Baháʼí Esperanto League
on this vast subject are many and deep and as they refer positively in various places to five tongues - Arabic, English, Esperanto, Persian and Spanish - one can easily accept why the very next sentence of that 1980 letter explains: "It is not possible now to see how this will come about..." What requires little intellectual discussion is how often and pleadingly ʻAbdu'l-Baha asked 'every one of us to study Esperanto' whether or not it becomes universal and how Shoghi Effendi interpreted all that as 'repeated and emphatic admonitions of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá.'
It was not until Paulo Amorim Cardoso accepted the faith in Brazil in 1971 that, with his help and that of Roan Orloff-Stone in the USA, the idea of a collaboration began, with surprising speed, to change into a viable project.
In a message from the League, dated 30 July 1973, the result of the election, in which a total of 30 members had taken part, was announced: Paulo Amorim Cardoso (Brazil), Roan Orloff-Stone (USA), Habib Taherzadeh (Israel/Baháʼí World Centre), Adelbert Mühlschlegel (Switzerland), Badiollah Samimy (Iran), Manuel de Freitas (Portugal), S.C. Gupta (India), Chagzin Kim (Korea), Leonora Stirling Armstrong (Brazil).
9 (November 1973) of the "Komuna Bahaa Letero" it was announced that "BEL now has 73 members in 14 countries: USA 27, Brazil 24, Canada 4, Iran 4, Spain 3, Italy 2, Portugal 2, Argentina 1, Austria 1, Germany 1, Israel 1, Korea 1, The Netherlands 1, Switzerland 1".
10 (January 1974), it was announced: "Here are the names of the first managing committee of our dearly beloved Baháʼí Esperanto League: Chairman: Adelbert Mühlschlegel (Germany), Vice-chairman: Habib Taherzadeh (Israel), Secretary: Paulo Amorim Cardoso (Brazil), Vice-secretary: Roan Orloff-Stone (USA), Treasurer: Manuel de Freitas (Portugal), Vice-treasurer: Leonora Stirling-Armstrong (Brazil)".
His work was augmented by Roan Orloff-Stone (USA), who made a significant contribution towards the development of the League and attended all the Esperanto World Congresses between 1976 and 1988.
Even after the initial founding years, the League went on being handicapped by the problem of geographical separation; the managing committee itself was unable to make personal acquaintance with the majority of the BEL members.
On top of all this, in 1979, contact with the Baháʼí Esperantists in Iran (there had been 16 on the election list of 1976) had to be broken off because, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, correspondence with the West would have been dangerous for these members.
One of the main tasks to which John Dale, in his capacity as secretary, dedicated himself "was to rectify the widespread misunderstanding on the part of Baháʼís of the Esperanto language".
He found that the many of them favoured English as the future world language; others regarded Esperanto as the ideal candidate for this role but were not willing to learn it before a specific request to do so had come from the Universal House of Justice.
The translation of John Esslemont's "Baháʼu'lláh and the New Era" — the most widely known introduction to the Baháʼí Faith — into Esperanto had been initiated by Martha Root and carried to completion by Lidia Zamenhof.
The reissuing in 1978 of this translation, "Baháʼu'lláh kaj la Nova Epoko", after revision, additions and the inclusion of an appendix was certainly one of the greatest successes of this period.
This was followed in 1977 by the brochure "Bahaaj Respondoj" (Baháʼí Answers) and in 1981 by "La Kaŝitaj Vortoj" (The Hidden Words), one of the central Writings of Baháʼu'lláh.
Dale also wrote to the Universal House of Justice, requesting it "to consider ways and means of experimentally introducing Esperanto and encouraging the Baháʼís to learn the language."
In addition to the nucleus of the League, Baháʼí-Esperanto committees or subsidiary groups in Germany, the USA, Great Britain and Switzerland (in 1993 Bulgaria joined them) were set up in the past and in part are still functioning today.
Not long after John T. Dale had tried to develop and more widely distribute the "BELmonda Letero", it shrank to a modest circular letter of 2 to 6 pages.
It contains membership information, important addresses, statements from the managing committee, news of activities in different countries and extracts from the Baháʼí Writings.
Right from the beginning, no membership charges were collected and, except for some donations from single National Spiritual Assemblies and other Baháʼí sources, the activities of the League were financed by voluntary contributions from its members.
The congratulatory openings by the Presidents of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) and of BEL itself are followed by Bernhard Westerhoff's essay on the changing, and not always completely harmonious, relationship between the Baháʼís and the Esperantists.
One BEL project, initiated by John Dale, is the publication of a compilation of texts from the Baháʼí Writings, concerning the principle an international auxiliary language.
This project was later taken over by Bernhard Westerhoff and then passed on to Gregory Paul Meyjes, who in 2015 first published an annotated collection of Baha'i excerpts on the auxiliary language in English, which was followed by a translation in Esperanto in 2019.
