| dc.description.abstract | Southern Tanzania is a home of various religious orientations. In the early 1970s, the
Sinai Church was started in Ipapa, southern Tanzania. The Sinai Church was added to
the number of religious orientations in the region all in the process of social change.
Yet, after a period of about twenty years, the members of Sinai Church embraced the
Bahai Faith. At the heart of the study is the role of religion in social transformational
disharmony. The study set out to investigate the factors, meaning in the integration of
the Sinai Church and the Bahai Faith in Ipapa, southern Tanzania. Three protagonists
can be identified in this meeting and integration. On the one hand is the political
establishment in Tanzania that was established on socialist policies immediately after
independence in the 1960s. The nationalization process was to be achieved along the
socialist lines thereby promising a new Tanzania through inward-looking self-reliance
that shunned anything from outside the borders of the country. The other protagonist
is the Ipapa community members who by their own initiative evolved a mechanism to
cope with the alienation and desperation that colonialism and later the nationalization
process produced in southern Tanzania.
The formation of the Sinai Church was an attempt to find meaning in this situation
and also provide hope to the people. The third protagonist is the Bahai Faith a
missionary religion that began in Iran in the 19th century and has continued to claim
following outside Iran. With the teaching and believe in progressive revelation, the
Bahai Faith holds that Bahaullah is the promised fulfilment of all religions. Bahaullah
has come to bring an age of fulfilment to all people. Bahais endeavour at all costs to
take the message of Bahaullah to all the inhabitants of the world. The message of
Bahaullah is believed to be the panacea to solve all the religious, political, economic,
and social problems of contemporary humanity. It is in this endeavour that Bahais in
Tanzania identified the receptivity of the Ipapa people and endeavoured to teach them
the Bahai Faith. The central hypothesis is that the meeting and confrontation of
internal and external forces of change contributed to the formation of the Sinai Church
and later its integration to the Bahai Faith.
IV
The meeting and integration of the Sinai Church and the Bahai Faith is treated
alongside other theories, the functional analysis theory, the socio-cultural theory and
the transformational matrix. The transformational matrix recognises that social change
occurs through the interaction of three actors namely the individual, the institution and
the community. The interaction of these three actors is factored into the events,
patterns, trends and processes of transformation that mark a society yearning for
change. The Supreme Being is also recognised as an actor in the matrix. This gives the
investigation a foothold in theological reflection to add to the religious reflections that
the other theories provide. A theological reflection appreciates the Supreme Being as
the author of divine revelation while religious reflections mainly focus on religion as a
human creation.
The study employed the purposive sampling technique to identify key respondents
from among the relevant individuals, institutions and communities. These include
individual members of the Sinai Church, individual Bahais, National Bahai Secretariat
of Tanzania, Regional Bahai Council of Southern Tanzania, The Bahai National
Institute Board, the Auxiliary Board Members in Mbozi, the Local Spiritual
Assemblies in Ipapa and its neighbourhood. The field research entailed conducting
interviews among key respondents, administering questionnaires and participating in
various activities of the core respondents. The researcher used a still camera to capture
the various events he participated in and observed. The sample size is 150. The
questionnaire, interviews and observations rendered into narrative form. In some cases
the results were presented in tables of frequency distribution and percentages.
The study showed that the state-guided nationalism in Tanzania was counterproductive.
Feelings of alienation and desperation cropped up especially among the
individuals and communities that did not experience the wellbeing that the state
promised. It is established in this study that the Ipapa community evolved a solution to
their predicaments by founding a religious community that grants meaning to their
existence. However, in the institutionalization of these endeavours the community
invited the Bahais into the scene and in this way the members of the Sinai Church en
mass embraced the Bahai Faith.
The acceptance of the Bahai Faith by the Sinaists would have meant that the feelings
of alienation and desperation would be replaced by feelings of fulfilment and
belonging. Yet as the study found the learning was only a one-way process. The
context of the Sinai Church was not taken into consideration during the integration.
Consequently feelings of betrayal and inequity abound among many of the Bahais that
were initially members of the Sinai Church. The Institute Process as conducted by the
Bahais has not achieved a vibrant Bahai community in Ipapa.
The study indicates that if the Bahai ideal is to be realized in Ipapa particularly and in
Tanzania in general, the three social actors (individual, institutions and community)
must be integrated into the process. Moreover the experiences and the expectations of
the Sinai Church must be included in the transformational matrix. In addition, a
dialogue and an exchange between the actors must be encouraged intentionally. The
Bahai institutions in Tanzania are well placed to advance such dialogue. At a wider
scale, the Bahai Faith invites more research into its claims of fulfilment and
achievements. Such research would benefit all missionary-oriented religions and
social engineers. Music and ritual dance informed a great deal the formation of the
Sinai Church. In this regard, more research in the relationship between music and
healing is worthwhile. There is also a need for fresh appreciation, of the models of
social reconstruction transformation as championed by the Bahai Faith. This can be
done by including Bahai studies in academic institutions. A situation of the Bahai
Faith being accepted by the people of the world may not arise, however, its ideals will
influence many. | en |
