NADER SAIEDI, Logos and Civilization: Spirit, History, and Order in the Writings of Bahaءuעllah (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland/CDL Press, 2000). Pp. 404. $45.50 cloth.

Extract

This volume, which succeeds in being both brilliant and riddled with weaknesses, appears at a time when the lines between proper academic study of the Bahai movement on the one hand and faith-based scholarship on the other are being blurred and even derided. To make my own position clear, I am deeply committed to a strictly academic approach to the study of religion and thus find myself alienated by apologetics dressed up as academic studies. I am in particular profoundly worried by increasing attempts by orthodox Bahais to seize the academic high ground through organizations such as the Association of Bahai Studies, the Bahai Chair at the University of Maryland, Landegg International University, and, most recently, the Bahai-funded Chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while resorting to the use of excommunication against Bahai scholars who take unorthodox positions. The Bahais, like the Unification Church in the 1980s, are using their financial muscle to set the academic agenda relating to their faith.