FOREWARD
The conclusion of the twentieth century provides Bahá'ís with
a unique vantage point. During the past hundred years our world
underwent changes far more profound than any in its preceding history,
changes that are, for the most part, little understood by the present
generation. These same hundred years saw the Bahá'í Cause emerge from
obscurity, demonstrating on a global scale the unifying power with
which its Divine origin has endowed it. As the century drew to its
close, the convergence of these two historical developments became
increasingly apparent.
Century of Light, prepared under our supervision, reviews
these two processes and the relationship between them, in the context
of the Bahá'í Teachings. We commend it to the thoughtful study of the
friends, in the confidence that the perspectives it opens up will
prove both spiritually enriching and of practical help in sharing with
others the challenging implications of the Revelation brought by
Bahá'u'lláh.
THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE Naw-Rúz, 158 B.E.
CENTURY OF LIGHT
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the most turbulent in the history of
the human race, has reached its end. Dismayed by the deepening moral
and social chaos that marked its course, the generality of the world's
peoples are eager to leave behind them the memories of the suffering
that these decades brought with them. No matter how frail the
foundations of confidence in the future may seem, no matter how great
the dangers looming on the horizon, humanity appears desperate to
believe that, through some fortuitous conjunction of circumstances, it
will nevertheless be possible to bend the conditions of human life
into conformity with prevailing human desires.
In the light of the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh such hopes are
not merely illusory, but miss entirely the nature and meaning of the
great turning point through which our world has passed in these
crucial hundred years. Only as humanity comes to understand the
implications of what occurred during this period of history will it be
able to meet the challenges that lie ahead. The value of the
contribution we as Bahá'ís can make to the process demands that we
ourselves grasp the significance of the historic transformation
wrought by the twentieth century.
What makes this insight possible for us is the light shed by
the rising Sun of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation and the influence it has
come to exercise in human affairs. It is this opportunity that the
following pages address.
I
LET US ACKNOWLEDGE AT THE OUTSET the magnitude of the ruin
that the human race has brought upon itself during the period of
history under review. The loss of life alone has been beyond counting.
The disintegration of basic institutions of social order, the
violation - indeed, the abandonment - of standards of decency, the
betrayal of the life of the mind through surrender to ideologies as
squalid as they have been empty, the invention and deployment of
monstrous weapons of mass annihilation, the bankrupting of entire
nations and the reduction of masses of human beings to hopeless
poverty, the reckless destruction of the environment of the planet -
such are only the more obvious in a catalogue of horrors unknown to
even the darkest of ages past. Merely to mention them is to call to
mind the Divine warnings expressed in Bahá'u'lláh's words of a century
ago: "O heedless ones! Though the wonders of My mercy have encompassed
all created things, both visible and invisible, and though the
revelations of My grace and bounty have permeated every atom of the
universe, yet the rod with which I can chastise the wicked is
grievous, and the fierceness of Mine anger against them terrible."1
Lest any observer of the Cause be tempted to misunderstand
such warnings as only metaphorical, Shoghi Effendi, drawing some of
the historical implications, wrote in 1941:
"A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in
its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably
glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face
of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and
momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing
with every passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its
devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury.
It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor
discern its outcome. Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches
this great and mighty wind of God invading the remotest and fairest
regions of the earth, rocking its foundations, deranging its
equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the homes of its
peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings, pulling
down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its light, and
harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants."2
*
From the point of view of wealth and influence, "the world"
of 1900 was Europe and, by grudging concession, the United States.
Throughout the planet, Western imperialism was pursuing among the
populations of other lands what it regarded as its "civilizing
mission". In the words of one historian, the century's opening decade
appeared to be essentially a continuation of the "long nineteenth
century",3 an era whose boundless self-satisfaction was perhaps best
epitomized by the celebration in 1897 of Queen Victoria's diamond
jubilee, a parade that rolled for hours through the streets of London,
with an imperial panoply and display of military power far surpassing
anything attempted in past civilizations. As the century began, there
were few, whatever their degree of social or moral sensitivity, who
perceived the catastrophes lying ahead, and few, if any, who could
have conceived their magnitude. The military leadership of most
European nations assumed that war of some kind would break out, but
viewed the prospect with equanimity because of the twin fixed
convictions that it would be short and would be won by their side.
To an extent that seemed little short of miraculous, the
international peace movement was enlisting the support of statesmen,
industrialists, scholars, the media, and influential personalities as
unlikely as the tsar of Russia. If the inordinate increase in
armaments seemed ominous, the network of painstakingly crafted and
often overlapping alliances seemed to give assurance that a general
conflagration would be avoided and regional disputes settled, as they
had been through most of the previous century. This illusion was
reinforced by the fact that Europe's crowned heads - most of them
members of one extended family, and many of them exercising seemingly
decisive political power - addressed one another familiarly by
nicknames, carried on an intimate correspondence, married one
another's sisters and daughters, and vacationed together throughout
long stretches of each year at one another's castles, regattas and
shooting lodges. Even the painful disparities in the distribution of
wealth were being energetically - if not very systematically -
addressed in Western societies through legislation designed to
restrain the worst of the corporate freebooting of preceding decades
and to meet the most urgent demands of growing urban populations.
The vast majority of the human family, living in lands
outside the Western world, shared in few of the blessings and little
of the optimism of their European and American brethren. China,
despite its ancient civilization and its sense of itself as the
"Middle Kingdom", had become the hapless victim of plundering by
Western nations and by its modernizing neighbour Japan. The multitudes
in India - whose economy and political life had fallen so totally
under the domination of a single imperial power as to exclude the
usual jockeying for advantage - escaped some of the worst of the
abuses afflicting other lands, but watched impotently as their
desperately needed resources were drained away. The coming agony of
Latin America was all too clearly prefigured in the suffering of
Mexico, large sections of which had been annexed by its great northern
neighbour, and whose natural resources were already attracting the
attention of avaricious foreign corporations. Particularly
embarrassing from a Western point of view - because of its proximity
to such brilliant European capitals as Berlin and Vienna - was the
medieval oppression in which the hundred million nominally liberated
serfs in Russia led lives of sullen, hopeless misery. Most tragic
of all was the plight of the inhabitants of the African continent,
divided against one another by artificial boundaries created through
cynical bargains among European powers. It has been estimated that
during the first decade of the twentieth century over a million people
in the Congo perished - starved, beaten, worked literally to death for
the profit of their distant masters, a preview of the fate that was to
engulf well over one hundred million of their fellow human beings
across Europe and Asia before the century reached its end.4
These masses of humankind, despoiled and scorned - but
representing most of the earth's inhabitants - were seen not as
protagonists but essentially as objects of the new century's much
vaunted civilizing process. Despite benefits conferred on a minority
among them, the colonial peoples existed chiefly to be acted upon - to
be used, trained, exploited, Christianized, civilized, mobilized - as
the shifting agendas of Western powers dictated. These agendas may
have been harsh or mild in execution, enlightened or selfish,
evangelical or exploitative, but were shaped by materialistic forces
that determined both their means and most of their ends. To a large
extent, religious and political pieties of various kinds masked both
ends and means from the publics in Western lands, who were thus able
to derive moral satisfaction from the blessings their nations were
assumed to be conferring on less worthy peoples, while themselves
enjoying the material fruits of this benevolence.
To point out the failings of a great civilization is not to
deny its accomplishments. As the twentieth century opened, the peoples
of the West could take justifiable pride in the technological,
scientific and philosophical developments for which their societies
had been responsible. Decades of experimentation had placed in their
hands material means that were still beyond the appreciation of the
rest of humanity. Throughout both Europe and America vast industries
had risen, dedicated to metallurgy, to the manufacturing of chemical
products of every kind, to textiles, to construction and to the
production of instruments that enhanced every aspect of life. A
continuous process of discovery, design and improvement was making
accessible power of unimaginable magnitude - with, alas, ecological
consequences equally unimagined at the time - especially through
the use of cheap fuel and electricity. The "era of the railroad" was
far advanced and steamships coursed the sea-ways of the world. With
the proliferation of telegraph and telephone communication, Western
society anticipated the moment when it would be freed of the limiting
effects that geographical distances had imposed on humankind since the
dawn of history.
Changes taking place at the deeper level of scientific
thought were even more far-reaching in their implications. The
nineteenth century had still been held in the grip of the Newtonian
view of the world as a vast clockwork system, but by the end of the
century the intellectual strides necessary to challenge that view had
already been taken. New ideas were emerging that would lead to the
formulation of quantum mechanics; and before long the revolutionizing
effect of the theory of relativity would call into question beliefs
about the phenomenal world that had been accepted as common sense for
centuries. Such break-throughs were encouraged - and their influence
greatly amplified - by the fact that science had already changed from
an activity of isolated thinkers to the systematically pursued concern
of a large and influential international community enjoying the
amenities of universities, laboratories and symposia for the exchange
of experimental discoveries.
Nor was the strength of Western societies limited to
scientific and technological advances. As the twentieth century
opened, Western civilization was reaping the fruits of a philosophical
culture that was rapidly liberating the energies of its populations,
and whose influence would soon produce a revolutionary impact
throughout the entire world. It was a culture which nurtured
constitutional government, prized the rule of law and respect for the
rights of all of society's members, and held up to the eyes of all it
reached a vision of a coming age of social justice. If the boasts of
liberty and equality that inflated patriotic rhetoric in Western lands
were a far cry from conditions actually prevailing, Westerners could
justly celebrate the advances toward those ideals that had been
accomplished in the nineteenth century.
From a spiritual perspective the age was gripped by a
strange, paradoxical duality. In almost every direction the
intellectual horizon was darkened by clouds of superstition produced
by unthinking imitation of earlier ages. For most of the world's
peoples, the consequences ranged from profound ignorance about both
human potentialities and the physical universe, to naďve attachment to
theologies that bore little or no relation to experience. Where winds
of change did dispel the mists, among the educated classes in Western
lands, inherited orthodoxies were all too often replaced by the blight
of an aggressive secularism that called into doubt both the spiritual
nature of humankind and the authority of moral values themselves.
Everywhere, the secularization of society's upper levels seemed to go
hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism among the general
population. At the deepest level - because religion's influence
reaches far into the human psyche and claims for itself a unique kind
of authority-religious prejudices in all lands had kept alive in
successive generations smouldering fires of bitter animosity that
would fuel the horrors of the coming decades.5
II
ON THIS LANDSCAPE OF FALSE CONFIDENCE and deep despair, of
scientific enlightenment and spiritual gloom, there appeared, as the
twentieth century opened, the luminous figure of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The
journey that had brought Him to this pivotal moment in the history of
humankind had led through more than fifty years of exile, imprisonment
and privation, hardly a month having passed in anything that resembled
tranquillity and ease. He came to it resolved to proclaim to
responsive and heedless alike the establishment on earth of that
promised reign of universal peace and justice that had sustained human
hope throughout the centuries. Its foundation, He declared, would be
the unification, in this "century of light", of the world's people:
"In this day ... means of communication have multiplied, and
the five continents of the earth have virtually merged into one.... In
like manner all the members of the human family, whether peoples or
governments, cities or villages, have become increasingly
interdependent.... Hence the unity of all mankind can in this day be
achieved. Verily this is none other but one of the wonders of this
wondrous age, this glorious century."6
During the long years of imprisonment and banishment that
followed Bahá'u'lláh's refusal to serve the political agenda of the
Ottoman authorities, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was entrusted with the management of
the Faith's affairs and with the responsibility of acting as His
Father's spokesman. A significant aspect of this work entailed
interaction with local and provincial officials who sought His advice
on the problems confronting them. Not dissimilar needs presented them-
selves in the Master's homeland. As early as 1875, responding to
Bahá'u'lláh's instructions, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed to the rulers and
people of Persia a treatise entitled The Secret of Divine
Civilization, setting out the spiritual principles that must guide the
shaping of their society in the age of humanity's maturity. Its
opening passage called upon the Iranian people to reflect on the
lesson taught by history about the key to social progress:
"Consider carefully: all these highly varied phenomena, these
concepts, this knowledge, these technical procedures and philosophical
systems, these sciences, arts, industries and inventions - all are
emanations of the human mind. Whatever people has ventured deeper into
this shoreless sea, has come to excel the rest. The happiness and
pride of a nation consist in this, that it should shine out like the
sun in the high heaven of knowledge. 'Shall they who have knowledge
and they who have it not, be treated alike?'"7
The Secret of Divine Civilization presaged the guidance that
would flow from the pen of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in subsequent decades. After
the devastating loss that followed the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh, the
Persian believers were revived and heartened by a flood of Tablets
from the Master, which provided not only the spiritual sustenance they
needed, but leadership in finding their way through the turmoil that
was undermining the established order of things in their land. These
communications, reaching even the smallest villages across the
country, responded to the appeals and questions of countless
individual believers, bringing guidance, encouragement and assurance.
We read, for example, a Tablet addressing believers in the village of
Kishih, mentioning by name nearly one hundred and sixty of them. Of
the age now dawning, the Master says: "this is the century of
light," explaining that the meaning of this image is acceptance of the
principle of oneness and its implications:
My meaning is that the beloved of the Lord must regard every
ill-wisher as a well-wisher.... That is, they must associate with a
foe as befitteth a friend, and deal with an oppressor as beseemeth a
kind companion. They should not gaze upon the faults and
transgressions of their foes, nor pay heed to their enmity, inequity
or oppression.8
Extraordinarily, the small company of persecuted believers,
living in this remote corner of a land which still remained largely
unaffected by the developments taking place elsewhere in social and
intellectual life, are summoned by this Tablet to raise their eyes
above the level of local concerns and to see the implications of unity
on a global scale:
"Rather, should they view people in the light of the Blessed
Beauty's call that the entire human race are servants of the Lord of
might and glory, as He hath brought the whole creation under the
purview of His gracious utterance, and hath enjoined upon us to show
forth love and affection, wisdom and compassion, faithfulness and
unity towards all, without any discrimination."9
Here, the call of the Master is not only to a new level of
understanding, but implies the need for commitment and action. In the
urgency and confidence of the language it employs can be felt the
power that would produce the great achievements of the Persian
believers in the decades since then-both in the world-wide promotion
of the Cause and in the acquisition of capacities that advance
civilization:
"O ye beloved of the Lord! With the utmost joy and gladness,
serve ye the human world, and love ye the human race. Turn your eyes
away from limitations, and free yourselves from restrictions, for ...
freedom therefrom brings about divine blessings and bestowals."
"Wherefore, rest ye not, be it for an instant; seek ye not a
minute's respite nor a moment's repose. Surge ye even as the billows
of a mighty sea, and roar like unto the leviathan of the ocean of
eternity. Therefore, so long as there be a trace of life in
one's veins, one must strive and labour, and seek to lay a foundation
that the passing of centuries and cycles may not undermine, and rear
an edifice which the rolling of ages and aeons cannot overthrow - an
edifice that shall prove eternal and everlasting, so that the
sovereignty of heart and soul may be established and secure in both
worlds."10
Social historians of the future, with a perspective far more
dispassion-ate and universal than is presently possible, and
benefiting from unimpeded access to all of the primary documentation,
will study minutely the transformation that the Master achieved in
these early years. Day after day, month after month, from a distant
exile where He was endlessly harried by the host of enemies
surrounding Him, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was able not only to stimulate the
expansion of the Persian Bahá'í community, but to shape its
consciousness and collective life. The result was the emergence of a
culture, however localized, that was unlike anything humanity had ever
known. Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent
claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the
systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building
of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere
of work as the globe itself.
Although suffering intermittent atrocities at the hands of
the Muslim clergy and their supporters-without protection from a
succession of indolent Qajar monarchs - the Persian Bahá'í community
found a new lease on life. The number of believers multiplied in all
regions of the country, persons prominent in the life of society were
enrolled, including several influential members of the clergy, and the
forerunners of administrative institutions emerged in the form of
rudimentary consultative bodies. The importance of the latter
development alone would be impossible to exaggerate. In a land and
among a people accustomed for centuries to a patriarchal system that
concentrated all decision-making authority in the hands of an absolute
monarch or Shi'ih mujtahids, a community representing a cross section
of that society had broken with the past, taking into its own hands
the responsibility for deciding its collective affairs through
consultative action.
In the society and culture the Master was developing,
spiritual energies expressed themselves in the practical affairs of
day-to-day life. The emphasis in the teachings on education provided
the impulse for the establishment of Bahá'í schools-including the
Tarbiyat school for girls,11 which gained national renown - in the
capital, as well as in provincial centres. With the assistance of
American and European Bahá'í helpers, clinics and other medical
facilities followed. A network of couriers, reaching across the land,
provided the struggling Bahá'í community with the rudiments of the
postal service that the rest of the country so conspicuously lacked.
The changes under way touched the homeliest circumstances of day-to-
day life. In obedience to the laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, for example,
Persian Bahá'ís abandoned the use of the filthy public baths, prolific
in their spread of infection and disease, and began to rely on showers
that used fresh water.
All of these advances, whether social, organizational or
practical, owed their driving force to the moral transformation taking
place among the believers, a transformation that was steadily
distinguishing Bahá'ís - even in the eyes of those hostile to the
Faith-as candidates for positions of trust. That such far-reaching
changes could so quickly set one segment of the Persian population
apart from the largely antagonistic majority around it was a
demonstration of the powers released by Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant with
His followers and by 'Abdu'l-Bahá's assumption of the leadership this
Covenant invested uniquely in Him.
Throughout these years Persian political life was in almost
constant turmoil. While Nasiri'd-Din Shah's immediate successor,
Muzaffari'd-Din Shah, was induced to approve a constitution in 1906,
his successor, Muhammad-'Ali Shah, recklessly dissolved the first two
parliaments - in one case attacking with cannon fire the building
where the legislature was meeting. The so-called "Constitutional
Movement" that overthrew him and compelled the last of the Qajar
kings, Ahmad Shah, to summon a third parliament was itself riven by
competing factions and shamelessly manipulated by the Shi'ih clergy.
Efforts by Bahá'ís to play a constructive role in this process of
modernization were repeatedly frustrated by royalist and popular
factions alike, both of which were inspired by the prevailing
religious prejudice and saw in the Bahá'í community merely a
convenient scapegoat. Here again, only a more politically mature age
than our own will be able to appreciate the way in which the Master -
setting an example for future challenges that the Bahá'í community
must inevitably encounter - guided the beleaguered community in doing
all it could to encourage political reform, and then in being willing
to step aside when these efforts were cynically rebuffed.
It was not only through His Tablets that 'Abdu'l-Bahá
exercised this influence on the rapidly developing Bahá'í community in
the cradle of the Faith. Unlike Westerners, Persian believers were not
distinguished from other peoples of the Near East by dress and
appearance, and so travellers from the cradle of the Faith did not
arouse the suspicion of the Ottoman authorities. Consequently, a
steady stream of Persian pilgrims provided 'Abdu'l-Bahá with another
powerful means of inspiring the friends, guiding their activities, and
drawing them ever more deeply into an understanding of Bahá'u'lláh's
purpose. Some of the greatest names in Persian Bahá'í history were
among those who journeyed to 'Akka and returned to their homes
prepared to give their lives if necessary for the achievement of the
Master's vision. The immortal Varqa and his son Ruhu'lláh were among
this privileged number, as were Haji Mirza Haydar 'Ali, Mirza Abu'l
Fadl, Mirza Muhammad-Taqi Afnan and four distinguished Hands of the
Cause, Ibn-i-Abhar, Haji Mulla Ali Akbar, Adibu'l-Ulama and Ibn-i-
Asdaq. The spirit that today sustains Persian pioneers in every part
of the world and that plays so creative a role in the building of
Bahá'í community life runs like a straight line through family after
family back to those heroic days. In retrospect, it is apparent that
the phenomenon we today know as the twin processes of expansion and
consolidation itself had its origin in those marvellous years.
Inspired by the Master's words and the accounts brought back
from the Holy Land, Persian believers arose to undertake travel-
teaching activities in the Far East. During the latter years of
Bahá'u'lláh's Ministry, communities had been established in India and
Burma, and the Faith carried as far as China; and this work was now
reinforced. A demonstration of the new powers released in the Cause
was the erection in the Russian province of Turkestan, where a
vigorous Bahá'í community life had also developed, of the first Bahá'í
House of from its inception, by His advice.
It was this broad range of activities, carried out by an
increasingly confident body of believers and stretching from the
Mediterranean to the China Sea, that built the base of support from
which 'Abdu'l-Bahá was able to pursue the promising opportunities
which, as the new century opened, had already begun to unfold in the
West. Not the least important feature of this base was its embrace of
representatives of the Orient's great diversity of racial, religious
and national backgrounds. This achievement provided 'Abdu'l-Bahá with
the examples on which He would repeatedly draw in His proclamation to
Western audiences of the integrating forces that had been released
through Bahá'u'lláh's advent.
The greatest victory of these early years was the Master's
success in constructing on Mount Carmel, on the spot designated for it
by Bahá'u'lláh and through immense effort, a mausoleum for the remains
of the Bab, which had been brought at great risk and difficulty to the
Holy Land. Shoghi Effendi has explained that whereas in past ages the
blood of martyrs was the seed of personal faith, in this day it has
constituted the seed of the administrative institutions of the
Cause.13 Such an insight lends special meaning to the way in which the
Administrative Centre of Bahá'u'lláh's World Order would take shape
under the shadow of the Shrine of the Faith's Martyr-Prophet. Shoghi
Effendi sets the Master's achievement in global and historical
perspective:
"For, just as in the realm of the spirit, the reality of the
Bab has been hailed by the Author of the Bahá'í Revelation as 'the
Point round Whom the realities of the Prophets and Messengers
revolve,' so, on this visible plane, His sacred remains constitute the
heart and center of what may be regarded as nine concentric circles,14
paralleling thereby, and adding further emphasis to the central
position accorded by the Founder of our Faith to One 'from Whom God
hath caused to proceed the knowledge of all that was and shall be,'
'the Primal Point from which have been generated all created
things.'"15
The significance in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own eyes of the mission He
had accomplished at such cost is movingly depicted by Shoghi Effendi:
"When all was finished, and the earthly remains of the Martyr-
Prophet of Shiraz were, at long last, safely deposited for their
everlasting rest in the bosom of God's holy mountain, 'Abdu'l-Bahá,
Who had cast aside His turban, removed His shoes and thrown off His
cloak, bent low over the still open sarcophagus, His silver hair
waving about His head and His face transfigured and luminous, rested
His forehead on the border of the wooden casket, and, sobbing aloud,
wept with such a weeping that all those who were present wept with
Him. That night He could not sleep, so overwhelmed was He with
emotion."16
By 1908, the so-called "Young Turk Revolution" had freed not
only most of the Ottoman empire's political prisoners, but 'Abdu'l-
Bahá as well. Suddenly, the restraints that had kept Him confined to
the prison-city of 'Akka and its immediate surroundings had fallen
away, and the Master was in a position to proceed with an enterprise
that Shoghi Effendi was later to describe as one of the three
principal achievements of His ministry: His public proclamation of the
Cause of God in the great population centres of the Western world.
*
Because of the dramatic character of the events that occurred
in North America and Europe, accounts of the Master's historic
journeys sometimes tend to overlook the important opening year spent
in Egypt. 'Abdu'l-Bahá arrived there in September 1910, intending to
go on directly to Europe, but was compelled by illness to remain in
residence at Ramleh, a suburb of Alexandria, until August of the
following year. As it turned out, the months that followed were a
period of great productivity whose full effects on the fortunes of the
Cause, in the African continent especially, will be felt for many
years to come. To some extent the way had no doubt been paved by warm
admiration for the Master on the part of Shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh, who
had met Him on several occasions in Beirut and who subsequently became
Mufti of Egypt and a leading figure at Al-Azhar University.
An aspect of the Egyptian sojourn that deserves special
attention was the opportunity it provided for the first public
proclamation of the Faith's message. The relatively cosmopolitan and
liberal atmosphere prevailing in Cairo and Alexandria at the time
opened a way for frank and searching discussions between the Master
and prominent figures in the intellectual world of Sunni Islam. These
included clerics, parliamentarians, administrators and aristocrats.
Further, editors and journalists from influential Arabic-language
newspapers, whose information about the Cause had been coloured by
prejudiced reports emanating from Persia and Constantinople, now had
an opportunity to learn the facts of the situation for themselves.
Publications that had been openly hostile changed their tone. The
editors of one such newspaper opened an article on the Master's
arrival by referring to "His Eminence Mirza 'Abbas Effendi, the
learned and erudite Head of the Bahá'ís in 'Akka and the Centre of
authority for Bahá'ís throughout the world" and expressing
appreciation of His visit to Alexandria.17 This and other articles
paid particular tribute to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's understanding of Islam and
to the principles of unity and religious tolerance that lay at the
heart of His teachings.
Despite the Master's ill health that had caused it, the
Egyptian interlude proved to be a great blessing. Western diplomats
and officials were able to observe at first-hand the extraordinary
success of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's interaction with leading figures in a region
of the Near East that was of lively interest in European circles.
Accordingly, by the time the Master embarked for Marseilles on 11
August 1911, His fame had preceded Him.
III
IN A TABLET ADRESSED BY 'ABDU'L-BAHÁ to an American believer
in 1905 contains a statement that is as illuminating as it is
touching. Referring to His situation following the ascension of
Bahá'u'lláh, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke of a letter He had received from
America at "a time when an ocean of trials and tribulations was
surging...":
"Such was our state when a letter came to us from the American
friends. They had covenanted together, so they wrote, to remain at one
in all things, and ... had pledged themselves to make sacrifices in
the pathway of the love of God, thus to achieve eternal life. At the
very moment when this letter was read, together with the signatures at
its close, 'Abdu'l-Bahá experienced a joy so vehement that no pen can
describe it...."18
An appreciation of the circumstances in which the expansion of
the Cause in the West occurred is vital for present-day Bahá'ís, and
for many reasons. It helps us abstract ourselves from the culture of
coarse and intrusive communication that has become so commonplace in
present-day society as to pass almost unnoticed. It draws to our
attention the gentleness with which the Master chose to introduce to
His Western audiences the concepts of human nature and human
society revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, concepts revolutionary in their
implications and entirely outside His hearers' experience. It explains
the delicacy with which He used metaphors or relied on historical
examples, the frequent indirectness of His approach, the intimacy He
could summon up at will, and the apparently limitless patience with
which He responded to questions, many of whose assumptions about
reality had long since lost whatever validity they might once have
possessed.
Yet another insight that a detached examination of the
historical situation to which the Master addressed Himself in the West
helps provide for our generation is an appreciation of the spiritual
greatness of those who responded to Him. These souls answered His
summons in spite, not because, of the liberal and economically
advanced world they knew, a world they no doubt cherished and valued,
and in which they had necessarily to carry on their daily lives. Their
response arose from a level of consciousness that recognized, even if
sometimes only dimly, the desperate need of the human race for
spiritual enlightenment. To remain steadfast in their commitment to
this insight required of these early believerson whose sacrifice of
self much of the foundation of the present-day Bahá'í communities both
in the West and many other lands were laid - that they resist not only
family and social pressures, but also the easy rationalizations of the
world-view in which they had been raised and to which everything
around them insistently exposed them. There was a heroism about the
steadfastness of these early Western Bahá'ís that is, in its own way,
as affecting as that of their Persian co-religionists who, in these
same years, were facing persecution and death for the Faith they had
embraced.
In the forefront of the Westerners who responded to the
Master's summons were the little groups of intrepid believers whom
Shoghi Effendi has hailed as "God-intoxicated pilgrims" and who had
the privilege of visiting 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the prison-city of 'Akka, of
seeing for themselves the luminosity of His Person and of hearing from
His own lips words that had the power to transform human life. The
effect on these believers has been expressed by May Maxwell:
"Of that first meeting," ... "I can remember neither joy nor
pain, nor anything that I can name. I had been carried suddenly to too
great a height, my soul had come in contact with the Divine
Spirit, and this force, so pure, so holy, so mighty, had overwhelmed
me...."19
Their return to their homes became, Shoghi Effendi explains, "the
signal for an outburst of systematic and sustained activity, which ...
spread its ramifications over Western Europe and the states and
provinces of the North American continent...."20 Fuelling their
endeavours and those of their fellow believers, and drawing into the
Cause growing numbers of new adherents, was a flood of Tablets
addressed by the Master to recipients on both sides of the Atlantic,
messages that threw open the imagination to the concepts, principles
and ideals of God's new Revelation. The power of this creative force
can be felt in the words with which the first American believer,
Thornton Chase, sought to describe what he was seeing:
"His [the Master's] own writings, spreading like white-winged
doves from the Center of His Presence to the ends of the earth, are so
many (hundreds pouring forth daily) that it is an impossibility for
him to have given time to them for searching thought or to have
applied the mental processes of the scholar to them. They flow like
streams from a gushing fountain...."21
These sentiments add their own perspective to the
determination with which the Master arose to undertake a venture so
ambitious as to dismay many of those immediately around Him. Setting
aside concerns expressed about His advanced age, His ill health, and
the physical disabilities left by decades of imprisonment, He set out
on a series of journeys that would last some three years, carrying Him
eventually to the Pacific coast of the North American continent. The
stresses and risks of international travel in the early years of the
century were the least of the obstacles to the realization of the
objectives He had set Himself. In the words of Shoghi Effendi:
He Who, in His own words, had entered prison as a youth and
left it an old man, Who never in His life had faced a public audience,
had attended no school, had never moved in Western circles, and was
unfamiliar with Western customs and language, had arisen not only to
proclaim from pulpit and platform, in some of the chief capitals of
Europe and in the leading cities of the North American
continent, the distinctive verities enshrined in His Father's Faith,
but to demonstrate as well the Divine origin of the Prophets gone
before Him, and to disclose the nature of the tie binding them to that
Faith.22
*
No more brilliant a stage for the opening act of this great
drama could have been desired than London, capital city of the largest
and most cosmopolitan empire the world has ever known. In the eyes of
the little groups of believers who had made the practical arrangements
and who longed for the sight of His face, the trip was a triumph far
surpassing their brightest hopes. Public officials, scholars, writers,
editors, industrialists, leaders of reform movements, members of the
British aristocracy, and influential clergymen of many denominations
eagerly sought Him out, invited Him to their platforms, classrooms,
homes and pulpits, and showered appreciation on the views He
expounded. On Sunday, 10 September 1911, the Master spoke for the
first time to a public audience anywhere, from the pulpit of the City
Temple. His words evoked for His hearers the vision of a new age in
the evolution of civilization:
"This is a new cycle of human power. All the horizons of the
world are luminous, and the world will become indeed as a garden and a
paradise.... You are loosed from ancient superstitions which have kept
men ignorant, destroying the foundation of true humanity.
"The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of
the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion. War
shall cease between nations, and by the will of God the Most Great
Peace shall come; the world will be seen as a new world, and all men
will live as brothers."23
After an additional two months' stay in Paris and a return to
Alexandria for a winter sojourn and the recuperation of His health,
'Abdu'l-Bahá sailed on 25 March 1912 to New York City, arriving on 11
April of that year. At even the simplest physical level, a
programme packed with hundreds of public addresses, conferences and
private talks in over forty cities across North America and an
additional nineteen in Europe, some of them visited more than once,
was a feat that may well have no parallel in modern history. On both
continents, but especially in North America, 'Abdu'l-Bahá received a
highly appreciative welcome from distinguished audiences devoted to
such concerns as peace, women's rights, racial equality, social reform
and moral development. On an almost daily basis, His talks and
interviews received wide coverage in mass-circulation newspapers. He
Himself was later to write that He had "observed all the doors open
... and the ideal power of the Kingdom of God removing every obstacle
and obstruction."24
The openness with which He was met permitted 'Abdu'l-Bahá to
proclaim unambiguously the social principles of the new Revelation.
Shoghi Effendi has summed up the truths thus presented:
"The independent search after truth, unfettered by
superstition or tradition; the oneness of the entire human race, the
pivotal principle and fundamental doctrine of the Faith; the basic
unity of all religions; the condemnation of all forms of prejudice,
whether religious, racial, class or national; the harmony which must
exist between religion and science; the equality of men and women, the
two wings on which the bird of human kind is able to soar; the
introduction of compulsory education; the adoption of a universal
auxiliary language; the abolition of the extremes of wealth and
poverty; the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of
disputes between nations; the exaltation of work, performed in the
spirit of service, to the rank of worship; the glorification of
justice as the ruling principle in human society, and of religion as a
bulwark for the protection of all peoples and nations; and the
establishment of a permanent and universal peace as the supreme goal
of all mankind - these stand out as the essential elements of that
Divine polity which He proclaimed to leaders of public thought as well
as to the masses at large in the course of these missionary
journeys."25
At the heart of the Master's message was the announcement that
the long-promised Day for the unification of humanity and the
establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God had come. That
Kingdom, as unveiled in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's letters and talks, owed nothing
whatever to the other-worldly assumptions familiar from the teachings
of traditional religion. Rather, the Master proclaimed the coming of
age of humankind and the emergence of a global civilization in which
the development of the whole range of human potentialities will be the
fruit of the interaction between universal spiritual values, on the
one hand, and, on the other, material advances that were even then
still undreamed of.
The means to achieve the goal, He said, had already come into
existence. What was needed was the will to act and the faith to
persist:
"All of us know that international peace is good, that it is
the cause of life, but volition and action are necessary. Inasmuch as
this century is the century of light, capacity for achieving peace has
been assured. It is certain that these ideas will be spread among men
to such a degree that they will result in action."26
Although expressed with unfailing courtesy and consideration,
the principles of the new Revelation were set out uncompromisingly in
both private and public encounters. Invariably, the Master's actions
were as eloquent as the words He used. In the United States, for
example, nothing could have more clearly communicated Bahá'í belief in
the oneness of religion than 'Abdu'l-Bahá's readiness to include
references to the Prophet Muhammad in addresses to Christian audiences
and His energetic vindication of the divine origin of both
Christianity and Islam to the congregation at Temple Emanu-El in San
Francisco. His ability to inspire in women of all ages confidence that
they possessed spiritual and intellectual capacities fully equal to
those of men, His unprovocative but clear demonstration of the meaning
of Bahá'u'lláh's teachings on racial oneness by welcoming black as
well as white guests at His own dinner table and the tables of His
prominent hostesses, and His insistence on the overriding importance
of unity in all aspects of Bahá'í endeavour - such demonstrations of
the way in which the spiritual and practical aspects of life must
interact threw open for the believers windows on a new world of
possibilities. The spirit of unconditional love in which these
challenges were phrased succeeded in overcoming the fears and
uncertainties of those whom the Master addressed.
Greater yet than the effort expended on His public exposition
of the Cause was the time and energy the Master devoted to deepening
the believers' understanding of the spiritual truths of Bahá'u'lláh's
Revelation. In city after city, from early morning to late at night,
the hours that were not taken up by the public demands of His mission
were given over to responding to the questions of the friends, meeting
their needs, and infusing into them a spirit of confidence in the
contributions each could make to the promotion of the Cause they had
embraced. His visit to Chicago provided the opportunity for 'Abdu'l-
Bahá to lay, with His own hands, the cornerstone of the first Bahá'í
House of Worship in the West, a project inspired by the one already
under way in 'Ishqabad and likewise encouraged from the moment of its
conception by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.
"The Mashriqu'l-Adhkar is one of the most vital institutions
in the world, and it hath many subsidiary branches. Although it is a
House of Worship, it is also connected with a hospital, a drug
dispensary, a traveler's hospice, a school for orphans, and a
university for advanced studies.... My hope is that the Mashriqu'l-
Adhkar will now be established in America, and that gradually the
hospital, the school, the university, the dispensary and the hospice,
all functioning according to the most efficient and orderly
procedures, will follow."27
As with the process simultaneously unfolding in Persia, only
future historians will be able to appreciate adequately the creative
power of this dimension of the Western trips. Memoirs and letters have
testified to the way in which even brief encounters with the Master
were to sustain countless Western Bahá'ís through the years of effort
and sacrifice that followed, as they struggled to expand and
consolidate the Faith. Without such an intervention by the Centre of
the Covenant Himself, it is impossible to imagine little groups of
Western believers - lacking entirely the spiritual heritage that their
Persian co-religionists derived from the long involvement of parents
and grandparents in the heroic events of Babi and early Bahá'í history
- being able so quickly to grasp what the Cause required of them and
to undertake the daunting tasks involved.
His hearers were summoned to become the loving and confident
agents of a great civilizing process, whose pivot is recognition of
the oneness of the human race. In arising to undertake their mission,
He promised that they would find unlocked in both themselves and
others entirely new capacities with which God has in this Day endowed
the human race:
Ye must become the very soul of the world, the living spirit
in the body of the children of men. In this wondrous Age, at this time
when the Ancient Beauty, the Most Great Name, bearing unnumbered
gifts, hath risen above the horizon of the world, the Word of God hath
infused such awesome power into the inmost essence of humankind that
He hath stripped men's human qualities of all effect, and hath, with
His all-conquering might, unified the peoples in a vast sea of
oneness.28
Nothing perhaps testifies so strikingly to the response the
believers made to this appeal than the fact that the unity established
among them did not inhibit their vivid individual ways of expressing
the truths of the Faith. The relationship between the individual and
the community has always been one of the most challenging issues in
the development of society. One has only to read, even cursorily,
accounts of the lives of the early Bahá'ís in the West to become aware
of the high degree of individuality that characterized many of them,
particularly the most active and creative. Not infrequently, they had
found the Faith only after intensive investigation of various
spiritual and social movements current at the time, and this broad
understanding of the concerns and interests of their contemporaries no
doubt helped make them such effective teachers of the Faith. It is
equally clear, however, that the wide range of expression and
understanding among them did not prevent them or their fellow
believers from contributing to building a collective unity that was
the chief attraction of the Cause. As the memoirs and historical
accounts of the period make clear, the secret of this balancing of
individual and community was the spiritual bond connecting all
believers to the words and example of the Master. In an important
sense 'Abdu'l-Bahá was, for all of them, the Bahá'í Cause.
No objective review of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's mission to the West can
fail to take into account the sobering fact that only a small number
of those who had accepted the Faith - and infinitely fewer among the
public audiences who had thronged to hear His words - derived from
these priceless opportunities more than a relatively dim understanding
of the implications of His message. Appreciating these limitations on
the part of His hearers, 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not hesitate to introduce
into His relations with Western believers actions that summoned them
to a level of consciousness far above mere social liberalism and
tolerance. One example that must stand for a range of such
interventions was His gentle but dramatic act in encouraging the
marriage of Louis Gregory and Louise Mathews - the one black, the
other white. The initiative set a standard for the American Bahá'í
community as to the real meaning of racial integration, however timid
and slow its members were in responding to the core implications of
the challenge.
Even without a deep understanding of the Master's goals, those
who embraced His message set out, often at great personal cost, to
give practical expression to the principles He taught. Commitment to
the cause of international peace; the abolition of extremes of wealth
and poverty that were undermining the unity of society; the overcoming
of national, racial and other prejudices; the encouragement of
equality in the education of boys and girls; the need to shake off the
shackles of ancient dogmas that were inhibiting investigation of
reality - these principles for the advancement of civilization had
made a powerful impression. What few, if any, of the Master's hearers
grasped - perhaps could have grasped - was the revolutionary change in
the very structure of society and the willing submission of human
nature to Divine Law that, in the final analysis, can alone produce
the necessary changes in attitude and behaviour.
*
The key to this vision of the coming transformation of the
individual and social life of humankind was 'Abdu'l-Bahá's
proclamation, shortly after His arrival in North America, of
Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant and of the central part He Himself had
been called on to play in it. In the Master's own words:
"As to the most great characteristic of the revelation of
Bahá'u'lláh, a specific teaching not given by any of the Prophets of
the past: It is the ordination and appointment of the Center of the
Covenant. By this appointment and provision He has safeguarded and
protected the religion of God against differences and schisms, making
it impossible for anyone to create a new sect or faction of belief."29
Choosing New York City for His purpose - and designating it
"the City of the Covenant" - 'Abdu'l-Bahá unveiled for Western
believers the devolution of authority made by the Founder of their
Faith for the definitive interpretation of His Revelation. A highly
regarded believer, Lua Getsinger, had been called on by the Master to
prepare the group of Bahá'ís who had gathered in the house where He
was temporarily residing for this historic announcement, following
which He Himself went downstairs and spoke in general terms about some
of the implications of the Covenant. Juliet Thompson, who, with one of
the Persian translators, had been in the upstairs room at the time
this mission had been given to her friend, has left an account of the
circumstances. She quotes 'Abdu'l-Bahá as saying:
"...I am the Covenant, appointed by Bahá'u'lláh. And no one
can refute His Word. This is the Testament of Bahá'u'lláh. You will
find it in the Holy Book of Aqdas. Go forth and proclaim, 'This is the
Covenant of God in your midst.'"30
Conceived by Bahá'u'lláh as the Instrument which, in the words
of Shoghi Effendi, was "to perpetuate the influence of [the] Faith,
insure its integrity, safeguard it from schism, and stimulate its
world-wide expansion,"31 the Covenant had been violated by members of
Bahá'u'lláh's own family almost immediately after His ascension.
Recognizing that the authority invested in the Master by the Kitáb-i-
'Ahd, the Tablet of the Branch and related documents frustrated their
private hopes to turn the Cause to their personal advantage, these
persons began a persistent campaign to undermine His position,
first in the Holy Land and then in Persia, where the bulk of the
Bahá'í community was concentrated. When these schemes failed, they
next sought to manipulate the fears of the Ottoman government and the
avarice of its representatives in Palestine. This hope too collapsed
when the "Young Turk Revolution" overthrew the regime in
Constantinople, hanging some thirty-one of its leading officials,
including several who had been implicated in the plans of the
Covenant-breakers.
In the West, during the early years of the Master's ministry,
representatives sent by Him had already successfully countered the
machinations of Ibrahim Khayru'lláh - ironically, the individual who
had introduced many of the American believers to the Cause - who had
aimed at securing a position of leadership through association with
the Covenant-breakers in the Holy Family. Such experiences had
doubtless prepared the Western believers for the Master's formal
proclamation of His station and for the firmness with which He
enjoined on believers avoidance of any involvement with such agents of
division. It would be only gradually, however, as the new communities
struggled to overcome differences of opinion and resist the perennial
human temptation to factionalism, that the implications of this great
organizing law of the new Dispensation would emerge.
While laying out in both public addresses and private
discussions the vision of a world of unity and peace that the
Revelation of God for our day will bring into being, the Master warned
emphatically of the dangers that lay on the immediate horizon - both
for the Faith and for the world. For both, 'Abdu'l-Bahá foresaw, in
the words of Shoghi Effendi, a "winter of unprecedented severity".
For the Cause of God, that winter would entail heartbreaking
betrayals of the Covenant. In North America, the inconstancy of a
small number of individuals, frustrated in their aspirations for
personal leadership, remained an ongoing source of difficulty for the
community, undermining the faith of some and causing others simply to
drift away from participation in the Faith. In Persia, too, the faith
of the friends was repeatedly tested by the schemes of ambitious
individuals suddenly awakened to the possibilities for self-
aggrandizement they believed they saw in the successes attending
the Master's work in the West. In both cases, the consequences of such
defections were ultimately to deepen the devotion of the firm
believers.
As for humanity in general, 'Abdu'l-Bahá warned in ominous
terms of the catastrophe that He saw approaching. While emphasizing
the urgency of efforts at reconciliation that might alleviate in some
measure the suffering of the world's people, He left His hearers in no
doubt of the magnitude of the danger. In one of the major newspapers
in Montreal, where press coverage of the trip was particularly
comprehensive, it was reported:
"'All Europe is an armed camp. These warlike preparations will
necessarily culminate in a great war. The very armaments themselves
are productive of war. This great arsenal must go ablaze. There is
nothing of the nature of prophecy about such a view', said 'Abdu'l-
Bahá; 'it is based on reasoning solely.'"32
On 5 December 1912, the Figure who had been hailed across
North America as "the Apostle of Peace" sailed from New York for
Liverpool. After relatively brief stays in London and other British
centres, He visited several continental cities, again devoting several
weeks to Paris, where He had available the services of Hippolyte
Dreyfus, whose written Arabic and Persian met the Master's
requirements. As the recognized cultural capital of continental
Europe, Paris was a focal centre for visitors from many parts of the
world, including the Orient. While the talks delivered during His two
extended visits to the city make frequent reference to the great
social issues discussed elsewhere, they seem particularly
distinguished by an intimate spirituality that must have profoundly
touched the hearts of those privileged to meet Him:
"Lift up your hearts above the present and look with eyes of
faith into the future! Today the seed is sown, the grain falls upon
the earth, but behold the day will come when it shall rise a glorious
tree and the branches thereof shall be laden with fruit. Rejoice and
be glad that this day has dawned, try to realize its power, for it is
indeed wonderful!"33
On the morning of 13 June 1913, 'Abdu'l-Bahá embarked at
Marseilles on the steamer S. S. Himalaya, arriving at Port Said in
Egypt four days later. What Shoghi Effendi has called "His historic
journeys" ended with His return to Haifa on 5 December 1913.
*
Two years, almost to the day, after 'Abdu'l-Bahá's statement
to the editor of the Montreal Daily Star, the world that had enjoyed
so intoxicating a sense of self-confidence and whose foundations had
appeared impregnable, collapsed abruptly. The catastrophe is popularly
associated with the murder in Sarajevo of the heir to the throne of
the Austro-Hungarian empire, and certainly the train of blunders,
reckless threats and mindless appeals to "honour" that led directly to
World War I was ignited by this relatively minor event. In reality,
however, as the Master had pointed out, preliminary "rumblings" during
the entire first decade of the century should have alerted European
leaders to the fragility of the existing order.
In the years 1904-1905, the Japanese and Russian empires had
gone to war with a violence that led to the destruction of virtually
the entire naval forces of the latter power and its surrender of
territories it regarded as vital to its interests, a humiliation that
was to have long-lasting domestic and international repercussions. On
two occasions during these opening years of the century, war between
France and Germany over imperialist designs in North Africa was
narrowly averted only through the self-interested intervention of
other powers. In 1911 Italian ambitions similarly provoked a dangerous
threat to international peace by the seizure from the Ottoman empire
of what is now Libya. International instability had been further
deepened - as the Master had also warned - when Germany, feeling
constrained by a growing web of hostile alliances, embarked on a
massive naval building programme aimed at eliminating the previously
accepted British lead.
Exacerbating these conflicts were tensions among the subject
peoples of the Romanov, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Waiting only for
some turn of events that would break the grip of the ramshackle
systems that suppressed them, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Balts,
Romanians, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Macedonians, Slavs and
Albanians looked forward eagerly to their day of liberation.
Tirelessly exploiting this network of fissures in the existing order
were a host of conspiracies, resistance groups and separatist
organizations. Inspired by ideologies ranging from an almost
incoherent anarchism at one extreme to sharply honed racist and
nationalist obsessions at the other, these underground forces shared
one naďve conviction: if the particular part of the prevailing order
that had become their target could somehow be brought down, the
inherent nobility of the segment of humankind that supported their
aims - or the assumed nobility of humankind in general - would by
itself ensure a new era of freedom and justice.
Alone among these would-be agents of violent change one
broadly based movement was proceeding systematically and with ruthless
clarity of purpose towards the goal of world revolution. The Communist
Party, deriving both its intellectual thrust and an unshakeable
confidence in its ultimate triumph from the writings of the nineteenth
century ideologue Karl Marx, had succeeded in establishing groups of
committed supporters throughout Europe and various other countries.
Convinced that the genius of its master had demonstrated beyond
question the essentially material nature of the forces that had given
rise to both human consciousness and social organization, the
Communist movement dismissed the validity of both religion and
"bourgeois" moral standards. In its view, faith in God was a neurotic
weakness indulged in by the human race, a weakness that had merely
permitted successive ruling classes to manipulate superstition as an
instrument for enslaving the masses.
To the leaders of the world, blindly edging their way towards
the universal conflagration which pride and folly had prepared, the
great strides being made by science and technology represented chiefly
a means of gaining military advantage over their rivals. The European
opponents of the nations concerned, however, were not the poverty-
stricken and largely uneducated colonial populations whom they had
been able to subject. The false confidence that military hardware thus
inspired led inexorably to a race to equip armies and navies with the
most advanced of modern weaponry, and to do so on as massive a scale
as possible. Machine guns, long-range cannon, "dreadnoughts",
submarines, landmines, poison gas and the possibility of equipping
airplanes for bombing attacks emerged as features of what one
commentator has termed the "technology of death".34 All of these
instruments of annihilation would, as 'Abdu'l-Bahá had warned, be
deployed and refined during the course of the coming conflict.
Science and technology were also exerting other, more subtle
pressures on the prevailing order. Large-scale industrial production,
fuelled by the arms race, had accelerated the movement of populations
into urban centres. By the end of the preceding century, this process
was already undermining inherited standards and loyalties, exposing
growing numbers of people to novel ideas for the bringing about of
social change, and exciting mass appetites for material benefits
previously available only to elite segments of society. Even under
relatively autocratic systems, the public was beginning to perceive
the extent to which civil authority was dependent for its
effectiveness on its ability to win broad popular support. These
social developments would have unforeseen and far-reaching
consequences. As war would drag endlessly on and unthinking faith in
its simplicities come into question, millions of men in conscript
armies on both sides would begin to see their sufferings as
meaningless in themselves and fruitless in terms of their own and
their families' well-being.
Beyond these implications of technological and economic
change, scientific advancement seemed to encourage easy assumptions
about human nature, the almost unnoticed overlay that Bahá'u'lláh has
termed "the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge".35 These
unexamined views communicated themselves to ever-widening audiences.
Sensationalism in the popular press, fiery debates between scientists
or scholars, on the one hand, and theologians or influential
clergymen, on the other, along with the rapid spread of public
education, continued to undermine the authority of accepted religious
doctrines, as well as of prevailing moral standards.
These seismic forces of the new century combined to make the
situation facing the Western world in 1914 intensely volatile. When
the great conflagration did break out, therefore, the nightmare far
surpassed the worst fears of thoughtful minds. It would serve no
purpose here to review the exhaustively analyzed cataclysm of
World War I. The statistics themselves remain almost beyond the
ability of the human mind to encompass: an estimated sixty million men
eventually being thrown into the most horrific inferno that history
had ever known, eight million of them perishing in the course of the
war and an additional ten million or more being permanently disabled
by crippling injuries, burned-out lungs and appalling
disfigurements.36 Historians have suggested that the total financial
cost may have reached thirty billion dollars, wiping out a substantial
portion of the total capital wealth of Europe.
Even such massive losses do not begin to suggest the full
scope of the ruin. One of the considerations that long held back
President Woodrow Wilson from proposing to the United States Congress
the declaration of war that had by then become virtually inescapable
was his awareness of the moral damage that would ensue. Not the least
of the distinctions that characterized this extraordinary man - a
statesman whose vision both 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi have
praised - was his understanding of the brutalization of human nature
that would be the worst legacy of the tragedy that was by then
engulfing Europe, a legacy beyond human capacity to reverse.37
Reflection on the magnitude of the suffering experienced by
humankind in the war's four years - and the resulting setback to the
long, painful process of the civilizing of human nature - lends tragic
force to words the Master had addressed only two or three years
earlier to audiences in such European cities as London, Paris, Vienna,
Budapest and Stuttgart, as well as in North America. Speaking one
evening in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland Maxwell in Montreal, He
had said:
"Today the world of humanity is walking in darkness because it
is out of touch with the world of God. That is why we do not see the
signs of God in the hearts of men. The power of the Holy Spirit has no
influence. When a divine spiritual illumination becomes manifest in
the world of humanity, when divine instruction and guidance appear,
then enlightenment follows, a new spirit is realized within, a new
power descends, and a new life is given. It is like the birth from the
animal kingdom into the kingdom of man.... I will pray, and you
must pray, likewise, that such heavenly bounty may be realized; that
strife and enmity may be banished, warfare and bloodshed taken away;
that hearts may attain ideal communication and that all people may
drink from the same fountain."38
The vindictive peace treaty, imposed by the Allied powers on
their defeated enemies, succeeded only, as both 'Abdu'l-Bahá and
Shoghi Effendi have pointed out, in planting the seeds of another, far
more terrible conflict. The ruinous reparations demanded of the
vanquished - and the injustice that required them to accept the full
guilt for a war for which all parties had been, to one degree or
another, responsible - were among the factors that would prepare
demoralized peoples in Europe to embrace totalitarian promises of
relief which they might not otherwise have contemplated.
Ironically, no matter how harsh were the reparations required
of the defeated, the supposed victors awoke to the appalled
realization that their triumph - and the demand for unconditional
surrender that had driven it - had come at an equally crippling price.
Staggering war debts ended forever the economic dominance which these
European nations had acquired through three centuries of imperialist
exploitation of the rest of the planet. The deaths of millions of
young men who would have been urgently needed to meet the challenges
of the coming decades was a loss that could never be recovered.
Indeed, Europe itself - which only four brief years earlier had
represented the apparent summit of civilization and world influence -
lost at one stroke this pre-eminence, and began the inexorable slide
during the following decades toward the status of an auxiliary to a
rising new centre of power in North America.
Initially, it seemed that the vision of the future conceived
by Woodrow Wilson would now be realized. In part, this proved to be
the case as subject peoples throughout Europe gained the freedom to
work out their own destinies through the emergence from the ruin of
the former empires of a series of new nation-states. Further, the
president's "Fourteen Points" briefly endowed his public statements
with so great a moral authority in the minds of millions of Europeans
that not even the most recalcitrant of his fellow leaders among the
Allied powers could entirely disregard his wishes. Despite
months of wrangling over colonies, borders, and clauses in the text of
the peace treaty, the Versailles settlement eventually incorporated an
attenuated form of the proposed League of Nations, an institution
which it was hoped could adjust future disputes between nations and
harmonize international affairs.
Shoghi Effendi's commentary on the significance of this
historic initiative commands reflection on the part of every Bahá'í
who seeks to understand the events of this turbulent century.
Describing two closely interrelated developments that are associated
with the dawn of world peace, he lays emphasis on the fact that they
are "destined to culminate, in the fullness of time, in a single
glorious consummation".39 The first, the Guardian describes as
associated with the mission of the Bahá'í community in the North
American continent; the second, with the destiny of the United States
as a nation. Speaking of this latter phenomenon, which dated back to
the outbreak of the first world war, Shoghi Effendi writes:
"It received its initial impetus through the formulation of
President Wilson's Fourteen Points, closely associating for the first
time that republic with the fortunes of the Old World. It suffered its
first set-back through the dissociation of that republic from the
newly born League of Nations which that president had labored to
create.... It must, however long and tortuous the way, lead, through a
series of victories and reverses, to the political unification of the
Eastern and Western Hemispheres, to the emergence of a world
government and the establishment of the Lesser Peace, as foretold by
Bahá'u'lláh and foreshadowed by the Prophet Isaiah. It must, in the
end, culminate in the unfurling of the banner of the Most Great Peace,
in the Golden Age of the Dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh."40
How tragic, therefore, was the fate of the conception that had
inspired the efforts of the American president. As soon became
apparent, the League had been stillborn. Although it included such
features as a legislature, a judiciary, an executive, and a supporting
bureaucracy, it had been denied the authority vital to the work it was
ostensibly intended to perform. Locked into the nineteenth century's
conception of untrammelled national sovereignty, it could take
decisions only with the unanimous assent of the member states, a
requirement largely ruling out effective action.41 The hollowness of
the system was exposed, as well, by its failure to include some of the
world's most powerful states: Germany had been rejected as a defeated
nation held responsible for the war, Russia was initially denied
entrance because of its Bolshevik regime, and the United States itself
refused - as a result of narrow political partisanship in Congress -
either to join the League or to ratify the treaty. Ironically, even
the half-hearted efforts made to protect ethnic minorities living in
the newly created nation-states proved eventually to be little more
than weapons to be used in Europe's continuing fratricidal conflicts.
In sum, at precisely the moment in human history when an
unprecedented outbreak of violence had undermined the inherited
bulwarks of civilized behaviour, the political leadership of the
Western world had emasculated the one alternative system of
international order to which experience of this catastrophe had given
birth and which alone could have alleviated the far greater suffering
that lay ahead. In the prophetic words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá: "Peace, Peace
... the lips of potentates and peoples unceasingly proclaim, whereas
the fire of unquenched hatreds still smoulders in their hearts." "The
ills from which the world now suffers," He added in 1920, "will
multiply; the gloom which envelops it will deepen.... The vanquished
Powers will continue to agitate. They will resort to every measure
that may rekindle the flame of war."42
*
As war's inferno was engulfing the world, 'Abdu'l-Bahá turned
His attention to the one great task remaining in His ministry, that of
ensuring the proclamation to the remotest corners of the Earth of the
message which had been neglected - or opposed - in Islamic and Western
society alike. The instrument He devised for this purpose was the
Divine Plan laid out in fourteen great Tablets, four of them addressed
to the Bahá'í community of North America and ten subsidiary ones
addressed to five specific segments of that community. Together with
Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet of Carmel and the Master's Will and
Testament, the Tablets of the Divine Plan were described by Shoghi
Effendi as three of the "Charters" of the Cause. Revealed during the
darkest days of the war, in 1916 and 1917, the Divine Plan summoned
the small body of American and Canadian believers to assume the role
of leadership in establishing the Cause of God throughout the planet.
The implications of the trust were awe-inspiring. In the words of the
Master:
"The hope which 'Abdu'l-Bahá cherishes for you is that the
same success which has attended your efforts in America may crown your
endeavors in other parts of the world, that through you the fame of
the Cause of God may be diffused throughout the East and the West, and
the advent of the Kingdom of the Lord of Hosts be proclaimed in all
the five continents of the globe. The moment this Divine Message is
carried forward by the American believers from the shores of America,
and is propagated through the continents of Europe, of Asia, of Africa
and of Australia, and as far as the islands of the Pacific, this
community will find itself securely established upon the throne of an
everlasting dominion. Then will all the peoples of the world witness
that this community is spiritually illumined and divinely guided. Then
will the whole earth resound with the praises of its majesty and
greatness...."43
Shoghi Effendi reminds us that this historic mission,
described by him as "the birthright of the North American Bahá'í
Community",44 is rooted in the words of the Twin Manifestations of God
to humanity's age of maturity. It appeared first in the words of the
Bab, who called on the "peoples of the West" to "issue forth from your
cities", to "aid God ere the Day when the Lord of mercy shall come
down unto you in the shadow of the clouds...", and to become "as true
brethren in the one and indivisible religion of God, free from
distinction,... so that ye find yourselves reflected in them, and they
in you".45 In His summons to the "Rulers of America and the Presidents
of the Republics therein", Bahá'u'lláh Himself delivered a mandate
that has no parallel in any of His other addresses to world leaders:
"Bind ye the broken with the hands of justice, and crush the
oppressor who flourisheth with the rod of the commandments of your
Lord, the Ordainer, the All-Wise."46 It was Bahá'u'lláh, too, who
enunciated one of the most profound truths about the process by which
civilization has evolved: "In the East the light of His Revelation
hath broken; in the West have appeared the signs of His dominion.
Ponder this in your hearts, O people...."47
Although the Divine Plan would, as the Guardian was later to
say, "be held in abeyance" until the system necessary to its execution
had been brought into being, 'Abdu'l-Bahá had selected, empowered and
mandated a company of believers who would take the lead in launching
the enterprise. His own life was now swiftly moving to its end, but
the three years left to Him after the conclusion of the world war
seemed, in retrospect, to provide a foretaste of the victories that
the Cause itself would know as the century unfolded. The changed
conditions in the Holy Land freed the Master to pursue His work
unhampered and created the conditions in which the brilliance of His
mind and spirit could exercise their influence on government
officials, visiting dignitaries of every kind, and the various
communities making up the population of the Holy Land. The Mandate
Power itself sought to express its appreciation of the unifying effect
of His example and the philanthropic work He did by conferring on Him
a knighthood.48 More importantly, a renewed flow of pilgrims and of
Tablets to Bahá'í communities of both East and West stimulated an
expansion in the teaching work and a deepening of the friends'
understanding of the implications of the Faith's message.
Nothing perhaps illustrated so dramatically the spiritual
triumph the Master had won at the World Centre of the Faith than the
events in Haifa that occurred immediately after His ascension in the
early hours of 28 November 1921. The following day a vast concourse of
thousands of people, representing the variegated races and sects of
the region, followed the funeral cortčge up the slopes of Mount Carmel
in a state of unaffected grief such as the city had never before
witnessed. It was led by representatives of the British government,
members of the diplomatic community, and the heads of all of the
religious bodies in the area, several of whom participated in the
service at the Shrine of the Bab. So unrestrained and unified an
outburst of mourning reflected a sudden awareness of the loss of
a Figure whose example had served as a focal centre of unity in an
angry and divided land. In itself, it served for all with eyes to see
as a compelling vindication of the truth of the oneness of humankind
which the Master had tirelessly proclaimed.
IV
WITH THE PASSING OF 'ABDU'L-BAHÁ, the Apostolic Age of the
Cause reached its end. The Divine intervention that had begun seventy-
seven years earlier on the night the Bab declared His mission to Mulla
Husayn - and 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself was born - had completed its work.
It had been, in the words of Shoghi Effendi, "a period whose
splendours no victories in this or any future age, however brilliant,
can rival...."49 Ahead lay the thousand or thousands of years in which
the potentialities that this creative force has planted in human
consciousness will gradually unfold.
Contemplation of so great a juncture in the history of
civilization brings into sharp focus the Figure whose nature and role
have been unique in this six-thousand-year process. Bahá'u'lláh has
called 'Abdu'l-Bahá "the Mystery of God". Shoghi Effendi has described
Him as "the Centre and Pivot" of Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant, the "perfect
Exemplar" of the teachings of the Revelation of God for the age of
human maturity, and "the Mainspring of the Oneness of Humanity". No
phenomenon in any way comparable to His appearance had accompanied any
of the Divine Revelations that had given birth to the other great
religious systems in recorded history; all of these had been
essentially stages preparing humanity for its coming of age. 'Abdu'l-
Bahá was Bahá'u'lláh's supreme Creation, the One that made
everything else possible. An understanding of this truth moved a
perceptive American Bahá'í to write:
"Now a message from God must be delivered, and there was no
mankind to hear this message. Therefore, God gave the world
'Abdu'lBahá. 'Abdu'l-Bahá received the message of Bahá'u'lláh on
behalf of the human race. He heard the voice of God; He was inspired
by the spirit; He attained complete consciousness and awareness of the
meaning of this message, and He pledged the human race to respond to
the voice of God. ...to me that is the Covenant - that there was on
this earth some one who could be a representative of an as yet
uncreated race. There were only tribes, families, creeds, classes,
etc., but there was no man except 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá, as
man, took to Himself the message of Bahá'u'lláh and promised God that
He would bring the people into the oneness of mankind, and create a
humanity that could be the vehicle for the laws of God."50
Beginning His mission as a prisoner of a brutal, ignorant
regime and relentlessly assailed by faithless brothers who ultimately
sought His death, the Master single-handedly created of the Persian
Bahá'í community a brilliant demonstration of the social development
the Cause could produce, inspired the expansion of the Faith across
the Orient, raised up communities of devoted believers throughout the
West, designed a Plan for the world-wide expansion of the Cause, won
the respect and admiration of leaders of thought wherever His
influence reached, and provided Bahá'u'lláh's followers throughout the
world with a vast body of authoritative guidance as to the intent of
the Faith's laws and teachings. On the slopes of Mount Carmel He
erected with enormous pain and difficulty the Shrine housing the
mortal remains of the martyred Bab, the focal point of the processes
by which the life of our planet will gradually be organized. Through
it all, in every least occasion of a life filled with cares and
demands of every sort - a life exposed at all times to examination by
enemy and friend alike - He ensured that posterity will possess that
treasure of which poets, philosophers and mystics have dreamed all
down the ages, a demonstration of unshadowed human perfection.
And finally, it was 'Abdu'l-Bahá who made certain that the
Divine Order conceived by Bahá'u'lláh for the unification of the human
race and the institution of justice in humanity's collective life
would be provided with the means required to realize its Founder's
purpose. For unity to exist among human beings - at even the simplest
level - two fundamental conditions must pertain. Those involved must
first of all be in some agreement about the nature of reality as it
affects their relationships with one another and with the phenomenal
world. They must, secondly, give assent to some recognized and
authoritative means by which decisions will be taken that affect their
association with one another and that determine their collective
goals.
Unity is not, that is, merely a condition resulting from a
sense of mutual goodwill and common purpose, however profound and
sincerely held such sentiments may be, any more than an organism is a
product of some fortuitous and amorphous association of various
elements. Unity is a phenomenon of creative power, whose existence
becomes apparent through the effects that collective action produces
and whose absence is betrayed by the impotence of such efforts.
However handicapped it often has been by ignorance and perversity,
this force has been the primary influence driving the advancement of
civilization, generating legal codes, social and political
institutions, artistic works, technological achievements without end,
moral breakthroughs, material prosperity, and long periods of public
peace whose afterglow lived in the memories of subsequent generations
as imagined "golden ages".
Through the Revelation of God to humanity's coming of age, the
full potentialities of this creative force have at last been released
and the means necessary to the realization of the Divine purpose have
been instituted. In His Will and Testament, which Shoghi Effendi has
described as the "Charter" of the Administrative Order, 'Abdu'l-Bahá
set out in detail the nature and role of the twin institutions that
are His appointed Successors and whose complementary functions ensure
the unity of the Bahá'í Cause and the achievement of its mission
throughout the Dispensation, the Guardianship and the Universal House
of Justice. He laid particularly strong emphasis on the authority thus
conveyed:
"Whatsoever they decide is of God. Whoso obeyeth him not,
neither obeyeth them, hath not obeyed God; whoso rebelleth against him
and against them hath rebelled against God; whoso opposeth him hath
opposed God; whoso contendeth with them hath contended with God...."51
Shoghi Effendi has explained the significance of this extraordinary
Text:
"The Administrative Order which this historic Document has
established, it should be noted, is, by virtue of its origin and
character, unique in the annals of the world's religious systems. No
Prophet before Bahá'u'lláh, it can be confidently asserted,... has
established, authoritatively and in writing, anything comparable to
the Administrative Order which the authorized Interpreter of
Bahá'u'lláh's teachings has instituted, an Order which ... must and
will, in a manner unparalleled in any previous religion, safeguard
from schism the Faith from which it has sprung."52
Before the reading and promulgation of the Will and Testament,
the great majority of the members of the Faith had assumed that the
next stage in the evolution of the Cause would be the election of the
Universal House of Justice, the institution founded by Bahá'u'lláh
Himself in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas as the governing body of the Bahá'í
world. An important fact for present-day Bahá'ís to understand is that
prior to this point the concept of Guardianship was unknown to the
Bahá'í community. There was wide-spread rejoicing at the news of the
unique distinction that the Master had conferred on Shoghi Effendi and
the continuing link with the Founders of the Faith that his role
represented. Until then, however, there had been no appreciation of
Bahá'u'lláh's intent that such an institution should emerge or of the
interpretive function it would have to perform - a function whose
vital importance has since become readily apparent and which hindsight
makes clear were implicit in certain of His Writings.
What was entirely beyond the imagination of anyone then
living, whether faithful or ill-disposed, was the transformation in
the life of the Cause that the Will of the Master set in motion. "Were
ye to know what will come to pass after Me," 'Abdu'l-Bahá had
declared, "surely would ye pray that my end be hastened?"53
V
AN APPRECIATION OF THE PLACE of the Guardianship in Bahá'í
history must begin with an objective consideration of the
circumstances in which Shoghi Effendi's mission had to be carried out.
Particularly important is the fact that the first half of this
ministry unfolded between wars, a period marked by deepening
uncertainty and anxiety about all aspects of human affairs. On the one
hand, significant advances had been made in overcoming barriers
between nations and classes; on the other, political impotence and a
resulting economic paralysis greatly handicapped efforts to take
advantage of these openings. There was everywhere a sense that some
fundamental redefinition of the nature of society and the role its
institutions should play was urgently needed - a redefinition, indeed,
of the purpose of human life itself.
In important respects, humanity found itself at the end of the
first world war able to explore possibilities never before imagined.
Throughout Europe and the Near East the absolutist systems that had
been among the most powerful barriers to unity had been swept away. To
a great extent, too, fossilized religious dogmas that had lent moral
endorsement to the forces of conflict and alienation were everywhere
in question. Former subject peoples were free to consider plans for
their collective futures and to assume responsibility for their
relationships with one another through the instrumentality of the new
nation-states created by the Versailles settlement. The same ingenuity
that had gone into producing weapons of destruction was being turned
to the challenging, but rewarding, tasks of economic expansion. Out of
the darkest days of the war had come poignant stories, such as the
impulse that had briefly moved British and German soldiers to leave
the slaughterhouse of the trenches to commemorate together the birth
of Christ, providing a flickering glimpse of the oneness of the human
race which the Master had tirelessly proclaimed in His journeys across
that same continent.54 Most important of all, an extraordinary effort
of imagination had brought the unification of humanity one immense
step forward. The world's leaders, however reluctantly, had created an
international consultative system which, though crippled by vested
interests, gave the ideal of international order its first suggestion
of shape and structure.
The post-war awakening expressed itself world-wide. Under the
leadership of Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese people had already thrown off
the decadent imperial regime that had compromised the country's well-
being, and were seeking to lay foundations of a rebirth of that
country's greatness. Throughout Latin America, despite terrible and
repeated set-backs, popular movements were likewise struggling to gain
control over their countries' destinies and the use of their
continent's immense natural resources. In India, one of the century's
most remarkable figures, Mohandas Gandhi, embarked on an enterprise
that would not only revolutionize the fortunes of his country, but
also demonstrate conclusively to the world what spiritual force can
achieve. Africa was still awaiting its moment of destiny, as were the
inhabitants of other colonial lands, but for anyone with eyes to see,
a process of change had been set in motion that could ultimately not
be suppressed, because it represented the universal yearnings of
humankind.
These advances, however encouraging, could not conceal the
historic tragedy that had occurred. During the second half of the
nineteenth century, the proclamation of the Day of God addressed by
Bahá'u'lláh to the rulers of His day, in whose hands lay the destiny
of humankind, had been either rejected or ignored by its recipients in
both East and West. Reflection on so great a breach of faith
throws into sobering perspective the subsequent response that had met
the mission of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to the West. However much one may rejoice
in the praise poured on the Master from every quarter, the immediate
results of His efforts represented yet another immense moral failure
on the part of a considerable portion of humankind and of its
leadership. The message that had been suppressed in the East was
essentially ignored by a Western world which had proceeded down the
path of ruin long prepared for it by overweening self-satisfaction,
leading finally to the betrayal of the ideal embodied in the League of
Nations.
In consequence, the two decades immediately after Shoghi
Effendi assumed his responsibility for the vindication of the Cause of
God were a period of deepening gloom throughout the Western world,
which seemed to reflect a massive setback in the process of
integration and enlightenment so confidently proclaimed by the Master.
It was as if political, social and economic life had fallen into a
kind of limbo. Grave doubts developed about the capacity of the
liberal democratic tradition to cope with the problems of the times;
indeed, in a number of European countries, governments inspired by
such principles were replaced by authoritarian regimes. Soon, the
economic crash of 1929 led to a world-wide reduction in material well-
being, with all the further moral and psychological insecurities that
resulted.
An appreciation of these circumstances helps us to understand
the magnitude of the challenge facing Shoghi Effendi at the outset of
his ministry. So far as the objective condition of humankind, as he
encountered it, was concerned, there was nothing that would have
inspired confidence that the vision of a new world bequeathed him by
the Founders of the Bahá'í Cause could be significantly advanced
during whatever span of years might be allowed him.
Nor did the instrument available to him appear to possess the
strength, the resilience or the sophistication his task required. In
1923, when Shoghi Effendi was eventually able to assume full direction
of the Cause, the core of Bahá'u'lláh's followers consisted of the
body of believers in Iran, of whose number not even a reliable
estimate could have then been produced. Denied most of the means
necessary to their promotion of the Cause, and severely limited
in the material resources at their disposal, the Iranian community was
hedged about by constant harassment. In North America, charged with
the daunting responsibilities of the Divine Plan, small communities of
believers found themselves struggling with the simple challenges of
making a livelihood for themselves and their families as the economic
crisis steadily deepened. In Europe, Australasia and the Far East,
even smaller Bahá'í groups kept the flame of the Faith alive, as did
isolated groups, families and individuals scattered throughout the
rest of the world. Literature, even in English, was inadequate, and
the task of translating the Writings into other major languages and of
finding the funds to publish them represented an almost impossible
burden.
Though the vision communicated by the Master burned as
brightly as ever, the means at their disposal must have appeared to
Bahá'ís as pitifully inadequate in the face of the conditions
prevailing everywhere. The hulking black foundation of the future
Mother Temple of the West, rising over the lake front north of
Chicago, seemed to mock the brilliant conception that had dazzled the
architectural world only a few years before. In Baghdad, the "Most
Holy House", designated by Bahá'u'lláh as the focal centre of Bahá'í
pilgrimage, had been seized by opponents of the Faith. In the Holy
Land itself, the Mansion of Bahá'u'lláh was falling into ruin as a
result of neglect by the Covenant-breakers who occupied it, and the
Shrine housing the precious remains of both the Bab and 'Abdu'l-Bahá
had progressed no further than the simple stone structure raised by
the Master.
A series of exploratory consultations with leading Bahá'ís
made it clear to the Guardian that even a formal discussion with
qualified believers about the creation of an international secretariat
would be not only useless, but probably counterproductive. It was
alone, therefore, that Shoghi Effendi set out on the task of
propelling forward the vast enterprise entrusted to his hands. How
completely alone he was is almost impossible for the present
generation of Bahá'ís to grasp; to the extent one does grasp it, the
realization is acutely painful.
Initially, the Guardian assumed that the members of the
Master's extended family, whose distinguished lineage brought them
immense respect from Bahá'ís everywhere, would welcome the opportunity
to assist him in realizing the purpose that the Master's Will had set
out in language so imperative and moving. Accordingly, he
invited his brothers, his cousins and one of his sisters, whose
education made them qualified for the purpose, to provide the
administrative support that the demanding work of the Guardianship
required. Tragically, as time passed, one after another of these
persons proved dissatisfied with the supporting role thus assigned and
careless in the discharge of its functions. Far more seriously, Shoghi
Effendi found himself facing a situation in which the authority
conferred on him, although expressed in uncompromising terms in the
Will and Testament, was seen by those related to him as relatively
nominal in character. These individuals preferred to regard the
leadership of the Faith as essentially a family affair in which great
weight should be placed on the views of senior figures among them, who
were supposedly qualified to assume such a prerogative. Beginning with
demonstrations of sullen resistance, the situation steadily
deteriorated to a point where the children and grandchildren of
'Abdu'l-Bahá felt free to disagree with His appointed successor and to
disobey his instructions.
Ruhiyyih Khanum, who saw this process of deterioration in its
later stages and herself suffered greatly in witnessing its effects on
both the work of the Cause and the Guardian personally, has written:
"...one must understand the old story of Cain and Abel, the
story of family jealousies which, like a sombre thread in the fabric
of history, runs through all its epochs and can be traced in all its
events.... The weakness of the human heart, which so often attaches
itself to an unworthy object, the weakness of the human mind, prone to
conceit and self-assurance in personal opinions, involve people in a
welter of emotions that blind their judgment and lead them far
astray.... Even though this phenomenon of Covenant-breaking seems to
be an inherent aspect of religion this does not mean it produces no
damaging effect on the Cause.... Above all it does not mean that a
devastating effect is not produced on the Centre of the Covenant
himself. Shoghi Effendi's whole life was darkened by the vicious
personal attacks made upon him."55
This sombre background casts in an all the more brilliant
light the achievements of the Greatest Holy Leaf, sister of 'Abdu'l-
Bahá and last survivor of the Faith's Heroic Age. Bahiyyih
Khanum played a vital role in guarding the interests of the Cause
after the Master's death and became Shoghi Effendi's sole effective
support. Her fidelity evoked from his pen perhaps the most deeply
moving passages he was ever to write. The apostrophe he addressed to
her after her passing in 1932 was set in a letter to the Bahá'ís
"throughout the West", which itself read in part:
"Only future generations and pens abler than mine can, and
will, pay a worthy tribute to the towering grandeur of her spiritual
life, to the unique part she played throughout the tumultuous stages
of Bahá'í history, to the expressions of unqualified praise that have
streamed from the pen of both Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the Center
of His covenant, though unrecorded, and in the main unsuspected by the
mass of her passionate admirers in East and West, the share she has
had in influencing the course of some of the chief events in the
annals of the Faith, the sufferings she bore, the sacrifices she made,
the rare gifts of unfailing sympathy she so strikingly displayed -
these, and many others stand so inextricably interwoven with the
fabric of the Cause itself that no future historian of the Faith of
Bahá'u'lláh can afford to ignore or minimize....Which of the blessings
am I to recount, which in her unfailing solicitude she showered upon
me, in the most critical and agitated hours of my life? To me,
standing in so dire a need of the vitalizing grace of God, she was the
living symbol of many an attribute I had learned to admire in 'Abdu'l-
Bahá."56
For long years, the Guardian felt that the protection of the
Cause required him to maintain silence about the deteriorating
situation in the Holy Family. Only as opposition finally burst into
acts of open defiance, eventually involving the family in shameful
collaboration and even marriages with members of the very band of
Covenant-breakers against whose treachery the Will and Testament of
the Master had warned in vehement language, as well as with a local
family deeply hostile to the Cause, did Shoghi Effendi eventually feel
compelled to expose to the Bahá'í world the nature of the
delinquencies with which he was having to deal.57
This sad history is of importance to an understanding of the
Cause in the twentieth century not only because of what the Guardian
called the "havoc" it wreaked in the Holy Family, but because of the
light it casts on the challenges the Bahá'í community will
increasingly face in the years ahead, challenges predicted in explicit
language by both the Master and the Guardian. Apart from the
insincerity that marked all too many of them, the relatives of Shoghi
Effendi demonstrated little or no awareness of the spiritual nature of
the role conferred on him in the Will and Testament. That the
Revelation of God to the age of humanity's maturity should have
brought with it, as a central feature of its mission, an authority
essential for the restructuring of social order represented a
spiritual challenge they seemed unable, or perhaps never sought, to
understand. Their abandonment of the Guardian is a lesson that will
remain with posterity down through the centuries of the Bahá'í
Dispensation. The fate of this most privileged but unworthy company of
human beings underlines for all who read their story both the
significance that the Covenant of Bahá'u'lláh holds for the
unification of humankind and the uncompromising demands it makes on
those who seek its shelter.
*
In considering the events of the ministry of Shoghi Effendi,
Bahá'ís need to make the effort of imagination to see, through his
eyes, the nature of the mission laid on him. Our guide is the body of
writings he has left. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had proclaimed in countless Tablets
and talks the pivotal principle of Bahá'u'lláh's message: "In this
wondrous Revelation, this glorious century, the foundation of the
Faith of God and the distinguishing feature of His Law is the
consciousness of the Oneness of Mankind."58 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been
equally emphatic in asserting, as already noted, that the
revolutionary changes taking place in every field of human endeavour
now made the unification of humanity a realistic objective. It was
this vision that, for the thirty-six years of his Guardianship,
provided the organizing force of Shoghi Effendi's work. Its
implications were the theme of some of the most important messages he
wrote. Addressing in 1931 the friends in the West, he opened for
them a brilliant vista:
"The principle of the Oneness of Mankind - the pivot round
which all the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh revolve - is no mere outburst
of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. Its
appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit
of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the
fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and
nations. Its implications are deeper, its claims greater than any
which the Prophets of old were allowed to advance. Its message is
applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily
with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all
the states and nations as members of one human family.... It implies
an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change
such as the world has not experienced.... It calls for no less than
the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized
world - a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of
its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade
and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the
diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units."59
A concept that showed itself strongly in the Guardian's
writings was the organic metaphor in which Bahá'u'lláh, and
subsequently 'Abdu'l-Bahá, had captured the millennia-long process
that has carried humanity to this culminating point in its collective
history. That image was the analogy that can be drawn between, on the
one hand, the stages by which human society has been gradually
organized and integrated, and, on the other, the process by which each
human being slowly develops out of the limitations of infantile
existence into the powers of maturity. It appears prominently in
several of Shoghi Effendi's writings on the transformation taking
place in our time:
"The long ages of infancy and childhood, through which the
human race had to pass, have receded into the background. Humanity is
now experiencing the commotions invariably associated with the
most turbulent stage of its evolution, the stage of adolescence, when
the impetuosity of youth and its vehemence reach their climax, and
must gradually be superseded by the calmness, the wisdom, and the
maturity that characterize the stage of manhood."
Deliberation on this vast conception was to lead Shoghi
Effendi to provide the Bahá'í world with a coherent description of the
future that has since permitted three generations of believers to
articulate for governments, media and the general public in every part
of the world the perspective in which the Bahá'í Faith pursues its
work:
"The unity of the human race, as envisaged by Bahá'u'lláh,
implies the establishment of a world commonwealth in which all
nations, races, creeds and classes are closely and permanently united,
and in which the autonomy of its state members and the personal
freedom and initiative of the individuals that compose them are
definitely and completely safeguarded. This commonwealth must, as far
as we can visualize it, consist of a world legislature, whose members
will, as the trustees of the whole of mankind, ultimately control the
entire resources of all the component nations, and will enact such
laws as shall be required to regulate the life, satisfy the needs and
adjust the relationships of all races and peoples. A world executive,
backed by an international Force, will carry out the decisions arrived
at, and apply the laws enacted by, this world legislature, and will
safeguard the organic unity of the whole commonwealth. A world
tribunal will adjudicate and deliver its compulsory and final verdict
in all and any disputes that may arise between the various elements
constituting this universal system.... The economic resources of the
world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be tapped
and fully utilized, its markets will be coordinated and developed, and
the distribution of its products will be equitably regulated."61
Writing a definitive interpretation of the Administrative
Order in "The Dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh", Shoghi Effendi made
particular reference to the role that the institution he himself
represented would play in enabling the Cause "to take a long, an
uninterrupted view over a series of generations...." This unique
endowment expressed itself with particular clarity in his description
of the dual nature of the historical process that he saw unfolding in
the twentieth century. The landscape of international affairs would,
he said, be increasingly reshaped by twin forces of "integration" and
"disintegration", both of them ultimately beyond human control. In the
light of what meets our eyes today, his previsioning of the operation
of this dual process is breathtaking: the creation of "a mechanism of
world inter-communication ... functioning with marvellous swiftness
and perfect regularity";62 the undermining of the nation-state as the
chief arbiter of human destiny; the devastating effects that advancing
moral breakdown throughout the world would have on social cohesion;
the widespread public disillusionment produced by political
corruption; and - unimaginable to others of his generation - the rise
of global agencies dedicated to promoting human welfare, coordinating
economic activity, defining international standards, and encouraging a
sense of solidarity among diverse races and cultures. These and other
developments, the Guardian explained, would fundamentally alter the
conditions in which the Bahá'í Cause would pursue its mission in the
decades lying ahead.
One of the striking developments of this kind that Shoghi
Effendi discerned in the Writings he was called on to interpret
concerned the future role of the United States as a nation, and, to a
lesser extent, its sister nations in the Western hemisphere. His
foresight is all the more remarkable when one remembers that he was
writing during a period of history when the United States was
determinedly isolationist in both its foreign policy and the
convictions of the majority of its citizens. Shoghi Effendi, however,
envisioned the country assuming an "active and decisive part ... in
the organization and the peaceful settlement of the affairs of
mankind". He reminded Bahá'ís of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's anticipation that,
because of the unique nature of its social composition and political
development - as opposed to any "inherent excellence or special merit"
of its people - the United States had developed capacities that could
empower it to be "the first nation to establish the foundation of
international agreement". Indeed, he foresaw the governments and
peoples of the entire hemisphere becoming increasingly oriented in
this direction.63
The role that the Bahá'í community must play in helping bring
about this consummation of the historical process had been prefigured
in the summons addressed to His followers by the Bab, at the very
birth of the Cause:
"O My beloved friends! You are the bearers of the name of God
in this Day.... You are the lowly, of whom God has thus spoken in His
Book: "And We desire to show favour to those who were brought low in
the land, and to make them spiritual leaders among men, and to make
them Our heirs." You have been called to this station; you will attain
to it, only if you arise to trample beneath your feet every earthly
desire, and endeavour to become those "honoured servants of His who
speak not till He hath spoken, and who do His bidding".... Heed not
your weaknesses and frailty; fix your gaze upon the invincible power
of the Lord, your God, the Almighty.... Arise in His name, put your
trust wholly in Him, and be assured of ultimate victory."64
As early as 1923, Shoghi Effendi was moved to open his heart
on this subject to the friends in North America:
"Let us pray to God that in these days of world-encircling
gloom, when the dark forces of nature, of hate, rebellion, anarchy and
reaction are threatening the very stability of human society, when the
most precious fruits of civilization are undergoing severe and
unparalleled tests, we may all realize, more profoundly than ever,
that though but a mere handful amidst the seething masses of the
world, we are in this day the chosen instruments of God's grace, that
our mission is most urgent and vital to the fate of humanity, and,
fortified by these sentiments, arise to achieve God's holy purpose for
mankind."65
*
Fully aware of the condition into which society had fallen,
the consequences of his betrayal at the hands of family members on
whose assistance he should have been able to rely, and the relative
weakness of the resources available to him in the Bahá'í
community itself, Shoghi Effendi arose to forge the means needed to
realize the mission bequeathed to him.
To one degree or another, most Bahá'ís no doubt appreciated
that the Assemblies they were being called on to form had a
significance far beyond the mere management of practical affairs with
which they were charged. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who had guided this
development, had spoken of them as:
"...shining lamps and heavenly gardens, from which the
fragrances of holiness are diffused over all regions, and the lights
of knowledge are shed abroad over all created things. From them the
spirit of life streameth in every direction. They, indeed, are the
potent sources of the progress of man, at all times and under all
conditions."66
It fell to Shoghi Effendi, however, to assist the community to
understand the place and role of these national and local consultative
bodies in the framework of the Administrative Order created by
Bahá'u'lláh and elaborated in the provisions of the Master's Will and
Testament. An obstacle faced by a significant number of believers in
this respect was the unexamined assumption of many that the Cause was
essentially a "spiritual" association in which organization, while not
necessarily antithetical, did not constitute an inherent feature of
the Divine purpose. Emphasizing that the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Will
and Testament "are not only complementary, but ... mutually confirm
one another, and are inseparable parts of one complete unit",67 the
Guardian invited the believers to reflect deeply on a central truth of
the Cause they had embraced:
"Few will fail to recognize that the Spirit breathed by
Bahá'u'lláh upon the world, and which is manifesting itself with
varying degrees of intensity through the efforts consciously displayed
by His avowed supporters and indirectly through certain humanitarian
organizations, can never permeate and exercise an abiding influence
upon mankind unless and until it incarnates itself in a visible Order,
which would bear His name, wholly identify itself with His principles,
and function in conformity with His laws."68
He went on to urge the Faith's followers to realize the
essential difference between the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh, whose Revealed
Texts contain detailed provisions for such an authoritative Order, and
those preparatory Revelations whose Scriptures had been largely silent
on the administration of affairs and on the interpretation of their
Founders' intent. In the words of Bahá'u'lláh: "The Prophetic Cycle
hath, verily, ended. The Eternal Truth is now come. He hath lifted up
the Ensign of Power...."69 Unlike the Dispensations of the past, the
Revelation of God to this age has given birth, Shoghi Effendi said, to
"a living organism", whose laws and institutions constitute "the
essentials of a Divine Economy", "a pattern for future society", and
"the one agency for the unification of the world, and the proclamation
of the reign of righteousness and justice upon the earth".70
The friends should strive to appreciate, therefore, the
Guardian urged, that the Spiritual Assemblies they were painstakingly
establishing throughout the world were the forerunners of the local
and national "Houses of Justice" envisioned by Bahá'u'lláh. As such,
they were integral parts of an Administrative Order that will, in
time, "assert its claim and demonstrate its capacity to be regarded
not only as the nucleus but the very pattern of the New World Order
destined to embrace in the fullness of time the whole of mankind".71
For a few in the young communities of the West, such a
departure from traditional conceptions of the nature and role of
religion proved too great a test, and Bahá'í communities suffered the
distress of seeing valued co-workers drift away in search of spiritual
pursuits more congenial to their inclinations. For the vast majority
of believers, however, great messages from the Guardian's pen, such as
"The Goal of a New World Order" and "The Dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh",
threw brilliant light on precisely the issue that most concerned them,
the relationship between spiritual truth and social development,
inspiring in them a determination to play their part in laying the
foundations of humanity's future.
The Guardian provided, as well, the organizing image for this
mighty work. The "Heroic Age" of Bahá'u'lláh's Dispensation, he
declared, had ended with the passing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The Bahá'í
community now embarked on the "Iron Age", the "Formative Age", in
which the Administrative Order would be erected throughout the
planet, its institutions established and the "society building" powers
inherent in it fully revealed. Far ahead lay what Shoghi Effendi
called the "Golden Age" of the Dispensation, leading eventually to the
emergence of the Bahá'í World Commonwealth that will constitute the
establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God and the creation of a
world civilization.72 The impulse that had been initially communicated
to human consciousness through the revelation of the Creative Word
itself, whose revolutionary social implications had been proclaimed by
the Master, was now being translated by their appointed interpreter
into the vocabulary of political and economic transformation in which
the public discourse of the century was everywhere taking place.
Lending the process irresistible force, illuminating ever new
dimensions of Bahá'í experience, and serving as the mainspring of the
unification of humankind it proclaimed was the Covenant that
Bahá'u'lláh had established between Himself and those who turn to Him.
Although not initially designated "Spiritual Assemblies", the
councils that local Bahá'í communities in Persia had been encouraged
by 'Abdu'l-Bahá to create had assumed responsibility for the
administration of their affairs. In the light of what was to follow,
no one with a sense of history can fail to be struck by the fact that
the Faith's first Spiritual Assembly, that of Tehran, was founded in
1897, the year of Shoghi Effendi's own birth. Under the Master's
guidance, intermittent meetings held by the four Hands of the Cause in
Persia had gradually evolved into this institution that served
simultaneously as Persia's "Central Spiritual Assembly" and as the
governing body of the local community in the capital. By the time of
'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing, there were more than thirty Local Spiritual
Assemblies established in Persia. In 1922 Shoghi Effendi called for
the formal establishment of Persia's National Spiritual Assembly, an
achievement delayed until 1934 by the demands related to the taking of
a reliable census of the community as a basis for the election of
delegates.
Outside Persia, the believers in 'Ishqabad, in Russian
Turkestan, elected their first Local Spiritual Assembly, a body that
assumed an important role in the project for the construction of the
first Bahá'í Mashriqu'l-Adhkar in 'Ishqabad. In North America a
variety of consultative arrangements - "Boards of Council", "Council
Boards", "Boards of Consultation" and "Working Committees" -
performed analogous functions, evolving gradually into elected bodies
that constituted the forerunners of Spiritual Assemblies. By the time
of the Master's passing, there were perhaps forty such councils
functioning in North America. These developments prepared the way for
the eventual emergence of the first National Spiritual Assembly of the
Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada, which evolved from the
"Temple Unity Board", a body created in 1909 to coordinate
construction of the future House of Worship. It was formed in 1923,
although the administrative requirements set by the Guardian for this
step were met only in 1925. Before this latter date arrived, National
Assemblies had been established in the British Isles, in Germany and
Austria, and in Egypt and the Sudan.73
As the formation of National and Local Spiritual Assemblies
was taking place, the Guardian began to lay emphasis on the importance
of their securing recognition as "corporate persons" under civil law.
By securing such formal incorporation, in whatever fashion proved
practicable, Bahá'í administrative institutions would be enabled to
hold property, enter into contracts, and gradually assume a range of
legal rights vital to the interests of the Cause. The importance
Shoghi Effendi attached to this new stage of administrative evolution
becomes clear in the photocopies of such civil instruments that began
to become a major feature of the photographic coverage of the
expansion of the Faith in successive volumes of The Bahá'í World .
Indeed, once the Mansion at Bahji had been repossessed and fully
restored to its original condition, and appropriately furnished,
Shoghi Effendi put together a collection of this much valued
documentation for display there as an encouragement and education for
the growing stream of pilgrims to the World Centre.
The processes of civil incorporation began with the adoption
in 1927 of a Declaration of Trust and By-Laws for the National
Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada, which gained civil
recognition as a voluntary trust two years later. On 17 February 1932
the first local Bahá'í Assembly, that of Chicago, adopted papers of
incorporation which, together with those adopted by that of New York
City on 31 March of that year, were to become a pattern for such
instruments throughout the world. By 1949, the National Spiritual
Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Canada - formed when the two North
American Bahá'í communities had separated the previous year - was able
to secure formal recognition of its status under civil law through a
special Act of Parliament, a victory which Shoghi Effendi hailed as
"an act wholly unprecedented in the annals of the Faith in any
country, in either East or West".74
These pressing administrative demands did not distract Shoghi
Effendi from other tasks that were vital to shaping the spiritual life
of a global community. The most important of these was the arduous
work that he alone could perform in providing the growing body of the
believers who were not of Persian background with direct and reliable
access to the Writings of the Faith's Founders. The Hidden Words, The
Kitáb-i-Iqan, the priceless treasury brought together with so much
love and insight under the title Gleanings from the Writings of
Bahá'u'lláh , Prayers and Meditations of Bahá'u'lláh and Epistle to
the Son of the Wolf provided the spiritual nourishment the work of the
Cause urgently required, as did Shoghi Effendi's translation and
editing of Nabil's "Narrative" under the title The Dawn-Breakers.
Bahá'í pilgrims found spiritual enrichment of yet another kind
in the Holy Places and historic sites that the Guardian acquired -
often at the cost of protracted and wrenching negotiations - and
lovingly restored. Shoghi Effendi was equally responsive to unexpected
opportunities that offered themselves to his historical perspective.
In 1925, a Sunni Muslim religious court in Egypt denied civil
recognition to marriages contracted between Muslim women and Bahá'í
men, insisting that "The Bahá'í Faith is a new religion, entirely
independent" and that "no Bahá'í, therefore, can be regarded a Muslim"
(and therefore qualified to enter into marriage with someone who
was).75 Seizing on the larger implications of this apparent defeat,
the Guardian made wide use of the court's definitive judgement to
reinforce the claim of the Cause in international circles to be an
independent Faith, separate and distinct from its Islamic roots.
*
As the Bahá'í community was constructing administrative
foundations which would permit it to play an effective role in human
affairs, the accelerating process of disintegration that Shoghi
Effendi had discerned was undermining the fabric of social order. Its
origins, however determinedly ignored by many social and political
theorists, are beginning, after the lapse of several decades, to gain
recognition at international conferences devoted to peace and
development. In our own time, it is no longer unusual to encounter in
such circles candid references to the essential role that "spiritual"
and "moral" forces must play in achieving solutions to urgent
problems. For a Bahá'í reader, such belated recognition awakens echoes
of warning addressed over a century earlier by Bahá'u'lláh to the
rulers of human affairs: "The vitality of men's belief in God is dying
out in every land.... The corrosion of ungodliness is eating into the
vitals of human society...."76
The responsibility for this greatest of tragedies, the
Guardian emphasized, rests primarily on the shoulders of the world's
religious leaders. Bahá'u'lláh's severest condemnation is reserved for
those who, presuming to speak in God's name, have imposed on credulous
masses a welter of dogmas and prejudices that have constituted the
greatest single obstacle against which the advancement of civilization
has been forced to struggle. While acknowledging the humanitarian
services of countless individual clerics, He points out the
consequences of the way in which self-appointed religious elites,
throughout history, have interposed themselves between humanity and
all voices of progress, not excluding the Messengers of God
Themselves. "What 'oppression' is more grievous," He asks, "than that
a soul seeking the truth, and wishing to attain unto the knowledge of
God, should know not where to go for it...?"77 In an age of scientific
advancement and widespread popular education, the cumulative effects
of the resulting disillusionment were to make religious faith appear
irrelevant. Impotent themselves to deal with the spiritual crisis,
most of those clerics of various Faiths who became aware of
Bahá'u'lláh's message either ignored the moral influence it was
demonstrating or actively opposed it.78
Recognition of this feature of history does not diminish the
harm done by those who have sought to take advantage of the spiritual
vacuum thus left. The yearning for belief is inextinguishable, an
inherent part of what makes one human. When it is blocked or betrayed,
the rational soul is driven to seek some new compass point,
however inadequate or unworthy, around which it can organize
experience and dare again to assume the risks that are an inescapable
aspect of life. It was in this perspective that Shoghi Effendi warned
the members of the Faith, in unusually strong language, that they must
try to understand the spiritual calamity engulfing a large part of
humankind during the decades between the two world wars:
"God Himself has indeed been dethroned from the hearts of men,
and an idolatrous world passionately and clamorously hails and
worships the false gods which its own idle fancies have fatuously
created, and its misguided hands so impiously exalted.... Their high
priests are the politicians and the worldly-wise, the so-called sages
of the age; their sacrifice, the flesh and blood of the slaughtered
multitudes; their incantations, outworn shibboleths and insidious and
irreverent formulas; their incense, the smoke of anguish that ascends
from the lacerated hearts of the bereaved, the maimed, and the
homeless."79
Like opportunistic infections, aggressive ideologies took
advantage of the situation created by the decline of religious
vitality. Although indistinguishable from one another in the
corruption of faith they represented, the three belief systems that
played a dominant role in human affairs during the twentieth century
differed sharply in their secondary and more conspicuous
characteristics to which the Guardian drew attention. In denouncing
"the dark, the false, and crooked doctrines" that would bring
devastation on "any man or people who believes in them", Shoghi
Effendi warned particularly against "the triple gods of Nationalism,
Racialism and Communism".80
Of Fascism's founding regime, created by the so-called "March
on Rome" in 1922, little need be said. Long before it and its leader
had been swept into oblivion during the concluding months of the
second world war, Fascism had become an object of ridicule among the
majority of even those who had originally supported it. Its
significance lies, rather, in the host of imitators it spawned and
which were to proliferate throughout the world like some malignant
series of mutations, in the decades since then. Fuelled by a manic
nationalism, this aberration of the human spirit deified the
state, discovered everywhere imaginary threats to the national
survival of whatever unhappy people it had fastened upon, and preached
to all who would listen the notion that war has an "ennobling"
influence on the human soul. The comic opera parade of uniforms,
jackboots, banners and trumpets usually associated with it should not
conceal from a contemporary observer the virulent legacy it has left
in our own age, enshrining in political vocabulary such anguished
terms as desaparecidos ("the disappeared").
While sharing Fascism's idolatry of the state, its sister
ideology Naziism made itself the voice of a far more ancient and
insidious perversion. At its dark heart was an obsession with what its
proponents called "race purity". The single-minded determination with
which it pursued its murderous ends was in no way weakened by the
demonstrably false postulates upon which it was based. The Nazi system
was unique in the sheer bestiality of the act most commonly associated
with its name, the programme of genocide systematically carried out
against populations considered either valueless or harmful to
humanity's future, a programme that included a deliberate attempt
literally to exterminate the entire Jewish people. Ultimately, it was
Naziism's determination that a "master race" of its own conception
must rule over the entire planet which was principally responsible for
fulfilling 'Abdu'l-Bahá's prophetic warning of twenty years earlier
that another war, far more terrible than the first, would ravage the
world. Like Fascism, Naziism has left a detritus in our own time. In
its case, this takes the form of a language and symbols through which
fringe elements in present-day society, demoralized by the economic
and social decay around them and made desperate by the absence of
solutions, vent their impotent rage on minorities whom they blame for
their disappointments.
The false god that the Master was moved to identify
explicitly, and the one denounced by name by Shoghi Effendi, had
demonstrated its character at its outset by brutally destroying,
during the latter part of World War I, the first democratic government
ever established in Russia. For long years, the Soviet system created
by Vladimir Lenin succeeded in representing itself to many as a
benefactor of humankind and the champion of social justice. In the
light of historical events, such pretensions were grotesque. The
documentation now available provides irrefutable evidence of crimes so
enormous and follies so abysmal as to have no parallel in the six
thousand years of recorded history. To a degree never before imagined,
let alone attempted, the Leninist conspiracy against human nature also
sought systematically to extinguish faith in God. Whatever view of the
situation political theorists may currently hold, no one can be
surprised that such deliberate violence to the roots of human
motivation led inexorably to the economic and political ruin of those
societies luckless enough to fall under Soviet sway. Its longer-term
spiritual effect, tragically, was to pervert to the service of its own
amoral agenda the legitimate yearnings for freedom and justice of
subject peoples throughout the world.
From a Bahá'í point of view, humanity's worship of idols of
its own invention is of importance not because of the historical
events associated with these forces, however horrifying, but because
of the lesson it taught. Looking back on the twilight world in which
such diabolical forces loomed over humanity's future, one must ask
what was the weakness in human nature that rendered it vulnerable to
such influences. To have seen in someone like Benito Mussolini the
figure of a "Man of Destiny", to have felt obliged to understand the
racial theories of Adolf Hitler as anything other than the self-
evident products of a diseased mind, to have seriously entertained the
reinterpretation of human experience through dogmas that had given
birth to the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin - so wilful an abandonment
of reason on the part of a considerable segment of the intellectual
leadership of society demands an accounting to posterity. If
undertaken dispassionately, such an evaluation must, sooner or later,
focus attention on a truth that runs like a central strand through the
Scriptures of all of humanity's religions. In the words of
Bahá'u'lláh:
"Upon the reality of man ... He hath focused the radiance of
all of His names and attributes, and made it a mirror of His own
Self.... These energies ... lie, however, latent within him, even as
the flame is hidden within the candle and the rays of light are
potentially present in the lamp.... Neither the candle nor the lamp
can be lighted through their own unaided efforts, nor can it
ever be possible for the mirror to free itself from its dross."81
The consequence of humanity's infatuation with the ideologies
its own mind had conceived was to produce a terrifying acceleration of
the process of disintegration that was dissolving the fabric of social
life and cultivating the basest impulses of human nature. The
brutalization that the first world war had engendered now became an
omnipresent feature of social life throughout much of the planet.
"Thus have We gathered together the workers of iniquity", Bahá'u'lláh
warned over a century earlier. "We see them rushing on towards their
idol.... They hasten forward to Hell Fire, and mistake it for
light."82
VI
WITH THE ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE of the Cause taking shape,
Shoghi Effendi turned his attention to the task he had been compelled
to delay for so long, the implementation of the Master's Divine Plan.
In Persia, the development was already well advanced. Directed first
by Bahá'u'lláh and subsequently by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, a corps of especially
designated teachers - muballighin - stimulated the work at the local
level throughout the country, and the existence of a vibrant community
life assisted in the relatively rapid integration of new declarants.
Huququ'lláh funds, supplemented by the practice of deputization, which
was already an established feature of Persian Bahá'í consciousness,
provided material support for this teaching activity.
In the West, inspiration for the promotion of the Faith had
been provided by the response to the Master's appeals by such
outstanding individuals as Lua Getsinger, May Maxwell and Martha Root.
Merely to mention these names is to highlight a feature of the rise of
the Cause in the West to which the Master drew particular attention:
"In America, the women have outdone the men in this regard and
have taken the lead in this field. They strive harder in guiding the
peoples of the world, and their endeavours are greater. They are
confirmed by divine bestowals and blessings."83
In the East, social conditions of the time had virtually dictated
that the initiative in the promotion of the Cause would be taken
largely by men. Few such constraints prevailed in North America and
Europe, where a galaxy of unforgettable women became the principal
exponents of the Bahá'í message on both sides of the Atlantic. One
thinks of Sarah Farmer, whose Green Acre school provided the infant
Bahá'í community with a forum for the introduction of the Faith to
influential thinkers; of Sara Lady Blomfield, whose social position
lent added force to the ardour with which she championed the
teachings; of Marion Jack, immortalized by Shoghi Effendi as a model
for Bahá'í pioneers; of Laura Dreyfus-Barney, who gave the Faith the
priceless collection of the Master's table talks, Some Answered
Questions; of Agnes Parsons, co-founder with Louis Gregory of the
"Race Amity" initiatives inspired by 'Abdu'l-Bahá; of Corinne True,
Keith Ransom-Kehler, Helen Goodall, Juliet Thompson, Grace Ober, Ethel
Rosenberg, Clara Dunn, Alma Knobloch and a distinguished company of
others, most of whom pioneered some new field of Bahá'í service.
To the list must be added the name of Queen Marie of Romania,
whom the ages will hail as the first crowned head to recognize the
Revelation of God for this day. The courage shown by this lone woman
in publicly declaring her faith, through the letters she fearlessly
addressed to the editors of several newspapers in both Europe and
North America, in all probability introduced the name of the Cause to
an audience numbering millions of readers.
Despite the impressive response that the earliest of these
efforts elicited, the lack of an organized means of capitalizing on
the results initially limited the benefits accruing to Bahá'í
communities in Western lands. The rise of the Administrative Order
dramatically changed the latter situation. As Local Spiritual
Assemblies came into being, goals were set, resources were made
available to support individual teaching efforts, and those who
declared their faith found themselves participating in the many
activities of an engrossing Bahá'í community life. It was now possible
to systematically translate and publish literature, news of general
interest was regularly shared, and the bonds that linked
believers with the World Centre of the Faith grew steadily stronger.
The two chief instruments by which Shoghi Effendi set about
cultivating a heightened devotion to teaching in both East and West
were the same as those on which the Master had relied. A steady stream
of letters to communities and individuals alike opened up for the
recipients new dimensions in the beliefs they had embraced. The most
important of these communications, however, now became those addressed
to National and Local Spiritual Assemblies. Their effect was
intensified by the stream of returning pilgrims who shared insights
gained by direct contact with the Centre of the Cause. Through these
connections every individual believer was encouraged to see himself or
herself as an instrument of the power flowing through the Covenant.
The invaluable compilation that eventually appeared under the title
Messages to America, 1932-1946 provides a review of the steps by which
Shoghi Effendi drew the North American believers ever deeper into the
implications of the Master's Divine Plan for "the spiritual conquest
of the planet":
"By the sublimity and serenity of their faith, by the
steadiness and clarity of their vision, the incorruptibility of their
character, the rigor of their discipline, the sanctity of their
morals, and the unique example of their community life, they can and
indeed must in a world polluted with its incurable corruptions,
paralyzed by its haunting fears, torn by its devastating hatreds, and
languishing under the weight of its appalling miseries demonstrate the
validity of their claim to be regarded as the sole repository of that
grace upon whose operation must depend the complete deliverance, the
fundamental reorganization and the supreme felicity of all mankind."84
The Guardian held up before the eyes of the North American
Bahá'í community a vision of their spiritual destiny. Its members
were, he said, "the spiritual descendants of the heroes of God's
Cause", their rising institutions were "the visible symbols of its
[the Faith's] undoubted sovereignty", the teachers and pioneers it
sent out were "torch-bearers of an as yet unborn civilization", it was
their collective challenge to assume "a preponderating share" in
laying the foundations of the World Order "which the Bab has
heralded, which the mind of Bahá'u'lláh has envisioned, and whose
features 'Abdu'l-Bahá, its Architect, has delineated...."85
The language of the messages is magnificent, enthralling. In
acknowledging the darkness that widespread godlessness, violence and
creeping immorality was engendering, Shoghi Effendi described the role
that Bahá'ís everywhere must play as instruments of the transforming
power of the new Revelation:
"Theirs is the duty to hold, aloft and undimmed, the torch of
Divine guidance, as the shades of night descend upon, and ultimately
envelop the entire human race. Theirs is the function, amidst its
tumults, perils and agonies, to witness to the vision, and proclaim
the approach, of that re-created society, that Christ-promised
Kingdom, that World Order whose generative impulse is the spirit of
none other than Bahá'u'lláh Himself, whose dominion is the entire
planet, whose watchword is unity, whose animating power is the force
of Justice, whose directive purpose is the reign of righteousness and
truth, and whose supreme glory is the complete, the undisturbed and
everlasting felicity of the whole of human kind."86
In 1936 the Guardian judged that the administrative structure
of the Cause was sufficiently broad and consolidated in North America
that he could begin the first stage of the implementation of the
Divine Plan itself. With the world sliding into another global
conflagration, and the scope possible to the efforts of the Persian
believers being severely limited, the focus would necessarily have to
be on the expansion and consolidation of the Bahá'í community in the
Western hemisphere in preparation for the much larger undertakings
that lay ahead. Calling on the Plan's appointed "executors", the
believers in North America, the Guardian laid out a Seven Year Plan,
scheduled to run from 1937 to 1944. Its objectives were to establish
at least one Local Spiritual Assembly in every state of the United
States and every province of Canada, and to open to the Cause fourteen
republics in Latin America. To these objectives was added the task,
immensely demanding of a community with still very limited numbers and
severely straitened financial resources, of completing the exterior
ornamentation of the "Mother Temple of the West".
Ruhiyyih Khanum has pointed out a striking parallel between
two developments during this period of history. On the one hand,
powerful nations were launching armies of invasion whose goal was to
seize the natural resources of neighbour states - or simply to satisfy
an appetite for conquest. During this same period, Shoghi Effendi was
mobilizing the painfully small band of pioneers available to him, and
dispatching them to the teaching goals of the Plan he had created.
Within a few short years, the vast battalions of aggression would be
shattered beyond recovery, their names and conquests erased from
history. The little company of believers who had gone out with their
lives in their hands to fulfil the mission entrusted to them by the
Guardian would have achieved or exceeded all of their objectives,
objectives that soon became the foundations of flourishing
communities.87
In appreciating this undertaking, it is helpful for Bahá'ís to
understand not only the role that planning plays in the life of the
Cause, but the unique nature of this instrumentality in its Bahá'í
expression. The systematic identification of objectives to be achieved
and decisions as to how to achieve them does not mean that the Bahá'í
community has assumed the responsibility of "designing" a future for
itself, as the concept of planning customarily implies. What Bahá'í
institutions do, rather, is to strive to align the work of the Cause
with the Divinely impelled process they see steadily unfolding in the
world, a process that will ultimately realize its purpose, regardless
of historical circumstances or events. The challenge to the
Administrative Order is to ensure that, as Providence allows, Bahá'í
efforts are in harmony with this Greater Plan of God, because it is in
doing so that the potentialities implanted in the Cause by Bahá'u'lláh
bear their fruit. That the provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the
Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá ensure the success of the efforts
of the Bahá'ís is dramatically demonstrated in the unbroken series of
triumphs that fulfilled the plans created by Shoghi Effendi.
By August 1944, Shoghi Effendi was able to celebrate the
completion of the first Seven Year Plan. The Guardian marked the
moment with a gift to the Bahá'ís of the world that represents one of
the greatest achievements of his life. The publication, in 1944, of
God Passes By, his comprehensive and reflective history of the first
hundred years of the Cause, threw open for believers a window on
the spiritual process by which Bahá'u'lláh's purpose for humankind is
being realized.
History is a powerful instrument. At its best, it provides a
perspective on the past and casts a light on the future. It populates
human consciousness with heroes, saints and martyrs whose example
awakens in everyone touched by it capacities they had not imagined
they possessed. It helps make sense of the world - and of human
experience. It inspires, consoles and enlightens. It enriches life. In
the great body of literature and legend that it has left to humanity,
history's hand can be seen at work shaping much of the course of
civilization - in the legends that have inspired the ideals of every
people since the dawn of recorded time, as well as in the epics of the
Ramayana, in the exploits celebrated in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, in
the Nordic sagas, in the Shahnameh, and in much of the Bible and the
Qur'an.
God Passes By elevates this great work of the mind to a level
ardently striven after but never attained in any of ages past. Those
who open themselves to its vision discover in it an avenue of approach
to understanding the Purpose of God, an avenue that converges with the
vast expanse spread out in the Guardian's matchless translations of
the Revealed Texts. Its appearance on the centenary of the birth of
the Cause - just as the Bahá'í world was celebrating the success of
the first collective effort it had ever been able to undertake -
summoned up for believers everywhere the full majesty and meaning of a
hundred years of ceaseless sacrifice.
*
At a relatively early point in the second world war, the
Guardian set that conflict in a perspective for Bahá'ís that was very
different from the one generally prevailing. The war should be
regarded, he said, "as the direct continuation" of the conflagration
ignited in 1914. It would come to be seen as the "essential pre-
requisite to world unification". The entry into the war by the United
States, whose president had initiated the project of a system of
international order, but which had itself rejected this
visionary initiative, would lead that nation, Shoghi Effendi
predicted, to "assume through adversity its preponderating share of
responsibility to lay down, once for all, broad, worldwide,
unassailable foundations of that discredited yet immortal System."88
These statements proved prophetic. With the end of
hostilities, it gradually became apparent that a fundamental shift in
consciousness was under way throughout the world and that inherited
assumptions, institutions and priorities that had been progressively
undermined by forces at work during the first half of the century were
now crumbling. If the change could not yet be described as an emerging
conviction about the oneness of humankind, no objective observer could
mistake the fact that barriers blocking such a realization, which had
survived all the assaults against them earlier in the century, were at
last giving way. One's mind turns to the prophetic words of the
Qur'an: "And you see the mountains and think them solid, but they
shall pass away as the passing away of the clouds." (78:20) The effect
was to inspire in progressive minds a sense of confidence that it
would be possible to construct a new kind of society that would not
only preserve the long-term peace of the world, but enrich the lives
of all of its inhabitants.
Primarily, this new birth of hope had resulted, as Shoghi
Effendi had foreseen, from the "fiery ordeal" that had at last
succeeded in "implanting that sense of responsibility" which leaders
earlier in the century had sought to avoid.89 To this new awareness
had been added the effects of the fear induced by the invention and
use of atomic weapons, a reaction calling to mind for Bahá'ís the
Master's prescient statements in North America that ultimately peace
would come because the nations would be driven to accept it. The
Montreal Daily Star had quoted Him as saying: "It [peace] will be
universal in the twentieth century. All nations will be forced into
it."90 The years immediately following 1945 witnessed advances in
framing a new social order that went far beyond the brightest hopes of
earlier decades.
Most important of all was the willingness of national
governments to create a new system of international order, and to
endow it with the peace-keeping authority so tragically denied to the
defunct League. Meeting in San Francisco in April 1945 - in the state
where 'Abdu'l-Bahá had prophetically declared, "May the first
flag of international peace be upraised in this state" - delegates of
fifty nations adopted the Charter of the United Nations Organization,
the name proposed for it by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.91
Ratification by the required number of member nations followed that
October, and the first General Assembly of the new organization
convened on 10 January 1946, in London. In October 1949, the
cornerstone of the United Nations' permanent seat was laid in New York
City, hailed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá thirty-seven years earlier as the "City
of the Covenant". During His visit there He had predicted: "There is
no doubt that ... the banner of international agreement will be
unfurled here to spread onward and outward among all the nations of
the world."92
Significantly, it was also on the initiative of a political
leader of one of the Western hemisphere nations which had been
addressed by Bahá'u'lláh, that His summons to collective security -
first reflected in the nominal sanctions voted by the League of
Nations against Fascist aggression in Ethiopia - was at long last
given practical effect. In November 1956, Lester Bowles Pearson, then
External Affairs Minister and later Prime Minister of Canada, secured
the creation by the United Nations of its first international
peacekeeping force, an achievement which won its author the Nobel
Prize for Peace.93 The full nature of the authority contained in such
a mandate would steadily emerge as a major feature of international
relations during the second half of the century. Beginning with the
policing of agreements worked out between hostile states, the
principle of collective action in defence of peace gradually took on
the form of military interventions such as that of the Gulf War, in
which compliance with Security Council resolutions were imposed by
force on aggressor factions and states.
Along with the establishment of the new United Nations' system
and steps to enforce its sanctions, a second major breakthrough
occurred. Even before hostilities had ended, public audiences
throughout the world were stunned by film coverage of the liberation
of Nazi death camps, which exposed for all to see the horrific
consequences of racism. What can adequately be described only as a
profound sense of shame at the depths of evil that humanity had shown
itself capable of committing shook the conscience of humankind.
Through the window of opportunity thus briefly opened, a group
of dedicated and far-sighted men and women, under the inspired
leadership of figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, secured the United
Nations' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The
moral commitment it represented was institutionalized in the
subsequent establishment of the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights. In due course, the Bahá'í community itself would have good
cause to appreciate, at firsthand, the system's importance as a shield
protecting minorities from the abuses of the past.
Highlighting the significance of both advances was the
decision of the nations that had triumphed in the recent conflict to
put on trial leading figures of the Nazi regime. For the first time in
history, the leaders of a sovereign nation - men who sought to argue
the constitutionality of the political positions they had occupied -
were brought before a public court, their crimes unsparingly reviewed
and documented, were duly convicted, and those who did not escape
through suicide were then either hanged or sentenced to long terms of
imprisonment. No serious protest had been raised against this
procedure which, theoretically, constituted a fundamental departure
from existing norms of international law. Although the integrity of
the proceedings was gravely marred by the participation of judges
appointed by a Soviet dictatorship whose own crimes matched or
exceeded those of the defendants' regime, the act set an historic
precedent. It demonstrated, for the first time, that the fetish of
"national sovereignty" has recognizable and enforceable limits.
Beginning in these same years, the fulfilment of a long-
delayed ideal unfolded in the dissolution of the great empires that
had not merely survived 1918, but had managed even to extend their
reach through acquiring "mandates", "protectorates" and colonies
seized from the defeated powers. Now, these antiquated systems of
political oppression were submerged by a rising tide of movements of
national liberation far beyond their weakened abilities to resist.
With astonishing swiftness, all of them either willingly abandoned
their claims or were forced by colonial rebellions to bow to the same
fate that had overtaken their Ottoman and Hapsburg predecessors
earlier in the century.
Suddenly, the peoples of the world found themselves with a
place to stand in dignity, a forum in which to express the
concerns that most deeply affected them, and the faint beginnings of a
role in deciding their own future and that of humanity in general. A
corner had been turned that left behind six or more millennia of
history. Beyond all the continuing educational disadvantages, the
economic inequities, and the obstructions created by political and
diplomatic manoeuvring - beyond all these practical but historically
transient limitations - a new authority was at work in human affairs
to which all might reasonably hope somehow to appeal. Representatives
of once subject peoples, whose exotically clad warriors had brought up
the rear of the Diamond Jubilee procession in London only five decades
earlier, now began to appear as delegates to the Security Council and
occupants of senior posts in the United Nations and non-governmental
organizations of every kind. The magnitude of the change is perhaps
best symbolized by the fact that the Secretary-General of the United
Nations is today a Ghanaian, his two immediate predecessors having
been, respectively, from Egypt and Peru.94
Nor was this change merely one of formal and administrative
character. As time passed, growing numbers of outstanding figures in
every walk of life would escape the familiar limits of racial,
cultural or religious identity. In every continent of the globe, names
like Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., Paolo Freire, Ravi Shankar,
Gabriel Garcia Marques, Kiri Te Kanawa, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Teresa
and Zhang Yimou became sources of inspiration and encouragement to
great numbers of their fellow citizens.95 In every department of life,
heroism, professional excellence or moral distinction would
increasingly be able to speak for themselves and be embraced by the
generality of humankind. The world-wide outpouring of affection and
rejoicing that was to greet the release from prison of Nelson Mandela
and his subsequent election as president of his country would reflect
a sense among peoples of every race and nation that these historic
events represented victories of the human family itself.
It became apparent, too, that pre-war conceptions regarding
the use and distribution of wealth would have to be overhauled. Apart
from principles of social justice, which doubtless motivated a
significant number of those committed to this task, the economic
dislocations produced by the events of the previous three
decades had made it clear that existing arrangements were outdated and
ineffective. Experiments to address such problems at the national
level had been undertaken in several countries in response to the
Depression during the 1930s. Now an interlocking system of
institutions oriented to recognition that national economies
constitute elements of a global whole was successively devised and put
in place. The International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trades, the World Bank, and various subsidiary agencies
began belatedly to grapple with the implications of an integrating
world, and with issues related to the distribution of wealth inherent
in this development. Thinkers in developing countries were not slow to
point out that such initiatives served primarily the needs of the
Western world. Nevertheless, their emergence marked a fundamental
change of direction that would increasingly open participation to a
wide range of states and institutions.
A humanitarian initiative of a kind never previously conceived
opened still another dimension of the global integration occurring.
Beginning with the "Marshall Plan" devised by the government of the
United States to rehabilitate war-torn European nations, those nations
that were able to do so turned to serious consideration of programmes
that might foster the social and economic development of rising
nations. Widespread publicity awakened a sense of solidarity with the
rest of the world on the part of peoples in lands that enjoyed
reasonable levels of education, health care and the application of
technology. In time, this ambitious initiative came under attack for
the mixed motives attributed to it. Nor can anyone deny that the long-
term results of development projects have been heartbreakingly
disappointing in their failure to close the yawning gap between the
rich and the poor. Neither circumstance can obscure, however, a sense
of common humanity in its objectives that spoke perhaps most
eloquently in the response it evoked from an army of idealistic youth
of many lands.
Paradoxically, in the Far East particularly, even war had a
certain liberating effect on consciousness. As early as 1904, the
Russo-Japanese conflict had been seen in parts of the Orient as
encouraging evidence that non-Western peoples could resist the
apparently invincible might of the West. The effect had been
heightened by the events of the first world war, and greatly advanced
by the success of Japanese arms in withstanding for so long the
massive Western effort devoted to defeating them during the period
1941-1945. The second half of the century saw this new technological
expertise give birth to modern economies in half a dozen nations of
the region, whose innovative products and industrial energy,
particularly in the areas of transportation and information
technology, were able to hold their own with the best that the rest of
the world had to offer.
*
By 1946, the end of hostilities had opened the way for the
launching by Shoghi Effendi of a second Seven Year Plan, which
benefited from the new receptivity to the message of the Faith
produced by the shift of consciousness that was by then already
apparent. Once again, the North American Bahá'í community was summoned
to assume a demanding responsibility, one that essentially built upon
and developed the achievements of the earlier Plan. The great
difference, however, was that several other Bahá'í communities were
now in a position to participate. Already in 1938, the Bahá'ís of
India, Pakistan and Burma had set out on a plan of their own. As
international hostilities gradually came to an end, the National
Spiritual Assemblies of Persia, of the British Isles, of Australia and
New Zealand, of Germany and Austria, of Egypt and the Sudan, and of
Iraq - freed from the limitations imposed on them by the war -
embarked on projects of various durations to expand the base of the
Administrative Order, settle pioneers in goals both at home and
abroad, and multiply the available Bahá'í literature.
By 1953 all of these undertakings had been fully completed.
Three new National Spiritual Assemblies had been established and had
also undertaken supplementary teaching plans, an array of new Local
Spiritual Assemblies had been formed in Europe, initiatives by five
different national communities acting under the coordination of the
National Spiritual Assembly of the British Isles had led to the
settling of pioneers in East and West Africa, and the great project
set in motion by the Master's laying of the corner stone of the
Mother Temple of the West was at last finished.96
Before the believers could celebrate these achievements, a new
challenge of staggering proportions was unveiled by Shoghi Effendi.
Impelled by historic forces that only he was in a position to
appreciate, the Guardian announced the launching at the forthcoming
Ridván of a decade-long, world-embracing Plan, which he designated
a "Spiritual Crusade". Engaging the energies of all the twelve
National Spiritual Assemblies then in existence - the twelfth being
that of the Italo-Swiss community - it called for the establishment of
the Faith in one hundred and thirty-one additional countries and
territories, together with the formation of forty-four new National
Spiritual Assemblies, the incorporation of thirty-three of these, a
vast increase in Bahá'í literature, the erection of Houses of Worship
in Iran and Germany (the former being replaced by Temples in both
Africa and Australia when the Tehran project was blocked), and the
expansion of the number of Local Spiritual Assemblies around the world
to a total of five thousand, of which three hundred and fifty must be
incorporated. Nothing in their collective experience had prepared the
Bahá'ís of the world for so colossal an undertaking. The magnitude of
the challenge was set out by Shoghi Effendi in a cablegram of 8
October 1952:
"Feel hour propitious to proclaim to the entire Bahá'í world
the projected launching ... the fate-laden, soul-stirring, decade-
long, world-embracing Spiritual Crusade involving ... the concerted
participation of all National Spiritual Assemblies of the Bahá'í world
aiming at the immediate extension of Bahá'u'lláh's spiritual dominion
... in all remaining Sovereign States, Principal Dependencies
comprising Principalities, Sultanates, Emirates, Shaykhdoms,
Protectorates, Trust Territories, and Crown Colonies scattered over
the surface of the entire planet. The entire body of the avowed
supporters of Bahá'u'lláh's all-conquering Faith are now summoned to
achieve in a single decade feats eclipsing in totality the
achievements which in the course of the eleven preceding decades
illuminated the annals of Bahá'í pioneering."97
Victory in so ambitious an enterprise would mean that the embrace of
the Faith would span the globe, that the institutional foundations of
its Administrative Order would expand at least five-fold, and that its
community life would be enriched through the participation of
believers from a vast number of as yet untapped cultures, nations and
tribes.
In effect, the Plan called for the Cause to make a giant leap
forward over what might otherwise have been several stages in its
evolution. What Shoghi Effendi saw clearly - and what only the powers
of foresight inherent in the Guardianship made it possible to see -
was that an historical conjunction of circumstances presented the
Bahá'í community with an opportunity that would not come again and on
which the success of future stages in the prosecution of the Divine
Plan would entirely depend. What he did not hesitate to call the
"summons of the Lord of Hosts" was embodied in a message that seized
the imagination of Bahá'ís in every part of the world:
"No matter how long the period that separates them from
ultimate victory; however arduous the task; however formidable the
exertions demanded of them; however dark the days which mankind,
perplexed and sorely-tried, must, in its hour of travail, traverse;
however severe the tests with which they who are to redeem its
fortunes will be confronted.... I adjure them, by the precious blood
that flowed in such great profusion, by the lives of the unnumbered
saints and heroes who were immolated, by the supreme, the glorious
sacrifice of the Prophet-Herald of our Faith, by the tribulations
which its Founder, Himself, willingly underwent, so that His Cause
might live, His Order might redeem a shattered world and its glory
might suffuse the entire planet - I adjure them, as this solemn hour
draws nigh, to resolve never to flinch, never to hesitate, never to
relax, until each and every objective in the Plans to be proclaimed,
at a later date, has been fully consummated."98
The response was immediate. Within a few months messages from
the World Centre began sharing the news of a succession of victories
in country after country. Those pioneers who succeeded in establishing
the Faith's first foothold in a country or territory were designated
"Knights of Bahá'u'lláh", and their names inscribed on a Roll of
Honour destined, in time, to be deposited, as called for by the
Guardian, under the threshold of the entrance to the Shrine of
Bahá'u'lláh. Nothing testified quite so dramatically to the foresight
embodied in Shoghi Effendi's successive Plans than the fact that,
within each of the new nation-states born after the second world war,
Bahá'í communities and Spiritual Assemblies were already a part of the
fabric of national life.
A brilliant succession of achievements followed these initial
ones. By October 1957, by which time the Faith had been established in
over two hundred and fifty countries and territories, Shoghi Effendi
was able to announce the purchase of property for ten new temple
sites, and the commencement of work on the Houses of Worship in
Kampala, Sydney and Frankfurt; the acquisition of properties for
forty-six of the required national H . az . iratu'l-Quds; a vast
increase in the production of Bahá'í literature; additional Assembly
incorporations that had raised the total number to one hundred and
ninety-five; growing recognition of Bahá'í marriage and Bahá'í Holy
Days; and the advancing work on the International Bahá'í Archives, the
first building to be constructed on the broad arc that the Guardian
had traced on the slope of Mount Carmel. No one who reviews the events
of those days can fail to be deeply moved by the parental care with
which Shoghi Effendi ensured the achievement of these magnificent
results, as reflected in his painstaking listing by name, in the last
general message he wrote on the Crusade, in April 1957, of each one of
sixty-three regional teaching conferences and institutes held that
year around the Bahá'í world.
Such a review would be incomplete without an understanding of
parallel developments of the Administrative Order at the international
level that the Guardian undertook during these years. These steps
proved crucial not merely to winning the Crusade but to consolidating
and protecting the future of the Cause. Alongside the decision-making
authority devolved on the elective institutions of the Faith, a
parallel function of the Administrative Order is to exert a spiritual,
moral and intellectual influence on both these institutions and the
lives of the individual members of the community. Conceived by
Bahá'u'lláh Himself, this responsibility "to diffuse the Divine
Fragrances, to edify the souls of men, to promote learning, to
improve the character of all men..." is vested by the Master's Will
and Testament particularly in the Hands of the Cause of God. 99
During the ministries of both Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá
those believers given this high station had played crucial roles in
advancing the teaching work in the Orient. As the conception of the
Ten Year Crusade took shape in his mind, Shoghi Effendi moved to
mobilize the spiritual support this institution could bring to
achieving the tasks of the Plan. In a cablegram of 24 December 1951,
he announced the appointment of the first contingent of twelve Hands
of the Cause of God, allocated equally to the work in the Holy Land,
in Asia, the Americas and Europe. These distinguished servants of the
Cause were called upon to focus directly on the challenge of
mobilizing the energies of the friends and providing the elected
bodies with encouragement and counsel. Shortly thereafter the number
of Hands of the Cause was raised from twelve to nineteen.
The resources available for the discharge of this
responsibility were greatly increased by the Guardian's decision in
October 1952, calling on the Hands of the Cause to create five
auxiliary boards, one for each continent: those in the Americas,
Europe and Africa consisting of nine members each, while those in Asia
and Australasia having seven and two respectively. Subsequently,
separate auxiliary boards were created to assist with the protection
of the Faith, the other of the two chief functions of the Hands of the
Cause.
A message of 3 June 1957 celebrated the action of the Israeli
government in executing the final decision of the court of appeals of
that country, by which the surviving band of Covenant-breakers were at
last evicted from the H . aram-i-Aqdas surrounding the focal Centre of
the Bahá'í World at Bahji.100 Only a day later, however, a second
cablegram warned ominously of the urgent need of the Faith's senior
institutions to act in concert to protect it from new dangers that the
Guardian perceived to be gathering on the horizon. This was followed
in October by a message announcing that the number of Hands of the
Cause of the God had been raised from nineteen to twenty-seven,
designating these senior officers "Chief Stewards of Bahá'u'lláh's
embryonic World Commonwealth", and charging them with responsibility
to consult with National Spiritual Assemblies on urgently needed
measures to protect the Faith.
Less than a month thereafter, the Bahá'í world was devastated
by the news of Shoghi Effendi's death on 4 November 1957 from
complications following an attack of Asiatic influenza contracted
during the course of a visit to London. The Centre of the Cause who,
for thirty-six years, had day by day guided its evolution, whose
vision encompassed both the flow of events and the actions the Bahá'í
community must take, and whose messages of encouragement had been the
spiritual lifeline of countless Bahá'ís around the planet, was
suddenly gone, leaving the great Crusade half finished and the future
of the Administrative Order in crisis.
*
The grief and overwhelming sense of desolation produced by the
loss of the Guardian lends all the greater significance to the triumph
of the Plan he had conceived and inspired. On 21 April 1963, the
ballots of delegates from fifty-six National Spiritual Assemblies,
including the forty-four new bodies called for and successfully formed
during the Ten Year Crusade, brought into existence the Universal
House of Justice, the governing body of the Cause conceived by
Bahá'u'lláh and assured by Him unequivocally of Divine guidance in the
exercise of its functions:
"It is incumbent upon the Trustees of the House of Justice to
take counsel together regarding those things which have not outwardly
been revealed in the Book, and to enforce that which is agreeable to
them. God will verily inspire them with whatsoever He willeth, and He,
verily, is the Provider, the Omniscient."101
It seemed especially fitting that the election - carried out by the
assembled delegates and those voting by mail - should take place in
the home of the Master, whose Will and Testament had described nearly
sixty years earlier the intent and scope of the authority bestowed by
Bahá'u'lláh's words:
"Unto the Most Holy Book every one must turn and all that is
not expressly recorded therein must be referred to the Universal House
of Justice. That which this body, whether unanimously or by a
majority doth carry, that is verily the Truth and the Purpose of God
Himself. Whoso doth deviate therefrom is verily of them that love
discord, hath shown forth malice and turned away from the Lord of the
Covenant."102
An important preliminary step for the election had been taken
by Shoghi Effendi in 1951, in his appointment of the membership of the
International Council to assist him with his work. In 1961, as he had
explained would be the case, the second step in the process had been
taken when this institution evolved into a nine-member Council,
elected by the members of the National Spiritual Assemblies.
Consequently, when the Ten Year Crusade came to its victorious end in
1963, the Bahá'í world had gained important experience in the
challenging act it was then called on to perform.
Historians will unhesitatingly accord credit for mobilizing
the effort that had made this moment possible to the Hands of the
Cause, who provided the coordination of which the loss of the
Guardian's leadership had deprived the Bahá'í world. Tirelessly
coursing the earth in promotion of Shoghi Effendi's Plan, coming
together in annual conclaves to provide encouragement and information,
inspiring the endeavours of their newly created deputies, and fending
off the efforts of a new band of Covenant-breakers to undermine the
unity of the Faith, this small company of grief-stricken men and women
succeeded in ensuring that the Crusade's ambitious objectives were
attained in the time required and that the necessary foundation was in
place for the erection of the Administrative Order's crowning unit. In
asking that their own members be left free from election to the
Universal House of Justice, so as to perform the services assigned
them by the Guardian, the Hands also endowed the Bahá'í world, as a
second great legacy, with a spiritual distinction that is without
precedent in human history. Never before had persons into whose hands
the supreme power in a great religion had fallen and who enjoyed a
level of regard unmatched by any others in their community, requested
not to be considered for participation in the exercise of supreme
authority, placing themselves entirely at the service of the Body
chosen by the community of their fellow believers for this role.103
VII
HOWEVER GREAT IS THE DISTANCE between the Guardianship and the
unique station of the Centre of the Covenant, the role played by
Shoghi Effendi after the Master's passing stands alone in the history
of the Cause. It will continue to occupy this focal place in the life
of the Faith throughout the coming centuries. In important respects
Shoghi Effendi may be said to have extended by an additional,
critical, thirty-six years the influence of the guiding hand of the
Master in the building of the Administrative Order and the expansion
and consolidation of the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh. One has only to make
the fearful effort of imagining the fate of the infant Cause of God
had it not been held firmly, during the period of its greatest
vulnerability, in the grip of one who had been prepared for this
purpose by 'Abdu'l-Bahá and who accepted to serve - in the fullest
sense of the word - as its Guardian.
Although emphasizing to the body of his fellow believers that
the Master's twin Successors were "inseparable" and "complementary" in
the functions they were individually designed to carry out, it is
clear that Shoghi Effendi early accepted the implications of the fact
that the Universal House of Justice could not come into existence
until a lengthy process of administrative development had created the
supporting structure of National and Local Spiritual Assemblies
it required. He was entirely candid with the Bahá'í community about
the implications of the fact that he was called on to exercise his
supreme responsibility alone. In his own words:
"Severed from the no less essential institution of the
Universal House of Justice this same System of the Will of 'Abdu'l-
Bahá would be paralyzed in its action and would be powerless to fill
in those gaps which the Author of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas has deliberately
left in the body of His legislative and administrative ordinances."104
Aware of this truth, Shoghi Effendi proceeded with scrupulous
regard for the constraints placed on him by circumstance, a
faithfulness that will be the pride of Bahá'u'lláh's followers
throughout the ages to come. The record of his thirty-six years of
service to the Faith - a record which, like that of his Grandfather,
is open for posterity to review and assess - contains, as he assured
the Bahá'í community would be the case, no action on his part that
would in any degree "infringe upon the sacred and prescribed domain"
of the Universal House of Justice. It is not only that Shoghi Effendi
refrained from legislation; he was able to fulfil his mandate by
introducing no more than provisional ordinances, leaving decisions in
such matters entirely to the Universal House of Justice.
Nowhere is this self-restraint more striking than in the
central issue of a successor to the Guardianship. Shoghi Effendi had
no heirs of his own, and the other branches of the Holy family had
violated the Covenant. The Bahá'í Writings contain no guidance in such
an eventuality, but the Will and Testament of the Master is explicit
as to how all matters that are unclear are to be resolved:
"It is incumbent upon these members (of the Universal House of
Justice) to gather in a certain place and deliberate upon all problems
which have caused difference, questions that are obscure and matters
that are not expressly recorded in the Book. Whatsoever they decide
has the same effect as the Text itself."105
In conformity with this guidance from the pen of the Centre of the
Covenant, Shoghi Effendi remained silent, leaving the question of his
successor or successors in the hands of the Body alone
authorized to determine the matter. Five months after it came into
existence, the Universal House of Justice clarified the issue in a
message dated 6 October 1963 to all National Spiritual Assemblies:
"After prayerful and careful study of the Holy Texts ... and
after prolonged consideration ... the Universal House of Justice finds
that there is no way to appoint or to legislate to make it possible to
appoint a second Guardian to succeed Shoghi Effendi."106
In embarking on a mission for which history supplied him with
no precedent, Shoghi Effendi could look nowhere but to the Writings of
the Founders of the Faith and the example of the Master for the
guidance his work required. No body of advisors could help him
determine the meaning of the Texts he was called on to interpret for a
Bahá'í community that had placed its whole trust in him. Although he
read widely the published works of historians, economists and
political thinkers, such research could do no more than supply raw
materials that his inspired vision of the Cause must then organize.
The confidence and courage required in mobilizing a heterogeneous
community of believers to undertake tasks that were, by any objective
criteria, far beyond their capacities, could be found only in the
spiritual resources of his own heart. No dispassionate observer of the
twentieth century, however sceptical about the claims of religion he
or she may be, can fail to acknowledge that the integrity with which a
young man in his early twenties accepted so awesome a responsibility -
and the magnitude of the victory he won - are evidences of an immense
spiritual power inherent in the Cause he championed.
To acknowledge all this is to recognize that the capacities
with which the Covenant had endowed the Guardianship were not a form
of magic. Their successful exercise entailed, as Ruhiyyih Khanum has
movingly described, a never-ending process of testing, evaluation, and
refinement. One is awed by the precision with which Shoghi Effendi
analyzed political and social processes in the early stages of their
development, and the mastery with which his mind encompassed a
kaleidoscope of events, both current and historical, relating their
implications to the unfolding Will of Providence. That this work of
the intellect was carried out on a level far above the one on
which the human mind customarily operates did not make the effort any
the less real or stressful. Rather, given the insight into human
nature and human motivation that was an inseparable feature of the
institution Shoghi Effendi represented, the opposite was the case.107
In the perspective of the more than forty years since Shoghi
Effendi's passing, the long-term significance of his work in the
evolution of the Administrative Order has begun to emerge with
brilliant clarity. Had circumstances been different, the Master's Will
and Testament had provided for the possibility that one or more
successors might have followed in the institution Shoghi Effendi
embodied. We obviously cannot penetrate the mind of God. What is clear
and undeniable, however, is that, through his interpretive authority,
the structure of the Administrative Order, as well as the course that
its future development will pursue, have been permanently fixed by
Shoghi Effendi's fulfilment - in every least respect and to the
fullest extent imaginable - of the mandate laid on him by the Master.
Equally clear and undeniable is the fact that both structure and
course represent the Will of God.
VIII
AS SHOGHI EFFENDI HAD PROPHETICALLY WARNED, forces undermining
inherited systems and convictions of every kind were continuing to
advance in tandem with the integrating processes at work in the world.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the euphoria induced by the
restoration of peace in both Europe and the Orient proved to be of the
briefest duration. Hardly had hostilities ended than the ideological
divisions between Marxism and liberal democracy burst out into
attempts to secure dominance between the respective blocs of nations
they inspired. The phenomenon of "Cold War", in which the struggle for
advantage stopped just short of military conflict, emerged as the
prevailing political paradigm of the next several decades.
The threat posed by a new crisis in the international order
was heightened by breakthroughs in nuclear technology and the success
of both blocs of nations in equipping themselves with an ever-growing
array of weapons of mass destruction. The horrific images of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki had awakened humanity to the appalling possibility that a
series of relatively minor mishaps, as uncalculated as the process set
in motion by the 1914 incident in Sarajevo, might this time lead to
the annihilation of a considerable portion of the world's population
and leave large areas of the globe uninhabitable. For Bahá'ís,
the prospect could only bring vividly to mind the sombre warning
uttered by Bahá'u'lláh decades earlier: "Strange and astonishing
things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the
understanding of men. These things are capable of changing the whole
atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would prove
lethal."108
By far the greatest tragedy resulting from this latest contest
for world domination was the blight that it cast over the hopes with
which formerly subject peoples had welcomed the opportunity they
believed they had been given to build a new life of their own
devising. The obstinate determination of some of the surviving
colonial powers to suppress such hopes, though doomed to failure in
the eyes of any objective observer, had left the urge for liberation
in many countries with no recourse but to assume the character of
revolutionary struggle. By 1960, such movements, which had already
been a feature of the political landscape during the earlier decades
of the century, were coming to represent the principal form of
indigenous political activity in most subject nations.
Since the driving force of colonialism itself was economic
exploitation, it was perhaps inevitable that most movements of
liberation assumed a broadly socialistic ideological cast. Within only
a few short years, these circumstances had created a fertile ground
for exploitation by the world's superpowers. For the Soviet Union, the
situation seemed to offer an opportunity to induce a shift in the
existing alignment of nations by gaining a preponderating influence in
what was by now beginning to be called the "Third World". The response
of the West - wherever development aid failed to retain the loyalties
of recipient populations - was to resort to the encouragement and
arming of a wide variety of authoritarian regimes.
As outside forces manipulated new governments, attention was
increasingly diverted from an objective consideration of developmental
needs to ideological and political struggles that bore little or no
relation to social or economic reality. The results were uniformly
devastating. Economic bankruptcy, gross violations of human rights,
the breakdown of civil administration and the rise of opportunistic
elites who saw in the suffering of their countries only openings for
self-enrichment - such was the heartbreaking fate that engulfed
one after another of the new nations who, only short years before, had
begun life with such great promise.
Inspiring these political, social and economic crises was the
inexorable rise and consolidation of a disease of the human soul
infinitely more destructive than any of its specific manifestations.
Its triumph marked a new and ominous stage in the process of social
and spiritual degeneration that Shoghi Effendi had identified.
Fathered by nineteenth century European thought, acquiring enormous
influence through the achievements of American capitalist culture, and
endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit credibility peculiar to that
system, materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the
twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute
authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed
was simplicity itself. Reality - including human reality and the
process by which it evolves - is essentially material in nature. The
goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of material
needs and wants. Society exists to facilitate this quest, and the
collective concern of humankind should be an ongoing refinement of the
system, aimed at rendering it ever more efficient in carrying out its
assigned task.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, impulses to devise and
promote any formal materialistic belief system disappeared. Nor would
any useful purpose have been served by such efforts, as materialism
was soon facing no significant challenge in most parts of the world.
Religion, where not simply driven back into fanaticism and unthinking
rejection of progress, became progressively reduced to a kind of
personal preference, a predilection, a pursuit designed to satisfy
spiritual and emotional needs of the individual. The sense of
historical mission that had defined the major Faiths learned to
content itself with providing religious endorsement for campaigns of
social change carried on by secular movements. The academic world,
once the scene of great exploits of the mind and spirit, settled into
the role of a kind of scholastic industry preoccupied with tending its
machinery of dissertations, symposia, publication credits and grants.
Whether as world-view or simple appetite, materialism's effect
is to leach out of human motivation - and even interest - the
spiritual impulses that distinguish the rational soul. "For
self-love," 'Abdu'l-Bahá has said, "is kneaded into the very clay of
man, and it is not possible that, without any hope of a substantial
reward, he should neglect his own present material good."109 In the
absence of conviction about the spiritual nature of reality and the
fulfilment it alone offers, it is not surprising to find at the very
heart of the current crisis of civilization a cult of individualism
that increasingly admits of no restraint and that elevates acquisition
and personal advancement to the status of major cultural values. The
resulting atomization of society has marked a new stage in the process
of disintegration about which the writings of Shoghi Effendi speak so
urgently.
To accept willingly the rupture of one after another strand of
the moral fabric that guides and disciplines individual life in any
social system, is a self-defeating approach to reality. If leaders of
thought were to be candid in their assessment of the evidence readily
available, it is here that one would find the root cause of such
apparently unrelated problems as the pollution of the environment,
economic dislocation, ethnic violence, spreading public apathy, the
massive increase in crime, and epidemics that ravage whole
populations. However important the application of legal, sociological
or technological expertise to such issues undoubtedly is, it would be
unrealistic to imagine that efforts of this kind will produce any
significant recovery without a fundamental change of moral
consciousness and behaviour.
*
What the Bahá'í world accomplished during those same years
acquires an added brilliancy against the background of this darkened
horizon. It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the
achievement that brought the Universal House of Justice into
existence. For some six thousand years humanity has experimented with
an almost unlimited variety of methods for collective decision-making.
From the vantage point of the twentieth century, the political history
of the world presents a constantly shifting scene in which there was
no possibility that was not seized upon by human ingenuity.
Systems based on principles as different as theocracy, monarchy,
aristocracy, oligarchy, republic, democracy and near anarchy have
proliferated freely, along with innovations without end that have
sought to combine various desirable features of these possibilities.
Although most of the options have lent themselves to abuses of one
kind or another, the great majority have no doubt contributed in
varying degrees to fulfilling hopes of those whose interests they
purportedly served.
During this long evolutionary process, as ever larger and more
diverse populations came under the control of one or another system of
government, the temptation of universal empire repeatedly seized the
imaginations of the Caesars and Napoleons directing such expansion.
The resulting series of calamitous failures that have lent history so
much of its ability to both fascinate and appal, would seem to provide
persuasive evidence that the realization of the ambition lies beyond
the reach of any human agency, no matter how great the resources
available to it or how firm its confidence in the genius of its
particular culture.
Yet, the unification of humankind under a system of governance
that can release the full potentialities latent in human nature, and
allow their expression in programmes for the benefit of all, is
clearly the next stage in the evolution of civilization. The physical
unification of the planet in our time and the awakening aspirations of
the mass of its inhabitants have at last produced the conditions that
permit achievement of the ideal, although in a manner far different
from that imagined by imperial dreamers of the past. To this effort
the governments of the world have contributed the founding of the
United Nations Organization, with all its great blessings, all its
regrettable shortcomings.
Somewhere ahead lie the further great changes that will
eventually impel acceptance of the principle of world government
itself. The United Nations does not possess such a mandate, nor is
there anything in the current discourse of political leaders that
seriously envisions so radical a restructuring of the administration
of the affairs of the planet. That it will come about in due course
Bahá'u'lláh has made unmistakably clear. That yet greater suffering
and disillusionment will be required to impel humanity to this great
leap forward appears, alas, equally clear. Its establishment will
require national governments and other centres of power to surrender
to international determination, unconditionally and
irreversibly, the full measure of overriding authority implicit in the
word "government".
This is the context in which Bahá'ís must strive to appreciate
the unique victory that the Cause won in 1963, and which has
consolidated itself over the years since then. A full understanding of
its meaning is beyond the reach of the present and perhaps of the next
several generations of believers. To the extent that a Bahá'í does
grasp it, he or she will hold nothing back in a determination to serve
its unfolding purpose.
The process leading to the election of the Universal House of
Justice - made possible by the successful completion of the three
initial stages of the Master's Divine Plan under the leadership of
Shoghi Effendi - very likely constituted history's first global
democratic election. Each of the successive elections since then has
been carried out by an ever broader and more diverse body of the
community's chosen delegates, a development that has now reached the
point that it incontestably represents the will of a cross-section of
the entire human race. There is nothing in existence - nothing indeed
envisioned by any group of people - that in any way resembles this
achievement.
When one considers, further, the spiritual atmosphere that
pervades Bahá'í elections and the principled conduct called for in
even their simplest operations, one is humbled by a much greater
awareness. In the raising up of the supreme governing institution of
our Faith, one is witnessing a striving to the utmost of human
capacity to win the good pleasure of God, a united and ardent
determination that nothing whatever, in either cultural conditioning
or the promptings of personal desire, should be allowed to stain the
purity of this ultimate collective act. Nothing beyond this lies
within human power. By its action, humanity has done literally
everything of which it is capable, and God, in accepting this
consecrated effort on the part of those who have embraced His Cause,
endows the institution thus brought into existence with those powers
promised to it in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Will and Testament of
'Abdu'l-Bahá. Little wonder that 'Abdu'l-Bahá foresaw in the process
leading up to the culminating historical moment reached in 1963, the
centenary of Bahá'u'lláh's declaration of His mission, the fulfilment
of the vision of the prophet Daniel, "Blessed is he that waiteth
and cometh unto the thousand, three hundred and five and thirty days."
In the Master's words:
"For according to this calculation a century will have elapsed
from the dawn of the Sun of Truth, then will the teachings of God be
firmly established upon the earth, and the Divine Light shall flood
the world from the East even unto the West. Then, on this day, will
the faithful rejoice!"110
With the establishment of the Universal House of Justice, the
second of the two successor institutions named by 'Abdu'l-Bahá as the
guarantors of the integrity of the Cause had emerged. The vast body of
the Guardian's writings and the pattern of administrative life he had
created and which were imprinted indelibly in Bahá'í consciousness,
had endowed the Bahá'í world with the means to ensure universal
agreement about the intent of the Revelation of God. In the Universal
House of Justice it now also possessed the ultimate authority
conceived by Bahá'u'lláh for the exercise of the decision-making
functions of the Administrative Order. As the Will and Testament
explains, the two institutions share jointly in the Divine promise of
unfailing guidance:
The sacred and youthful branch, the guardian of the Cause of
God as well as the Universal House of Justice, to be universally
elected and established, are both under the care and protection of the
Abha Beauty, under the shelter and unerring guidance of His Holiness,
the Exalted One (may my life be offered up for them both). Whatsoever
they decide is of God.111
The relationship between these two centres of authority,
Shoghi Effendi further explained, is a complementary one, in which
some functions are shared in common and others specialized for one or
other of the two institutions. Nevertheless, he was at pains to
emphasize:
"It must be ... clearly understood by every believer that the
institution of Guardianship does not under any circumstances abrogate,
or even in the slightest degree detract from, the powers granted to
the Universal House of Justice by Bahá'u'lláh in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas,
and repeatedly and solemnly confirmed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in His
Will. It does not constitute in any manner a contradiction to the Will
and Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, nor does it nullify any of His revealed
instructions."112
Realization of the uniqueness of what Bahá'u'lláh has brought
into being opens the imagination to the contribution that the Cause
can make to the unification of humankind and the building of a global
society. The immediate responsibility of establishing world government
rests on the shoulders of the nation-states. What the Bahá'í community
is called on to do, at this stage in humanity's social and political
evolution, is to contribute by every means in its power to the
creation of conditions that will encourage and facilitate this
enormously demanding undertaking. In the same way that Bahá'u'lláh
assured the monarchs of His day that "It is not Our wish to lay hands
on your kingdoms",113 so the Bahá'í community has no political agenda,
abstains from all involvement in partisan activity, and accepts
unreservedly the authority of civil government in public affairs.
Whatever concern Bahá'ís may have about current conditions or about
the needs of their own members is expressed through constitutional
channels.
The power that the Cause possesses to influence the course of
history thus lies not only in the spiritual potency of its message but
in the example it provides. "So powerful is the light of unity,"
Bahá'u'lláh asserts, "that it can illuminate the whole earth."114 The
oneness of humankind embodied in the Faith represents, as Shoghi
Effendi emphasized, "no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an
expression of vague and pious hope". The organic unity of the body of
believers - and the Administrative Order that makes it possible - are
evidences of what Shoghi Effendi termed "the society-building power
which their Faith possesses."115 As the Cause expands and the
capacities latent in its Administrative Order become ever more
apparent, it will increasingly attract the attention of leaders of
thought, inspiring progressive minds with confidence that their ideals
are ultimately attainable. In Shoghi Effendi's words:
"Leaders of religion, exponents of political theories,
governors of human institutions, who at present are witnessing with
perplexity and dismay the bankruptcy of their ideas, and the
disintegration of their handiwork, would do well to turn their gaze to
the Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, and to meditate upon the World Order
which, lying enshrined in His teachings, is slowly and imperceptibly
rising amid the welter and chaos of present-day civilization."116
Such an examination will focus attention on the power that has
made it possible for Bahá'í unity to be achieved, consolidated and
maintained. "The light of men," Bahá'u'lláh says, "is Justice." Its
purpose, He adds, "is the appearance of unity among men. The ocean of
divine wisdom surgeth within this exalted word".117 The designation
"Houses of Justice" given to the institutions that will govern the
World Order He conceived, at local, national and international levels,
reflects the centrality of this principle in the teachings of the
Revelation and the life of the Cause. As the Bahá'í community becomes
an increasingly familiar participant in the life of society, its
experience will offer ever more encouraging evidence of this crucial
law in healing the countless ills which, in the final analysis, are
the consequences of the disunity afflicting the human family. "Know
thou, of a truth," Bahá'u'lláh explains, "these great oppressions that
have befallen the world are preparing it for the advent of the Most
Great Justice."118 Clearly, that culminating stage in the evolution of
human society will take place in a world very different from the one
we know today.
IX
THE IMMEDIATE EFFECT of the winning of the Ten Year Crusade
and the establishment of the Universal House of Justice was to give a
powerful impetus to the advance of the Cause. This time the progress -
which affected virtually every aspect of Bahá'í life - took the form
of long-range developments that are best appreciated when the entire
period since 1963 is viewed as a whole. During these crucial thirty-
seven years the work proceeded rapidly forward along two parallel
tracks: the expansion and consolidation of the Bahá'í community itself
and, along with it, a dramatic rise in the influence the Faith came to
exercise in the life of society. While the range of Bahá'í activities
greatly diversified, most such efforts tended to contribute directly
to one or other of the two main developments.
A decision taken by the House of Justice at an early point in
the period proved crucial to all aspects of both teaching and
administrative development. Realization that there was no successor to
Shoghi Effendi brought with it recognition that neither would the
appointment of new Hands of the Cause be any longer possible. How
essential the functions of this institution are to the progress of the
Faith had been demonstrated with unforgettable force during the
anxious six years between 1957 and 1963. Accordingly, in pursuance of
the mandate authorizing it to bring into existence new Bahá'í
institutions,119 as the needs of the Cause require, the House of
Justice created, in June 1968, the Continental Boards of Counsellors.
Empowered to extend into the future the functions of the Hands of the
Cause for the protection and propagation of the Faith, the new
institution assumed responsibility for guiding the work of the already
existing Auxiliary Boards and joined National Assemblies in
shouldering responsibilities for the advancement of the Faith. The
great victories celebrated at the end of the Nine Year Plan in 1973,
splendid in themselves, reflected the extraordinary ease with which
the new administrative agency had taken up its duties and the
eagerness with which it had been welcomed by believers and Assemblies
alike. The moment was marked by another major development of the
Administrative Order, the creation of the International Teaching
Centre, the Body that would carry into the future certain of the
responsibilities performed by the group of "Hands of the Cause
Residing in the Holy Land", and from this point on coordinate the work
of the Boards of Counsellors around the world.
Envisioning the course that the growth of the Cause would
follow, Shoghi Effendi had written of "the launching of worldwide
enterprises destined to be embarked upon, in future epochs of that
same [Formative] Age, by the Universal House of Justice, that will
symbolize the unity and coordinate and unify the activities of ...
National Assemblies." 120 These global undertakings began in 1964 with
the Nine Year Plan, to be followed by a Five Year Plan (1974), a Seven
Year Plan (1979), a Six Year Plan (1986), a Three Year Plan (1993), a
Four Year Plan (1996), and a Twelve Month Plan that ended the century.
The shifts in emphasis that distinguished these successive endeavours
from one another provide a useful index to the growth that the Cause
was experiencing in these decades and the new opportunities and
challenges that this growth produced. Far more important than the
differences amongst them, however, is the fact that the activities
called for in each Plan were extensions of initiatives which had been
set in motion by Shoghi Effendi, who in turn had seized up and
elaborated strands woven by the Faith's Founders - the training of
Spiritual Assemblies; the translation, production and distribution of
literature; the encouragement of universal participation by the
friends; attention to the spiritual enrichment of Bahá'í life;
efforts toward the involvement of the Bahá'í community in the life of
society; the strengthening of Bahá'í family life; and the education of
children and youth. While these various processes will continue
indefinitely to unfold new possibilities, the fact that each
originated in the creative impulse of the Revelation itself lends to
everything the Bahá'í community does a unifying force that is both the
secret and the guarantee of its ultimate success.
The first two decades of the process were one of the most
enriching periods that the Bahá'í community has experienced. Within a
remarkably short period of time, the number of Local Spiritual
Assemblies multiplied and the ethnic and cultural diversity of the
membership became an ever more distinctive feature of Bahá'í life.
Although the breakdown of society was creating problems for Bahá'í
administrative institutions, a related effect was to generate a
greatly increased interest in the message of the Cause. At the outset,
the community was introduced to the challenge of "teaching the
masses". By 1967, it was being called on "to launch, on a global scale
and to every stratum of human society, an enduring and intensive
proclamation of the healing message that the Promised One has
come...."121
As believers from urban centres set out on sustained campaigns
to reach the mass of the world's peoples living in villages and rural
areas, they encountered a receptivity to Bahá'u'lláh's message far
beyond anything they had imagined possible. While the response usually
took forms very different from the ones with which the teachers had
been familiar, the new declarants were eagerly welcomed. Tens of
thousands of new Bahá'ís poured into the Cause throughout Africa, Asia
and Latin America, often representing the greater part of whole rural
villages. The 1960s and 1970s were heady days for a Bahá'í community
most of whose growth outside of Iran had been slow and measured. To
the friends in the Pacific went the great distinction of attracting
into the Cause the first Head of State, His Highness Malietoa
Tanumafili II of Samoa, a distinction for which only future events
will provide an adequate frame.
At the heart of the development, as has been the case in the
life of the Cause from the outset, was the commitment made by the
individual believer. Already, during the ministry of Shoghi Effendi,
far-sighted persons had taken the initiative to reach
indigenous populations in such countries as Uganda, Bolivia and
Indonesia. During the Nine Year Plan, ever larger numbers of such
teachers were drawn into the work, particularly in India, several
countries in Africa, and most regions of Latin America, as well as in
islands of the Pacific, Alaska and among the native peoples of Canada
and the rural black population of the southern United States.
Pioneering brought vital support to the work, encouraging the
emergence of groups of teachers among the indigenous believers
themselves.
Even so, it soon became apparent that individual initiative
alone, however inspired and energetic, could not respond adequately to
the opportunities opening up. The result was to launch Bahá'í
communities on a wide range of collective teaching and proclamation
projects recalling the heroic days of the dawn-breakers. Teams of
ardent teachers found that it was now possible to introduce the
message of the Faith not merely to a succession of inquirers, but to
entire groups and even whole communities. The tens of thousands became
hundreds of thousands. The Faith's growth meant that members of
Spiritual Assemblies, whose experience had been limited to confirming
the understanding of the Faith of individual applicants raised in
cultures of doubt or religious fanaticism, had to adjust to
expressions of belief on the part of whole groups of people to whom
religious awareness and response were normal features of daily life.
No segment of the community made a more energetic or
significant contribution to this dramatic process of growth than did
Bahá'í youth. In their exploits during these crucial decades - as,
indeed, throughout the entire history of the past one hundred and
fifty years - one is reminded again and again that the great majority
of the band of heroes who launched the Cause on its course in the
middle years of the nineteenth century were all of them young people.
The Bab Himself declared His mission when He was twenty-five years
old, and Anis, who attained the imperishable glory of dying with his
Lord, was only a youth. Quddus responded to the Revelation at the age
of twenty-two. Zaynab, whose age was never recorded, was a very young
woman. Shaykh 'Ali, so greatly cherished by both Quddus and Mulla
Husayn, was martyred at the age of twenty, while Muhammad-i-Baqir-
Naqsh laid down his life when he was only fourteen. Tahirih was in her
twenties when she embraced the Bab's Cause.
Following in the path that these extraordinary figures had
opened, thousands of young Bahá'ís arose in subsequent years to
proclaim the message of the Faith throughout all five continents and
the scattered islands of the globe. As an international youth culture
began to emerge in society during the late nineteen sixties and
seventies, believers with talent in music, drama and the arts
demonstrated something of what Shoghi Effendi had meant when he
pointed out: "That day will the Cause spread like wildfire when its
spirit and teachings are presented on the stage or in art and
literature...."122 The spirit of zeal and enthusiasm characteristic of
youth has also provided an ongoing challenge to the general body of
the community to explore ever more audaciously the revolutionary
social implications of Bahá'u'lláh's teachings.
The burst of enrolments brought with it, however, equally
great problems. At the immediate level, the resources of Bahá'í
communities engaged in the work were soon overwhelmed by the task of
providing the sustained deepening the masses of new believers needed
and the consolidation of the resulting communities and Spiritual
Assemblies. Beyond that, cultural challenges like those encountered by
the early Persian believers who had first sought to introduce the
Faith in Western lands now replicated themselves throughout the world.
Theological and administrative principles that might be of consuming
interest to pioneers and teachers were seldom those that were central
to the concern of new declarants from very different social and
cultural backgrounds. Often, differences of view about even such
elementary matters as the use of time or simple social conventions
created gaps of understanding that made communication extremely
difficult.
Initially, such problems proved stimulating as both Bahá'í
institutions and individual believers struggled to find new ways of
looking at situations - new ways, indeed, of understanding important
passages in the Bahá'í Writings themselves. Determined efforts were
made to respond to the guidance of the World Centre that expansion and
consolidation are twin processes that must go hand in hand. Where
hoped for results did not readily materialize, however, a measure of
discouragement frequently set in. The initial rapid rise in enrolment
rates slowed markedly in many countries, tempting some Bahá'í
institutions and communities to turn back to more familiar activities
and more accessible publics.
The principal effect of the setbacks, however, was that they
brought home to communities that the high expectations of the early
years were in some respects quite unrealistic. Although the easy
successes of the initial teaching activities were encouraging, they
did not, by themselves, build a Bahá'í community life that could meet
the needs of its new members and be self-generating. Rather, pioneers
and new believers alike faced questions for which Bahá'í experience in
Western lands - or even Iran - offered few answers. How were Local
Spiritual Assemblies to be established - and once established, how
were they to function - in areas where large numbers of new believers
had joined the Cause overnight, simply on the strength of their
spiritual apprehension of its truth? How, in societies dominated by
men since the dawn of time, were women to be accorded an equal voice?
How was the education of large numbers of children to be
systematically addressed in cultural situations where poverty and
illiteracy prevailed? What priorities should guide Bahá'í moral
teaching, and how could these objectives best be related to prevailing
indigenous conventions? How could a vibrant community life be
cultivated that would stimulate the spiritual growth of its members?
What priorities, too, should be set with respect to the production of
Bahá'í literature, particularly given the sudden explosion that had
taken place in the number of languages represented in the community?
How could the integrity of the Bahá'í institution of the Nineteen Day
Feast be maintained, while opening this vital activity to the
enriching influence of diverse cultures? And, in all areas of concern,
how were the necessary resources to be recruited, funded, and
coordinated?
The pressure of these urgent and interlocking challenges
launched the Bahá'í world on a learning process that has proved to be
as important as the expansion itself. It is safe to say that during
these years there was virtually no type of teaching activity, no
combination of expansion, consolidation and proclamation, no
administrative option, no effort at cultural adaptation that was not
being energetically tried in some part of the Bahá'í world. The net
result of the experience was an intensive education of a great part of
the Bahá'í community in the implications of the mass teaching work, an
education that could have occurred in no other way. By its very
nature, the process was largely local and regional in focus,
qualitative rather than quantitative in its gains, and incremental
rather than large-scale in the progress achieved. Had it not been for
the painstaking, always difficult and often frustrating consolidation
work pursued during these years, however, the subsequent strategy of
systematizing the promotion of entry by troops would have had very
little with which to work.
The fact that the Bahá'í message was now penetrating the lives
not merely of small groups of individuals but of whole communities
also had the effect of reviving a vital feature of an earlier stage in
the advancement of the Cause. For the first time in decades, the Faith
found itself once more in a situation where teaching and consolidation
were inseparably bound up with social and economic development. In the
early years of the century, under the guidance of the Master and the
Guardian, the Iranian believers - denied the opportunity to
participate equally in whatever limited benefits the society of the
day offered - had arisen to painstakingly construct a comprehensive
community life of a kind beyond either the need or the reach of the
relatively isolated Bahá'í groups across North America and Western
Europe. In Iran, spiritual and moral advancement, teaching activities,
the creation of schools and clinics, the building of administrative
institutions, and the encouragement of initiatives aimed at economic
self-sufficiency and prosperity - all had been from an early stage
inseparable features of one organically unified process of
development. Now - in Africa, in Latin America, and parts of Asia -
the same challenges and opportunities had re-emerged.
While social and economic development activities had long been
under way, particularly in Latin America and Asia, these had been
isolated projects carried out by groups of believers under the
guidance of individual National Assemblies, and unrelated to any plan.
In October 1983, however, Bahá'í communities throughout the world were
called on to begin incorporating such efforts into their regular
programmes of work. An Office of Social and Economic Development was
created at the World Centre to coordinate learning and help seek
financial support.
The decade that followed saw wide experimentation in a field
of work for which most Bahá'í institutions had little preparation.
While striving to benefit from the models being tried by the many
development agencies operating around the world, Bahá'í
communities faced the challenge of relating what they found in various
areas of concern - education, health, literacy, agriculture and
communications technology - to their understanding of Bahá'í
principles. The temptation was great, given the magnitude of the
resources being invested by governments and founda-tions, and the
confidence with which this effort was pursued, merely to borrow
methods current at the moment or to adapt Bahá'í efforts to pre-
vailing theories. As the work evolved, however, Bahá'í institutions
began turning their attention to the goal of devising development
paradigms that could assimilate what they were observing in the larger
society to the Faith's unique conception of human potentialities.
Nowhere was the strategy of the successive Plans so
impressively vindicated as was the case in India. The community there
has today become a giant of the Cause, numbering well over a million
souls. Its work stretches across the expanse of a vast sub-continent,
home to an immense diversity of cultures, languages, ethnic groups and
religious traditions. In many respects, the experience of this greatly
blessed body of believers encapsulates the Bahá'í world's struggles,
experiments, setbacks and victories throughout these critical three
decades. The dramatic rise in enrolments had brought with it all of
the problems being encountered elsewhere in the world, but on a
massive scale. The long road leading the Indian Bahá'í community to
its present-day eminence was beset with the most painful difficulties,
some of which threatened at times to overwhelm the administrative
resources available. The victories won, however, provide a foretaste
of the confirmations that will in time bless the efforts of Bahá'í
communities struggling with the same challenges on other continents.
By 1985, the growth of the Faith in India had reached the point where
the needs and opportunities of so many diverse regions called for more
sharply focused attention than the National Spiritual Assembly alone
could provide. Thus was born the new institution of the Regional
Bahá'í Council, setting in motion the process of administrative
decentralization that has since proven so effective in many other
lands.
In 1986, the expansion and consolidation taking place in India
were befittingly crowned with the inauguration of the beautiful "Lotus
Temple". Although the project had raised optimistic expectations as to
the impact its completion would have on public recognition of
the Faith, the reality has infinitely surpassed the brightest of such
hopes. Today, India's House of Worship has become the foremost
visitors' attraction on the subcontinent, welcoming an average of over
ten thousand visitors every day, and featuring prominently in
publications, films and television productions. The interest aroused
in a Faith that could inspire and embody itself in so magnificent a
creation has given new meaning to the description by 'Abdu'l-Bahá of
Bahá'í Temples as "silent teachers" of the Faith.
The progress of the Indian Bahá'í community, both in its
internal development and its relationship with the larger society, was
illustrated by a pioneering initiative undertaken in November 2000 in
the field of social and economic development. Taking advantage of the
reputation it had deservedly won among progressive circles in the
country, the National Spiritual Assembly hosted, in collaboration with
the Bahá'í International Community's newly created Institute for
Studies in Global Prosperity,123 a symposium on the subject of
"Religion, Science and Development". The project engaged the
participation of over one hundred of the most influential development
organizations in the country and inspired national media coverage.
Marking out a distinctive Bahá'í contribution to the promotion of
social advancement, the event set the stage for symposia of the same
kind in Africa, Latin America and other regions, where creative Bahá'í
communities can help shape what may well become one of the Faith's
major success stories.
During these same years, the Asian continent also saw the
sudden emergence of the Malaysian Bahá'í community as an engine of the
expansion work, winning its own goals with stunning speed and
dispatching pioneers and travelling teachers to neighbouring lands. A
development that made this dramatic advance possible was the bonds of
spiritual partnership that had been woven between believers of Chinese
and Indian backgrounds. Visitors to Malaysia spoke, with something
approaching awe, of the way in which the Malaysian community, although
working under many constraints and disabilities, seemed to be the very
embodiment of the military metaphors with which Shoghi Effendi's
writings seek to capture the spirit of Bahá'í teaching efforts.
Neither the world-wide growth of the Bahá'í community nor the
process of learning it was experiencing, however, tell the
whole story of these tumultuous and creative decades. When the history
of the period is eventually written, one of its most brilliant
chapters will recount the spiritual victories won by Bahá'í
communities, in Africa particularly, who survived war, terror,
political oppression and extreme privations, and who emerged from
these tests with their faith intact, determined to resume the
interrupted work of building a viable Bahá'í collective life. The
community in Ethiopia, homeland of one of the world's oldest and
richest cultural traditions, succeeded in maintaining both the morale
of its members and the coherence of its administrative structures
under relentless pressure from a brutal dictatorship. Of the friends
in other countries on the continent, it may be truly said that their
path of faithfulness to the Cause led through a hell of suffering
seldom equalled in modern history. The annals of the Faith possess few
more moving testimonies to the sheer power of the spirit than the
stories of courage and purity of heart emerging from the inferno that
engulfed the friends in what was then Zaire, stories that will inspire
generations to come and represent priceless contributions to the
creation of a global Bahá'í culture. Such countries as Uganda and
Rwanda added unforgettable achievements of their own to this record of
heroic struggle.
Inspiring, too, was the demonstration of the capacity for
renewal that is inherent in the Cause and which emerged in Cambodian
refugee camps along the Thailand border. Through the heroic efforts of
a handful of teachers, Local Spiritual Assemblies were established
among people who had survived a campaign of genocide almost beyond the
capacity of the human heart to contemplate, who had lost countless
loved ones as well as everything they possessed in the way of material
security, but in whom still burned the longing of the human soul for
spiritual truth. An extraordinary achievement of a related kind was
that of the Liberian Bahá'í community. Driven from their homes into
exile in neighbouring lands, many of these intrepid believers
transported with them their whole community life, setting up Local
Spiritual Assemblies, carrying on teaching work, continuing the
education of their children, using their time to learn new skills, and
finding in music, dance and drama powers of the spirit that helped
keep hope alive until they could return to their country.
As the process of education in methods of mass teaching was
taking place, the Faith's membership was being transformed. In 1992,
the Bahá'í world celebrated its second Holy Year, this one marking the
centenary of the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh and the promulgation of His
Covenant. More eloquently than words could have done, the ethnic,
cultural and national diversity of the 27,000 believers who gathered
at the Javits Convention Center in New York City - together with the
thousands present at nine auxiliary conferences in Bucharest, Buenos
Aires, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Panama City, Singapore, Sydney and
Western Samoa - provided compelling evidence of the success of Bahá'í
teaching work around the world. An affecting moment occurred when the
network of satellite broadcasts linked the gathering in Moscow with
the one taking place in New York City, and Bahá'ís everywhere thrilled
to greetings in Russian - the common language of some 280 million
people from at least fifteen countries - that proclaimed a new phase
in humanity's response to Bahá'u'lláh.
In the Moscow and Bucharest conferences could be glimpsed the
rebirth of Bahá'í communities that had been nearly extinguished under
the oppression of the Soviet regime and its collaborators. One of the
last three surviving Hands of the Cause, 'Ali-Akbar Furutan, who had
been born in Russia, had the great joy of returning to Moscow, at the
age of eighty-six, for the inaugural election of the National Assembly
of his homeland. Local Spiritual Assemblies sprang up in all of the
newly opened lands, and six new National Spiritual Assemblies were
elected. In a brief space of time, pioneering and teaching activities
in countries along the southern rim of the former Soviet empire -
where the Faith had been similarly proscribed - soon brought into
existence still more Local Assemblies and eight additional National
Spiritual Assemblies. Bahá'í literature was translated into a range of
new languages, energetic steps were taken to secure civil recognition
of Bahá'í institutions, and representatives from Eastern Europe and
the countries of the now vanished Soviet bloc began participating with
their fellow believers in the external affairs work of the Faith at
the international level.
Gradually, too, the message of the Faith began to find a
welcome in many parts of China and among Chinese populations abroad.
Bahá'í literature was translated into Mandarin, university
audiences in many Chinese cities extended invitations to Bahá'í
scholars, a Centre for Bahá'í Studies was established at the
prestigious Institute of World Religions in Beijing,124 which operates
within the Academy of Social Sciences, and many Chinese dignitaries
have been generous in their appreciation of the principles they
discover in the Writings. In light of the high praise of the Master
for Chinese civilization and its role in humanity's future, one begins
to anticipate the creative contribution that believers from this
background will make to the intellectual and moral life of the Cause
in the years ahead.125
The significance of these three decades of struggle, learning
and sacrifice became apparent when the moment arrived to devise a
global Plan that would capitalize on the insights gained and the
resources that had been developed. The Bahá'í community that set out
on the Four Year Plan in 1996 was a very different one from the eager,
but new and still inexperienced body of believers who, in 1964, had
ventured out on the first of such undertakings that were no longer
sustained by the guiding hand of Shoghi Effendi. By 1996, it had
become possible to see all of the distinct strands of the enterprise
as integral parts of one coherent whole.
With this education had also come a much needed perspective on
what had been accomplished. The expansion of the Cause over the
preceding three decades had represented the response of several
million human beings who had been affected by their encounter with the
message of Bahá'u'lláh to the point that they were moved to identify
themselves in varying degrees with the Cause of God. They were aware
that a new Messenger of the Divine had appeared, had caught something
of the spirit of faith, and had been strongly affected by the Bahá'í
teaching of the oneness of humankind. A small minority among them were
able to go beyond this point. For the most part, however, these
friends were essentially recipients of teaching programmes conducted
by teachers and pioneers from outside. One of the great strengths of
the masses of humankind from among whom the newly enrolled believers
came lies in an openness of heart that has the potentiality to
generate lasting social transformation. The greatest handicap of these
same populations has so far been a passivity learned through
generations of exposure to outside influences which, no matter
how great their material advantages, have pursued agendas that were
often related only tangentially - if at all - to the realities of the
needs and daily lives of indigenous peoples.
The Four Year Plan, which was a major advance on those that
immediately preceded it, was designed to take advantage of the
opportunities and insights thus offered. The goal of advancing the
process of entry by troops became the single-minded aim of the
enterprise. The lessons that had been learned during earlier Plans now
placed the emphasis on developing the capacities of believers -
wherever they might be - so that all could arise as confident
protagonists of the Faith's mission. The instrument to accomplish this
objective had been undergoing steady refinement during the earlier
Plans and had demonstrated its efficacy.
As with most of the other methods and activities by which the
Faith was advancing, this instrument had likewise been conceived
decades earlier by the Master, who calls in the Tablets of the Divine
Plan for deepened believers to "gather together the youths of the love
of God in schools of instruction and teach them all the divine proofs
and irrefragable arguments, explain and elucidate the history of the
Cause, and interpret also the prophecies and proofs which are recorded
and are extant in the divine books and epistles regarding the
manifestation of the Promised One...."126 Pioneering work and
organized training of this nature had already been done in Iran,
during the early years of the century, by the much-loved Sadru's-
Sudur.127 As the years passed, winter and summer schools had
multiplied, and successive Plans also encouraged experimentation in
the development of Bahá'í institutes.
By far the most significant advance in this latter respect
occurred over a period of more than two decades, beginning in the
1970s in Colombia, where a systematic and sustained programme of
education in the Writings was devised and soon adopted in neighbouring
countries. Influenced by the Colombian community's parallel efforts in
the field of social and economic development, the breakthrough was all
the more impressive in the fact that it was achieved against a
background of violence and lawlessness that was deranging the life of
the surrounding society.
The Colombian acheivement proved a source of great inspiration
and example to Bahá'í communities elsewhere in the world. By the
time the Four Year Plan ended, over one hundred thousand
believers were involved world-wide in the programmes of the more than
three hundred permanent training institutes. In accomplishing this
goal, a majority of regional institutes had carried the process a
stage further by creating networks of "study circles" which utilize
the talents of believers to replicate the work of the institute at a
local level. It is already apparent that the success of the institute
work has significantly reinforced the long-term process by which a
universal system of Bahá'í education will take shape.128
Although the struggles of these decades were relatively modest
- at least when set against the standard of the Heroic Age - they
provide the present generation of Bahá'ís with a window on what Shoghi
Effendi describes as the cyclical nature of the Faith's history: "a
series of internal and external crises, of varying severity,
devastating in their immediate effects, but each mysteriously
releasing a corresponding measure of divine power, lending thereby a
fresh impulse to its unfoldment."129 These words put into perspective
the succession of efforts, experiments, heartbreaks and victories that
characterized the beginning of large-scale teaching, and prepared the
Bahá'í community for the much greater challenges ahead.
Throughout history, the mass of humanity have been, at best,
spectators at the advance of civilization. Their role has been to
serve the designs of whatever elite had temporarily assumed control of
the process. Even the successive Revelations of the Divine, whose
objective was the liberation of the human spirit, were, in time, taken
captive by "the insistent self ", were frozen into man-made dogma,
ritual, clerical privilege and sectarian quarrels, and reached their
end with their ultimate purpose frustrated.
Bahá'u'lláh has come to free humanity from this long bondage,
and the closing decades of the twentieth century were devoted by the
community of His followers to creative experimentation with the means
by which His objective can be realized. The prosecution of the Divine
Plan entails no less than the involvement of the entire body of
humankind in the work of its own spiritual, social and intellectual
development. The trials encountered by the Bahá'í community in the
decades since 1963 are those necessary ones that refine
endeavour and purify motivation so as to render those who would take
part worthy of so great a trust. Such test are the surest evidences of
that process of maturation which 'Abdu'l-Bahá so confidently
described:
"Some movements appear, manifest a brief period of activity,
then discontinue. Others show forth a greater measure of growth and
strength, but before attaining mature development, weaken,
disintegrate and are lost in oblivion.... There is still another kind
of movement or cause which from a very small, inconspicuous beginning
goes forward with sure and steady progress, gradually broadening and
widening until it has assumed universal dimensions. The Bahá'í
Movement is of this nature."130
X
BAHÁ'U'LLAH'S MISSION IS NOT LIMITED to the building of the
Bahá'í community. The Revelation of God has come for the whole of
humanity, and it will win the support of the institutions of society
to the extent that they find in its example encouragement and
inspiration for their efforts to lay the foundations of a just
society. To appreciate the importance of this parallel concern, one
has only to recall the time and care that Bahá'u'lláh Himself devoted
to cultivating relationships with government officials, leaders of
thought, prominent figures in various minority groups, and the
diplomatic representatives of foreign governments assigned to service
in the Ottoman empire. The spiritual effect of this effort is apparent
in the tributes paid to His character and principles by even such
bitter enemies as 'Ali Pasha and the Persian ambassador to
Constantinople, Mirza Husayn Khan. The former, who condemned his
Prisoner to banishment in the penal colony at 'Akka, was nevertheless
moved to describe Him as "a man of great distinction, exemplary
conduct, great moderation, and a most dignified figure", whose
teachings were, in the minister's opinion "worthy of high esteem".131
The latter, whose machinations had been principally responsible for
poisoning the minds of 'Ali Pasha and his colleagues, frankly
admitted, in later years, the great contrast between the moral and
intellectual stature of his Enemy and the harm done to Persian-Turkish
relations by the reputation for greed and dishonesty that
characterized most of his other countrymen resident in Constantinople.
From the beginning, 'Abdu'l-Bahá took keen interest in efforts
to bring into existence a new international order. It is significant,
for example, that His early public references in North America to the
purpose of His visit there placed particular emphasis on the
invitation of the organizing committee of the Lake Mohonk Peace
Conference for Him to address this international gathering. He had
also been generous in His encouragement of the Central Organization
for a Durable Peace at The Hague. He was, however, entirely candid in
the counsel He provided. Letters which the Executive Committee of The
Hague organization had written to Him during the course of the war
provided the opportunity for a response that drew the organizers'
attention to Bahá'u'lláh's enunciation of spiritual truths which alone
can provide a foundation for the realization of their aims:
"O ye esteemed ones who are pioneers among the well-wishers of
the world of humanity!... At present Universal Peace is a matter of
great importance, but unity of conscience is essential, so that the
foundation of this matter may become secure, its establishment firm
and its edifice strong.... Today nothing but the power of the Word of
God which encompasses the realities of things can bring the thoughts,
the minds, the hearts and the spirits under the shade of one Tree. He
is the potent in all things, the vivifier of souls, the preserver and
the controller of the world of mankind."132
Beyond this, the list of influential persons with whom the
Master spent patient hours in both North America and Europe -
particularly individuals struggling to promote the goal of world peace
and humanitarianism - reflects His awareness of the responsibility the
Cause has to humanity at large. As the extraordinary response evoked
by His passing testifies, He pursued this course to the end of His
life.
Shoghi Effendi took up this legacy almost immediately upon
beginning his ministry. As early as 1925, he encouraged the interest
of an American believer, Jean Stannard, to establish an
"International Bahá'í Bureau", directing her to Geneva, seat of the
League of Nations. While the Bureau exercised no administrative
authority, it acted, in the Guardian's words, "as intermediary between
Haifa and other Bahá'í centers" and served as an information
"distributing center" in the heart of Europe, its role being formally
recognized when the League's publishing house solicited and published
an account of the Bureau's activities.133
As has so often been the case in the history of the Cause, an
unexpected crisis served to greatly advance Bahá'í involvement with
the larger society at the international level. In 1928, Shoghi Effendi
encouraged the Spiritual Assembly of Baghdad to appeal to the League's
Permanent Mandates Commission against the seizure, by Shi'ih
opponents, of Bahá'u'lláh's House in that city. Recognizing the wrong
that had been done, the Council of the League unanimously called on
the British mandate authority, in March 1929, to press the Iraqi
government "with a view to the immediate redress of the injustice
suffered by the Petitioners". Repeated evasions by the Iraqi
government, including the violation of a solemn pledge on the part of
the monarch himself, resulted in the case dragging on for years
through successive sessions of the Mandates Commission, leaving the
House in the hands of those who had seized it, a situation that
remains to this day uncorrected. 134 Undeterred by this failure,
Shoghi Effendi focused the attention of the Bahá'í community on the
historic benefit that the campaign had won for the Cause. As had
earlier been the case with the Sunni Muslim court's rejection of the
appeal of an Egyptian Bahá'í community regarding marriage, the
Guardian pointed out:
"Suffice it to say that, despite these interminable delays,
protests and evasions ... the publicity achieved for the Faith by this
memorable litigation, and the defence of its cause - the cause of
truth and justice - by the world's highest tribunal, have been such as
to excite the wonder of its friends and to fill with consternation its
enemies."135
The birth of the United Nations opened to the Faith a far
broader and more effective forum for its efforts toward exerting a
spiritual influence on the life of society. As early as 1947, a
special "Palestine Committee" of the United Nations solicited the
views of the Guardian on the future of that mandated territory.
His response to the inquiry provided an opportunity for him to forward
an authoritative exposition of the history and teachings of the Cause
itself. That same year, with Shoghi Effendi's encouragement, the
National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada submitted
to the international organization a document entitled "A Bahá'í
Declaration on Human Obligations and Rights", which was to inspire the
work of Bahá'í writers and spokespersons over the decades that
followed.136 A year later the eight National Spiritual Assemblies then
in existence secured from the responsible United Nations body
accreditation for "The Bahá'í International Community" as an
international non-governmental organization.
It was not only the Faith's slowly emerging relationship with
the new international order that elicited support of this kind from
the Guardian. The pages of God Passes By and Amatu'l-Bahá's memoirs of
the Guardian are filled with references to responses that influential
individuals and organizations made to initiatives taken by Shoghi
Effendi and to the events around the world in which Bahá'í
representatives were invited to participate. In the perspective of
history, one is struck by the vast disparity between many of these
relatively inconsequential occasions and the attention given them by a
figure whose work was not only of enormous importance to humanity's
future, but who understood fully the relative significance of events
unfolding around him. What the Bahá'í community has been given in this
careful record is a guide to the way that it must take up the growing
opportunities born out of modest beginnings.
From the moment of its accreditation, the Bahá'í International
Community began to play an energetic role in United Nations' affairs.
An activity that won it much appreciation was a programme carried out,
through the expanding network of Bahá'í Assemblies, to provide the
public with information about the United Nations itself, and which
gave generous support to struggling United Nations associations
throughout the world. By 1970, the Community had secured consultative
status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
This was followed in 1974 by the granting of formal association with
the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and in 1976 by the
acquisition of consultative status with the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF). The influence and expertise developed during
these years showed their capacity, in 1955 and 1962, when the
Community was successful in securing United Nations' intervention on
behalf of the believers suffering persecution in Iran and Morocco,
respectively.
*
In 1980, the patient external affairs activities of the
National Spiritual Assemblies and the Community's United Nations
Office were suddenly propelled into a new stage of their development.
The catalyst was the attempt by the Shi'ih clergy of Iran to
exterminate the Cause in the land of its birth. The consequences were
as little anticipated by the Faith's persecutors as they were by its
defenders.
Throughout the long decades in which the believers in the
cradle of the Faith suffered intermittent persecution for their
beliefs, the mullas, who instigated and led these attacks, acted in
concert with the country's succession of monarchs. The latter,
ostensibly absolute in their authority, were in fact constrained by
political calculations that rendered them vulnerable to outside
pressures, particularly from Western governments. So it was that the
outrage voiced by Russian, British and other diplomatic missions had
compelled Nasiri'd-Din Shah, against his will, to bring to an end the
orgy of violence that took so many believers' lives in the early 1850s
and threatened that of Bahá'u'lláh Himself. During the twentieth
century, his Qajar successors had been similarly concerned to placate
the opinion of foreign governments. The pattern was repeated in 1955
when the second of the Pahlavi shahs, who had been induced by the
mullas to approve a wave of anti-Bahá'í violence, was forced by United
Nations' protest and by objections on the part of the American
government to abruptly halt the campaign - both interventions
harbingers of things to come.
Such checks on the clergy's behaviour seemed to have been
swept away by the Islamic revolution of 1979. Suddenly, the mullas
were themselves in power, appointing their own nominees to the highest
positions in the new republic, and eventually taking over these posts
directly. "Revolutionary courts" were set up, answering only to
the senior clergy. An army of "revolutionary guards", far more
effective than the shah's secret police, and quite as brutal, took
over control of every aspect of public life.
While the attention of the new ruling caste was focused
chiefly on what it believed were threats from foreign governments,
influential elements within it saw an opportunity at last to destroy
the Iranian Bahá'í community.137 The harrowing details of the campaign
that followed need no review here. Their significance lies, rather, in
the response made to these attacks by thousands of individual Bahá'ís
- men, women and children - throughout the country. Their refusal to
compromise their faith, even at the cost of their lives, inspired in
their fellow believers throughout the world a heightened dedication to
the Cause for which these sacrifices were being made. It was not,
however, only the members of the Faith who were affected by these
events. Decades earlier, in 1889, a distinguished Western commentator
on the heroism of the dawn-breakers of the Faith had prophetically
written of the sufferings of the early believers:
"It is the lives and deaths of these, their hope which knows
no despair, their love which knows no cooling, their steadfastness
which knows no wavering, which stamp this wonderful movement with a
character entirely its own.... It is not a small or easy thing to
endure what these have endured, and surely what they deemed worth life
itself is worth trying to understand. I say nothing of the mighty
influence which, as I believe, the Babi [sic] faith will exert in the
future, nor of the new life it may perchance breathe into a dead
people; for, whether it succeed or fail, the splendid heroism of the
Babi martyrs is a thing eternal and indestructible.... But what I
cannot hope to have conveyed to you is the terrible earnestness of
these men, and the indescribable influence which this earnestness,
combined with other qualities, exerts on any one who has actually been
brought in contact with them."138
These words prefigured the rise of a similar sentiment among non-
Bahá'í observers during the Islamic revolutionary years; and this was
to become one of the most powerful forces propelling the emergence of
the Cause from obscurity. Captured in those early words, too,
was the fundamentally spiritual nature of what has always been at
stake in the cradle of the Faith. Beyond a revulsion at the senseless
brutality of the persecution, a growing body of foreign opinion has
been profoundly moved by the response of the Iranian Bahá'ís.
The twentieth century has, alas, been overwhelmed by the
suffering of countless victims of oppression. What made the Bahá'í
situation unique was the attitude adopted by those who endured the
suffering. The Iranian believers refused to accept the all too
familiar role of victims. Like the Founders of the Faith before them,
they took moral charge of the great issue between them and their
adversaries. It was they, not revolutionary courts or revolutionary
guards, who quickly set the terms of the encounter, and this
extraordinary achievement affected not only the hearts but the minds
of those who observed the situation from outside the Bahá'í Faith. The
persecuted community neither attacked its oppressors, nor sought
political advantage from the crisis. Nor did its Bahá'í defenders in
other lands call for the dismantling of the Iranian constitution, much
less for revenge. All demanded only justice - the recognition of the
rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
endorsed by the community of nations, ratified by the Iranian
government, and many of them embodied even in clauses of the Islamic
constitution.
The crisis roused the Bahá'í world to extraordinary feats of
achievement. National Spiritual Assemblies who had little or no
experience in developing a working relationship with officials of
their countries' governments were called on to solicit government
support for resolutions at various levels of the international human
rights system, and did so with outstanding success. Year after year,
for twenty uninterrupted years, the case of the Iranian Bahá'ís
proceeded through the international human rights system, gathering
support in successive resolutions, ensuring attention to Bahá'í
grievances in the missions of rapporteurs appointed by the United
Nations Human Rights Commission and consolidating these gains through
decisions of the Third Committee of the United Nations General
Assembly. Every attempt by the Iranian regime to escape international
condemnation of its treatment of its Bahá'í citizens failed to shake
the support the Bahá'í issue attracted from a persistent
majority of sympathetic nations represented on the Commission. The
achievement was all the more remarkable in the context of the
Commission's constantly changing membership and a demanding agenda
that included human rights abuses in other countries that affected
millions of victims.
At the same time as direct pressure was being exerted on the
Iranian government, the case was attracting unprecedented publicity
around the world in newspapers, magazines and the broadcast media.
Newspapers such as The New York Times, Le Monde and Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, enjoying international readership, gave wide
coverage to the persecution, and television networks in Australia,
Canada, the United States and a number of European countries produced
in-depth, magazine - format presentations. The abuses were denounced
in often strong editorial comment. Apart from the support thus lent to
the efforts to secure effective intervention at the Human Rights
Commission, such publicity had the effect of introducing, usually for
the first time and to an audience of tens of millions of people,
accurate and appreciative information about Bahá'í teachings and
belief. Both the publicity and the campaign being carried on through
the United Nations' system provided influential officials around the
world with a sustained opportunity to judge for themselves both the
teachings of the Cause and the character of the Bahá'í community.
A problem arising out of the persecution was that faced by
several thousand Iranian Bahá'ís who found themselves either stranded
without valid passports in countries where they were serving as
pioneers, or forced to flee from Iran because they or their families
had been singled out as targets of the pogrom. In 1983, an
International Bahá'í Refugee Office was established in Canada,139
where the government had been particularly responsive to the
representations made by the National Spiritual Assembly of that
country. Over the next few years, with the assistance of the United
Nations High Commission for Refugees, a series of other countries
likewise opened their doors to more than ten thousand Iranian Bahá'ís,
many of whom filled pioneer goals in their new places of residence.
*
Not only the Bahá'í community but the United Nations' human
rights system itself benefited from this long struggle. Initially,
after the Islamic revolution, the community of believers in Iran had
faced a threat to its very survival. In time, the United Nations Human
Rights Commission, however slow and relatively cumbersome its
operations may appear to some outside observers, succeeded in
compelling the Iranian regime to bring the worst of the persecution to
a halt. In this way, the "case of Iran's Bahá'ís" marked a significant
victory for the Commission and the Bahá'í Faith alike. It served as a
startling demonstration of the power of the community of nations,
acting through the machinery created for the purpose, to bring under
control patterns of oppression that had darkened the pages of recorded
history throughout the ages.
This circumstance highlights the relevance of the Faith's
activities to the life of the larger society in which these efforts
are taking place. Together with world peace, the need for the
international community to take effective steps to realize the ideals
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related covenants
is an urgent challenge facing humanity at the present moment in its
history. There are relatively few places in the world where minority
populations, because of religious, ethnic or national prejudices, are
not still denied basic human needs of some kind. No body of people on
the planet understands better this issue than does the Bahá'í
community. It has endured - continues to endure in some lands -
mistreatment for which there is no conceivable justification, whether
legal or moral; it has given its martyrs and shed its tears, while
remaining faithful to its conviction that hatred and retaliation are
corrosive to the soul; and it has learned, as few communities have
done, how to use the United Nations' human rights system in the manner
intended by that system's creators, without having recourse to
involvement in political partisanship of any kind, much less violence.
Drawing on this experience, it is today embarked on a programme to
encourage governments in a score of countries to institute public
education programmes on the subject of human rights, providing
whatever practical assistance of its own is possible.140
Throughout the world, it is particularly active in promoting the
rights of women and children. Most important of all, it provides a
living example of brotherhood, from which countless people outside its
embrace derive courage and hope.
*
As the Iranian crisis was unfolding, an initiative taken by
the Universal House of Justice suddenly moved the external affairs
work of the Bahá'í community to an entirely new level. In 1985, the
statement The Promise of World Peace, addressed to the generality of
humankind, was released through National Spiritual Assemblies. In it,
the House of Justice asserted, in unprovocative but uncompromising
terms, Bahá'í confidence in the advent of international peace as the
next stage in the evolution of society. Set out, as well, were
elements of the form that this long-awaited development must take,
many of which went far beyond the political terms in which the subject
is commonly discussed. It concluded:
"The experience of the Bahá'í community may be seen as an
example of this enlarging unity [of humankind].... If the Bahá'í
experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in
the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for
study."
While the immediate purpose of the release was to provide Bahá'í
institutions and individual believers with a coherent line of
discussion for their interactions with government authorities,
organizations of civil society, the media and influential
personalities, a collateral effect was to set in motion an intensive
and ongoing education of the Bahá'í community itself in several
important Bahá'í teachings. The influence of the ideas and
perspectives in the document was soon making itself widely felt in
conventions, publications, summer and winter schools, and the general
discourse of believers everywhere.
In many respects, The Promise of World Peace may be said to
have set the agenda for Bahá'í interaction with the United Nations and
its attendant organizations in the years since 1985. Building on the
reputation it had already won, the Bahá'í International
Community became, in only a few short years, one of the most
influential of the non-governmental organizations. Because it is, and
is seen to be, entirely non-partisan, it has increasingly been trusted
as a mediating voice in complex, and often stressful, discussions in
international circles on major issues of social progress. This
reputation has been strengthened by appreciation of the fact that the
Community refrains, on principle, from taking advantage of such trust
to press partisan agendas of its own. By 1968, a Bahá'í representative
had been elected to membership on the Executive Committee of Non-
Governmental Organizations, subsequently holding the positions of
chairman and vice-chairman. From this point on, representatives of the
Community found themselves increasingly asked to function as convenors
or chairpersons of a wide range of bodies: committees, task forces,
working groups and advisory boards. During the past four years, the
Community's Principal Representative has served as executive secretary
of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations, the central
coordinating body of non-governmental groups affiliated with the
United Nations.
The structure of the Bahá'í International Community reflects
the principles guiding its work. It has escaped labelling as merely
another special interest lobby group. While making full use of the
expertise and executive resources of its United Nations Office and
Office of Public Information, the Community has come to be recognized
by its fellow non-governmental organizations as essentially an
"association" of democratically elected national "councils",
representative of a cross-section of humankind. Bahá'í delegations to
international events commonly include members appointed by various
National Spiritual Assemblies who are experienced in the subject
matters under discussion and who can provide regional perspectives.
This feature of the Faith's involvement in the life of society
- in which motivating principle and operating method represent two
dimensions of a unified approach to issues - demonstrated its power at
the series of world summits and related conferences organized by the
United Nations held between 1990 and 1996. In that period of nearly
six years, the political leaders of the world came together repeatedly
under the aegis of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to
discuss the major challenges facing humankind as the twentieth
century drew to a close. No Bahá'í can review the themes of these
historic gatherings without being struck by how closely the agenda
mirrored major teachings of Bahá'u'lláh. It seemed befitting that the
centenary of His ascension should occur at the midway point in the
process, endowing the meetings, for Bahá'ís, with spiritual meaning
beyond merely their stated goals.
Among those gatherings, the World Conference on Education for
All in Thailand (1990), the World Summit for Children in New York
(1990), the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Rio de
Janeiro (1992), an anguished and chaotic World Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna (1993), the International Conference on Population in
Cairo (1994), the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen
(1995), and the particularly vibrant Fourth World Conference on Women
in Beijing (1995),141 stand out as high-lights of this process of
global discourse on the problems afflicting the world's peoples. At
the concurrent non-governmental conferences, Bahá'í delegations, made
up of members from a wide range of countries, had the opportunity to
place issues in a spiritual as well as social perspective. Evidence of
the trust the Community enjoys among hundreds of its fellow non-
governmental organizations was the fact that Bahá'í delegations were
repeatedly selected by their peers for inclusion among the handful of
member groups to be accorded the much prized opportunity to address
the conferences from the podium, rather than merely distributing
printed copies of presentations.
*
During the century's concluding years, many National Spiritual
Assemblies won impressive victories of their own in the field of
external affairs. Two outstanding examples suggest the character and
importance of these advances. The first was achieved by the National
Spiritual Assembly of Germany, where the nature of Bahá'í elected
bodies had been challenged by local authorities as being technically
incompatible with the requirements of German civil law. In upholding
the appeal of the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of
Tübingen against this ruling, Germany's constitutional High Court
concluded that the Bahá'í Administrative Order is an integral feature
of the Faith and as such is inseparable from Bahá'í belief. The High
Court justified its taking jurisdiction in the case by adducing
evidence that the Bahá'í Faith itself is a religion, a judgement with
far-reaching implications in a society where church opponents have
long sought to misrepresent the Cause as a "cult" or "sect". The
definitive language of the judgement merits repetition:
"...the character of the Bahá'í Faith as a religion and of the
Bahá'í Community as a religious community is evident, in actual every
day life, in cultural tradition, and in the understanding of the
general public as well as of the science of comparative religion."142
It was left to the Brazilian Bahá'í community to win a victory
in the field of external affairs that is so far unique in Bahá'í
history. On 28 May 1992, its country's highest legislative body, the
Chamber of Deputies, held a special session to pay tribute to
Bahá'u'lláh on the centenary of His ascension. The Speaker read a
message from the Universal House of Justice and representatives of all
of the parties rose, one by one, to acknowledge the contribution to
human betterment of the Faith and its Founder. A moving address by one
prominent deputy described the Bahá'í Teachings as "the most colossal
religious work ever written by the pen of a single Man".143
Such appreciations of the nature of the Cause and of the work
it is trying to accomplish - coming as they did from the highest
judicial and legislative levels, respectively, of two of the world's
major nations - were victories of the spirit as important in their way
as those won in the teaching field. They help to open those doors
through which Bahá'u'lláh's healing influence begins to touch the life
of society itself.
XI
THE IMAGE USED BY 'ABDU'L-BAHÁ to capture for His hearers the
coming transformation of society was that of light. Unity, He
declared, is the power that illuminates and advances all forms of
human endeavour. The age that was opening would come in the future to
be regarded as "the century of light", because in it universal
recognition of the oneness of humankind would be achieved. With this
foundation in place, the process of building a global society
embodying principles of justice will begin. The vision was enunciated
by the Master in several Tablets and addresses. Its fullest expression
occurs in a Tablet addressed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Jane Elizabeth Whyte,
wife of the former Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland. Mrs.
Whyte was an ardent sympathizer of the Bahá'í teachings, had visited
the Master in 'Akka and would later make arrangements for the
particularly warm reception that met Him in Edinburgh. Using the
familiar metaphor of "candles", 'Abdu'l-Bahá wrote to Mrs. Whyte:
O honored lady!... Behold how its [unity's] light is now
dawning upon the world's darkened horizon. The first candle is unity
in the political realm, the early glimmerings of which can now be
discerned. The second candle is unity of thought in world
undertakings, the consummation of which will erelong be
witnessed. The third candle is unity in freedom which will surely come
to pass. The fourth candle is unity in religion which is the corner-
stone of the foundation itself, and which, by the power of God, will
be revealed in all its splendor. The fifth candle is the unity of
nations - a unity which in this century will be securely established,
causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens
of one common fatherland. The sixth candle is unity of races, making
of all that dwell on earth peoples and kindreds of one race. The
seventh candle is unity of language, i.e., the choice of a universal
tongue in which all peoples will be instructed and converse. Each and
every one of these will inevitably come to pass, inasmuch as the power
of the Kingdom of God will aid and assist in their realization.144
While it will be decades - or perhaps a great deal longer -
before the vision contained in this remarkable document is fully
realized, the essential features of what it promised are now
established facts throughout the world. In several of the great
changes envisioned - unity of race and unity of religion - the intent
of the Master's words is clear and the processes involved are far
advanced, however great may be the resistance in some quarters. To a
large extent this is also true of unity of language. The need for it
is now recognized on all sides, as reflected in the circumstances that
have compelled the United Nations and much of the non-governmental
community to adopt several "official languages". Until a decision is
taken by international agreement, the effect of such developments as
the Internet, the management of air traffic, the development of
technological vocabularies of various kinds, and universal education
itself, has been to make it possible, to some extent, for English to
fill the gap.
"Unity of thought in world undertakings", a concept for which
the most idealistic aspirations at the opening of the twentieth
century lacked even reference points, is also in large measure
everywhere apparent in vast programmes of social and economic
development, humanitarian aid and concern for protection of the
environment of the planet and its oceans. As to "unity in the
political realm", Shoghi Effendi has explained that the
reference is to unity which sovereign states achieve among themselves,
a developing process the present stage of which is the establishment
of the United Nations. The Master's promise of "unity of nations", on
the other hand, looked forward to today's widespread acceptance among
the peoples of the world of the fact that, however great the
differences among them may be, they are the inhabitants of a single
global homeland.
"Unity in freedom" has today, of course, become a universal
aspiration of the Earth's inhabitants. Among the chief developments
giving substance to it, the Master may well have had in mind the
dramatic extinction of colonialism and the consequent rise of self-
determination as a dominant feature of national identity at century's
end.
*
Whatever threats still hang over humanity's future, the world
has been transformed by the events of the twentieth century. That the
features of the process should also have been described by the Voice
that predicted it with such confidence ought to command earnest
reflection on the part of serious minds everywhere. The changes
wrought in humanity's social and moral life received powerful
endorsement at a series of international gatherings called under the
United Nations' authority to mark the approaching end of one
"millennium" and the beginning of a new one. On 22-26 May 2000,
representatives of over one thousand non-governmental organizations
assembled in New York at the invitation of Kofi Annan, the United
Nations Secretary-General. In the statement that emerged from this
meeting, spokespersons of civil society committed their organizations
to the ideal that: "...we are one human family, in all our diversity,
living on one common homeland and sharing a just, sustainable and
peaceful world, guided by universal principles of democracy...."145
Shortly afterwards, from 28-31 August 2000, a second gathering
brought together leaders of most of the world's religious communities,
likewise assembled at the United Nations Headquarters. The Bahá'í
International Community was represented by its Secretary-General, who
addressed one of the plenary sessions. No observer could fail
to be struck by the call of the world's religious leaders, formally,
for their communities "to respect the right to freedom of religion, to
seek reconciliation, and to engage in mutual forgiveness and
healing...."146
These two preliminary events prepared the way for what had
been designated as the Millennium Summit itself, meeting at the United
Nations Headquarters from 6-8 September 2000. Bringing together 149
heads of state and government, the consultation sought to give hope
and assurance to the populations of the nations represented. The
Summit took the welcome step of inviting a spokesman for the Forum of
non-governmental organizations to share the concerns that had been
identified at that preparatory gathering. It seemed to Bahá'ís as
significant as it was gratifying that the individual accorded this
high honour was the Bahá'í International Community's Principal
Representative to the United Nations, in his capacity as Co-Chairman
of the Forum. Nothing so dramatically illustrates the difference
between the world of 1900 and that of 2000 than the text of the Summit
Resolution, signed by all the participants, and referred by them to
the United Nations General Assembly:
"We solemnly reaffirm, on this historic occasion, that the
United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human
family, through which we will seek to realize our universal
aspirations for peace, cooperation and development. We therefore
pledge our unstinting support for these common objectives, and our
determination to achieve them."147
In concluding this sequence of historic meetings, Mr. Annan
addressed himself to the assembled world leaders in surprisingly
candid terms - terms that, for many Bahá'ís, carried echoes of
Bahá'u'lláh's stern admonition to the now vanished kings and emperors
who had been these leaders' predecessors: "It lies in your power, and
therefore it is your responsibility, to reach the goals that you have
defined. Only you can determine whether the United Nations rises to
the challenge."148
*
Despite the historic importance of the meetings and the fact
that the greater portion of humanity's political, civil and religious
leadership took part, the Millennium Summit made little impression on
the public mind in most countries. Generous media attention was given
to certain of the events, but few readers or listeners could fail to
note the expression of scepticism that characterized editorial
treatment of the subject or the air of doubt - even of cynicism - that
crept into many of the news stories themselves. This sharp disjunction
between an event that could legitimately claim to mark a major
turning-point in human history, on the one hand, and the lack of
enthusiasm or even interest it aroused among populations who were its
supposed beneficiaries, on the other, was perhaps the most striking
feature of the millennium observations. It exposed the depth of the
crisis the world is experiencing at century's end, in which the
processes of both integration and disintegration that had gathered
momentum during the past hundred years seem to accelerate with each
passing day.
Those who long to believe the visionary statements of world
leaders struggle at the same time in the grip of two phenomena that
undermine such confidence. The first has already been considered at
some length in these pages. The collapse of society's moral
foundations has left the greater part of humankind floundering without
reference points in a world that grows daily more threatening and
unpredictable. To suggest that the process has nearly reached its end
would be merely to raise false hopes. One may appreciate that intense
political efforts are being made, that impressive scientific advances
continue or that economic conditions improve for a portion of
humankind - all without seeing in such developments anything
resembling hope of a secure life for oneself, or more importantly, for
one's children. The sense of disillusionment which, as Shoghi Effendi
warned, the spread of political corruption would create in the minds
of the mass of humankind is now widespread. Outbreaks of lawlessness
have become pandemic in both urban and rural life in many lands. The
failure of social controls, the effort to justify the most extreme
forms of aberrant behaviour as primarily civil rights issues, and an
almost universal celebration in the arts and media of
degeneracy and violence - these and similar manifestations of a
condition approaching moral anarchy suggest a future that paralyzes
the imagination. Against the background of this desolate landscape the
intellectual vogue of the age, seeking to make a virtue out of grim
necessity, has adopted for itself the appellation and mission of
"deconstructionism".
The second of the two developments undermining faith in the
future was the focus of some of the Millennium Summit's most anguished
debates. The information revolution set off in the closing decade of
the century by the invention of the World Wide Web transformed
irreversibly much of human activity. The process of "globalization"
that had been following a long rising curve over a period of several
centuries was galvanized by new powers beyond the imaginations of most
people. Economic forces, breaking free of traditional restraints,
brought into being during the closing decade of the century a new
global order in the designing, generation and distribution of wealth.
Knowledge itself became a significantly more valuable commodity than
even financial capital and material resources. In a breathtakingly
short space of time, national borders, already under assault, became
permeable, with the result that vast sums now pass instantly through
them at the command of a computer signal. Complex production
operations are so reconfigured as to integrate and maximize the
economies available from the contributions of a range of specializing
participants, without regard to their national locations. If one were
to lower one's horizon to purely material considerations, the earth
has already taken on something of the character of "one country" and
the inhabitants of various lands the status of its consumer
"citizens".
Nor is the transformation merely economic. Increasingly,
globalization assumes political, social and cultural dimensions. It
has become clear that the powers of the institution of the nation-
state, once the arbiter and protector of humanity's fortunes, have
been drastically eroded. While national governments continue to play a
crucial role, they must now make room for such rising centres of power
as multinational corporations, United Nations agencies, non-
governmental organizations of every kind, and huge media
conglomerates, the cooperation of all of which is vital to the
success of most programmes aimed at achieving significant economic or
social ends. Just as the migration of money or corporations encounters
little hindrance from national borders, neither can the latter any
longer exercise effective control over the dissemination of knowledge.
Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds
the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of study to
amass, vastly enriches the intellectual life of anyone able to use it,
as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of
professional fields. The system, so prophetically foreseen sixty years
ago by Shoghi Effendi, builds a sense of shared community among its
users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances.
The benefits to many millions of persons are obvious and
impressive. Cost effectiveness resulting from the coordination of
formerly competing operations tends to bring goods and services within
the reach of populations who could not previously have hoped to enjoy
them. Enormous increases in the funds available for research and
development expand the variety and quality of such benefits. Something
of a levelling effect in the distribution of employment opportunities
can be seen in the ease with which business operations can shift their
base from one part of the world to another. The abandonment of
barriers to transnational trade reduces still further the cost of
goods to consumers. It is not difficult to appreciate, from a Bahá'í
perspective, the potentiality of such transformations for laying the
foundations of the global society envisioned in Bahá'u'lláh's
Writings.
Far from inspiring optimism about the future, however,
globalization is seen by large and growing numbers of people around
the world as the principal threat to that future. The violence of the
riots set off by the meetings of the World Trade Organization, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund during the last two
years testifies to the depth of the fear and resentment that the rise
of globalization has provoked. Media coverage of these unexpected
outbursts focused public attention on protests against gross
disparities in the distribution of benefits and opportunities, which
globalization is seen as only increasing, and on warnings that, if
effective controls are not speedily imposed, the consequences will be
catastrophic in social and political, as well as in economic
and environmental, terms.
Such concerns appear well-founded. Economic statistics alone
reveal a picture of current global conditions that is profoundly
disturbing. The ever-widening gulf between the one fifth of the
world's population living in the highest income countries and the one
fifth living in the lowest income countries tells a grim story.
According to the 1999 Human Development Report published by the United
Nations Development Programme, this gap represented, in 1990, a ratio
of sixty to one. That is to say, one segment of humankind was enjoying
access to sixty percent of the world's wealth, while another, equally
large, population struggled merely to survive on barely one percent of
that wealth. By 1997, in the wake of globalization's rapid advance,
the gulf had widened in only seven years to a ratio of seventy-four to
one. Even this appalling fact does not take into account the steady
impoverishment of the majority of the remaining billions of human
beings trapped in the relentlessly narrowing isthmus between these two
extremes. Far from being brought under control, the crisis is clearly
accelerating. The implications for humanity's future, in terms of
privation and despair engulfing more than two thirds of the Earth's
population, helped to account for the apathy that met the Millennium
Summit's celebration of achievements that were, by every reasonable
criteria, truly historic.
Globalization itself is an intrinsic feature of the evolution
of human society. It has brought into existence a socio-economic
culture that, at the practical level, constitutes the world in which
the aspirations of the human race will be pursued in the century now
opening. No objective observer, if he is fair-minded in his judgement,
will deny that both of the two contradictory reactions it is arousing
are, in large measure, well justified. The unification of human
society, forged by the fires of the twentieth century, is a reality
that with every passing day opens breath-taking new possibilities. A
reality also being forced on serious minds everywhere, is the claim of
justice to be the one means capable of harnessing these great
potentialities to the advancement of civilization. It no longer
requires the gift of prophecy to realize that the fate of humanity in
the century now opening will be determined by the relationship
established between these two fundamental forces of the historical
process, the inseparable principles of unity and justice.
*
In the perspective of Bahá'u'lláh's teachings, the greatest
danger of both the moral crisis and the inequities associated with
globalization in its current form is an entrenched philosophical
attitude that seeks to justify and excuse these failures. The
overthrow of the twentieth century's totalitarian systems has not
meant the end of ideology. On the contrary. There has not been a
society in the history of the world, no matter how pragmatic,
experimentalist and multiform it may have been, that did not derive
its thrust from some foundational interpretation of reality. Such a
system of thought reigns today virtually unchallenged across the
planet, under the nominal designation "Western civilization".
Philosophically and politically, it presents itself as a kind of
liberal relativism; economically and socially, as capitalism - two
value systems that have now so adjusted to each other and become so
mutually reinforcing as to constitute virtually a single,
comprehensive world-view.
Appreciation of the benefits - in terms of the personal
freedom, social prosperity and scientific progress enjoyed by a
significant minority of the Earth's people - cannot withhold a
thinking person from recognizing that the system is morally and
intellectually bankrupt. It has contributed its best to the
advancement of civilization, as did all its predecessors, and, like
them, is impotent to deal with the needs of a world never imagined by
the eighteenth century prophets who conceived most of its component
elements. Shoghi Effendi did not limit his attention to divine right
monarchies, established churches or totalitarian ideologies when he
posed the searching question: "Why should these, in a world subject to
the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the
deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution?"149
Bahá'u'lláh urges those who believe in Him to "see with thine
own eyes and not through the eyes of others", to "know of thine own
knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour".
Tragically, what Bahá'ís see in present-day society is unbridled
exploitation of the masses of humanity by greed that excuses itself as
the operation of "impersonal market forces". What meets their eyes
everywhere is the destruction of moral foundations vital to humanity's
future, through gross self-indulgence masquerading as "freedom of
speech". What they find themselves struggling against daily is the
pressure of a dogmatic materialism, claiming to be the voice of
"science", that seeks systematically to exclude from intellectual life
all impulses arising from the spiritual level of human consciousness.
And for a Bahá'í the ultimate issues are spiritual. The Cause
is not a political party nor an ideology, much less an engine for
political agitation against this or that social wrong. The process of
transformation it has set in motion advances by inducing a fundamental
change of consciousness, and the challenge it poses to everyone who
would serve it is to free oneself from attachment to inherited
assumptions and preferences that are irreconcilable with the Will of
God for humanity's coming of age. Paradoxically, even the distress
caused by prevailing conditions that violate one's conscience aids in
this process of spiritual liberation. In the final analysis, such
disillusionment drives a Bahá'í to confront a truth emphasized over
and over again in the Writings of the Faith:
"He hath chosen out of the whole world the hearts of His
servants, and made them each a seat for the revelation of His glory.
Wherefore, sanctify them from every defilement, that the things for
which they were created may be engraven upon them."150
XII
THE OPENING STATEMENT OF THE GOSPEL attributed to Jesus'
disciple, John - "In the beginning was the Word..." - has fascinated
readers for two thousand years. The passage goes on to assert with
breath-taking simplicity and directness a spiritual truth that has
been central to all revealed religions, vindicated time and again in a
succession of civilizations down the ages: "He was in the world, and
the world was made by Him". The promised Manifestation of God appears;
a community of believers forms around this focal centre of spiritual
life and authority; a new system of values begins to reorder both
consciousness and behaviour; the arts and sciences respond; a
restructuring of laws and of the administration of social affairs
takes place. Slowly, but irresistibly, a new civilization emerges, one
that so fulfils the ideals and so engages the capacities of millions
of human beings that it does indeed constitute a new world, a world
far more real to those who "live, move, and have their being"151 in it
than the earthly foundations on which it rests. Throughout the
centuries that follow, society continues to depend for its cohesion
and self-confidence primarily on the spiritual impulse that gave it
birth.
With the appearance of Bahá'u'lláh, the phenomenon has
recurred - this time on a scale that embraces the totality of the
earth's inhabitants. In the events of the twentieth century can be
seen the first stages of the universal transformation of
society set in motion by the Revelation of which Bahá'u'lláh wrote:
"I testify that no sooner had the First Word proceeded,
through the potency of Thy will and purpose, out of His mouth ... than
the whole creation was revolutionized, and all that are in the heavens
and all that are on earth were stirred to the depths. Through that
Word the realities of all created things were shaken, were divided,
separated, scattered, combined and reunited, disclosing, in both the
contingent world and the heavenly kingdom, entities of a new creation,
and revealing, in the unseen realms, the signs and tokens of Thy unity
and oneness."152
Shoghi Effendi describes this process of world unification as
the "Major Plan" of God, whose operation will continue, gathering
force and momentum, until the human race has been united in a global
society that has banished war and taken charge of its collective
destiny. What the struggles of the twentieth century achieved was the
fundamental change of direction the Divine purpose required. The
change is irreversible. There is no way back to an earlier state of
affairs, however greatly some elements of society may, from time to
time, be tempted to seek one.
The importance of the historic breakthrough that has thus
occurred is in no way minimized by recognition that the process has
barely begun. It must lead in time, as Shoghi Effendi has made clear,
to the spiritualization of human consciousness and the emergence of
the global civilization that will embody the Will of God. Merely to
state the goal is to acknowledge the great distance that the human
race has yet to traverse. It was against the most intense resistance
at every level of society, among governed and governors alike, that
the political, social and conceptual changes of the past hundred years
were achieved. Ultimately, they were accomplished only at the cost of
terrible suffering. It would be unrealistic to imagine that the
challenges lying ahead may not exact an even greater toll of a human
race that still seeks, by every means in its power, to avoid the
spiritual implications of the experience it is undergoing. Shoghi
Effendi's words on the consequences of this obduracy of heart and mind
make sober reading:
"Adversities unimaginably appalling, undreamed of crises and
upheavals, war, famine, and pestilence, might well combine to engrave
in the soul of an unheeding generation those truths and principles
which it has disdained to recognize and follow."153
*
Barely a third of the twentieth century had elapsed when the
Guardian summoned the followers of Bahá'u'lláh to a far deeper
understanding of the Cause itself than anything they had yet
appreciated. The Faith had reached the point, he said, when it was
"ceasing to designate itself a movement, a fellowship and the like",
designations which, although perhaps appropriate at a time when the
message was first being introduced to the West, now "did grave
injustice to its ever-unfolding system". Rejecting as adequate even
the term "religion" in its familiar sense, he pointed out that the
Faith was already:
"...visibly succeeding in demonstrating its claim and title to
be regarded as a World Religion, destined to attain, in the fullness
of time, the status of a world-embracing Commonwealth, which would be
at once the instrument and the guardian of the Most Great Peace
announced by its Author."154
As the century advanced, the same creative Force that was
awakening the generality of humankind to its oneness was progressively
releasing the powers inherent in the Cause and opening a new role for
it in human affairs. Over the first two decades of the century,
through the loving care of the Master, the spiritual and
administrative foundations necessary to Bahá'u'lláh's purpose were
established. On the base thus made available - during the thirty-six
years of his own ministry, and the subsequent six years during which
his Ten Year Crusade guided the community's efforts - Shoghi Effendi
devoted himself to refining the administrative instruments needed to
carry forward the Divine Plan. With the successful establishment in
1963 of the Universal House of Justice, the Bahá'ís of the
world set out on the first stage of a mission of long duration: the
spiritual empowerment of the whole body of humankind as the
protagonists of their own advancement. By the time the century ended,
this immense effort had brought into existence a community
representative of the diversity of the entire human race, unified in
its beliefs and allegiance, and committed to building a global society
that will reflect on earth the spiritual and moral vision of its
Founder.
This process was immeasurably strengthened in 1992 through the
long-awaited publication of a fully-annotated translation into English
of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, a repository of Divine guidance for the age of
humanity's collective maturity. A spreading circle of translations was
soon providing followers of the Faith around the world with direct
access to a Book which its Author has described as: "the Dayspring of
Divine knowledge, if ye be of them that understand, and the Dawning-
place of God's commandments, if ye be of those who comprehend."155
Apart from the soul's recognition of the Manifestation of God, nothing
awakens so great a sense of confidence and vitality in human
consciousness - both individual and collective - as does the force of
moral certitude. In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, laws that are basic to both
personal and community life have been reformulated in the context of a
society that embraces the whole range of human diversity. New laws and
concepts address the further needs of a human race that is entering on
its collective coming of age. "O peoples of the earth!", is
Bahá'u'lláh's appeal, "Cast away that which ye possess, and, on the
wings of detachment, soar beyond all created things. Thus biddeth you
the Lord of creation, the movement of Whose Pen hath revolutionized
the soul of mankind."156
A feature of the past hundred years of Bahá'í development that
should seize the attention of any observer is the Faith's success in
overcoming the attacks made on it. As had been the case during the
ministries of the Bab and Bahá'u'lláh, elements in society who either
resented the rise of the new religion or feared the principles it
teaches sought by every means in their power to suffocate it. Hardly a
decade of the past century did not witness attempts of this kind -
ranging from the bloody persecutions incited by Shi'ih clergy and the
shameless falsehoods concocted and spread by their Christian
counterparts, to systematic efforts at suppression by various
totalitarian regimes, and, finally, to violations of their commitment
to Bahá'u'lláh on the part of the insincere, the ambitious or the
malevolent among its professed adherents. By every human standard, the
Cause should have succumbed to a barrage of opposition without
parallel in recent history. Far from succumbing, it flourished. Its
reputation rose, its membership vastly increased, its influence spread
beyond the dreams of earlier generations of its followers. Persecution
served to galvanize its supporters' efforts. Calumny drove believers
to seek a more mature understanding of its history and teachings. And,
as both the Master and the Guardian had promised, violation of the
Covenant washed out of its ranks persons whose behaviour and attitudes
had dampened the faith of others and inhibited progress. If the Cause
could bring no other testimony to the powers that sustain it, this
succession of triumphs alone should suffice.
*
Three years before his passing, Shoghi Effendi took advantage
of the acquisition of the last plot of land needed for the erection of
the International Archives Building to describe for the Bahá'í world
the nature and significance of the building project on the slopes of
Mount Carmel that the Master had inaugurated and that he himself was
pursuing:
"These Edifices will, in the shape of a far-flung arc, and
following a harmonizing style of architecture, surround the resting-
places of the Greatest Holy Leaf ... of her Brother ... and of their
Mother.... The ultimate completion of this stupendous undertaking will
mark the culmination of the development of a world-wide divinely-
appointed Administrative Order whose beginnings may be traced as far
back as the concluding years of the Heroic Age of the Faith."157
The current stage of this ambitious enterprise was brought to
its successful conclusion in the final year of the century. An
outpouring of resources from believers throughout the world had
responded to the vision of Bahá'u'lláh for this sacred spot, announced
in His Tablet of Carmel: "Rejoice, for God hath in this day
established upon thee His throne, hath made thee the dawning-place of
His signs and the dayspring of the evidences of His Revelation." In
the complex of majestic buildings spread out along the Arc and the
flights of terraced gardens rising from the foot of the mountain to
its summit, the Cause whose influence had steadily expanded throughout
the world during the century of light emerged finally as a visible and
compelling presence. In the crowds of visitors from every land
thronging the stairs and pathways each day and the stream of
distinguished guests who are welcomed to the World Centre's reception
rooms, perceptive minds already sense the dawning fulfilment of the
vision recorded twenty-three hundred years ago by the prophet Isaiah:
"And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the
Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and
shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto
it."158
The Bahá'í Cause is distinguished above all else by its nature
as an uncompromised organic whole. Embodying the principle of unity
that lies at the heart of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation, this nature is the
sign of the presence of the indwelling Spirit that animates the Faith.
Alone among the religions of history - and despite repeated efforts to
break this unity - the Cause has successfully resisted the perennial
blight of schism and faction. The success of the community's teaching
work is assured by the fact that the instruments it uses were created
by the Revelation itself, that it was the Faith's Founders who
conceived the methods for the prosecution of its Divine Plan, and that
it was They who guided, in every significant detail, the launching of
the enterprise. During the twentieth century, through the efforts of
'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Guardian, Mount Carmel itself has become an
expression of this oneness of the Faith's being. In contrast to the
circumstances of other world religions, the spiritual and
administrative centres of the Cause are inseparably bound together in
this same spot on earth, its guiding institutions centred on the
Shrine of its martyred Prophet. For many visitors, even the harmony
that has been achieved in the variegated flowers, trees and shrubs of
the surrounding gardens seems to proclaim the ideal of unity in
diversity that they find attractive in the Faith's teachings.
Nothing so dramatically marked the conclusion of one hundred
years of achievement as an event that also plunged believers
the world over into deep sorrow. On 19 January 2000, a message from
the Universal House of Justice announced:
"In the early hours of this morning, the soul of Amatu'l-Bahá
Ruhiyyih Khanum, beloved consort of Shoghi Effendi and the Bahá'í
world's last remaining link with the family of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, was
released from the limitations of this earthly existence.... Her twenty
years of intimate association with Shoghi Effendi evoked from his pen
such accolades as "my helpmate', 'my shield', 'my tireless
collaborator in the arduous tasks I shoulder'...."
As the initial shock of grief began to lift, appreciation of
yet another of the inexhaustible bounties of Bahá'u'lláh gradually
took its place. To a figure whose long lifetime had spanned most of
the century - and whose indomitable spirit had sustained Bahá'í
struggles and sacrifices throughout its latter half - it had been
given to live and celebrate the magnificent victories to which she had
so magnificently contributed.
*
In calling on those who have recognized Him to share the
message of the Day of God with others, Bahá'u'lláh turns again to the
language of creation itself: "Every body calleth aloud for a soul.
Heavenly souls must needs quicken, with the breath of the Word of God,
the dead bodies with a fresh spirit."159 The principle is as true of
the collective life of humankind, 'Abdu'l-Bahá points out, as it is of
the lives of its individual members: "Material civilization is like
the body. No matter how infinitely graceful, elegant and beautiful it
may be, it is dead. Divine civilization is like the spirit, and the
body gets its life from the spirit...."160
In this compelling analogy is summed up the relationship
between the two historical developments that the Will of God propelled
forward along converging tracks during the century of light. Only a
person blind to the intellectual and social capacities latent in the
human race, and insensitive to humanity's desperate needs,
could fail to take deep satisfaction from the advances that society
has made during the past hundred years, and particularly from the
processes knitting together the earth's peoples and nations. How much
more are such achievements cherished by Bahá'ís, who see in them the
very Purpose of God. But this Body of humanity's material civilization
calls aloud, yearns more desperately with each passing day, for its
Soul. As with every great civilization in history, until it is so
animated, and its spiritual faculties awakened, it will find neither
peace, nor justice, nor a unity that rises above the level of
negotiation and compromise. Addressing the "elected representatives of
the people in every land", Bahá'u'lláh wrote:
"That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and
mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of
all its peoples in one universal Cause, one common Faith."161
It is not, therefore, in providing support, nor encouragement,
nor even example that the work of the Cause chiefly lies. The Bahá'í
community will go on contributing in every way possible to efforts
toward global unification and social betterment, but such
contributions are secondary to its purpose. Its purpose is to assist
the people of the world to open their minds and hearts to the one
Power that can fulfil their ultimate longing. There are none, except
those who have themselves awakened to the Revelation of God, who can
bring this help. There are none who can offer credible testimony to a
coming world of peace and justice but those who understand, however
dimly, the words with which the Voice of God summoned Bahá'u'lláh to
arise and undertake His mission:
"Canst thou discover any one but Me, O Pen, in this Day? What
hath become of the creation and the manifestations thereof? What of
the names and their kingdom? Whither are gone all created things,
whether seen or unseen? What of the hidden secrets of the universe and
its revelations? Lo, the entire creation hath passed away! Nothing
remaineth except My Face, the Ever-Abiding, the Resplendent, the All-
Glorious.
"This is the Day whereon naught can be seen except the
splendors of the Light that shineth from the face of Thy Lord, the
Gracious, the Most Bountiful. Verily, We have caused every soul
to expire by virtue of Our irresistible and all-subduing sovereignty.
We have, then, called into being a new creation, as a token of Our
grace unto men. I am, verily, the All-Bountiful, the Ancient of
Days."162 <146>
NOTES
1 Shoghi Effendi, Advent of Divine Justice (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1990), p. 81.
2 Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day is Come (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1996), p. 1.
3 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century,
1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), p. 584.
4 Leopold II, King of the Belgians, operated the colony as a
private preserve for some three decades (1877-1908). The atrocities
carried out under his misrule aroused international protest, and in
1908 he was compelled to surrender the territory to the administration
of the Belgian government.
5 The processes that brought about these changes are reviewed
in some detail by A. N. Wilson, et al., God's Funeral (London: John
Murray, 1999). In 1872, a book published by Winwood Reade under the
title The Martyrdom of Man (London: Pemberton Publishing, 1968), which
became something of a secular "Bible" in the early decades of the
twentieth century, expressed the confidence that "finally, men will
master the forces of Nature. They will become themselves architects of
systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man will then be perfect; he will
then be a creator; he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a
god." Cited by Anne Glyn-Jones, Holding up a Mirror: How Civilizations
Decline (London: Century, 1996), pp. 371-372.
6 Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Wilmette:
Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1997), p. 35, (section 15.6).
7 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization (Wilmette:
Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1990), p. 2.
8 Makatib-i-'Abdu'l-Bahá (Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá), vol. 4
(Tehran: Iran National Publishing Trust, 1965), pp. 132-134,
provisional translation.
9 ibid.
10 ibid.
11 The school was closed in 1934, by order of Reza Shah,
because it had observed Bahá'í Holy Days as religious holidays. The
closing of all other Bahá'í schools in Iran followed.
12 See The Bahá'í World, vol. XIV (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre,
1975), pp. 479-481, for history.
13 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh (Wilmette:
Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1991), p. 156.
14 "The outermost circle in this vast system, the visible
counterpart of the pivotal position conferred on the Herald of our
Faith, is none other than the entire planet. Within the heart of this
planet lies the 'Most Holy Land,' acclaimed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá as 'the
Nest of the Prophets' and which must be regarded as the center of the
world and the Qiblih of the nations. Within this Most Holy Land rises
the Mountain of God of immemorial sanctity, the Vineyard of the Lord,
the Retreat of Elijah, Whose return the Bab Himself symbolizes.
Reposing on the breast of this holy mountain are the extensive
properties permanently dedicated to, and constituting the sacred
precincts of, the Bab's holy Sepulcher. In the midst of these
properties, recognized as the international endowments of the Faith,
is situated the most holy court, an enclosure comprising gardens and
terraces which at once embellish, and lend a peculiar charm to, these
sacred precincts. Embosomed in these lovely and verdant surroundings
stands in all its exquisite beauty the mausoleum of the Bab, the shell
designed to preserve and adorn the original structure raised by
'Abdu'l-Bahá as the tomb of the Martyr-Herald of our Faith. Within
this shell is enshrined that Pearl of Great Price, the holy of holies,
those chambers which constitute the tomb itself, and which were
constructed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Within the heart of this holy of holies
is the tabernacle, the vault wherein reposes the most holy casket.
Within this vault rests the alabaster sarcophagus in which is
deposited that inestimable jewel, the Bab's holy dust." Shoghi
Effendi, Citadel of Faith (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1995),
pp. 95-96.
15 ibid., p. 95.
16 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing
Trust, 1995), p. 276.
17 H. M. Balyuzi, 'Abdu'l-Bahá: The Centre of the Covenant of
Bahá'u'lláh, 2nd ed. (Oxford: George Ronald, 1992), p. 136.
18 Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., pp.
254-255, (section 200.3). 19 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op.
cit., p. 258.
20 ibid., p. 259.
21 The Bahá'í Centenary, 1844-1944, compiled by the National
Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada
(Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Committee, 1944), pp. 140-141.
22 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., p. 280.
23 'Abdu'l-Bahá in London: Addresses and Notes of
Conversations (London: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1982), pp. 19-20.
24 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1993), p. 94.
25 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., pp. 281-282.
26 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace
(Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 121, provisional
retranslation.
27 Selections From the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., p.
106, (section 64.1).
28 ibid., p. 23, (section 7.2).
29 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, op.
cit., pp. 455-456.
30 Juliet Thompson, The Diary of Juliet Thompson (Los Angeles:
Kalimat Press, 1983), p. 313.
31 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., pp. 244-245.
32 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Canada (Forest: National Spiritual Assembly
of Canada, 1962), p. 51.
33 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Paris Talks, 12th ed. (London: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 64.
34 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth
Century, 1914-1991, op. cit., p. 23.
35 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh (Wilmette:
Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1983), p. 264, (section CXXV).
36 Edward R. Kantowicz, The Rage of Nations (Cambridge:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), p. 138. Kantowicz adds
that the total population loss for Europe was 48 million, including 15
million "swept away" because their run down health made them
vulnerable to the post-war influenza epidemic, and because of the
reduction caused by the steep drop in the birth rate consequent on
these disasters. Hobsbawm estimates that France lost almost twenty
percent of its men of military age, Britain lost one quarter of its
Oxford and Cambridge graduates who served in the army during the war,
while German losses reached 1.8 million or thirteen percent of their
military age population. (See Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The
Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, op. cit., p. 26).
37 President Wilson has been the subject of many biographies
over the years since his death. Three relatively recent biographies
are Louis Auchincloss, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Viking Penguin,
2000); A. Clements Kendrick, Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987); Thomas J. Knock, To En d
All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
38 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, op.
cit., p. 305.
39 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, op. cit., p. 32.
40 ibid., pp. 32-33.
41 As finally adopted, Article X of the Covenant of the League
did not require collective military intervention in cases of
aggression but merely stated that "...the Council shall advise upon
the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled."
42 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
pp. 29-30.
43 Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
44 ibid., p. 7.
45 Selections from the Writings of the Bab (Haifa: Bahá'í
World Centre, 1978), p. 56.
46 Bahá'u'lláh, The Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Most Holy Book
(Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1993), paragraph 88.
47 Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas
(Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1988), p. 13.
48 The citation made reference to the value of the Master's
"advice" to the British military authorities who were attempting to
restore civil life following the overthrow of the Turkish regime in
the area, adding that "all his influence has been for good". See
Moojan Momen, ed., The Babi and Bahá'í Religions, 1844-1944: Some
Contemporary Western Accounts (Oxford: George Ronald, 1981), p. 344.
49 The Bahá'í World, vol. XV (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre,
1976), p. 132.
50 Horace Holley, Religion for Mankind (London: George Ronald,
1956), pp. 243- 244.
51 Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1991), p. 11.
52 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., p. 326.
53 Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Administration (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1998), p. 15.
54 Although the "Christmas truce" involved principally British
and German soldiers, French and Belgian troops also participated: BBC
News, Online Network Summary of Brown, Malcolm and Shirley Seaton,
"Christmas Truce".
55 Ruhiyyih Rabbani, The Priceless Pearl (London: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1969), pp. 121, 123.
56 Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Administration, op. cit., pp. 187-
188, 194.
57 In case after case, the open misbehaviour of Shoghi
Effendi's brothers, sisters and cousins left him finally with no
alternative but to advise the Bahá'í world that these individuals had
violated the Covenant.
58 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 36.
59 ibid., pp. 42-43.
60 ibid., p. 202.
61 ibid., pp. 203-204.
62 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 203.
63 Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, op. cit., pp.
90, 19, 85.
64 Nabil-i-A'zam, The Dawn-Breakers: Nabil's Narrative of the
Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing
Trust, 1999), pp. 92-94.
65 Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Administration, op. cit., p. 52.
66 Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., pp.
85-86, (section 38.5).
67 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 4.
68 ibid., p. 19.
69 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit., p.
60, (section XXV).
70 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 19.
71 ibid., p. 144.
72 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., p. 26.
73 The Bahá'í World, vol. X (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing
Committee, 1949), pp. 142- 149, provides a detailed survey of the
expansion of the Cause up to the conclusion of the first Seven Year
Plan.
74 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Canada, 2nd ed. (Thornhill:
Bahá'í Canada Publications, 1999), p. 114.
75 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., p. 365.
76 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit., p.
200, (section XCIX).
77 Bahá'u'lláh, The Kitáb-i-Iqan (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing
Trust, 1983), p. 31.
78 "In Europe at the start of the twentieth century, most
people accepted the authority of morality.... [Then] reflective
Europeans were also able to believe in moral progress, and to see
human viciousness and barbarism as in retreat. At the end of the
century, it is hard to be confident either about the moral law or
about moral progress": Jonathon Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of
the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), p. 1. Glover's
study concentrates particularly on the rise and influence of twentieth
century ideologies.
79 Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day is Come, op. cit., pp.
185-186.
80 ibid.
81 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit., pp.
65-66, (section XXVII).
82 ibid., pp. 41-42, (section XVII).
83 Women: Extracts from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, 'Abdu'l-
Bahá, Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice, compiled by
the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice (Thornhill:
Bahá'í Canada Publications, 1986), p. 50.
84 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Committee, 1947), p. 28.
85 ibid., pp. 9, 10, 14, 22.
86 ibid., p. 28.
87 Ruhiyyih Rabbani, The Priceless Pearl, op. cit., p. 382.
88 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to America, op. cit., p. 53.
89 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 46.
90 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Canada, op. cit., p. 51.
91 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Promulgation of Universal Peace, op. cit., p.
377.
92 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Foundations of World Unity (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1979), p. 21.
93 Lester Bowles Pearson (1897-1972) was awarded the 1957
Nobel prize for peace for his formulation of international policy in
the period after World War II, particularly for his plan that led to
the establishment of the first United Nations' emergency force in the
Suez Canal in 1956, a response to the crisis created by the invasion
of Egypt by British and French military forces, acting in agreement
with those of Israel, following the seizure of the Suez Canal by
Egypt. The first formal vote of international sanctions against
aggression, taken in 1936 by the League of Nations, when Fascist Italy
invaded Ethiopia, was hailed by Shoghi Effendi as: "an event without
parallel in human history". (See Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of
Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit., p. 191.)
94 The three United Nations' Secretaries-General mentioned
were, in chronological order, Javier Perez de Cuellar (1982-1991),
Peru; Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992- 96), Egypt; Kofi Annan, (1997-
present), Ghana.
95 Anne Frank (1929-1945) - Jewish youth, victim of Nazi
genocide, captured in her family's hiding place in the Netherlands in
August 1944 and sent to the concentration camp at Belsen, where she
died a year later. Her diary was published in 1952 under the title The
Diary of a Young Girl and subsequently dramatized on the stage and in
film. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) - American clergyman and
Nobel laureate, one of the principal leaders of the American civil
rights movement, who was assassinated on 4 April 1968 in Memphis,
Tennessee. He is commemorated in the United States in a
national holiday on the third Monday of January. Paulo Freire (1921-
1997) - innovative Brazilian educator, whose pioneer work in adult
education won him international fame, but led to two periods of
imprisonment in his own country. Kiri Te Kanawa (1944- ) - Born in New
Zealand of Maori ancestry, and today one of the world's leading
operatic divas. Awarded the Order of Dame Commander of the British
Empire by H. M. Queen Elizabeth II, 1982. Gabriel Garcia Marques
(1928- ) - Colombian writer and novelist, winner of the Nobel prize
for literature in 1982, who was compelled to spend the 1960s and 1970s
in voluntary exile in Mexico and Spain to escape persecution in his
native land. Ravi Shankar (1920- ) - Indian composer and sitarist,
whose impressive talents and tours of Europe and North America
contributed to the awakening of interest in Indian music throughout
the West. Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov (1921-1989) - Russian nuclear
physicist, who abandoned scientific research to become the leading
spokesman for civil liberties in the Soviet Union, for which he was
awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, while suffering internal exile in
his own land. "Mother Teresa" (Agnes Gonxha Borjaxhiu, 1910-1997) -
Albanian born Roman Catholic nun, founder of the Missionaries of
Charity, whose self-sacrificing work on behalf of the poor, the
homeless and the dying in Calcutta won her the Nobel Peace Prize in
1979. Zhang Yimou (1951- ) - A leading director among China's "Fifth
Generation" film makers and winner of many professional awards for his
sensitive and visually stunning work.
96 The three new National Spiritual Assemblies were Canada,
which established a National Assembly separate from that of the United
States in 1948, and the Regional Assemblies of Central America and the
Antilles (1953) and South America (1953).
97 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Bahá'í World, 1950-1957
(Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1995), p. 41.
98 ibid., pp. 38-39.
99 Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., p. 13.
100 Under the leadership of two of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's half
brothers, Muhammad 'Ali and Badi'u'lláh, together with a cousin,
Majdi'd-Din, the group of Covenant-breakers who had long occupied the
Mansion at Bahji after the death of Bahá'u'lláh carried on an
unremitting campaign of attacks and machinations against both the
Master and the Guardian. Under the British Mandate, they had been
forced to evacuate the Mansion because of the neglect into which they
had allowed it to fall, thus permitting the Guardian to restore the
building and establish its status in the eyes of the civil authorities
as a Holy Place. Subsequently, Shoghi Effendi secured from the newly
established Israeli government recognition that the entire property
had this privileged character, and an official order was issued,
requiring the remaining Covenant-breakers to evacuate the unsightly
building that they still occupied next to the Mansion. When their
appeal to the Supreme Court against this judgement failed, the
eviction order was executed, the building demolished at the Guardian's
instructions, and the last obstacle to the beautification of the
property was successfully overcome.
101 Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas,
op. cit., p. 68.
102 Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., pp. 19-20.
103 A full account of the role played by the Hands of the
Cause during these critical years is provided by Amatu'l-Bahá Ruhiyyih
Khanum, Ministry of the Custodians (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 1997).
104 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 148.
105 Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., p. 20.
106 Universal House of Justice, Messages from the Universal
House of Justice, 1963-1986: The Third Epoch of the Formative Age
(Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1996), p. 14.
107 The subject is discussed in a number of places throughout
The Priceless Pearl, op. cit. See particularly pages 79, 85, 90, 128
and 159.
108 Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas,
op. cit., p. 69.
109 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, op. cit.,
pp. 96-97. 110 J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era: An
Introduction to the Bahá'í Faith, 5th rev. ed. (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1998), p. 250.
111 Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., p. 11.
112 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 8.
113 Bahá'u'lláh, The Kitáb-i-Aqdas, op. cit., paragraph 83.
114 Bahá'u'lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf (Wilmette:
Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1988), p. 14.
115 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
pp. 43, 195.
116 ibid., p. 24.
117 Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas,
op. cit., pp. 66-67.
118 Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, op. cit., p.
27.
119 The Establishment of the Universal House of Justice,
compiled by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice
(Oakham: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1984), p. 17.
120 Universal House of Justice, Messages from the Universal
House of Justice, 1963-1986: The Third Epoch of the Formative Age, op.
cit., p. 52.
121 ibid., p. 104.
122 Bahá'í News, no. 73, May 1933 (Wilmette: National
Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States), p. 7.
123 The Institute was created by the Universal House of
Justice in 1998 as an agency of the Bahá'í International Community,
reporting to the House of Justice through the Office of Public
Information. Its mandate describes it as an agency "dedicated to
researching both the spiritual and material underpinnings of human
knowledge and the processes of social advance."
124 The Centre's purpose is described as undertaking "research
in a systematic manner on the Bahá'í Faith, including its religious
culture, humanitarian spirit and religious ethics."
125 Cited in Star of the West, vol. 13, no. 7 (October 1922),
pp. 184-186.
126 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, op. cit., p. 54.
127 Beginning in approximately 1904, a learned Iranian
believer known as Sadru's-Sudur established the first teacher-training
class for Bahá'í youth in Tehran with 'Abdu'l-Bahá's encouragement.
The classes met daily, and the graduates, who had been trained in the
beliefs of other religions as well as various aspects of the Bahá'í
Faith, contributed greatly to the expansion and consolidation of the
Cause in their native land.
128 The model in question is the "Ruhi Institute", whose
materials and methods have been adopted by many Bahá'í communities
throughout the world. Its guiding philosophy is an integration of
service activities with focused study of the Bahá'í Writings
themselves. Organized as a series of levels of study, which form a
central "trunk" of basic understanding of the spiritual essentials
taught by Bahá'u'lláh, the system allows for the almost infinite
development by various user communities of branching subsets that
serve particular needs.
129 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., p. xiii.
130 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, op.
cit., pp. 43-44.
131 Moojan Momen, The Babi and Bahá'í Religions, 1844-1944:
Some Contemporary Western Accounts, op. cit., pp. 186-187.
132 The Bahá'í World, vol. XV, op. cit., pp. 29, 36.
133 The Bahá'í World, vol. IV (New York City: Bahá'í
Publishing Committee, 1933), pp. 257-261. Provides a short history of
the bureau's founding and operations.
134 The Bahá'í World, vol. III (New York City: Bahá'í
Publishing Committee, 1930), pp. 198-206. Contains the text of a
formal Petition to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League
from the Bahá'ís of Iraq, that summarizes the history of the case.
135 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, op. cit., p. 360.
136 The full text of the Declaration may be found in World
Order Magazine, April 1947, vol. XIII, No. 1.
137 The Bahá'í Question, Iran's Secret Blueprint for the
Destruction of a Religious Community, An Examination of the
Persecution of the Bahá'ís of Iran (New York: Bahá'í
International Community, 1999), prepared by the Bahá'í International
Community United Nations' Office for distribution to members of the
United Nations Human Rights Commission.
138 Excerpt from an address by Edward Granville Browne,
published in Religious Systems of the World: A Contribution to the
Study of Comparative Religion, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1892),
pp. 352-353.
139 During the nine years of its existence, the office was
responsible for settling an estimated 10,000 Iranian Bahá'í refugees
in twenty-seven countries.
140 To date, ninety-nine National Spiritual Assemblies have
received intensive training in the programme.
141 The Beijing Conference on Women would have permitted fifty
out of the two thousand non-governmental organizations involved to
present their statements orally. Because the Bahá'í International
Community had received this privilege at previous conferences, most
notably that in Rio de Janeiro on the environment and that in
Copenhagen on social and economic development, the Community's
representatives yielded the slot that had been accorded them, in
favour of the Moscow Centre for Gender Studies.
142 A full account, including the text of the decision of the
German Federal Constitutional Court, can be found in The Bahá'í World,
vol. XX (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 1998), pp. 571-606.
143 Sessăo Solene da Câmara Federal, Brasilia, 28 de Maio,
1992, (reprinted, with English translation by the National Spiritual
Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Brazil, 1992).
144 Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit.,
pp. 34-36, (section 15).
145 United Nations General Assembly, Fifty-Fourth Session,
Agenda Item 49 (b) United Nations Reform Measures and Proposals: the
Millennium Assembly of the United Nations, 8 August 2000, (Document
no. A/54/959), p. 2.
146 See Commitment to Global Peace, declaration of the
Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders,
presented to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 29 August 2000 during
a summit session at the UN General Assembly.
147 United Nations General Assembly, Fifty-Fourth Session,
Agenda Item 61 (b) The Millennium Assembly of the United Nations, 8
September 2000, (Document no. A/55/L.2), section 32.
148 The respective purposes of the three Millennium
gatherings, as well as the involvement of the Bahá'í community in
these meetings, were summarized in a letter from the Universal House
of Justice to all National Spiritual Assemblies dated 24 September
2000.
149 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 42.
150 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit., p.
297, (section CXXXVI).
151 Bahá'u'lláh, The Kitáb-i-Iqan, op. cit., p. 34.
152 Bahá'u'lláh, Prayers and Meditations (Wilmette: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1998), p. 295, (section CLXXVIII).
153 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit.,
p. 193.
154 ibid., p. 196.
155 Bahá'u'lláh, The Kitáb-i-Aqdas, op. cit., paragraph 186.
156 ibid., paragraph 54.
157 Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Bahá'í World, 1950-1957,
op. cit., p. 74.
158 Isaiah 2.2 Authorized (King James) Version.
159 Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, op. cit.,
pp. 82-83.
160 Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, op. cit., p.
317, (section 227.22).
161 The Proclamation of Bahá'u'lláh to the kings and leaders
of the world (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 1967), p. 67.
162 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, op. cit., pp.
29-30, (section XIV).
