In November 1994, I started the site called "A Baha'i Faith Page" to be a listing and index of Baha'i sites. It started with links to just a few dozen sites.
Over the following months, I worked regularly to add links to new sites as they came online. Within a couple of years, it got to the point that many additions were needed every day. (The snapshot here is of the oldest version that the http://web.archive.org/ site has, from June 1997.)
Today, I don't think it is even possible to have a comprehensive listing of web sites and blogs developed by Baha'is!
(You can see the current version of this site at: http://www.bcca.org/bahaivision/. It was enhanced by Cary Enoch Reinstein is now operated by Larry Curtis.)
Many groups of people became interested in the Internet and the "world wide web" when it began to emerge from its early beginnings in the "technology sector" and began to prove useful and interesting to society in general.
I think Baha'is in particular realized something big was happening, even if no one quite knew what to do with it. And that's because when Shoghi Effendi described in a letter, from Haifa on March 11, 1936, his vision of what the future of the human race would be like, he mentioned this:
A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity. (Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, p. 203)So Baha'is were "expecting" the Internet. (However, it will only be in distant hind-sight that we'll know for sure if it is our current Internet that Shoghi Effendi envisioned, or whether something better is still to come.)
As wonderful as it may seem, this "mechanism of world inter-communication" is only one small part of the world expected by Baha'is. In that same letter, Shoghi Effendi detailed many other parts of the future he was envisioning. Some seem to be coming soon, others we might wonder how they could ever happen.
And Shoghi Effendi did not originate the Baha'i enthusiasm for the future. It is a core part of the religion that was introduced to humankind by Baha'u'llah Himself.
Baha'u'llah wrote much about that future, describing how and why the world was changing. He explained the root cause for all the changes that we have seen since the 1800's and are still seeing:
The world's equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind's ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System -- the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed. (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Aqdas, para. 181)
The Internet. I think it is just the tip of the iceberg - a glimpse of the changes that are coming, as our "ordered life" is being revolutionized!
3 comments:
By the time I started work on the Baha'i Faith site at About.com (which after About dumped it became the independent site Planet Baha'i), your site was already one of the key Internet resources on the Baha'i Faith. I find it interesting that the use of the Internet in promoting the Baha'i Faith has largely been in the realm of individual initiative. We'll undoubtedly see a lot more of that, with increasing diversity of material, styles, etc.
It might be useful to log this older article that catches some details of the early use of technology by the Baha'i Faith.
And another venue is wikipedia which has a diversity of articles on the Baha'i Faith as well as many of the countries where the religion has found a home.
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