Last Friday night, this year’s CBC Massey lecturer Payam Akhavan spoke to a packed out crowd at the Ottawa Writers Festival. As wave after wave of people took the liberty of adding chairs onto already packed out rows, I allowed my mind to wander back to my first encounter with Akhavan.

One cold and rainy night during the spring of 2016, I found myself in a lecture hall at McGill University, gathered with a smattering of students and legal practitioners to hear a presentation from Harold Koh, Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and Legal Advisor in the American State Department. Devastating statistics were accompanied by a grim prognosis for the nation of Syria, gripped in the throes of a totalitarian regime. These, followed by a haunting viewing of drone footage that depicted the beautiful city of Homes in a post-apocalyptic state, left attendees in stunned silence. As they sat in contemplation, Akhavan walked with grace towards the podium.

“I would like to bring our time together to a close, and I thought I might do so in the tradition of my people. I will share with you a few words from Rumi, the Persian poet and mystic,” he said.

He then delivered the lines of a poem that I have carried with me since: “Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

I remember thinking then that it was a most courageous thing for a lawyer to do, to stand in light of horrific fact, and a discouraging future, and speak words of life, raise the torch of poetry and spirituality to light the way in a world so dark. Imagine my surprise two years later when this same Baha’i law professor’s name appeared on the news: “A Call for Action in Our Times,” the headline read.

What would he say, I wondered, this law professor and author of the recently published book In Search of a Better World? What would this man, who had given me poetry in a season past, say to a world that increasingly seemed to be set against a sense of the poetic and the spiritual?   

It was time for last Friday’s event to begin. My eyes returned to where Akhavan made his way to the front of the room. The evening opened with a touch of laughter as our guest humbly admitted his own incredulity at being named a Massey Scholar. He ruefully recounted to the audience his shock, and then his ignorance, Googling the Massey lectures while simultaneously giving his acceptance.

Soon however, Akhavan’s face grew still, and he began to recount his story of coming to Canada as the son of Baha’i refugees. From the first moments of the evening, as recounted in the first pages of his book, it was apparent that Akhavan’s sense of what it means to be human, and what it means to belong to each other, is embedded in a sense of faith, is baptized in the spiritual.

Admired for his work as the first legal advisor to the prosecutor’s office of the Hague’s International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (1994-2000), Akhavan made it clear that human rights are bound up a sense of “communal belonging” and a commitment to religious tolerance. His depiction of the Iran of his childhood included a necessary description of the persecution and demonization of Jewish and Baha’i minorities in early 1960s Iran. So, too, did it include explaining the way in which Baha’i beliefs came up against those being advanced by the Iranian Islamic state in the 1960s and 1970s. Religion, he revealed, even more so than geopolitics, could be the force through which entire civilizations rise and fall.

I looked around at the faces of those in the audience. What was the response to this framing of headlines and world events in spiritual terms, rather than precise legal terminology? How would they respond to this Baha’i mystic committed to a pragmatic undertaking of human rights work as connected to his sense of devotion to his own Baha’i faith? Surprisingly, I began to see heads nodding in agreement as Akhavan’s quiet voice drew even the most hesitant listener in.  

“As I tried to fit into Canadian society as an adolescent immigrant, religious persecution was the last thing on my mind,” Akhavan read from his book.

It soon became apparent that religious persecution is the locus in which Akhavan’s future, as well as his past, is framed. Religious persecution, we discovered, is what would inevitably catalyze him into action, launching him into his career as a human rights lawyer and legal scholar.

A woman named Mona, a faithful Baha’i executed for her outspoken denunciation of Sharia law and militant Islam, became the figure through which Akhavan’s human rights calling was discovered. Mona’s execution on June 18, 1983 alongside nine other Baha’i women woke up Akhavan to the world and his place in it.

His voice full of emotion, Akhavan read, “This was not a passing sound bite in the television news, an unfortunate event in a distant place, an abstract victim soon to be forgotten. This was an intimate, lived experience; it sliced through my complacency like a knife.”

And then, as stillness filled the hall, he said softly, “Mona’s death changed everything. I would never be the same person again.”

The breath of the woman next to me caught in her throat. Akhavan described his terror, his horror, and the inversion of this experience into a call to action.

It became clear, as Akhavan continued to share with those gathered, that faith still serves as the lens through which he has engaged the world since that initial moment of clarity. The rest of the evening was filled with the recounting of the emptiness that Akhavan has found in many of those he encounters – from Rwanda to Davos.

The world it seems is afflicted by an emptiness of heart, a lack of community, and an absence of empathy. Later, paging through his book, I would find an echoing of his lament of the vacuum that absence of faith has left in our society: “Happiness is just a pill away. It has nothing to do with our life choices. This mindset reflects the spiritual crises of our times, with far-reaching implications on how we conceive the struggle for human betterment.”

The night ended, and we had not so much reflected on the specific details of his career as the vision for a better world that drives him forward. There was time for just one or two questions. The first question, “How shall we then pursue this better world? What tools must we make use of to move forward together?”

Akhavan was quiet, his face very still. When he spoke, his voice was gentle yet firm.

“Spirituality is fundamental to this social struggle,” he said.

I was surprised by his words. I looked at those around me. Their faces also reflected a moment of confusion. A noted academic with prestigious degrees, an enviable CV, and extensive life opportunity had answered the very first question put to him with a call for the sacred to break through into the secular.

Perhaps this is what has drawn me to admire Akhavan all along. His willingness to speak openly about the wholeness of his identity and to deliver a spiritual answer to a serious question is rare in this day and age. Fear of being castigated or framed as naïve prevents even some of our most seasoned public intellectuals and politicians from delivering a response informed by faith from a public platform. I often find myself wondering if there were a way to do it with grace. Is there a space in the public sphere in which I can bring the fullness of myself, my professional training, and my sense of orthodoxy to bear on the world about me? If Akhavan, professor, practitioner, and author can do it, why can’t I?

“What is the way forward?” I said at the evening’s close to my dear friend next to me, a staunch atheist.

“Well spirituality, or so I hear,” he grinned.

We headed into the cold and I gave thanks yet again for the intersection of the sacred in the secular, and the presence of the spirit all around. 

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