Roger Kingdon in 2008

My first encounter with the Bahá’í Faith occurred on 19th October 1981, at the Birth of the Báb celebration hosted by the Westminster Bahá’í Community at Methodist Central Hall in London. I was a twenty-year-old second year physics undergraduate at Imperial College and I had been invited to this event by a classmate, Sunita Gandhi. Other than hearing that this would be a gathering of very friendly people and that there would be plenty of good food and entertainment, including an Indian folk dance to be performed by Sunita’s sisters Geeta and Nita, I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for. Sunita had mentioned something about the Bahá’í Faith but I didn’t pay much attention, being more interested in the speaker than the words, I suppose. And of course the prospect of meeting her sisters was enticing.

Sunita had arranged that we would go to the event with the Djalili family, who lived a short walk from Imperial College. At the appointed hour I arrived at the Djalili residence, where the door was opened by a very friendly young man, Javid, who immediately made me feel most welcome, plying me with pistachios (which I had never seen before) and tea without milk (which I had never drunk before). I have an abiding memory of chandeliers and other ornate decorations and furnishings (which I had never experienced before in anything other than a stately home). Javid was fascinated to hear that I was a physicist and asked me all sorts of questions, which I don’t think I handled at all well (not having ever experienced this level of attention before), but that only seemed to heighten his interest in me. Eventually, and well after the appointed hour (which made me rather nervous), Sunita turned up and the household journeyed to Central Hall (in a Mercedes, which I had never experienced before). Clearly, even before I had arrived at the expected event, I had been transported to an entirely alien world.

Press cutting of the Gandhi sisters in 1981

The event itself was the most extraordinary, diverse, colourful, vibrant, disorganised affair that I had ever experienced. Bahá’ís tend to take their cosmopolitan celebrations for granted, but for me then, and on every occasion since, such gatherings are the perfect expression of ‘unity in diversity’, which I still take to be the central tenet of the Faith. Such riotous diversity was the polar opposite of my first nineteen years, growing up in rural Somerset, and I was ill-prepared for it. Having been in London for little over a year, I was still inclined to stare at the bus drivers, marvelling that they were all West Indians, exactly as depicted by Giles the newspaper cartoonist. I still had not been introduced to aubergines, or kebabs, or unfermented apple juice, or aircraft, or foreign languages. I had not been abroad, not even to Scotland. Two years earlier I had preferred my fifth choice university because when I visited my first choice, Durham, it seemed as if it was located at the ends of the earth. Under such circumstances, it would have been understandable if I had made my excuses and departed the Bahá’í celebration in a great hurry. That I did not was due in large part to the inclusive nature of the gathering. If I had detected that I was being ‘love-bombed’ or otherwise picked out for special treatment then I would have felt that I had been brought there under false pretences, and most likely I would have done a runner. But the general bonhomie and goodwill radiating from everyone to everyone, and the complete absence of any authority that could orchestrate the proceedings, put me at ease. I stayed and allowed myself to become immersed, absorbed, overwhelmed, intoxicated, hooked. The intensity of the experience was such that it became the central event in a fictional account of a person taking a journey through the Seven Valleys of life that I composed some thirteen years later. In that story I have my protagonist reflect to himself precisely the thoughts that I felt on emerging from the Birth of the Báb celebration: “For sure, there is something precious here, something unique, something which I must not forsake… we should always follow the light, wherever it shines.” Yes, in my experience, it is indeed possible for one to “cross these seven stages in seven steps, nay rather in seven breaths, nay rather in a single breath, if God will and desire it.” I did not know it then, but my emotional journey to the Faith was fulfilled in a single evening.

Being an agnostic scientist, my intellectual journey to the Faith took considerably longer than a single evening: Thirteen months, in fact. On many occasions I have been asked (and have asked myself) about this intellectual journey, which I suppose would be a story in itself. There were key moments: When Geoff Nash gave me my first Bahá’í book, ‘Paris Talks’, a perfect choice which remains my favourite to this day; When I realised that Bahá’í explanations for behaviours and events were more reliable than my own; When I acknowledged that, if it is rational to reject all of the Manifestations of God, then it is no less rational to accept them all, on equal terms; When I concluded that the only ‘scientific’ way to test the efficacy of faith was for the scientist to suspend disbelief and wholeheartedly commit himself to the Cause, for a period at least, with the promise to review the results in due course; And, above all, when I became assured that my ideas and interpretations of religious writings were my own affair, not to be overruled by someone claiming higher spiritual authority, just as long as I did not try to impose them on others. It was a tortuous journey, and I do not think I would have completed it without the great sense of hope that filled me on my first encounter with the Faith. And that is why, when people ask about my intellectual journey, I always prefer to steer the conversation around to my experience of 19th October 1981.

Roger with his mother, Sept 1982

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roger Kingdon, 2012

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On re-reading my Bahá’í Story, I feel that it’s high time I undertook the promised review of this interesting scientific experiment to which I have subjected myself for forty years or more. As it happens I’ve effectively done this already, in the following endnote from my 2015 book How to Make a Mind: ‘I still count myself a Bahai, although my propensity for philosophical doubt continually presents a challenge for me and for my fellow Bahais. On the one hand, if I had not declared and maintained my faith in Bahaullah then it is very unlikely that Geeta and I would have got married, and stayed married through all the triumphs and disasters of the last thirty-plus years, and brought Arjun into the world in the way that we have. On the other hand, the intellectual straightjacket that I willingly put on when I became a Bahai (which is a lot less restrictive than the straightjackets prescribed by most other religions) has put back my research on how to make a mind by – oh, ten years or more. That hurts: it would have been so much easier to write this book when I was ten years younger, for now I feel that I am in my intellectual dotage, beset by tinnitus, traumatic memories of failure, and angst-ridden regrets. But if I had the chance to do it all again, would I still have declared as a Bahai in November 1982? Yes, of course I would. No right-thinking person would risk trading their only son (begotten not made) for a thinking machine (made not begotten). In any case … without Arjun there may well be no design of a thinking machine.’ Regarding ‘my propensity for philosophical doubt’, in my recent review of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy I distance myself from his quite extreme ‘philosophy of disbelief’. Instead, as hinted in my five-year review of My Philosophy, I find it much more constructive and rewarding to follow the maxim, ‘The good life comes to those who embrace their suspension of disbelief.’ (Both of these reviews are available on my website, www.idealectic.com, together with various other ‘gems from my treasure trove of original writings, programs and other works’.) And it’s clear to me that this maxim encapsulates a key aspect of the intellectual journey by which I accepted the Faith in the first place: which is a complicated way of saying that I remain just as steadfast in the Cause as ever I was.


Roger Kingdon, May 2023