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A Covenant-breaker or the act of Covenant-breaking is a term used by Bahá'ís to refer to a particular form of heresy. Being declared a Covenant-breaker by the head of the Faith — which since 1963 refers to the elected nine-member Universal House of Justice, the governing body of the Bahá'ís. Bahá'ís avoid association with them, even if the Covenant-breaker is a family member. The authority to declare a Bahá'í a Covenant-breaker resides solely with the head of the Bahá'í Faith.
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Covenant-breaking does not refer to attacks from those who are not Bahá'ís or who have left the Bahá'í Faith out of disagreement with its tenets. Rather it is in reference to internal campaigns of opposition whereby the Covenant-breaker is seen to be as one who is challenging the internal succession of the Faith and thereby causing internal division, or by claiming or supporting an alternate succession of authority or administrative structure.
In a letter to an individual dated 23 March 1975, the Universal House of Justice wrote:
When a person declares his acceptance of Bahá'u'lláh as a Manifestation of God he becomes a party to the Covenant and accepts the totality of His Revelation. If he then turns round and attacks Bahá'u'lláh or the Central Institution of the Faith he violates the Covenant. If this happens every effort is made to help that person to see the illogicality and error of his actions, but if he persists he must, in accordance with the instructions of Bahá'u'lláh Himself, be shunned as a Covenant-breaker.
The term 'Covenant-breaker' or, in Arabic 'naqid al-mithaq' [pl. Naqidu 'l-mithaq], was first used by `Abdu'l-Bahá to describe the partisans of his brother Mírzá Muhammad `Alí, who challenged his leadership. In `Abdu'l-Bahá's Will and Testament, He appointed Shoghi Effendi as the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, called for the eventual election of the Universal House of Justice, and defined in the same manner opposition to these two institutions as Covenant-Breaking. `Abdu'l-Bahá advised all Bahá'ís to shun anyone opposing the Covenant: "...one of the greatest and most fundamental principles of the Cause of God is to shun and avoid entirely the Covenant-breakers, for they will utterly destroy the Cause of God, exterminate His Law and render of no account all efforts exerted in the past."[1]
While most Covenant-breakers are involved in schismatic groups, that is not always the case. For example, a Bahá'í who refuses to shun Covenant-breakers is at risk of being named one. One article[2] originally written for the Bahá'í Encyclopedia, characterized Covenant-breakers that have emerged in the course of Bahá'í history as belonging to one of four categories:
Shoghi Effendi wrote to the National Spiritual Assembly of Canada in 1957:
People who have withdrawn from the Cause because they no longer feel that they can support its Teachings and Institutions sincerely, are not Covenant-breakers -- they are non-Bahá'ís and should just be treated as such. Only those who ally themselves actively with known enemies of the Faith who are Covenant-breakers, and who attack the Faith in the same spirit as these people, can be considered, themselves, to be Covenant-breakers.[3]
Beyond this, many other relationships to the Bahá'í Faith exist, both positive and negative. Covenant-breaking does not apply to most of them. The following is a partial list of those who could not rightly be termed Covenant-breakers:
Bábís are generally regarded as another religion altogether. Since Covenant-breaking presumes that one has submitted oneself to a covenant and then broken it, and Bábís never swore allegiance to Bahá'u'lláh, they are not subject to shunning. However, followers of Subh-i-Azal, Bahá'u'lláh's half-brother who tried to poison him, were engaged in active opposition to Bahá'ís, and Shoghi Effendi did inform Bahá'ís that they should avoid contact with the descendants of Azal, writing that "No intelligent and loyal Baha'i would associate with a descendant of Azal, if he traced the slightest breath of criticism of our Faith, in any aspect, from that person. In fact these people should be strenuously avoided as having an inherited spiritual disease -- the disease of Covenant-breaking!".[4]
Through the influence of Bahiyyih Khanum, the eldest daughter of Bahá'u'lláh, everyone in the household initially rallied around Shoghi Effendi after the death of `Abdu'l-Bahá. For several years his brother Husayn and several cousins served him as secretaries. The only ones publicly opposing him were Mirza Muhammad-Ali and his followers, who had been declared Covenant-breakers by `Abdu'l-Bahá. Contrary to `Abdu'l-Bahá's specific instruction, certain family members established illicit links with those declared Covenant-breakers by `Abdu'l-Bahá after Bahiyyih Khanum died in 1932, first resulting in the marriage of Shoghi Effendi's eldest sister--Ruhangiz --to a son of Siyyid Ali Afnan, Bahá'u'lláh's son-in-law, and a long-standing enemy of `Abdu'l-Bahá who had declared him a Covenant-breaker. Through Ruhangiz's efforts, Shoghi Effendi's other sister and his cousin Thurayya also married sons of Siyyid Ali Afnan. Presumably being faced with a choice between shunning their family members and being disobedient to `Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, his cousins, aunts and uncles chose the latter.
After years of silence on these developments, cables sent by Shoghi Effendi on 2 November 1941 provide background to developments among family members. Ruhi Afnan, Shoghi Effendi's cousin through `Abdu'l-Bahá's daughter Tuba:
Then in a 1950 cable:
And in 1953:
Later, Ruhi was presented with a copy of Sohrab's book about his excommunication:
Concerning Munib Shahid, Shoghi Effendi's cousin through `Abdu'l-Bahá's daughter Ruha, Shoghi Effendi sent the following cable to the Bahá'í world in November 1944:
Concerning his own brother Husayn, Shoghi Effendi sent the following cable to the Bahá'í world in April 1945:
Concerning his own brother Riaz, the following cable was sent in December 1951:
He dispatched a cable concerning his younger sister in December 1941:
Most of the groups regarded by the larger group of Bahá'ís as Covenant-breakers originated in the claims of Charles Mason Remey to the Guardianship in 1960. The Will and Testament of `Abdu'l-Bahá states that Guardians should be lineal descendants of Bahá'u'lláh, that each Guardian must select his successor during his lifetime, and that the nine Hands of the Cause of God permanently stationed in the holy land must approve the appointment by majority vote. Bahá'ís interpret lineal descendency to mean physical familial relation to Bahá'u'lláh, of which Mason Remey was not.
The majority of Bahá'ís accepted the determination of the Hands of the Cause upon the death of Shoghi Effendi, that he died "without having appointed his successor", owing to an absence of a valid descendant of Bahá'u'lláh who could qualify under the terms of `Abdu'l-Bahá's will. Later the Universal House of Justice, first elected in 1963, made a ruling on the subject that it was not possible for another Guardian to be appointed.
In 1960 Remey, a Hand of the Cause himself, retracted his earlier position, and claimed to have been coerced. He claimed to be the successor to Shoghi Effendi. He and the small number of Bahá'ís who followed him were expelled from the majority group by the Hands of the Cause. Those close to Remey claimed that he went senile in old age, and by the time of his death he was largely abandoned, with his most prominent followers fighting amongst themselves for leadership.
The largest of the remaining followers of Remey, members of the Orthodox Bahá'í Faith, believe that legitimate authority passed from Shoghi Effendi to Mason Remey to Joel Marangella. They, therefore, regard the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel to be illegitimate, and its members and followers to be Covenant-breakers.
The present descendants of expelled members of Bahá'u'lláh's family have not specifically been declared Covenant-breakers, though they mostly do not associate themselves with the Bahá'í religion. A small group of Bahá'ís in Northern New Mexico believe that these descendants are eligible for appointment to the Guardianship and are waiting for such a direct descendant of Bahá'u'lláh to arise as the rightful Guardian.
There is also a small group in Montana, originally formed around the personality of Leland Jensen, who claimed a status higher than that of the Guardian. His failed apocalyptic predictions and unsuccessful efforts to reestablish the Guardianship and the administration were apparent by his death in 1996. A dispute among Jensen's followers over the identity of the Guardian resulted in another division in 2001.