The central contention of this book is that Timor-Leste's leaders promote an absolute external sovereignty concept that views selfdetermination and a lack of reliance upon other actors in the international community as central to effective statehood. As the previous chapter examined, the “security-development nexus” reflects the mutually-reinforcing relationship between conflict management, and economic and institutional development. According to José Ramos-Horta, Timor-Leste is “keenly aware of the link between security, stability and poverty reduction”. The capacities of state governments to deliver key services to citizens are “essential” for managing conflict, and internal security conditions influence the capacities of states to promote economic development. While the previous chapter highlighted the security dimensions of effective statehood, this chapter examines the use of foreign policy by Timorese governments to advance their economic ambitions to secure empirical sovereignty by consolidating their governmental capacities.

As a self-identified fragile state, Timor-Leste's ability to enact its vision of sovereignty relies upon its medium- and long-term development and resource allocation plans, and its economic relations with other actors in the global economy. Timor-Leste's leaders recognized during the independence movement that Timor-Leste's economic independence would rely upon the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, a body of water separating the coastlines of the island of Timor and Australia by less than 400 nautical miles. Since 2007, Timor-Leste has experienced high rates of economic growth and associated gains in socioeconomic development indicators due to joint oil and gas development with Australia. This has enabled Timor-Leste's political leaders to present the state as a fragile state “success story” (see chapter four). Timor- Leste's representatives, including Xanana Gusmão, promote these finite resources as the centrepiece of its ambitious economic plans. The 2011 Strategic Development Plan (SDP) articulated aspirations of turning Timor-Leste into an upper-middle income state by 2030. This goal forms an important part of its aspirational foreign policy.

Timor-Leste's biggest economic challenge has also constituted its biggest foreign policy challenge: since 2002, the issue of who “owns” the resources in the Timor Sea has complicated bilateral relations between Timor-Leste and Australia. Maritime resources are inherently tied up with Timor-Leste's economic viability and internal sovereign capabilities as oil revenues have provided over 90 per cent of government revenue, rendering the state as central to wealth production and the allocation of scarce economic resources.

Abduʾl-Bahā (Abbās Effendi, 1844-1921) was the son of Bahāʾuʾllāh (Mirzā Hosayn ʿAli Nuri, 1817-1892), the founder of the Bahāʾi Faith. His ideas cannot be separated from that framework. The network of Bahāʾi communities willing to practise and spread Abduʾl-Bahā's ideas has also been a major factor in his influence and effectiveness. Moreover the Bahāʾi community was a precocious model for some of the reforms that Iranian modernists wanted to see in Iranian society: modern forms of education, the education and social participation of women and reliance on consultation among the people.

From about 1867, Bahāʾuʾllāh sent letters to prominent world leaders that addressed the inadequacy of national and international governance. He also instructed Abduʾl-Bahā to write the first of the works translated here, The Secret of Divine Civilization, in support of the reforms that the Prime Minister, Mirzā Hosayn Khān, known as Moshir al-Dawleh and Sepahsālār, had initiated in Iran. Abduʾl-Bahā did so in 1875.

Abduʾl-Bahā lived in tumultuous times: Iran, along with the wider area in which Persian was the language of culture, was feeling the impact of modernity and the influence of European (especially Russian) colonial and commercial expansion, as well as being under pressure from its Sunni neighbour and rival, the Ottoman Empire. The need for modernisation was felt earlier in the Ottoman Empire, where a larger modernising intellectual network was connected with more diverse European influences than was the case in Iran at that time. The first Ottoman Constitution was promulgated in 1876. As Abbas Amanat notes:

It should be noted that modernisation in 1850 did not entail democratisation, or many of the features we associate today with the modern state. The Russian Empire was an absolute monarchy; the Ottoman Empire was only slightly more progressive.

He is God.

[Preamble]

All praise and thanksgiving be to God, who has made the appearance of the sacred perfections of the human realm the foundation of His creation, so that the unseen essence may be manifested on the plane of perception, in the form of ranks and signs, precepts and functions, characteristics and essences. Thus the rays of the reality of the saying, “I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known” may dawn on the horizon of the visible world.

And all praise and glorification are due to that exalted reality of grandeur who is the sun of truth in the divine world, the most great luminary of the human realm, the seat of the manifestation of the Merciful, and the dawningplace for the signs shining from the presence of the One Being. Through his appearance, the secret of “I created the creation, so that I might be known” has been confirmed on the visible plane.

You see the earth lifeless: when we let rain descend upon it, it stirs and swells, and produces plants from all the pairs, causing rejoicing.

[The author's purpose]

In these days and times, certain events that are contrary to all religious law, things that destroy human institutions and undermine the divine edifice, have been brought about by some ignorant, foolish people and by rebels and those who love discord. They have taken God's clear Faith as a pretext and have stirred up a seditious commotion. They have dishonoured the people of Iran in the eyes of the nations of the world, far and near.

Gracious God! They claim to be shepherds, but have the characters of wolves; they recite the Quran, and wish to behave like wild animals. They have a human form, but they prefer the manners of beasts. “And when it is said to them, ‘Do no mischief on the earth’ they say, ‘We only want to make peace’ Truly, they are the ones who make mischief, but they do not realise it.” Therefore it has become necessary to briefly clarify the most basic fundamentals of the Faith of God, and to remind the friends to be alert and watchful.

The Bābi leaders … prepared replies in accordance with their own beliefs … for example, they interpreted the sovereignty of the Qāʾim as spiritual sovereignty, and “conquests” as conquests of the cities of men's hearts, their proof for this being that Imām Hosayn, the Prince of Martyrs (may the life of all beings be sacrificed for his sake), suffered oppression and was conquered, although he was the true manifestation of the blessed verse “and that our hosts must surely conquer.” Despite this, he suffered grievous oppression and drained the cup of martyrdom. Yet even in resounding defeat, he was defeating the enemy at the head of the hosts of the concourse on high.

At all events, the Prime Minister, acting entirely on his own without consultation or permission, sent commands to all quarters to chastise and torture the Bābis. Magistrates and governors sought a pretext for meddling, officials sought a means of benefiting from the situation, and celebrated divines from pulpit tops incited mob attacks. The powers of church and state7 joined hands to eradicate and exterminate this community.

Since the Bāb was but beginning to lay the foundations when he was slain, this community was ignorant concerning its proper customs, conduct, morals and obligations. Their only foundation was love for the Bāb, and their ignorance led to disorder in some places. And when they encountered severe persecution, they defended themselves.

But after his return, Bahāʾuʾllāh made strenuous efforts in training, educating, refining, regulating, and improving the conditions of this community, so that in a short time all this disruption and mischief was extinguished, and the hearts attained the utmost peace and tranquillity. According to reports, it became clear and evident even to those in authority that the intentions, principles and ideas of this community were of spiritual matters and of the bonds between pure hearts; that their true and essential foundation was to reform the morals and improve the conduct of the human race. They had absolutely no attachment to the material world.

This book presents three of the works of Abduʾl-Bahā dealing with social and political issues that deserve to be taken more seriously as contributions to reformist literature in the Islamic world during the period leading up to Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). It is intended for general readers, scholars in the field of Persian intellectual history and students of Persian political and religious history. These works, in chronological order, are The Secret of Divine Civilization, A Traveller's Narrative and The Art of Governance.

In recent years there have been signs of a softening in the anti-Bahāʾism which, in Abbas Amanat's words, has long been “a social affliction – a kind of Iranian anti-Semitism, …” affecting Iranians of all backgrounds. Some of the texts translated here, especially the extracts from A Traveller's Narrative, give an authoritative overview of Bahāʾi religious teachings, and will be an initial and indispensable source – along with the Tablets of Bahāʾuʾllāh Revealed after the Kitāb-e Aqdas and Epistle to the Son of the Wolf – for those seeking primary material for an informed judgement. The failure to reach a modus vivendi between religion and politics has been the major cause of Iran's aborted modernity, which has continued for more than a century past its first tragic failure at the end of the Constitutional Revolution. Those Iranian intellectuals who are coming to regard the relationship between church and state as the central question to be resolved in Iran may well be willing to examine again what Bahāʾuʾllāh and Abduʾl-Bahā were saying on this topic in the period leading to the Revolution.

At the same time, in Iran and around the world, doctrinaire secularism has given way to an awareness that religions are part of our cultures, and neither religion nor culture is destined to wither away in a march towards progress enlightened by scientific consciousness. Public intellectuals must therefore consider how to preserve the gains of modernity and secularism in societies that are becoming post-modern and post-secular, in which the death of religion anticipated by the pioneers of modernism no longer looks likely.

The Secret of Divine Civilization

The earliest of the works by Abduʾl-Bahā included here is the Resāleh-ye madaniyyeh (Treatise on Civilization), also known in Arabic as Asrār algheybiyya le asbāb al-madaniyyah (Heavenly secrets as to the means of civilization), and known in English as The Secret of Divine Civilization. Composed in 1875, it supports the administrative and broader social reforms of Mirzā Hosayn Khān, but looks mainly for organic reform from below, and especially through the efforts of Iranian intellectuals to waken and educate the masses. Abduʾl-Bahā gives virtuous and progressive Islamic clerics a leading role among these intellectuals; indeed most of his appeals are directed specifically to them. This is an important counter to a commonly expressed view that the Bahāʾi Faith, which has no clergy itself, is anti-clerical in principle. Relatively innovative elements in Abduʾl-Bahā's programme include the need for a system of global collective security based on law and backed by force, and the suggestion that public officials should be chosen in periodic elections, rather than being appointed by the Shah, so as to give the public a supervisory role and inhibit corruption. Abduʾl-Bahā not only has definite reforms in mind, he also brings a sociological perspective regarding what makes reform possible without fragmenting society, and a comparative historical perspective. This perspective ranges from observations on the shape of society in medieval Europe to seeing what lessons can be learned from the Paris commune and the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war.

This was the second reformist treatise in Persian to be printed and distributed in Iran, after Mostashār al-Dowleh's Yek Kalameh. Mirzā Fath ʿAli Ākhundzādeh's Letters of Kamāl al-Dawleh was a few years earlier, and circulated in manuscript from the late 1860s.

E.G. Browne has noted its wide dissemination, although I do not know of any evidence of how its message was received outside the Bahāʾi community. Its importance to Bahāʾuʾllāh's project is indicated by the fact that, when the Hasani Zivar Press became available in Bombay, this was the second printed publication Bahāʾuʾllāh commissioned (the first being his Kitāb-e Iqān, or Book of Certitude).

[Preamble]

Prodigies of praise and thanks, manifold expressions of gratitude and thankfulness, are due to the court of God's Oneness, for out of all the realities of existence, He singled out the human reality and honoured it with knowledge and understanding, the two most luminous lights in this world, and in the entire creation. Through the effects and products of that supreme endowment, He has painted new images and imprinted wondrous forms on the mirror of creation in every age and dispensation. For if we cast a pure eye upon the realm of existence, it is apparent that in every cycle the body of the world is adorned with a certain quality and splendour and is honoured through the new virtues bestowed upon it through emanations from knowledge and insight.

This great sign of God has no peer in His creation and has been honoured above all created things. The tradition which says, “Before all else, God created reason” bears witness to this fact. From the dawn of creation, it was ordained that reason should be manifest in the human temple.

Pure and blameless is He who has made our world of darkness the envy of the worlds of light, through the radiance of this heavenly bounty. As it is written: “The earth shone by the light of her Lord.” Holy and exalted is He, Who has decreed that the innate nature of human beings should become the source of this boundless grace. As it is written: “The God of mercy taught the recitation of His Word: He created human beings and taught them articulate speech.”

O you who are wise! Out of gratitude for this supreme grace, raise your suppliant hands to the court of the one God, and humble yourselves and be lowly before Him, for we have lived to see the day, in this dispensation, when waves of heavenly power dawn and radiate from the conscience of humanity, so that the flame of the Lord's fire may be rekindled in human hearts.

Every discerning eye will see that all these works, these concepts, knowledge, useful arts and philosophical systems, these sciences, industries and inventions – have all emanated from reason and knowledge.