Iranian Visionary: On 'Abdu'l-Baha's Modernism

Catalog description

Among the handful of occasions when Stanford's President has required all students and faculty to attend a public lecture, two names are widely remembered: Martin Luther King Jr. and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Less well known is that in 1912, Stanford's founding President David Starr Jordan - himself one of the original trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - extended that same rare invitation to 'Abdu'l-Baha Abbas, a Persian thinker and social reformer who had spent decades as a prisoner of the Ottoman Empire before his release in 1908. During his 1912 North American tour, Abdu'l-Baha Abbas spoke before an audience of approximately 2,000 Stanford faculty and students on the themes that defined his public mission: the abolition of war, the oneness of humanity, the dangers of unchecked technological progress, the adoption of a universal auxiliary language, the advancement of women's education and equality, and the question of racism and racial justice in America. His presence at Stanford was not incidental - it reflected a serious intellectual engagement with the modern world at a moment of profound global transformation. This course asks: what kind of modernism did 'Abdu'l-Baha Abbas's vision represent? We will examine the philosophical and historical roots of his thought, tracing how an Iranian prisoner of conscience became one of the early twentieth century's most compelling voices on global order and human advancement. Our primary texts will be The Secret of Divine Civilization (1875), a foundational political treatise advocating constitutional governance, rational administration, and cultural reform in the Muslim world, and A Traveller's Narrative (1886), a historical account of the Babi and Baha'i movements that raises essential questions about religion, modernity, and political authority from the perspective of a fictional traveler to…