The Arts
Unprecedented in any religious dispensation is the emphasis Bahá’u’lláh has placed on the role that artists and craftsmen have in advancing the progress of humankind. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá implored parents to raise their children to become accomplished practitioners of the arts:
Emily Dragoman performs “I am a voice.”
While the children are yet in their infancy feed them from the breast of heavenly grace, foster them in the cradle of all excellence, rear them in the embrace of bounty. Give them the advantage of every useful kind of knowledge. Let them share in every new and rare and wondrous craft and art. Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship. Teach them to dedicate their lives to matters of great import, and inspire them to undertake studies that will benefit mankind.1
By specifying “studies that will benefit mankind,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá indicates that arts are not a luxury, nor are they on the periphery of human existence, but are rather at its very heart. Contemporary Canadian painter Otto Donald Rogers has expressed the perspective this way:
Art... has a fundamental role to play in the evolution of community since artistic form is not simply the ornament of society but is an important measurement of the progress made in reaching the ideal. The creation of models of profound beauty have, by their very order, educative effect; art becomes in time a common experience of unity in the culture of a whole population.2
Read more Bahá’í perspectives on the arts on the international Bahá’ís website.
2. Otto Donald Rogers, “The Moral Circumstance of Artistic Intent.” Unpublished essay.