November 30, 2021

Who is Laura Barney? Why should we know about her? What are some of her achievements? How did she become a Bahá’í? Her greatest legacy [is] the book called Some Answered Questions published in 1908. Who was this person who conjured such deep and intriguing questions for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá? Why did she spend months in the prison city of Akka?

Unfortunately Laura’s personal notes and diaries were stolen during the Nazi occupation of Paris between 1940 and 1944. … Proper recognition has eluded Laura Dreyfus-Barney both within the Bahá’í community as well as the world. One reason may be the lack of her diaries or memoirs. Another factor may be that she still stands in the shadow of her prominent and accomplished spouse, Hippolyte Dreyfus-Barney. Yet another might be that she divided her time between two countries, which was uncommon in those days. Therefore her heroism has been lost in unexamined history.

During her first trip [to visit ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, imprisoned in Akka, today in Israel] she was twenty-one years old. … She traveled several times to the Holy Land. Her third trip was in 1904. The next year, she traveled with her future husband to the native land of Bahá’u’lláh at the request of the Master. They were the first Western Bahá’ís to do so.  They visited Tabriz and Maku and Ishqabad in Russian Turkistan where the first Bahá’í House of Worship had been built. Madame Lachenay, a Bahá’í from France, was her travel companion.

The original Persian texts [of Some Answered Questions] are in the Bahá’í archives of Haifa. The book was first called the ‘table talks.’ … She also later collaborated with Hippolyte Dreyfus to translate An-Nuru’l-Abha-fi-Mufawadat into French. 

Laura Dreyfus-Barney moved easily between two worlds: that of her wealthy and flamboyant family and that of her Bahá’í life, in particular her spiritual and intellectual partnership with her distinguished husband. When others would have left one world for the other, she moved gracefully between the two. … “With her keen intelligence” [wrote U.R. Giachery,] “logical mind and investigating nature, she devoted her whole life, from adolescence, to improving human relations, bringing together people of the different races, classes and nations.”

Mona Khademi, author

Some Answered Questions: The Life of Laura Barney, forthcoming in January 2022 from George Ronald Publisher (London).

Excerpted with the author’s permission from “A Glimpse into the Life of Laura Dreyfus-Barney” (2009: Lights of Irfan, Vol. 10, pp. 71-105).