Vancouver’s small Baha’i community is in the midst of the holiest time of their year, a 12-day festival marking the foundation of the faith. Ridvan (pronounced rez-VON) began at sundown Sunday and recalls the time the faith’s founder, Bahá’u’lláh, spent in a paradise-like garden in Baghdad in 1863.
The roots of the Baha’i faith trace back to Iran and the religion flourished first in the Middle East. The Universal House of Justice, the administrative seat of the faith, is in Haifa, Israel, sitting splendidly atop a cascading garden of 19 terraces on Mount Carmel. And, while a great many Baha’is in the Vancouver area — especially in North Vancouver — speak Farsi or Arabic, inherent to Baha’i belief is the unity of humankind and all religions, and the universality of the Baha’i faith. The celebrations that took place Monday in the Baha’i Centre on Main Street proceeded mostly in English.
Baha’i activities take place customarily in the local tongue, affirming the faith’s concept of “unity in diversity,” but the universal language of music is an important expression of the faith as well, bringing adherents closer to the spiritual.
Susan Ardekany is a member of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Vancouver, the administrative body of the faith in these parts. Her own story is a sort of microcosm of trends in Baha’i demographics. Her surname comes from her husband, who is from the Middle East, but Ardekany is the daughter of a woman who converted to Baha’i in, of all places, remote Moosonee, Ont.
In fact, while the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran helped swell the ranks of Baha’is in B.C., Ardekany says the faith came to the West Coast originally not from Middle Easterners, but from a small group of Canadians who moved west in the 1920s, making this one of the oldest Baha’i communities in Canada.
The faith has spread worldwide, now counting about six million adherents. In Vancouver, there are about 670 Baha’is, says Ardekany, with maybe 1,500 or 2,000 in the metro area. Numbers are difficult to estimate because there are many people who have not officially joined the faith but who participate nonetheless in the many Baha’i projects that better the community and the world.
Social action is central to Baha’is, part of a core belief in service to humankind. Canadian Baha’is were involved with the Truth and Reconciliation process looking at the history of First Nations in residential schools. Empowerment for young people is also a top concern, as is equality between women and men, the elimination of extreme poverty and wealth, emphasis on education, and the elimination of all prejudice, among other values.
Baha’is view Bahá’u’lláh as the latest in a succession of messengers of God. Baha’is recognize figures that are central to other faiths — Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad — and view Bahá’u’lláh (as he himself did) as the latest incarnation of divine word made flesh.
Baha’is have often had a difficult relationship with officialdom in the faith’s place of origin. Almost immediately after Bahá’u’lláh began his prophetic mission, Muslim clerics and the Persian government took note. (Baha’is remain among the most persecuted groups in contemporary Iran.) He was exiled to Baghdad, then, in 1863, summoned by the Ottoman rulers to move on to Constantinople. He would die in an Ottoman prison in 1892. It was the preparation for his exile from Baghdad that is the basis for Ridvan, the King of Festivals. The 12-day holy period recalls Bahá’u’lláh’s 11 days in the Najibiyyih garden, near Baghdad, where he received visitors before leaving on the 12th day. It was here that he began to acknowledge to those closest to him his messianic mission as “He whom God shall make manifest.”
The time in the garden represents the pivotal moment in the Baha’i tradition. The community to which Bahá’u’lláh belonged was a breakaway of Shia Islam known as the Babis, after “the Bab,” Siyyid Alí-Muhammad of Shiraz, who two decades earlier had foretold the advent of a messiah.
During the sojourn in the garden, with Bahá’u’lláh’s profession as a messenger from God, the new faith was born and the Babis became Baha’is.
For Ardekany, Ridvan is a time to reflect and celebrate humankind’s oneness.
“It’s really a joyous time. And it’s also spring,” she says. It is a time when Baha’is rededicate themselves to the central idea that “we are all flowers of one garden, leaves of one tree.”
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