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The Baha'i faith and the World's Religions ...

Another volume of papers delivered during the 1997-9 seminars appeared under the title :

  • The Baha'i faith and the World's Religions, papers presented at the Irfan Colloquia, ed. Moojan Momen, Oxford: George Ronald, 2003, ISBN 0-85398-465-4, 247 pp.

There is a review of this volume by Stephen Lambden in Iranian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, Sep., 2007 pp. 550-552. 

"This 247 page book from the U.K.-European Baha'i Publisher "George Ronald" falls within its "Baha'i Studies Scries" and selectively prints a number of papers for the most part delivered during 1997-99 at various U.K. and North American Baha'i studies seminar events, known as "Irfan Colloquia." These semi-academic scholarly gatherings began in the U.K. with this name in the mid-1990s and came to be supported by funding from the U.S.-based "Haj Mehdi Arjmand Memorial Fund."

The volume under review contains eleven somewhat uneven papers, a few of the more useful of which will be commented upon here. First, is a useful summary of basic Baha'i theology in comparative mode by Moojan Momen entitled "The God of Baha'u'llah." It sums up major aspects of Baha'i theology and theophanology (the doctrine of the mazhar-i ilahi or "Manifestation of God") without getting too bogged down in technical terminology and highlighting an interesting integrative theology of religious unity implied in the Baha'i scriptural writings. In his apophatic transcendence, God is beyond direct human interaction
such that varieties of theistic, monistic, and non-theistic approaches to the Transcendent can all find some legitimacy within an inclusive Babl-Baha'I theology of "oneness." ... etc....