After having lived in many countries, traveled through various cultures, and read piles of academic books it’s always humbling to discover that there’s still basic knowledge in this world that I haven’t acquired.
Mount Carmel is a place of pilgrimage
Today is the Martyrdom of the Bab, (according to the BBC: “a major holy day”) and until this morning I had never heard about it. My immediate reaction was skepticism: the day must not be that major…Turns out, Martyrdom of the Bab is not only a holiday I’ve never heard of, but that it’s a part of the Baha’i fate, a religion completely unknown to me.
And, this religion is not even a very distant one: there are approximately 6 million Baha’is in the world, 6,000 of them in the UK. Realising that there is a world religion out there (or, out here, in London, probably!) which I had never heard of felt the same as finding out that Pluto is no longer a planet. The row of paper mache planets I had built in third grade is now dated and inaccurate because it includes Pluto, a whole extra paper mache ball which, I found out a few years ago, has not been considered a planet since 2006.
Anyway, I am, and was, both dumbfounded and thrilled. Today is the Martyrdom of the Bab and I looked into it a bit further…
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Hello, I'm Deborah Swallow and, for the last fifteen years, I've worked in over thirty countries addressing the complexities of people working internationally across multiple cultures, so individuals and organisations alike can gain an authentic competitive edge and win in international markets. 