Conclusion to my 2019 OCCULTURE (Berlin) talk
To conclude, in these times of the
so-called “clash of civilizations” where postmodernity in its neoliberal
capitalist form with its assorted spawns and permutations has either directly
or indirectly, whether by intention or unintentionally, infiltrated almost all
spiritual lifeworlds of this planet; and where its purported antitheses in the
far-right (East and West) has increasingly clawed more and more into the
public’s attention with its own bankrupt totalitarian ideologies; in the creed
founded by Siyyid ʿAlī Muḥammad Shīrāzī, the Bāb, there appears to be a way out
of the global predicament with concrete solutions whether from the planetary
environmental crisis (in the proposed collectivization of the 4 Elements with
its novel eco-socialism) to the perennial problem of human freedom, gender and
equality.
Here is a creed at once deeply
esoteric while -- and contrary to the quite problematic models offered by the
Guenonian-Evolian Neo-Traditionalists and their fellow travellers – it is
simultaneously leftwing and progressive, in the genuine denotation of those
terms. If the Neo-Traditionalist school has offered theocracy, feudalism and
monarchy as the solution to the Crisis of the Modern World, calling it
Traditionalism; almost one hundred years prior to the original publication of
Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times in 1945, in Iran
during the 1840s the Bāb instead had offered a model of Theophanocracy (or
spiritualized democracy), eco-socialism, freedom, gender equality,
anti-colonialism and liberation from the abusive and authoritarian strictures
of synagogue, church, mosque, monarch, capitalism, colonialism and ecocide
alike while offering an interpretation of both sacred and profane history (with
the nexus between the two) that makes far more sense than the blatantly
reactionary pseudo-metaphysical focus of nostalgia towards the past by Guenon,
Evola, Schuon and their school. Here in the lettrist Bābī metaphysics of the
All-Things, we have an upending of the arbitrary top-down Neo-Traditionalist
fallacy of hierarchy and hierarchization, with its related patriarchy and
misogyny, and instead we observe a more dynamic notion of an organic ontology
of the holarchy of Being multiversally located within the Names and Attributes
of God to which all believing human subjects (nay, all beings) are a manifested
instantiation. Nor here is there a tout court rejection of science or
technological advance. Rather, for the Bayān, there exists pluralities of
possible scientific methodologies and so it is the materialist-positivist
approach that is at issue, and not the thing-in-itself. Here we have a creed
that at once rejects notions of either the linear or non-linear “end of
history” and instead proposes the incessant movement of history as the locus of
perpetual levels of spiritual perfection and perfectability with everlasting
eschatons or endless qīyāmāt (formulated via the symbolism of the rising of the
sun and its setting and its re-rise and reset ad infinitum) which punctuates
and acts as history’s assorted periodizations in the continual dramaturgical
unfoldment of progressive Divine Apotheosis in time; humanly located,
singularly as well as collectively, whether within the House of Being (that for
the spatiotemporal condition of humanity abides within Language), or beyond it.
Here we have a creed that inhabits both the spatial and ideational
weltanschauung of Islamic esotericism and gnosis with its rich
Hermeto-Neoplatonic occulture while simultaneously being openly post-Islamic in
its vision and offering unique novelizations upon what had preceded it.
Unlike the Guenonian
Neo-Traditionalists, the religion of the Bayān does not reject modernity per
se. Rather it offers a completely alternative narrative to the patently failed
machine-driven Eurocentric model of it. Secularism to the Bayān does not mean
that we throw the Spirit out of society and marginalize its Reality. Rather it
means we make the Spirit the very guiding pivot of society itself while
obviating the power of 'human, all too human' institutionalized religious
authority, with its penchant for authoritarianism, in dictating the Divine Will
to the collectivity of the believing human subject -- who as singularity as
well as in multiplicity is the locus of the Divine Will; until, that is, the
arrival of the next manifestation of the Human Pentagrammic Talisman of the
Divine actualizes in the spatiotemporal world.
Although beginning as of the late
1860s the Bahāʾīs, their founder and his successors violently usurped the
original Bābī movement (i.e. the religion of the Bayān), relegating it to the
margins of at least the Western imagination (while instead they manufactured
for themselves a Western colonialist-driven, pro-capitalist and heavily
corporatized, authoritarian, fetishizing, feel-good but abusive and patriarchal
“Amway” cult with prayer); within Iran itself the Bayānīs went on to spawn the
Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09 that eventually toppled the
authoritarian Qājār dynasty with its brutal and corrupt feudalism. While again
relegated to the underground during much of the Pahlavī period from 1925-1941,
the Bayānī community went on to help build much of Iran’s modern education
infrastructure (and esp. of women and girls) while being active on the side of
Mohammad Mossadegh and the Iranian nationalization of oil during the early
1950s. Although unsubstantiated rumors originating with the Bahāʾīs claim the
Shah’s able court minister, Asadollah Alam, was a Bayānī; in the decade
following the August 1953 coup d’etat against Mossadegh, out of the ranks of
the Bayānī community emerged Dr. ʿAlī Sharīʿatī (d. 1977) with his pointed
anti-clericalism and typologies of 'Red and Black Shiʿism' which is informed
by a left-oriented qua existential interpretation of Islamic history and
sociology: Dr. ʿAlī Sharīʿatī, a student of Louis Massignon, who is credited as
being one of the ideological founding fathers of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of
Iran (that is, in its authentically leftwing orientation as opposed to its
theocratic and reactionary actualization); Dr. ʿAlī Sharīʿatī who, together
with his father, was secretly an adherent of the post-Islamic religion of the
Bāb the whole time. Thanks to the internet, as of the closing decade of the
20th century, and especially with the launch of the website Bayanic.com as of 2004, the Bayānī community
re-emerged back into the greater public space once more in order to pick up the
greater struggle from where it had left off.
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