family foto

i want to touch this picture with my fingers. it's like magic.

it is a picture of my grandparents and their three (of six) children ---including my mum, who's looking in the other direction at something way more fascinating than a box. this is the first picture i've ever ever seen of my mum as a child. she says, "Here is a photo of my family, it is taken at the time that they just went homefront pioneering to Assad-Abad, near Hamadan."

my grandfather grew up persecuting Baha'is, throwing stones at them on their way to gatherings and so on. when he himself became a Baha'i, he was excommunicated from his family, who were from Amjazerd, and was not allowed back into that town for a long time. while living in Assad-Abad (a description of it is here), he and his family were subject to harassment, threats, and physical abuse for belonging to the Baha'i Faith.* my mum has told me stories of her own and her mother's memories of these incidences, involving extraordinary strength of character, courage, steadfastness, and humour.

i should start writing them down.

* this stuff continues today, and you can check out Baha'i World News Service for regular updates.


frequently in my Baha'i life i have had reason to remember my grandfather in thankfulness for his faith, which my mother also believes in and which i eventually chose as my own path too. from the germ of his choice in becoming a Baha'i, more than 60 years later i have made friends with people from most every religious, socio-economic, national, political, and ethnic background. i have travelled to all these crazy places around the world, and i have had incredible, heart-felt connections with people with whom i did not even share a common language. i have been able to avoid developing a misanthropic world-view---something i think i was in great danger of succumbing to when i was young and feckless. (... oh. i didn't realise it meant something so grOUCHy with a capital OUCH. i thought it was more in the vein of saying "footloose and fancy free". i also wasn't referring to this either, nor him: it was my OWN version of young and feckless.)

anyway, anyway.

and so when i remember him for his sacrfice and firmness in the face of fanatical violence, i remember what he stood firm for: oneness of humanity, oneness of religion, oneness of God. and he was illiterate, and probably never left the country of his birth (he may have gone on the Muslim pilgrimage, the hajj, before he became a Baha'i). i mean he had this world-embracing view; it was not confined to his own self, or his own region. through the education that my mother received from her Baha'i parents, i have received from my own parents a love for humanity that was imparted with the love from my mother's milk. to think of it like that, that this man who i never met has had this far-reaching an effect on my character, it floors me. always.

recalling the life of my grandfather in this way brings to mind strongly the following passage recorded by a 19th-century orientalist, E.G. Browne, from words spoken to him by Baha'u'llah, Who was a prisoner most of His life for encouraging people to lay aside their prejudices*:

Thou hast come to see a prisoner and an exile.... We desire but the good of the world and happiness of the nations; yet they deem us a stirrer up of strife and sedition worthy of bondage and banishment.... That all nations should become one in faith and all men as brothers; that the bonds of affection and unity between the sons of men should be strengthened; that diversity of religion should cease, and differences of race be annulled -- what harm is there in this?... Yet so it shall be; these fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the "Most Great Peace" shall come.... Do not you in Europe need this also? Is not this that which Christ foretold?... Yet do we see your kings and rulers lavishing their treasures more freely on means for the destruction of the human race than on that which would conduce to the happiness of mankind.... These strifes and this bloodshed and discord must cease, and all men be as one kindred and one family.... Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind....

(Words spoken. to E. G. Browne, from his pen portrait of Bahá'u'lláh, J. E. Esslemont, "Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era", 5th rev. ed. (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1987), pp. 39-40)


* if you scroll down on this wikipedia page on the Baha'i Faith, you'll see a header that says "Social Principles". yup. that basically sums it up.





and p.s.? shaun thinks this picture looks like it's from, like, 1909---but i hazard a guess it's from 1949? 1950? he comes from a background of wealthy americans, and i've seen COLOUR pictures of his GRANDparents, which is just insane. the earliest colour pictures in my family start when my parents were in their 30s.