What the Court at Beba Wrote Down

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Words in quotation marks are from the court's judgment or from Shoghi Effendi, as he gives them.

The village was called Kawmu's-Sa'ayidih. It lay in the district of Beba, in the province of Beni Suef in Upper Egypt, and the Baha'is there had formed a Baha'i assembly.

The headman of the village opposed it. Shoghi Effendi attributes his conduct to religious fanaticism. The headman made grave accusations against the believers to the District Police Officer and to the Governor of the province, and these so inflamed feeling in the village that shameful acts were committed against the Baha'is.

The matter then went to law. The notary of the village, acting as a religious plaintiff authorized by the Ministry of Justice, brought an action against three Baha'i residents. They had been married as Muslims to Muslim wives, and since then, he claimed, they had abandoned Islam; he asked that their wives be divorced from them.

The case came before the Appellate religious court of Beba. Before giving its verdict, the court set out the fundamental tenets and ordinances of Islam, then gave a detailed exposition of the Baha'i teachings, quoting from the Kitab-i-Aqdas, from the writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha and from Mirza Abu'l-Fadl, with special reference to certain Baha'i laws. On that basis it found that the defendants had in fact abjured the religion of Muhammad.

The judgment was delivered on 10 May 1925. It annulled the marriages of the three defendants, ordered the husbands' "separation" from their wives, and condemned the men as heretics who had violated the laws and ordinances of Islam. It ended by saying that if any of the husbands repented and returned to Islam, testifying that Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets and Messengers, "that no religion will succeed His religion, that no law will abrogate His law, that the Qur'an is the last of the Books of God," then "he shall be accepted and shall be entitled to renew his marriage contract."

To reach that verdict, the judges had to state what the Baha'i Faith is. In Shoghi Effendi's words, the court's formal verdict declared "in the most unequivocal terms": "The Baha'i Faith is a new religion, entirely independent, with beliefs, principles and laws of its own, which differ from, and are utterly in conflict with, the beliefs, principles and laws of Islam. No Baha'i, therefore, can be regarded a Muslim or vice-versa, even as no Buddhist, Brahmin, or Christian can be regarded a Muslim or vice-versa."

The highest ecclesiastical authorities in Cairo sanctioned the judgment and upheld it as final, and the Muslim authorities themselves printed and circulated it.

Writing in 1944, Shoghi Effendi explained why the judgment mattered. The enemies of the Faith, in the East and in the West, had until then either disputed or ignored the claim that it was an independent religion, and the leaders of Shi'ih Islam in Persia and Iraq had for a century avoided saying so. Now a religious court in a country that aspired to the headship of Islam had said it, supported by proofs its own members had assembled. Baha'i communities in the East and the West acclaimed the judgment, he writes, as "the first Charter of the emancipation of the Cause of Baha'u'llah from the fetters of Islamic orthodoxy," the first historic step on the road to its recognition, taken "not by its adherents as might have been expected, but by its adversaries."

The verdict had been designed to deny the Baha'is access to the Muslim courts and leave them in a perplexing and embarrassing situation. Instead it became, in Shoghi Effendi's word, a "lever." Translated into several languages and circulated among the Baha'i communities, it paved the way for negotiations with the civil authorities in Egypt, in the Holy Land, in Persia and even in the United States, for the official recognition of the Faith as an independent religion.

In Egypt the believers resolved to have no dealings with any Muslim ecclesiastical court and to refuse any ecclesiastical post offered them. The laws of the Kitab-i-Aqdas on marriage, divorce, inheritance and burial were codified, published and presented to the Egyptian Cabinet, and the National Spiritual Assembly began issuing its own marriage and divorce certificates. The Assembly petitioned the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Justice to recognize it as a body qualified to exercise the functions of an independent court, and it enclosed with the petition a copy of the judgment of the court.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, chapter XXIV.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Baha'i Publishing Trust.