995) omitted, due to lack of materials on the subject when they were written, substantive references to early Canadian Bahá’í history. In recent years, however, a number of studies on Bahá’í communities elsewhere in the world have added to the growing field of Bahá’í studies. The Bahá’í movement has been examined in India (Garlington, 1975; Garrigues, 1975), the United States (Berger, 1954; Stockman, 1985 and 1995; Bramson-Lerche, 1981; Peter Smith, 1982; Archer, 1977), Malaysia (Murthi, 1969), New Zealand (Margaret Ross, 1979), and Denmark (Warburg, 1992 and 1993).

There are, simply speaking, no studies on the Canadian Bahá’í community. Memoirs have either not yet been written by Canadian Bahá’ís, or are just now being put on paper.¹⁷ There are only several unpublished regional and national histories, relying often on secondary sources (e.g., Paula Williams, 1985; O’Neil, 1975; Pemberton-Pigott, 1988). Gerald Filson (1982) wrote a master’s thesis on the role of media in a specific information campaign in the Canadian Bahá’í community. There are infrequent references to Canadian Bahá’í history in Canadian Bahá’í journals. One finds few articles that delve into the past, except for a one-page article, notable for its lack of detail (1893: First Canadian Bahá’í, 1979), and one on Prince Edward Island (Rolfe, 1987). A brief article on early British Columbia Bahá’í history (McGee and McGee, 1983) also exists. Two major doctoral studies are currently underway (1996). Lynn Echevarria-Howe’s study (in progress at Essex University) deals with social change and Canadian Bahá’ís; Paula Drewek’s dissertation is on faith development among Bahá’ís in Canada and in India (defended in 1996 at the University of Ottawa). This lack of available documentation is reinforced by the scattered and unorganized nature of the National Bahá’í Archives in Canada.

Faced with the prospect of wanting to do a study of a new religious movement on which exists very little knowledge, I decided to draw on a variety of sources and to use both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Thus, from the perspective of someone doing qualitative research, I relied on some sixty-three open-ended interviews, conducted by myself or others, with individuals who were Bahá’ís before 1948 or who have some direct knowledge of the events described in this book. I also asked some sixty correspondents to identify sources, corroborate information, and provide fresh data. My other approach is quantitative in orientation and involves unofficial and official reports and the creation of a unique membership list (I shall spell this out in greater detail in Appendix E, which covers other matters related to my methodology).

A word about research ethics. I feel that the best way for a researcher to carry out his or her ethical obligations is to promote the view that the so-called subjects of the research are partners. Qualitative research methods are ideal because they accord the subjects primacy: the researcher has an obligation to understand and portray their perspectives of the world, without the inhibitions of a rigid theory usually conceived well in advance of the research with the support of hypotheses. This research process is not simple, because both the researcher and the partner develop a heightened awareness of their mutual interaction. Subtle shifts in the relationship result in new insights and fresh theoretical orientations.

The researcher’s obligations do not cease with writing up his or her findings. After finishing the first draft of the book, I submitted it to two circles of readers, consisting of both older and younger Bahá’ís, women and men. I asked them to consider the tone of the work and draw my attention to factual errors of omission or commission. Each group not only formally outlined the changes it would like to see, but we all met together to consider the issues raised. This process allowed me to be more confident about the research findings, forestalling ethical problems later on. I later convened several groups of people whom I had interviewed, and shared with them sections of the manuscript that pertained to them or to their communities. Enthusiasm and further offers of assistance greeted this consultative process.

Some may object that I have circulated an early draft of the book manuscript to Bahá’í readers. With the increased importance of maintaining ethics in their research, researchers are increasingly sharing their findings and questions with their research subjects, something that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada guidelines (and those of my University Ethics Committee) wholeheartedly endorse. In fact, such a process often yields important new data and insights, discussions of which can be taken down in either endnote form or in the main text itself. Along another dimension, I believe it is important to be as sensitive as possible to the question of gender in one’s research. Hence, I have made sure that my first circles of readers included both women and men. I have found it most helpful to receive the views of female readers, spotting this or that particular blind spot or bias on my part. Margrit Eichler’s book, Non-Sexist Research Methods (1988), has, in particular, moved me to consider carefully such bias in research: circulating the manuscript was simply one way of fulfilling this particular goal.

I decided to employ largely a narrative style, which seems the best way to integrate the various disciplines and methods and to best serve all the intended audiences. It means, in practical terms, that since the first few chapters deal with history, one is more likely to find the focus on the personalities of early believers. As the Bahá’í community takes clearer shape, the narrative focusses less on the personalities, and more on community processes. Similarly, the relations of the larger society to the Bahá’í Faith will require differing descriptions, depending on the particular phase of Bahá’í history. Obviously, the reactions of society to a new religion are quite different in its more developed phase than in its emergent phase.

The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada corrects, I hope, several trends in Canadian Bahá’í informal historiography. The few written, but many oral, accounts of the history of the Bahá’í Faith in Canada tend to focus on Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver—Canada’s principal urban centres then and now. Yet Bahá’í communities existed in about half a dozen other localities in Canada in the pre-1921 period. Moreover, much of the early Canadian history revolves around the personality and activities of May Maxwell of Montreal (In Memoriam, 1938-40: 631-42), one of Canada’s most influential and historically significant Bahá’ís before 1940. Little is known of Bahá’í work carried out by others.

A reader may naturally raise the question as to why a work on the Bahá’í Faith in Canada would focus on the first fifty years of its development (1898-1948). First, there is a particular value in examining the earliest developments of the Bahá’í community. The pre-1921 period in Bahá’í history represents an embryonic stage in the evolution of Bahá’í community administration. Under the leadership of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (the son of the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith) from 1892 until 1921, the Bahá’í movement expanded considerably, although little emphasis was given to administrative structure. Of necessity, the following early chapters of the book highlight the personal characteristics and social backgrounds of key individuals who have contributed to the spread of the new religion in Canada.

However, exploring the Bahá’í community between 1921 and 1948 gives us a different basis of discussion and renders more of a detailed understanding of the administrative growth and consolidation of the Bahá’í movement, leading to the establishment, in 1948, of its own national governing council in Canada, namely, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada. A study of the early Bahá’ís, as well as Bahá’í administrative development, sheds light on the social dynamics that underlie the rise, development, or decline of some communities. The Bahá’í community is emerging from obscurity and deserves, therefore, scholarly treatment. The new religion did take root in Canada, despite what may have appeared to be slow growth or even local stagnation here and there. The most recent persecutions of Bahá’ís in Iran (from 1979 to the present)—which received considerable attention in the press—accelerated the process of the Bahá’í community’s emergence from relative obscurity.

Sociologists and historians who have studied the phenomenon of new religious movements in Canada, which put them on the margins of their respective disciplines, have ignored the Bahá’í Faith. This has not always been the case. Several Islamicists of the late nineteenth century saw the Bahá’í Faith as a subject of great interest. The great Persian scholar Edward G. Browne devoted much of the early part of his career to the study of the Bahá’í movement (Balyuzi, 1970). Few followed Browne’s example, however, perhaps because the movement had become established in the West and no longer offered the drama and colour of its earlier, Eastern days. Since 1970, however, several important theses on the Shaykhi movement (the precursor to the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths), and on the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths have been written (Momen, forthcoming: 8). Since these theses were written by Bahá’ís, the transformations of the Bahá’í Faith in the latter part of the twentieth century passed almost without notice in the scholarly world, despite the fact that Bahá’ís represent a social and religious movement of sufficient size and age to merit study for its own sake. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1988: 303) considers it to be the third most global religion, and according to Ellwood (1985: 12), the Bahá’í Faith, possessing many adherents, well established in society, and a stable, institutional structure . . . seems likely to endure. Despite such commendations, one of the major annotated bibliographies of new religious movements (Choquette, 1985: 19-98) lists 347 sociological and anthropological studies, but none refers to the Bahá’í Faith. Stark and Bainbridge’s otherwise commendable study, The Future of Religion (1985), contains a number of factual errors about the Bahá’í Faith.¹⁸

Before considering the social history of the Bahá’ís in Canada, it will be useful to provide a general history of the movement before its arrival in Canada in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

General History of the Bahá’í Faith before 1894

The place of origin of the Bahá’í Faith is the Middle East. In 1844 a young merchant in Persia, named the Báb (1819-50), declared himself¹⁹ as the spiritual reformer long-awaited by the Muslim world. His progressive teachings (which included the emancipation of women) and his challenge to secular and clerical authorities led to his execution in Tabriz in 1850. The Báb also proclaimed that he was the harbinger of one who would succeed him and whose teachings would establish a new world order.

Bahá’u’lláh (1817-92) declared himself to be the Manifestation of God anticipated by the Báb. He first received an intimation of this mission in 1853 when he was incarcerated in an underground dungeon in Tehran, and more openly proclaimed it in 1863, in Baghdad, after his forced exile there. After a succession of similar exiles that lasted thirty-nine years, Bahá’u’lláh died in Akka, Palestine, in 1892.

Whereas in contemporary North American society, a traditional and personal moral code is associated with right-wing and orthodox social action, Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings emphasize a personal moral code based on traditional religious ethics, and embrace a liberal set of social teachings focussed on the need for universal disarmament and peace, a world tribunal, a universal auxiliary language, the equality of men and women, the harmony of science and religion, the elimination of racism, and the abolition of the extremes of poverty and wealth. His writings, which number some 5,000 letters and over 100 books, amplify these moral principles, in addition to a host of other teachings in matters of personal status such as laws of inheritance and marriage. In 1892 Bahá’u’lláh died, and according to his explicit wishes, his oldest son, ‘Abdu’1-Bahá (1844-1921), assumed leadership of the Bahá’í community. At this time, the Bahá’í Faith had spread to five countries in the Middle East and India.

Under the guidance of ‘Abdu’1-Bahá, the Bahá’í Faith spread to other lands and continents, including South America, South Africa, Australia, Japan, and Hawaii. After some fifty-five years of forced exile, the 1908 revolution of the Young Turks released ‘Abdu’1-Bahá from very restricted personal circumstances, whereupon he undertook voyages to Egypt, Europe, and North America, spreading the spiritual gospel of his father.

During World War I (1914-18), ‘Abdu’1-Bahá issued fourteen letters to the Bahá’ís in North America, giving them spiritual and administrative primacy to establish the Bahá’í Faith around the world. ‘Abdu’1-Bahá was knighted by the British for saving thousands in Palestine from famine. He left some 16,000 letters, in addition to records of his talks in the western hemisphere, which form the substance of his authorative interpretations and explanations of the teachings of Bahá’u’ llah. His summary of those teachings are, in fact, sometimes referred to as the Twelve Principles of the Bahá’í Faith, and are still used today by many Bahá’ís to sum up the main tenets of the Bahá’í Faith. Upon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s death in 1921, his will appointed his grandson, Shoghi Effendi (1897-1957), to lead the Bahá’í Faith under the title of Guardian.

Under Shoghi Effendi, the Bahá’í community spread from thirty-five countries to 257. The nature of the Bahá’í administrative order, believed to be drawn from the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, was clarified and interpreted by Shoghi Effendi. He assisted Bahá’í communities around the world in laying the foundation of such an order, and undertook a massive amount of correspondence (there are at least 36,000 known letters and cablegrams on file) in which he explained these teachings. Upon his death in 1957, authority was for a time assumed by a group of men and women, known as the Hands of the Cause of God, who had been appointed by Shoghi Effendi to act as the Chief Stewards of the Bahá’í Faith. They prepared the worldwide Bahá’í community for the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963. This latter body, anticipated by Bahá’u’lláh, is the supreme administrative authority of the Bahá’í Faith with the authority to legislate on matters not expressly revealed in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings.

The Bahá’í Faith today is primarily a Third World religious movement with over 80% of its adherents found in Third World countries. Numerically, the largest Bahá’í communities are found in India, Iran, East Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and the Andes. In some South Pacific locations, Bahá’ís constitute as much as one-fourth of the whole population.

Outline of the Book

Part One explores the earliest beginnings of the Bahá’í Faith in Canada, 1898-1912. The focus is entirely on the involvement of individuals across Canada who, independently of each other, accepted the new religion. Part One also underscores the attraction the religion exerted on people whose religious backgrounds included liberal Protestantism and cult-like movements such as New Thought, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, the occult, and spiritualism. This phase of the Bahá’í Faith came to an end in 1912 with the visit to North America of’Abdu’1-Bahá, the son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith; this visit was a keystone event in the development of the Canadian Bahá’í community. It linked the fragmented, highly individualistically oriented Bahá’ís before 1912 with the rise of community identity after 1912.

Part Two centres on the formation of community identity, with its implications of changing criteria of membership, the movement from porous to more firm boundaries, and changing styles