The Liberal/Unenrolled Baha'is and their cultural Islamophobia

[NUR]

http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2012/04/liberalunenrolled-bahais-and-their.html


The Greatest Name shall do its thing, be of good cheer, O Heart
For by guile and deceit the demon shall never become Solomon!

- Hafiz

Recently on Facebook someone made the following astute observation:

"....I have noticed that most "liberal" Baha'i "dissenters" are
essentially Islamophobic. They blame everything "wrong" with the
Baha'i Administration on Islam, while everything "good" about the
Baha'i Faith is due to Western Enlightement Liberal values. So, their
whole platform is "Islam is bad, and it's Islam's fault that the
Baha'i Administration is conservative on some views", etc. I mean,
some of them have gone so far as to completely get rid of the Bab'
from their religious worldview, such as Frederick Glaysher of the
"Reform Bahai Faith", because the Bab' is "too close to Islam." They
also call Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice,
"Ayatollahs" as a pejorative. So I think Islamophobia really does play
a strong role in the so-called "liberal Baha'i dissent" "movement...."


My response: This all came about as a result of Juan Cole's departure
from the Haifan Baha'i cyberspace scene in 2002, although he himself
laid the seeds of it. Remember, most of the Liberal/Unenrolled Baha'i
crowd are white middle-class suburbanite yuppies whose professed
intellectual cosmopolitanism actually masks a deep seated
provincialism, including the ones who came into the Baha'i
organization from the 1960s hippy counter-culture. Most of them also
went dissident in the '90s because of personal problems and cultural
clashes with the Iranian Baha'i community as a result of the Iranian
diaspora of the '80s. As such Baha'i liberalism is actually not
liberal at all, but it is outright white reactionary knee-jerkism.
Frederick Glaysher, for all the otherwise good work he has done, is a
professed anti-Iranian racist. The Marshalls, especially Steve
Marshall, typify the attitude of cultural arrogance of white south-
Island New Zealanders towards people of the Subcontinent and the
Middle East. You will see total racism especially in someone like
Starr Saffa and her silly Hollywood glitz and glamor, Americanesque
appropriation of Qurrat'ul-'Ayn, re-Imagining Tahirih into a New Age
"ascended master" guru (which Saffa claims to channel) (a parody of
everything Edward Sa’id wrote about in Orientalism). The paranoid,
xenophobic drivel and racist Islamophobic hysterics of Saffa, where
she argues the existence of a conspiracy by Western Muslims to impose
shar'ia law in Western countries, echoes the same amongst the US Tea
Party and Fox News, the far-right and Neo-Nazi fringe in Europe and
North America, not to mention Pauline Hanson's putative One Nation
Party in Australia of the late 1990s and that ZioNazi lunatic Debbie
Schlussel and her friends. Note that some of the stuff Saffa used to
say about this Muslim conspiracy echoes the talking points of Anders
Breivik's manifesto before he went on his killing spree in Norway last
year.


I fell afoul of these people in 2000/2001 because I realized that on
many core issues they were not only illiberal but outright
reactionary, basically products of the Western capitalist pop-culture
mainstream and its largely ingrained cultural racism; and since I was
not going to remain as the token Persian to their silly games of
'loyal opposition' to the UHJ system, I basically cut my losses with
these idiots. Their polarized constructs of the Islamic Other - in
ample evidence within the covers of both Juan Cole's MODERNITY AND THE
MILLENIUM and Sen McGlinn's CHURCH AND STATE (the two proof-text
Bibles of this group) - might as well be the platform for the American
Enterprise Institute or the Neo-Nazi founded Liberty Lobby. This is
why the US/British/Zionist establishment likes to play ball with all
of these people (whether they be establishmentarian loyalists or the
Liberal/Unenrolled crowd) because these people are goose-steppers and
convinced cultural-warriors of the Anglo-American-Zionist West's
"Huntingtonian" kulturkampf and Islamophobic "clash of civilizations"
agenda. Bottom line, these people are cultural Fascists and so
Islamophobia is part and parcel of their self-referential
discourse(s). Those like Bacquia (their token Persian), who is
culturally more a Canadian with hardly any Iranianity/Iraniyat to her
whatsoever (despite what she claims otherwise about her ethnic
pedigree), are among them the Quislings, the native informers (as
typologized by Fanon and Dabashi in their books).


That said, however hard these people beat their chests about being
liberal or dissidents to the system, at the end of the day, when all
is said and done (other than Glaysher), they are all, to the last of
them, ultimately nothing but pegs, pawns and patsies of the UHJ system
itself. They do, after all, plead to being loyalists of the 'Haifan
tradition'. Note especially as well, how even though they (the UHJ)
formally threw him out, Sen McGlin has in recent years become the most
dependable and lock-jawed covenant-warrior for the Baha'i Internet
Agency online, stooping to every form of intellectual dishonesty in
the book in order to prove himself to the masters on the Carmelian
hill in Zionistan. Go figure...