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Summer 1982

World Order

Bahíyyih Khánum (1846-1932):

An Indelible Memory

A Senate Resolution

Holding Iran Responsible

The Bahá’í Era:

The First 138 Years

Nosratollah Rassekh

Beyond the Rag-and-Bone Shop

Alex Aronson

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 16, NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

Consultant in Poetry:

WILLIAM STAFFORD

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to Mail at Second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $12.00; 2 years, $22.00; single copes $3.00.

Copyright © 1982, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Bahíyyih Khánum (1846-1932): An Indelible

Memory Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 A Senate Resolution: Holding Iran Responsible

14 Water Ballet

poem by Joan Imig Taylor

14 Towards Harvest

poem by Bret Breneman

15 The Bahá’í Era: The First 138 Years

by Nosratollah Rassekh

60 Beyond the Rag-and-Bone Shop

book reviews by Alex Aronson

Inside back cover: Authors & Artists in This Issue

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Bahíyyih Khánum (1846-1932): An Indelible Memory

AMIDST THE TERROR unleashed against their coreligionists in Iran by an inveterate and cruel enemy, the Bahá’ís of the world commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahá’u’lláh’s daughter and one of the most outstanding figures in the annals of their Faith.

Born in 1846, Bahíyyih Khánum at the age of six witnessed the persecutions that virtually wiped out the leadership of the Bábí community. We can only guess at the intensity of her suffering when, together with her eight-year-old brother ‘Abbás, later to be known as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, she waited at the entrance to the infamous dungeon, the Síyyáh-Chál (Black Pit) for news of their imprisoned Father.

There followed more than fifty years of exile in Baghdad, Constantinople, Adrianople, and ‘Akká, an exile during which Bahíyyih Khánum shared Bahá’u’lláh’s and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s every trial. Neither prison nor hunger, neither threat nor betrayals could break her indomitable will or prevent her from rendering matchless services to the Cause.

In the declining years of her long and selfless life Bahíyyih Khánum played a leading role as the foremost supporter, closest friend, and most loyal coworker of Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Cause of God, who has paid her eloquent tribute:

It would take me too long to make even a brief allusion to those incidents of her life, each of which eloquently proclaims her as a daughter, worthy to inherit that priceless heritage bequeathed to her by Bahá’u’lláh. A purity of life that reflected itself in even the minutest details of her daily occupations and activities; a tenderness of heart that obliterated every distinction of creed, class and colour; a resignation and serenity that evoked to the mind the calm and heroic fortitude of the Báb; a natural fondness of flowers and children that was so characteristic of Bahá’u’lláh; an unaffected simplicity of manners; an extreme sociability which made her accessible to all; a generosity, a love, at once disinterested and undiscriminating, that reflected so clearly the attributes of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s character; a sweetness of temper; a cheerfulness that no amount of sorrow could becloud; a quiet and unassuming disposition that served to enhance a thousandfold the prestige of her exalted rank; a forgiving nature that instantly disarmed the most unyielding enemy—these rank among the outstanding attributes of a saintly life which history will acknowledge as having been endowed with a celestial potency that few of the heroes of the past possessed.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

Richard St. Barbe Baker

9 October 1889-8 June 1982

THE DEATH of Richard St. Barbe Baker on 8 June 1982 reminds us of his contributions to WORLD ORDER (Fall 1967, Winter 1968-69), made in the midst of his successful struggle to save the California redwoods from the incursion of a six-lane highway. His love affair with the trees began in 1920 when he became Assistant Conservator of Forests in Kenya.

The story of his founding of the Men of the Trees provides a beautiful example of a highly practical application of Bahá’í principles—a process we have learned to call “a spiritual solution to economic problems.” In an interview with Mr. St. Barbe Baker, published in The Ecologist in 1979 and reprinted in The CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, he described how an ecological survey being taken in the Sahara brought him to the work with which his name will forever be associated. In 1922 he learned that desertification had forced the local tribes to live in a small triangle of land still covered with forest. But because the forest, the means of livelihood, seemed doomed to extinction women “refused to bear children” and “the chiefs had forbidden marriage.”

Mr. St. Barbe Baker resolved that “such an appalling social and ecological disaster” would not overtake the Kenyans. His solution was not the Kenyan government, which did not have money for a massive reafforestation, but the people themselves. Since dances are extremely important to Kenyan life, he approached the local elders about having a dance for trees; he himself would present prizes for the best “turned out warrior” and the most beautiful woman. “They liked the idea,” Mr. St. Barbe Baker recalled, “and three weeks later three thousand people turned up for the first Dance of the Trees. That was the day I called for volunteers who would promise before the High God to plant so many trees each year and to take care of trees everywhere. The movement gradually grew until tribes who were suspicious or hostile began to exchange hospitality because they were all Men of the Trees. The name started as a nickname really because we were always planting trees.”

That was only the beginning of a career that took St. Barbe Baker all over the world, planting the trees and the ideas that are indispensable to the preservation of an environment hospitable to life. He died in his ninety-third year in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, still in the active pursuit of his noble goals. He was buried there, with services conducted by the local Bahá’ís at St. Andrew’s Chapel of the University of Saskatchewan.

It is probable that St. Barbe Baker’s heroic efforts have not been made in vain, but it is essential that the cause of the environment be carried forward with undiminished zeal by those whom he has inspired.

* * *

IN this issue of WORLD ORDER we come to yet another conclusion: the end of the trilogy of articles written by Professor Nosratollah Rassekh on the first 138 years of Christianity, Islám, and the [Page 5] Bahá’í Faith. We have remarked before on the fascinating parallels and differences that emerge in the three accounts. Now that we are able to publish the essay of the Bahá’í Faith, the world’s newest religion, we highly recommend that you turn back to the earlier issues and give yourself the pleasure of reading all three articles at the same time. “Christianity, A.D. 138” appeared in our Spring/ Summer 1980 issue, and “Islám: The First 138 Years” in our Fall 1980/Winter 1981 issue.

RE INTERFAITH DIALOGUE

William Collins’ “The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism: A Preliminary Survey” [Fall 1980/Winter 1981] is a model article in interfaith dialogue. One is struck by how clean the survey is; no reference is made to the embarrassing judgments pronounced by former Mormon Egyptologist J. D. Nelson on the integrity of The Pearl of Great Price, nor to the presence of a Spaulding manuscript in the original of the Book of Mormon. No matter how important source-critical analyses are for the academic study of any scripture, this does not warrant the mudslinging which so often follows new finds in the origin of the Book of Mormon. The recent symposium, Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels (ed. T. G. Madsen; BYU, 1978), is also a model, where non-Mormon and Mormon scholars alike worked conjointly to produce a scholarly monument to an important American religious phenomenon.

Perhaps the only real disappointment for Bahá’ís in Collins’ article is the absence of any discussions on the remarkable prophecies of Joseph Smith as to the time of the advent of Christ. One would have hoped to have seen this in the section on eschatology. The famous statement of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith Apr. 2, 1843, is doubtless familiar to Bahá’ís conversant with Mormon scriptures: “Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man” (D. & C. 130:15; D.H.C. V, 324). This prediction of Dec. 23, 1890, accords with Smith’s 1835 prediction of Feb. 14, 1981 (Documentary History of the Church II, 182). The best Mormon exposition of these prophecies in context was undertaken by R. L. Anderson, “Joseph Smith and the Millenarian Time Table,” Brigham Young University Studies, Vol. 3 (1963) 55-66.

Collins proposes that Bahá’ís focus on prophecy fulfillments in dialogue with Mormons. “The Bahá’í claim to attention from Mormons” might not rest so much on “fulfillment of the prophecies . . . of Christianity” as on the efforts of Bahá’ís to forge ties of genuine friendship with Mormons. “This is the best method,” wrote ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (The Individual and Teaching, p. 12).

Christopher Buck

BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON

Mr. Christopher Buck expresses a disappointment that my survey [“The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism,” Fall 1980/Winter 1981] did not deal with the “remarkable prophecies of Joseph Smith as to the time of the advent of Christ” of which he cites two examples. I think that perhaps I should make it clear that I avoided these very “prophecies” intentionally for a number of reasons:

1. The publications by Artemus Lamb and Kenneth D. Stephens which I mentioned in the article deal quite thoroughly with this subject, and I felt no need to cover this ground again.

2. Use of “proof texts” of this type from the Mormon Scriptures in order to support a claim to Mormonism’s fulfillment in the Bahá’í Faith may presuppose Bahá’í recognition of some kind of prophetic status for Joseph Smith.

3. Discussion of these particular texts was not really intended for inclusion within [Page 6] the scope of my article, which was basically a comparison of doctrines and a look at historical contacts. Bahá’í use of such “prophetic” or predictive texts from the Book of Mormon or Doctrine and Covenants has no authoritative basis in the Faith, as opposed to the interpretations of Biblical and Qur’anic texts which appear in the Writings of the Central Figures and the Guardian. Such use of Mormon verses which might be taken as prediction of the Faith falls under the footnote wherein I dealt with popular but unauthoritative Bahá’í notions about Mormonism.

4. One of the letters from Shoghi Effendi, which I quoted, states that “Joseph Smith we do not consider a Prophet, minor or otherwise. Certainly no references he made could have foretold the Coming of this Revelation in his capacity as a Prophet.” This statement contains a certain ambiguity. It could be understood to mean that some of Joseph Smith’s statements were predictive of the Faith, but that Joseph Smith did not make such predictions from the station of Prophethood. It could also be read to mean that Joseph Smith made no real prophecies about the Bahá’í Revelation.

5. Mormons have equally strong texts from their writings where Joseph Smith said that Christ would not come as “a man traveling on the earth” (D & C 49:22), and where he interpreted the verse about his living to 85 years old and seeing the Son of Man (D & C 130:15) to mean that it might signify the coming of Christ or that Joseph Smith would go to heaven to dwell with Christ. In order for Bahá’ís to deal effectively with Mormon prophetic texts as proof texts for the Faith, we must have authoritative interpretation of such texts. Such interpretation does not exist.

William P. Collins

HAIFA, ISRAEL

CRITICISM AND TONE

The sadness I felt upon reading in the Winter 1982 issue criticisms directed against two contributors made me wonder if some important Bahá’í principle had been overlooked, both by the one who made them and WORLD ORDER in deciding to print them. The standard I hope the editors will keep as their watchword for what they print is expressed in the following words by Bahá’u’lláh:

O people of God! I admonish you to observe courtesy. For above all else it is the prince of virtues. . . . Whoso is endued with courtesy hath indeed attained a sublime station. It is hoped that this Wronged One and everyone else may be enabled to acquire it, hold fast unto it, observe it, and fix our gaze upon it. This is a binding command which hath streamed forth from the Pen of the Most Great Name. (Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 88)

Show forbearance and benevolence and love to one another. Should any one among you be incapable of grasping a certain truth, or be striving to comprehend it, show forth, when conversing with him, a spirit of extreme kindliness and good-will. Help him to see and recognize the truth, without esteeming yourself to be, in the least, superior to him, or to be possessed of greater endowments. . . . (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 8)

Mr. Cole has presented valuable works for publication in WORLD ORDER, including one in the Winter issue in which he was so sharply criticized. In examining Mr. Cole’s assertion that Bahá’u’lláh “transformed Bábism from an eschatological protest movement,” I I think it important to note that Mr. Cole made this characterization of Bábism, and not the Revelation of the Báb. Somewhat similar characterizations of the Bábism of that period, it must be noted, can be found through a careful reading of God Passes By, pp. 114, 128, and 132 among others.

It is my hope that WORLD ORDER will refrain from printing personal attacks, and when criticisms are received that need to be expressed, but do not do it with warmth, courtesy, and kindliness, that you will return the letters to their authors with the request that they be rephrased so as to conform with Bahá’u’lláh’s “binding command.”

John D. Bohlig

Attorney at Law

NEW BRIGHTON, MINNESOTA

I would like to respond to the comments of Dr. Firooz Oskooi printed in your Winter 1982 Interchange column, concerning my article, “Muḥammad ‘Abduh and Rashíd Riḍá: A Dialogue on the Bahá’í Faith” (Spring/ Summer 1981). First, I am surprised to find [Page 7] a Bahá’í commentator stating that the piece “should have been thrown away.” This angry dismissal hardly evinces the “extreme kindliness and good-will” Bahá’u’lláh urged upon us when we wish to help someone understand a certain truth (Gleanings V). See also my translation of Mírzá Abú’l-Faḍl’s Miracles and Metaphors, pp. 84-88, for advice on how Bahá’í scholars should present their criticisms of one another.

Dr. Oskooi makes three basic points. He first of all objects to a paragraph in which I tried to set the Bábí and Bahá’í movements in their historical context. What I said was that the Bábí faith was an eschatological protest movement. This is true. It was eschatological in the sense that it proclaimed the coming of the last days, and it was a protest movement insofar as it protested the decadence of Shí‘ih Islamic practices in Iran in the nineteenth century. I then said that Bahá’u’lláh transformed this movement into a religion aimed at reforming world society. This is also true. And world society needed reform because of the changes caused by the scientific and industrial revolutions in Europe, changes that were affecting the believers in Turkey and Palestine very directly. Since much of the Bahá’í revelation came as answers to specific questions by believers, the crisis brought on by the new age meant that Bahá’u’lláh would naturally address these issues. Thus, we find in His Writings guidance on constitutionalism, parliamentary government, the distribution of wealth, education, and so forth. These are all issues that emerged with the coming of industrial civilization, and they will be with us for the millenium. Bahá’u’lláh presented solutions to these problems. Now what, I would like to know, does Dr. Oskooi object to in all this? Perhaps he feels that the Faith does not have an historical context. If so, he is welcome to his opinion, but it is certainly not one that could be formed by anyone who had deeply read such classics as A Traveler’s Narrative or God Passes By.

Second, he accused me of expanding and comparing the opinions of “obscure political activists.” Actually, I simply translated and introduced a conversation on the Faith between two extremely important modern Arab thinkers. In the Arab world, and indeed in the Islamic world as a whole, Muḥammad ‘Abduh is about as obscure as Tolstoy in Europe or Gandhi in India. The fact is that this man, whom Shoghi Effendi mentions in God Passes By as a devoted friend of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, became the Mufti of Egypt and instituted highly significant reforms in the al-Azhar University. That so preeminent a Muslim leader had so high an opinion of the Faith proves that even great Muslim leaders need not necessarily be its enemies, and helps demonstrate the wrong-headedness of the fundamentalists in the Middle East who are currently persecuting Bahá’ís. If Dr. Oskooi would read the books I cited by Hourani and Kerr, he would be relieved of his notion that my article dealt with obscure figures. Moreover, in all the voluminous literature on ‘Abduh and his movement that has been produced in Western languages, no one has ever before brought out his positive views on the Bahá’í Faith and his praise of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

Finally, Dr. Oskooi accused me of presenting “the East” through the eyes of the wrong people. However, I must reject the Orientalist notion that any American historian can “present the East.” Indeed, I must even question the existence of the “East” as a category (does it mean the Arab world, India, or China? Or all of these? In the latter case, what do they conceivably have in common, except that they are not Europe?) I was simply writing history, and the oneness of mankind as a principle should indicate that history is universal, that there is not one history of the East and another of the West. Moreover, the writing of history will not admit of the attitude that the “wrong people” should not be mentioned. History is reality as it occurred in the past, and as we can recover and interpret it; and some people have been important who were not very nice. We cannot on this account ignore them, though we are entitled to judge them severely. Totalitarian governments often rewrite history and delete as non-persons those they do not like; I should hope that Bahá’í historians will be more honest. I maintain that the piece I published is important for the eventual writing of a history of the Faith in Egypt, though I can understand that a medical doctor who is not a trained historian might have difficulty appreciating this. I must end with a plea for more tolerance and openmindedness among the friends who are not historians, in regard to the endeavor of writing history. This is one area where the independent and unfettered investigation of reality is a paramount duty.

Juan R. Cole

LUCKNOW, INDIA

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A Senate Resolution: Holding Iran Responsible

IN the Spring 1982 issue of World Order we published the testimony about the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran given on 25 May 1982 before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Organizations of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives. Since then the United States Senate has unanimously passed a resolution condemning the persecution of the Bahá’í community of Iran. The following is the text of the debate and the resolution as it appears in the Senate Congressional Record on 30 June 1982, on pages S 7658-62.—EDITOR

IRANIAN PERSECUTION OF THE BAHÁ’Í COMMUNITY

Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 636, Senate Concurrent Resolution 73.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The concurrent resolution will be stated by title.

The assistant legislative clerk read as follow:

A concurrent resolution (S Con. Res. 73) to condemn the Iranian persecution of the Bahá’í community.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection to the present consideration of the concurrent resolution?

Mr. ROBERT C. BYRD. There is no objection, Mr. President.

The Senate proceeded to consider the concurrent resolution, which had been reported from the Committee on Foreign Relations. ...

Mr. HEINZ. Mr. President, we are considering today a resolution which condemns the Iranian Government’s persecution of the Bahá’í community. The extensive murder and persecution currently inflicted by the Khomeini regime is an immoral and unjustifiable continuing denial of the most basic human rights—a denial which began with the opposition of the Islamic clergy over 135 years ago. The extent of the mistreatment presently being applied is so great that it demonstrates the urgency of the matter and the need for us to speak out forcefully. Passage of this resolution, Mr. President, will show the Congress’ concern and anger regarding this tragic situation.

The reported 113 executions of Bahá’í citizens during the past year only too vividly illustrates the extent to which the Khomeini government is attempting to exterminate the Bahá’í religion. On August 21, 1980 all nine members of the Bahá’í National Assembly were abducted along with two other officers of the faith by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Since that time they have not been found, and must be presumed dead. Eight members of the subsequent national assembly were also abducted by revolutionary guards and then secretly executed in Tehran. And in January 1982, six of the nine members of the Tehran Assembly were executed. That the leaders of the Bahá’í struggle for life and freedom are the primary victims of this persecution is by no means coincidental, for I believe that there is a conscious effort on the part of the Iranian Government to destroy the Bahá’í leadership, and thus cripple the entire community. It has become very hard, if not impossible, for the 300,000 Bahá’ís currently [Page 10] in Iran to live under the rule of the Khomeini regime.

On May 25, 1982, the chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, Judge James Nelson, testified before the House Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations. The following are some of the more disturbing examples of Iranian persecution during the past 3½ years as told by Mr. Nelson:

In Miandoab, a mob, after destroying the local Bahá’í center, fell upon a man and his son, dragged their bodies through the streets, and chopped them up into small pieces that were finally consigned to flames.

In Yazd, following the execution of seven Bahá’ís, including an 85 year-old man, the authorities presented their widows with bills to cover the cost of the bullets used to execute them.

In Tehran, the High Court of Justice upheld a verdict of the Shiraz Revolutionary Court that cited membership in Bahá’í Assemblies as crime punishable by death. Since this verdict more than 60 Bahá’í leaders have been executed.

In addition to these violent tragedies, the holiest shrine in Iran for the Bahá’ís and a place for pilgrimage for the Bahá’ís of the world, the house of Bab, was destroyed. Many other holy places, historic sites, and sacred writings have been confiscated and/or destroyed by government authorities. Even though the Bahá’ís community has lost many of its leaders, its shrines, and its sacred texts, it has not lost its spirit to survive. The Bahá’ís are not restless political revolutionaries but are people striving to hold on to their most fundamental human rights including the freedom of religion.

For many decades they have struggled against this unfair oppression alone, but now as their plight worsens, it is time for our support. As a nation committed to the human rights of all we cannot understand how a nation can inflict such torture and execution on members of their own community. Apparently, since the Bahá’í religion is not recognized under the Iranian constitution they are, as in the words of Mr. Nelson, “not entitled to protection under the law, and have no opportunity to defend themselves against false accusations.” No person or group deserves to be treated so inhumanly; however, the present evidence suggests that the Iranian Government will stop at no end in its efforts to wipe out the Bahá’í faith, and will continue to pursue a policy of violent oppression. As a nation committed to the human rights of all, we cannot tolerate a continuation of this injustice.

We have a responsibility to speak out on this matter, even though our relationship with the Government of Iran is, at best, strained. People of good conscience cannot ignore terror and murder, and perhaps by bringing it forcefully to the world’s attention we can in some way influence the course of events in Iran.

This resolution, I believe, will do just that. By expressing America’s concern and outrage over the Iranian Government’s inhuman treatment, we have the opportunity to bring to light the Bahá’ís’ struggle. Considering recent developments, outside pressure is a very important, if not vital, method of helping the Bahá’ís secure the basic human rights all people deserve. Iran should be held responsible for upholding the rights of all its citizens, including the Bahá’ís, and I hope this resolution will demonstrate to Iran, as well as the rest of the world, our commitment to human rights and our determination that other nations protect their most fundamental freedoms.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the testimony of James F. Nelson, chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 25 be printed at this point in the RECORD.

There being no objection, the testimony was ordered to be printed in the RECORD. . . . [The testimony of Judge James F. Nelson was published in the Spring 1982 issue of World Order—ED.]

[Page 11] • Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, among the first to feel the sting of harassment and persecution in postrevolutionary Iran were the Bahá’ís. More than 3 years ago Members of this body wrote to the Iranian Prime Minister expressing concern over the possibility of mistreatment of ethnic and religious minorities, the Bahá’ís among them, because “Our own forebears settled in this country seeking refuge from political persecution on account of religious beliefs. This deep historical experience has generated concern among Americans when it appears that the freedom to worship is threatened in this country or elsewhere.” Subsequent letters have expressed the same concern, and have sought reassurances following reports of destruction and confiscation of holy places, including the House of Bab in Shiraz, Bahá’í centers, sites and cemeteries. Recently there have been increasing reports of attacks on individuals, their families and homes.

These assurances sought have never been provided by the Government of Iran, and indeed the precarious situation of the Bahá’ís has worsened with the passage of time. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, acknowledging the situation in Iran, has adopted a policy which recognizes adherence to the Bahá’í faith by an Iranian national as likely cause for persecution in Iran and therefore as prima facie grounds for asylum in the United States.

Mr. President, Senate Concurrent Resolution 73 condemns Iranian oppression of the Bahá’ís and calls for an end to their harassment and persecution. Its message is urgent and I urge its adoption. •

• Mr. DENTON. Mr. President, I support Senate Concurrent Resolution 73, which condemns the persecution of the Bahá’í community in Iran.

The Bahá’ís are not a foreign element within Iran; they are an indigenous religious faith. Since the inception of their faith in the middle 1800’s, the Bahá’ís have lived in a climate of constant repression characterized by frequent outbreaks of violence and bloodshed. From its earliest days, the aims and purposes of the faith have been misrepresented in Iran, where it has been portrayed as a heretical sect, actively engaged in designs to overthrow Islam in its existing form.

Religious persecution against the Bahá’ís has become institutionalized in Iran. The omission of the Bahá’í minority from the new constitution intensifies the adverse effects of denying recognition of the Bahá’í faith as an independent religion. The result has been to enable fanatical and criminal elements within the country to mount violent attacks against the Bahá’ís and their property with almost complete assurance of impunity.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has implemented a liberal policy toward granting U.S. asylum to Iranian Bahá’ís who fear persecution if they return to Iran. The State Department regards the persecution of the Bahá’ís as the most serious case of religious persecution in the world, and the “Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1981,” submitted to the Congress, states:

The Bahá’ís whose religion is not recognized by the constitution, continue to be singled out for especially harsh treatment, with the number of executions reaching well over a hundred. These executions included the secret execution in December of eight of nine members of the national leadership of the Bahá’í community as well as some local Bahá’í leaders. In the case of some officially acknowledged executions of Bahá’ís, the main charges were, basically, their adherence to the Bahá’í faith.

Mr. President, there are approximately 650 members of the Bahá’í faith in Alabama. I want this statement to be my message of support, support for their right to practice the religion of their choice and support for the resolution of condemnation for the persecution of their fellows in Iran. •

Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I wish to speak in support of Senate Concurrent Resolution 73 which deplores the persecution of the followers of the Bahá’í faith by the authorities in Iran. The resolution condemns the persecution of the 300,000 Iranian Bahá’ís and urges the cessation of the [Page 12] discrimination and executions from which the Bahá’ís have suffered.

The persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran has a long history; however, it has greatly intensified since the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. The Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has heard moving testimony from several Bahá’í community leaders. This testimony outlined the gross violations of human rights to which the Bahá’ís have been subjected. The Bahá’í faith is neither recognized nor respected by the government; the Bahá’í people are virtually denied all legal rights. Their homes and shrines are pillaged, their property confiscated, and their people brutally murdered and the bodies mutilated. In fact, the High Court of Justice in Tehran declared that being a member of the Bahá’í faith was a crime punishable by death. The Department of State’s 1981 Report on Hu- man Rights states:

The Bahá’ís, whose religion is not recognized by the constitution, continue to be singled out for especially harsh treatment, with the number of executions reaching well over one hundred. These executions included the secret executions of December 1980 of eight of the nine members of the national leadership of the Bahá’í community, as well as some local Bahá’í leaders. In the case of some officially acknowledged executions of Bahá’ís, the main charges were, basically, their adherence to the Bahá’í faith.

As one who has long been committed to the cause of human rights in the world, I welcome the Senate’s action in taking up that cause again in the name of the Bahá’ís. The Iranian authorities have blatantly violated Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which they are a State Party. Article 18 states:

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. The right shall include freedom to have or adopt a religion or a belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, and teaching.

Amnesty International, the Human Rights Commission of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Switzerland, and other organizations and journals have documented and protested the inhumane treatment of the Bahá’í community in Iran. It is time the United States lent its strong support to the international appeals to the Iranian authorities to cease this brutal persecution of a peaceful people. In all cases where human rights are denied, we must not hesitate to denounce the violations and appeal for human justice. We cannot bear silent witness. We must speak out.

Mr. President, I am proud to cosponsor resolution 73 in defense of the Bahá’ís, and I urge my colleagues to support this call to human decency.

Mr. SASSER. Mr. President, as a cosponsor of Senate Concurrent Resolution 73, which condemns the Iranian persecution of the Bahá’í community, I want to commend my colleague Senator HEINZ for his leadership in bringing this matter to the attention of the full Senate. This is an issue that transcends national boundaries and sectarian interests. The cause of the continuing bloody assault by the Islamic regime in Iran against adherents of the Bahá’í faith is religious bigotry and hatred; those who have sought to destroy the Bahá’í faith make a practice of conjuring up accusations of political and criminal intentions on the part of the Bahá’ís in order to justify the campaign of murder and desecration that has continued for the 138-year history of the Bahá’í religion.

Senator HEINZ has submitted for the RECORD the testimony of Chairman James F. Nelson of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations. I would urge my colleagues to read Mr. Nelson’s remarks, for they tell the story not only of the origins of their faith in Iran through the prophet Bahá’u’lláh, but also of the lies and distortions that have been used over the years by Shiite clergy to discredit members of the Bahá’í community. The use of fabricated information to discredit members of a [Page 13] religion is not limited to this case or to Iran. The horrors the Bahá’ís have suffered in Iran are one particularly brutal and egregious example of what can happen when religious hatred is allowed to grow and flourish. In Iran, it is a matter of national policy to exterminate the followers of Bahá’u’lláh, people whose affront to Islam is to renounce holy war, polygamy, certain dietary laws and regulations concerning ritual purity, according to Mr. Nelson’s testimony. The pivotal principle of the Bahá’í faith is the unity of mankind, and a belief that the dialogue between God and man never stops.

Although there have been bursts of repression and murder in Iran against the Bahá’ís since the faith was founded there, the days since the coming to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini have seen the most organized and relentless effort yet to destroy the Bahá’í community. Their most holy shrines have been eradicated, their literature and artifacts confiscated and burned, and their people kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the hundreds.

The United States must not sit by while the systematic annihilation of the followers of the Bahá’í faith continues. To endure this in silence is an abrogation of our fundamental responsibilities as human beings and as a nation committed to individual liberty and religious freedom. If the reality of the potential loss of these freedoms seems too far away, I would refer my colleagues again to the testimony of James Nelson. He reports that on March 27 of this year:

The Bahá’ís of Morgantown, W.Va., were prevented from holding a prayer meeting when a group believed to be Iranian students threatened the management of the hotel in which the event was to have taken place. Similar incidents have occurred in Reno, Nev., and Minneapolis, Minn.

I urge immediate passage of Senate Concurrent Resolution 73 by the Senate, and continued expressions of outrage and concern by the U.S. Government and its citizens. This genocide must not go unchallenged.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the committee amendment.

The committee amendment was agreed to.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the concurrent resolution, as amended.

The concurrent resolution, as amended, was agreed to.

The preamble was agreed to.

The concurrent resolution (S. Con. Res. 73), as amended, with its preamble, reads as follows:

S. CON. RES. 73

Whereas the Bahá’í community in Iran is experiencing persecution, harassment and disappearances of family members, job discrimination, seizure of bank funds, destruction of personal property, and torture;

Whereas current reports show at least one hundred and thirteen executions of Bahá’ís and Bahá’í religious leaders by the Government of Iran; and

Whereas the continued harassment and murder of Bahá’ís demonstrates that the Government of Iran has launched a conscious effort to destroy the Bahá’í community: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate (The House of Representatives concurring), That the Congress of the United States condemns persecution of the Bahá’ís, holds the Government of Iran responsible for upholding the rights of all its citizens, including the Bahá’ís, and expresses the hope that the discrimination and brutal executions within the Bahá’í community cease immediately. The Congress urges the Iranian Government to take whatever means are necessary to end this extermination of law abiding citizens who only wish to worship in freedom.

Amend the title so as to read: “To condemn the Iranian persecution of the Bahá’í community.”

The title was amended so as to read: “A concurrent resolution to condemn the Iranian persecution of the Bahá’í community.”

Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the concurrent resolution was agreed to.

Mr. HEINZ. I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

[Page 14]

Water Ballet

The promise of life exists

wherever water collects

even in a pothole—

In the brief span that water

fills a desert-rock pool,

speck-size fairy shrimp

begin a ballet of death

a last fling at life,

dancing and mating—

finally to burrow deep in the sand

before the sun and wind

crumble its tiny victims—

but the larvae remain

the seed has been planted

to live again

when the water returns

on the first day

of the world.

—Joan Imig Taylor

---

Towards Harvest

Autumn comes, summer passes.

The rice lies swathed in swirls

Like wind-spent seaside grasses,

And the flag of harvest thus unfurls.

Kernels mass in the leaves of my heart.

What hand will briskly glean

These golden beads? For what mart?

And the husband sun remains unseen.

—Bret Breneman

[Page 15]

The Bahá’í Era: The First 138 Years

BY NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH

Dedicated to my beloved nephew, Farhang Maveddat, who together with more than one hundred other Persian Bahá’ís has given his life so that future generations may live in love and peace.

ON WEDNESDAY, the twenty-second day of May in the year 1844, a few hours before sunset, a young man only twenty-five years old was walking outside the gates of the city of Shíráz, a sleepy city some forty miles west of the ruins of magnificant Persepolis, the ancient ceremonial and religious capital of the Persian empire. As Mullá Ḥusayn walked, “his eyes fell suddenly upon a Youth of radiant countenance, who wore a green turban and who, advancing towards him, greeted him with a smile of loving welcome.” He was not certain who his Host was, and when he was asked by the young stranger to follow Him, Mullá Ḥusayn explained that his two companions had already arranged for his stay in the city. But he received once again a warm invitation to follow and was directed to commit his friends “‘to the care of God’” Who “‘will surely protect and watch over them.’”

Profoundly impressed by the gentle yet compelling manner in which the stranger spoke, Mullá Ḥusayn recalled later, he followed the young man to a modest residence in an obscure corner of Shíráz. After the two had jointly offered their evening prayer, they began to talk about the Qá’im, the promised Mihdí whose reappearance after a thousand years of absence, the Shí’ite Muslims expected to herald the new age. It was this search for the “hidden Imám—the twelfth successor of the Prophet—that had brought Mullá Ḥusayn to Shíráz. One can only imagine the sense of bewilderment that must have overwhelmed him when, in the course of the evening conversation, his Host remarked that He was the Qá’im:

“by the righteousness of God! it behoves, in this day, the peoples and nations of both the East and the West to hasten to this threshold, and here seek to obtain the reviving grace of the Merciful. Whoso hesitates will indeed be in grievous loss. Do not the peoples of the earth testify that the fundamental purpose of their creation is the knowledge and adoration of God? It behoves them to arise, as earnestly and spontaneously as you have arisen, and to seek with determination and constancy their promised Beloved.”

The visitor looked at his Host, the twenty-five-year-old merchant of Shíráz, Siyyid ‘Alí-Muḥammad, and realized that his search was over. “No record,” Shoghi Effendi wrote, “has passed to posterity of that unique night save the fragmentary but highly illuminating account that fell from the lips of Mullá Ḥusayn.” But the exact moment of this revelation was recorded by both participants as two hours and eleven minutes after sunset. “‘This Night,’” claimed Siyyid ‘Alí-Muḥammad, [Page 16] “‘this very hour will, in the days to come, be celebrated as one of the greatest and most significant of all festivals.’” For He was the Báb, or gate, through Whom humanity was to enter a new era.

Thus, in that quiet night in Shíráz, the Báb, assuming “the exclusive right of annulling the whole Qur’ánic Dispensation,” inaugurated the most turbulent period of the heroic age of a new divine dispensation. The sleeping city was not “remotely aware of the import of the conversation” or the significance of “the interview itself” that “was protracted till the hour of dawn.” But at the moment that Mullá Ḥusayn confessed his acceptance of the Báb’s announcement, the age of religious provinciality had come to an end. It was the dawn of a new day. A new world order had begun, and humanity was being ushered into the most glorious chapter of its spiritual history.

It is significant that this new Faith came from the darkest corner of the world that it was to illumine. In 1844 Persia was in eclipse. Nothing but a memory was left of its magnificent culture. Politically and economically bankrupt, the country was but a pawn in the hands of European diplomats. Its people, as Shoghi Effendi characterized them, “were the most decadent race in the civilized world, grossly ignorant, savage, cruel, steeped in prejudice, servile in their submission to an almost deified hierarchy, recalling in their abjectness the Israelites of Egypt in the days of Moses, in their fanaticism the Jews in the days of Jesus, and in their perversity the idolators of Arabia in the days of Muḥammad.” But it was out of this element that the young Prophet of Shíráz intended to create a new race of men, uplift them morally and spiritually, and make them the “champion builders” of a new civilization. Shoghi Effendi wrote that

Only a close and unbiased observer of the manner and habits of the Persian people, already familiar with the prevailing tendencies of different sections of the population, such as their apathy and indolence, the absence of a sense of public duty and of loyalty to principle, the lack of concerted effort and constancy in action, the habit of secrecy and blind surrender to the capricious will of an ignorant and fanatical clergy, can truly estimate the immensity of the task that face[d] every conscientious believer in that land.

But in the course of the next 138 years such a phenomenon, indeed, was to occur; and to those who accepted the claim of the Báb, that May day in the year 1844 signified the inauguration of a divinely sanctioned universal order. To them, it was the year one of the newest religious cycle in the history of man.

The Triumph and the Agony of Western Civilization

The world on the verge of its catastrophe was very brilliant. Nations and Empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasure of the long peace. . . . The old world in its sunset was fair to see.

—Winston Churchill

[Page 17] “‘L’Europe,’ a celebrated writer has recently said, ‘fait aujourd’-hui pitié à l’homme d’esprit et horreur à l’homme vertueux.’” “Europe today causes an intelligent man to feel sorrow, a virtuous man horror.”

—From a letter of Prince Metternich to Tsar Alexander I

15 December 1820

The Eighteenth Century: The Age of Hope. In 1844 Western civilization seemed triimphant everywhere. Economically, scientifically, technologically, and intellectually it led the world; its political and military dominance was evident in all parts of the globe.

The golden age of Islamic civilization (the eighth through the thirteenth centuries) was long over. Islam had bequeathed to Europe its magnificent legacy (in science, literature, art, architecture, philosophy, and even methods of warfare) and had helped to bring about the great European revival of learning. It was in Europe that a new, dynamic but secular civilization had been created, a civilization whose tempo had greatly accelerated since the end of the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century was the age of exploration. Europeans discovered a new continent —America; rounded the Cape of Good Hope; established trading posts and military bases in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean; and sent merchants and missionaries to China and Japan and the Indies. In the process they helped themselves to the riches found along their routes and at their destinations. The material foundation of Western civilization was firmly secured in that century.

The seventeenth century in European history is known as the century of genius. Modern science was born in that age. The traditional outlook of Medieval Christianity concerning the universe was radically altered, and the old value system critically challenged. Copernicus, who died in 1543, had concluded by mathematical calculation that the sun was the center of the universe, but that was still a hypothesis. Galileo (1564-1642) in 1609 built a telescope and observed that the moon was not luminous, that heavenly bodies were of the same substance as the earth, and that the earth itself, a heavenly body, revolved around the sun. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) discovered that the time a planet takes to orbit around the sun varies proportionately with its distance from the sun: the square of the time is proportional to the cube of the distance. Isaac Newton in 1687 brought Kepler’s law of planetary motion and Galileo’s law of terrestrial motion together, demonstrating that the two were in fact aspects of the same law. His law of gravity explained in a simple mathematical formula the hitherto impenetrable mystery of how the universe was held together.

Robert Boyle (1627-91), the son of an Irish earl, discovered that under compression the volume of gas is inversely proportional to the amount of pressure—a law that still bears his name. William Harvey (1578-1657), physician to King Charles I, argued that the human heart was a pump that drove the blood through a single circulatory system. The Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) made a microscope that enabled him to discover tiny organisms— red blood cells, bacteria, protozoa, and spermatozoa. Employing a barometer, a Frenchman, Blaise Pascal (1623-62) proved that what we term “air pressure” diminished as altitude increased and went on to explode the old adage “Nature abhors a vacuum” by showing that a vacuum is possible. René Descartes (1596-1650) invented analytic geometry, developed a theory of light, explored physiology and psychology, and found in mathematics and the new physics a philosophical methodology that well fitted the intellectual climate of the era. His division of the world into mind and matter enabled him to say that the material world was the proper sphere of scientific investigation unhampered by religious interference. He thus made one of the most influential attempts to determine the place of religion relative to science.

[Page 18] A scientific academy had been established in Rome in 1603, but it was the creation of the English Royal Society under Charles II in 1662, the French Academy of Science under Louis XIV and Jean Baptiste Colbert in 1666, and the Philosophical Society in Massachusetts in 1683 that heralded the triumph of science. Their publications brought the scientific world closer together and made the scientists aware of the latest discoveries in various fields.

The great scientific discoveries and achievements of the seventeenth century had a profound effect on the mental outlook of Western man. Until the middle of the seventeenth century Western civilization had been basically a Christian civilization. There had not been a scientific challenge to Christian concepts of faith. Suddenly, the revolution in sciences severed the ties binding the West to its Christian past and articulated the basic precepts of the modern secular world view. It preached that nothing should be accepted uncritically on the basis of authority, tradition, or revelation and chose reason and experience as the best guides to correct belief.

The faith that had led the English prelate Archbishop Usher, in the time of Cromwell, to designate, with laudable precision, Friday, 28 October 4004 B.C. as the day of the creation of all the terrestrial animals and of the appearance of Adam and Eve (before the end of the day) could never be recaptured universally.

In 1678 a French priest, Richard Simon, published a pioneering work of Biblical criticism —Critical History of the Old Testament. In it he claimed that much of that sacred book was based on medieval manuscripts, many of which were of unknown origin and suffered from errors in copying. One of the profound biblical critics, Baruch Spinoza (1637-77), called for the elimination of all traditional beliefs and all organized religions and expressed his disbelief in miracles and the supernatural. God, he believed, had no existence aside from the world.

The discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and, above all, Newton had encouraged the general belief that there were no mysteries that human intellect could not resolve. By the eighteenth century the secularization of European society had begun in earnest. “Reason” was the only infallible guide to knowledge. The “Universe” was a machine: matter in perpetual motion, without a beginning and without an end, governed by inflexible laws that no miracle could override. There was no “revealed knowledge.” The world opened up its secrets through reason; it was capable of being understood and not merely admired.

It is no wonder that the intellectuals of the century called their age the Age of Enlightenment, an “enlightenment” that meant the rejection of any supernatural explanation of the universe. To some, institutionalized religions appeared as instruments of exploitation, devised, as Voltaire explained, by scoundrels to prey on the ignorance of the masses. “The first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.”

By the end of the eighteenth century it looked as though the rationalists were going to dismantle heaven totally. But a group of intellectuals took a stand in favor of deism, which recognized God as the builder of the universe but not its repairman.

From the very beginning, however, the cause of deism seemed to be self-defeating. Denying deity any emotional or spiritual characteristics, its basic appeal was to human [Page 19] reason. But, as Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach (1723-89) stated with impeccable logic, why use the word God if after all what one really meant was Nature? Nature did exist: this was the datum of experience. Why not accept it and not try to account for its existence? Everything predicated of God by deists could be predicated equally of Nature, without calling upon the notion of an extraneous God to account for it. Holbach was the first of the true scientific atheists.

As the Age of Reason dethroned or denied God, it glorified humanity. The prophets of the age, the philosophers—mostly publicists, economists, political theorists, and social reformers —in unison sang hymns in praise of man. They proclaimed that man’s perfectibility was the end toward which history moved. Perhaps no one better summarized the optimism of the age than the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94), one of the most historically minded among the philosophers, who set forth a theory of perfectibility through the steady accumulation of knowledge and the triumph of reason. In his remarkable book The Progress of the Human Mind, all the characteristic assumptions of the century were effectively summarized. Condorcet represented most typically the philosophic spirit—l’esprit philosophique— that had replaced Providence with the new trinity of Nature, Reason, and Humanity and expressed the unbounded optimism that was the trademark of the age.

If man can predict, almost with certainty, those appearances of which he understands the laws; if, even when the laws are unknown to him, experience of the past enables him to foresee, with considerable probability, future appearances; why should we suppose it a chimerical undertaking to delineate with some degree of truth, the picture of the future destiny of mankind from the results of its history? The only foundation of faith in the natural sciences is the principle, that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the universe, are regular and constant; and why should this principle, applicable to the other operations of nature, be less true when applied to the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man?

Will not every nation one day arrive at the state of civilization attained by those people who are most enlightened, most free, most exempt from prejudices as the French, for instance, and the Anglo-Americans? Will not the slavery of countries subject to kings, the barbarity of African tribes, and the ignorance of savages gradually vanish? Is there upon the face of the globe a single spot the inhabitants of which are condemned by nature never to enjoy liberty, never to exercise their reason?

This secular millennium was certain to come about:

There is, doubtless, no individual that does not perceive how very remote from us will be this period: but must it not arrive one day? . . . And who shall presume to foretell to what perfection the art of [Page 20] converting the elements of life into substances fitted for our use may, in a progression of ages, be brought?

As knowledge accumulates, each generation becomes more enlightened than the one before; and as human intellects unlock more of the universe’s secrets, others become less mysterious. So progress goes on.

There arose a craze for collecting in the form of dictionaries and encyclopaedias all the knowledge that was available and for synthesizing whole fields of knowledge. The most ambitious project was the thirty-three volume French Encyclopédie that was begun in 1741 and took thirty years to complete. Its editor, Denis Diderot (1713-84), was a prominent spokesman for the Enlightenment. Among the 160 contributors were many leading intellectuals of the age, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condorcet.

The new industrial machines and the details of their operation were illustrated in elaborate plates that filled eleven volumes. Most of these encyclopaedias, however, were sold clandestinely, since the emphasis was strongly anticlerical, and many of the authors poked fun not only at Christian ideas but at all the knowledge accepted by conservatives in all realms of inquiry and thus attracted the displeasure of the authorities.

With high hopes and unbounded optimism as the eighteenth century came to its end, the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment anticipated the establishment of peace, prosperity, and progress during the course of the coming century. The Industrial Revolution was expected to lay the material foundation for this millennium.

The Industrial Revolution. In 1844 England was in the midst of a most remarkable industrial change, and plans had already been drawn for the construction in London of the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” the first of many “world’s fairs.” It was to be opened by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851 and was intended to demonstrate to the world that Great Britain had become its workshop. The setting itself was a marvel of engineering. The Crystal Palace was a structure of iron and glass that stretched like a mammoth greenhouse for more than a third of a mile in Hyde Park.

Some historians today question the accuracy of the term “industrial revolution.” The phrase, which first appeared in the 1830s, counted Thomas Carlyle and the French revolutionary socialist Jérôme Adolphe Blanqui (1798-1854) among its first users. But one fact is indisputable. By the 1840s industrialization in England had become a continuous process of change at an ever-accelerating pace. More and more machines began to displace human and animal power in the various processes of manufacture. A century before, the work of the world was done by hand tools, and power was supplied by human or animal muscles, reinforced by levers or pulleys and supplemented by the force of running water or moving air. It is true that the principle of the water wheel had been known for centuries, as had that of the windmill. As long as industry had to rely on water and wind, however, it had to be located where these were available.

James Watt’s steam engine (1775) and Henry Cort’s puddling (1784) provided a new method of powering machines that made possible the use of coal in iron manufacture and thus sharply reduced the cost of the production of machinery. Two years later Cort invented the rolling mill for the manufacture of sheet iron. His achievements revolutionized the industry.

Few inventions have had greater influence upon history than the steam engine. The steam engine could be used wherever there was fuel, and the fuel could be brought to the factory by land or water. With no dependence on fixed locations, industry moved to the towns and exploited their reserves of labor; the factory system became the stepchild of the union. To build the new engine bar iron had to be made in greater quantities, [Page 21] and more coal had to be mined. Transportation had to be improved to bring fuel and raw materials to the factories and deliver the finished products to the market.

Before 1800 mines had used railways on which wagons with flanged wheels, drawn by horses, carried coals to canals or to the sea. In the 1820s steam engines were successfully placed on moving vehicles. The first satisfactory locomotive was George Stephenson’s Rocket, which in 1829 sped from Manchester to Liverpool at sixteen miles per hour. The railway boom was on. In eight years the British had built 500 miles of railroads. By 1870 they had 15,500 miles.

Along with the steam train came the steam boat. Steam engines were successfully used to propel river boats, notably on the Hudson in 1806 by Robert Fulton, who employed a Boulton-Watt engine. By mid-century railroads and steam boats had revolutionized domestic and foreign trade. In Canada and the United States the new transportation permitted massive colonization and settlement by immigrants from Europe who poured, in ever-increasing numbers, into the Americas from about 1840 until the first World War. Between 1850 and 1910 ocean tonnage increased twelvefold for Great Britain and over thirtyfold for Germany. Travel time and cost were radically reduced by the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the Panama Canal in 1914.

A more dramatic lowering of the barriers of distance, however, occurred in communication. Samuel F. B. Morse, one of America’s foremost portrait painters, was forced by poverty to foresake his brush. After prolonged disappointments he finally secured from the Congress a sum of $30,000 for an experiment. In 1844 he strung a wire from Washington to Baltimore and sent the message: “What hath God wrought?” demonstrating that electricity could provide virtually instantaneous communication.

Seven years later (1851) came the first submarine cable, under the British Channel. In 1858 the wealthy New York paper manufacturer, Cyrus Field, succeeded, after several unsuccessful attempts, to lay a cable between Newfoundland and Iceland. New York City celebrated the occasion with a two-day cable carnival, and Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged congratulatory notes. Unfortunately, after three weeks and several hundred messages the cable broke down, but by 1866 the first transatlantic cable had finally become operable.

After 1844 a bewildering array of discoveries piled one on top of another, giving promise that science could offer man an unlimited horizon of possibilities for communication. In 1877 Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) invented the telephone. In 1895 Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) transmitted a message for a mile on electromagnetic waves, inaugurating the era of wireless telegraphy only fifty years after the invention of the telegraph. Thomas Edison (1847-1931) patented over a thousand inventions, including the phonograph (1877), the first motion picture machine (1887), and sound moving pictures (1904). Nikolaus Otto (1832-91) produced the first internal combustion engine in 1876. A few years later Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) adapted that engine to the use of gasoline instead of natural gas, and Karl Benz equipped it with an electric spark to ignite the fuel. It was the dawn of the motorized age. In 1903 the Wright brothers used a gasoline motor to propel the first successful airplane.

Thus as the nineteenth century came to a close, the barriers of distance had been sharply reduced. There was instantaneous communication between the farthest reaches of the globe. Physically, the earth had become one entity, ensuring that in the course of the coming century no group would be able to exist anywhere in total isolation.

[Page 22] The Nineteenth Century: The Age of “Isms.” In 1844, as the British were preparing for the opening of the Crystal Palace Exposition, they had a right to be proud of their economic dominance. It was evident everywhere: on the teeming London docks, in the mushrooming factory and mining cities of the Midlands and Scotland, and in the thriving financial houses of their capital. But already in 1844 the darker side of the new economic order was also becoming manifest. Social disorder had followed the changing economic relationships. The traditional feudal bonds that had maintained some social cohesiveness for over a thousand years were breaking down, and the industrial revolution allowed no time for new arrangements to replace the old.

An urban civilization was emerging, and cities were witnessing a population explosion with which they could not cope. Manchester, which in 1772 had a population of 25,000, in 1844 had one of 455,000. It had become the first industrial city of our time. Its factories needed, primarily, unskilled labor, of which there was no shortage. The agricultural revolution that had preceded the industrial revolution had helped to commercialize farms, and the lords of the manors had no more need for the services of hundreds of thousands of peasants. The uprooted farmers moved to the cities by the thousands in search of jobs. As the cities’ populations grew by leaps and bounds, so increased land value. Houses were built in every passageway and in every conceivable nook and cranny. Most tenements had no running water. Lack of ventilation intensified the stench of garbage and excrement; and though it can be argued that the poor housing and unsanitary conditions owed more to obsolete government regulations than to capitalistic exploitation, the ugliness and the misery of slums, nevertheless, exceeded anything theretofore known.

It was an even greater tragedy that in every industrial city thousands could not find or afford even such housing. In 1850 in Manchester some 15,000 people lived in cellars. In Liverpool 39,000 lived in 7,800 cellars and another 86,000 in 2,400 courtyards. Often, as whole families were forced to live in single rooms, the effect on family life and morals was lamentable.

On the night of 15 March 1844 a Tory Member of Parliament from Dorsetshire, Lord Ashley, in an emotional speech appealed to his peers to do something about the crisis. He had come to the House of Commons armed with sets of impressive statistics. He reminded his colleagues that “in 1818, the total number of all ages and both sexes employed in all the cotton factories, was 57,323. In 1835, the number employed in the five departments—cotton, woolen, worsted, flax, and silk was 354,684.” But by 1839 the number in the same five departments had increased to 419,000, of whom 192,887 were under the age of eighteen.

Commenting on the condition of female employment, Lord Ashley pointed out that in 1835 of the 354,684 workers 196,383 were women, and well over half of them were under the age of eighteen. “The proportion in each department stood, females in cotton 56¼%; ditto worsted, 69½% ditto, ditto silk, 70½% ditto, ditto flax 70½% ditto.” Women, he argued, could not function properly as mothers, and neither could men carry on the responsibility of the household “because the men can discharge at [Page 23] home no one of the especial duties that Providence has assigned to the female. . . .” There were few who could work after they had reached the age of forty. Citing the statistics from certain mills in Stockport and Manchester he pointed out that for the year 1839, out of 22,094 mill workers only 143 were above the age of forty-five, “and of those, sixteen were retained by special favor, and one was doing boy’s work. . . .”

Lord Ashley was not the first reformer to see how the factory system and mill towns were uprooting the British socioeconomic order. Early in the 1830s a group of reformers had agitated for social reforms and had gathered significant data on the horrible working conditions. In 1832 a Parliamentary committee was appointed to investigate child abuse in factories. Its celebrated report brought national attention to the tragic issue, prompting the Factory Act of 1833, which marked the end of unrestricted laissez-faire in England. Still the flagrant abuse of the new factory-capitalistic system was discernible in every factory town and urban center.

If in 1844 Lord Ashley by his appeal to the conscience of the nation hoped to correct the industrial abuses peacefully, there was another significant social critic who saw nothing but a violent end to the old order. Friedrich Engels, the son of a prosperous cotton-textile manufacturer from the Rhineland, had been sent by his father to England in 1842 to work in the office of the family factory in Manchester. By 1844 he had surveyed the conditions of the workingmen and had come to the conclusion that the new industrial system was creating a new slavery.

The only difference between the old-fashioned slavery and the new is that while the former was openly acknowledged, the latter is disguised. . . . (the worker) is sold piecemeal by the day, the week, or the years. Moreover he is not sold by one owner to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this fashion. He is not the slave of a single individual, but the whole capitalist class. His real masters . . . can discard him at any moment and leave him to starve, if they have no further use for his service and no further interest in his survival.

But unlike Lord Ashley, Engels believed that the wrath of the worker, rather than the conscience of the employer, would soon lead to a revolution, “compared with which the French Revolution and the year 1794 will seem like child’s play.” Violence, he saw as an integral and unescapable aspect of the new system.

As the agrarian-commercial civilization of yesterday was being transformed into the industrial-technological civilization of tomorrow, almost all the traditional bonds were breaking down. Indeed, the revolutions that shook Europe in 1848 indicated that the strain of change had become too much to bear for the established order. In 1848 almost every European nation experienced a violent crisis, and though the revolutions did not turn out the way their instigators [Page 24] had hoped, every country did undergo a profound transformation during the next generation. “Kings have to calculate the chances of their very existence in the immediate future,” Metternich had warned Czar Alexander I in 1820. “[P]assions are let loose, and league together to overthrow everything which society respects as the basis of its existence; religion, public morality, laws, customs, rights and duties all are attacked, confounded, overthrown, or called in question. . . .” The warning had become a prophecy. Competing groups were developing their own ideologies and hoped to become the standard bearers of the new order. Never in history had beliefs and ideas been produced in such profusion, so carefully thought out, and so systematically classified and given definite names. The nineteenth century was indeed the “Age of Isms.” Of the multitude of ideological packages that emerged from the era none had more profound effect on history than socialism, nationalism, and relativism.

The Challenge of Socialism. Claude Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) was among the first Europeans to recognize that the feudal world had come to its end. He claimed that the days when the aristocracy provided men of importance were gone forever and that the future belonged to those who controlled industry and could convert their technological and managerial talents and knowledge into power. In 1819 he speculated that if France suddenly lost fifty of its best mechanical engineers, architects, doctors, bankers, and so on—“the most useful to their country”—the nation would become a lifeless corpse. Then he turned to another intriguing assumption:

Suppose that France preserves all the men of genius that she possesses in the sciences, fine arts and professions, but has the misfortune to lose in the same day Monsieur the King’s brother (and many other members of the royal family). Suppose that France loses at the same time all the great officers of the royal household, all the councillors of state, all the chief magistrates, marshals, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, vicars-general, judges, and in addition ten thousand of the richest proprietors who live in the style of nobles.

This mischance would certainly distress the French, because they are kind-hearted. . . . But this loss of thirty-thousand individuals, considered to be the most important in the State, would only grieve them for purely sentimental reasons and would result in no political evil for the State.

These suppositions underline the most important fact of present politics: . . . that our social organization is seriously defective. . . .

The scientists, artists, and artisans, the only men whose work is of positive utility to society, and cost it practically nothing, are kept down by the princes and other rulers who are simply more or less incapable bureaucrats. Those who control honours and other national awards owe, in general, the supremacy they enjoy, to the accident of birth, to flattery, intrigue and other dubious methods. . . .

These suppositions show that society is a world which is upside down.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, European society was, in fact, becoming upside down. The two social classes that formed the backbone of the new industrial society were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Industrialists, promoters of every kind, managers, bankers were joining the already established capitalists to form the modern middle class—the bourgeoisie. Factory workers, mill hands, miners, and all sorts of other [Page 25] recruits who swelled the ranks of wage-earning laborers were now classified as the proletariat. Rapid industrialization thoroughly strengthened the middle class. By the beginning of the twentieth century its ascendancy seemed secure everywhere. It was the bourgeoisie that built museums, patronized the arts, and encouraged scientific research. They were the ones who controlled politics, set social mores, and in some cases directed the course of European diplomacy.

But the rule of the bourgeoisie was not accepted without challenge. Engels had in 1844 predicted its early demise. It is ironic that the first attempts to awaken the social consciousness of the proletariat and encourage, or force, it collectively to demand its proper recognition in the new society came not from the working men but from the intellectuals representing middle or upper classes. It was Karl Marx, another bourgeois intellectual, who in collaboration with Engels made socialism assume its most extreme form—revolutionary communism.

Marx was born in 1818, son of a well-to-do German Jewish family. He attended the University of Berlin where, like many other young university students, he rebelled against the conservatism of his society. In 1843, at the age of twenty-five, he was expelled from Germany because of his radical writings and found refuge in Paris. There he came in contact and conflict with some French socialists, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1807-65), Louis Blanc (1811-82), and the Saint-Simonians, as well as the Scotsman Robert Owen (1771-1858). In 1847 he joined a secret workingmen’s society, the Communist League. A year later, in collaboration with Engels, he wrote the Communist Manifesto as a program for that group. During the 1848 revolution Marx returned to Germany, but he was again forced into exile and in 1849 settled in London, where he lived, for the most part in dreadful poverty, until his death in 1883. The Communist Manifesto was the most famous single document from Marx’s pen, though the first volume of his monumental study of political economy, Das Kapital, published almost twenty years later (1867), with great depth and intensity expounded and reaffirmed the ideas set forth in the Manifesto.

Marx was a great synthesizer as well as an original thinker. He accepted most of the ideas of the Enlightenment and believed in progress and human perfectibility. His intellectual godfathers were Adam Smith and Georg Friedrich Hegel. From Smith he borrowed the idea that the value of goods is determined by the amount of labor that enters into their manufacture. The “surplus” value, according to Marx, is the difference between the “labor value” and the “market value,” which the capitalist claimed as his own and which, he argued, was the lifeblood as well as the fatal cancer of the capitalist system.

Hegel’s influence was much more profound. By the time Marx arrived at the University of Berlin, Hegel had been dead for five years, but the stamp of the great philosopher was still very discernible in that center of learning. Marx associated himself with a group known as the “Left Hegelians” and was thoroughly enchanted by the master’s theory of dialectics. Hegel conceived of history as a great organism in which each epoch was characterized by a ruling spirit or idea. History itself was the record of human efforts to attain the “good,” which, in turn, was the unfolding of God’s plan for the world. And “good” he believed was “God. God governs the world: the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.”

History according to Hegel, however, was a dialectical process—that is, a series of conflicts. In each epoch the ruling spirit (“the thesis”) has inherent in it its own contradiction (“the antithesis”), or a challenge to the old order. As a result of the conflict between [Page 26] the two a new spirit, which was no mere compromise between the two, emerges. This new spirit he called the “synthesis,” a new and better epoch, another step toward a better world. The “synthesis” in turn breaks down, as it has now become the new thesis, with its own “antithesis.” Thus history goes on, and man moves step by step closer toward that final triumph of freedom and reason.

Marx substituted the conflict of class for the Hegelian conflict of ideas. To him the material, not the idea, determined the course of the social, political, and intellectual process of life. He believed in “economic determinism.” History, indeed, was a dialectical process, but a dialectic of conflicts between antagonistic groups, and the class struggle was bound to produce one final, total upheaval that would cause the permanent triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.

“The modern bourgeois society,” Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppressions, new forms of struggle in place of old ones.” Its rise was an historical necessity, for the bourgeoisie had a part to play in history: to destroy the outdated feudal system.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility. . . . the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

But the bourgeoisie digs its own grave and “forges the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.”

The triumph of the proletariat and the destruction of the bourgeoisie, Marx prophesized, will bring about the advent of a classless society. Yet, since “state” is nothing but an instrument of oppression, in a classless society such an instrument of exploitation will be superfluous, and thus the “state” will wither away. In the final victory of the working class history will achieve its final “synthesis,” and the dialectical process will cease to operate in its historical form.

Marx believed that his examination of the past was thoroughly objective and open to empirical verification. Thus he called his brand of socialism “scientific” and not “utopian.” Engels remarked at Marx’s funeral that he had done for the social sciences what Darwin had done for biology.

The vast intellectual edifice that Marx built perhaps was, as some of his critics have called it, “a monstrous fraud.” The fact is that from the very beginning there was dissension among the socialists. Some questioned the possibility of maintaining international proletarian solidarity when the development [Page 27] of socialism itself was so profoundly affected by the cultural, industrial, political, and historical character of the nation in which it grew. In 1863 Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) founded the General Worker’s Association in Germany, the first organized German socialist party—but with the aim of gaining control of the government by democratic means. In England, Marx’s home for thirty-four years, his doctrine never appealed deeply to the British temperament. There Sidney Webb (1859-1947), George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), and some other intellectuals formed the Fabian Society in 1883, the nucleus of the future Labour Party that advocated peaceful and democratic means for the attainment of socialist goals.

On the left side of the socialist spectrum were the Anarchists, followers of the Russian Michael Bakunin (1814-76), who argued that, if the best government is no government at all, one should not wait. The Anarchists prescribed terrorism and extensive violence, particularly aimed at heads of state, as the most effective way for bringing about political chaos and facilitating social collapse. In the span of a quarter of a century they assassinated an Italian king, a Belgian queen, and two presidents—Carnot of France and McKinley of the United States.

There were also the Syndicalists, such as Georges Sorel (1847-1922), whose aim was the destruction of the state through the destruction of machinery or factories or anything that would help to bring death to the capitalistic system. It is remarkable that this radical movement won control of France’s largest labor union, the Confédération Générale du Travail before the first World War and was influential in the trade union movements in Spain, Italy, and some other countries.

But of all these various social reform movements none had the general appeal of Marxian socialism. Perhaps one reason was Marx’s call for immediate and systematic social action that, he explained, was in harmony with, and not contrary to, the trend of history. Like a prophet, Marx was predicting the course of the future, and his followers did believe that his gospel would supplant all others. Philosophers of the past had tried to explain the world. Here was one philosopher who wanted to change it: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. . . . Workingmen of all countries, unite!”

Before 1848 there had been class antagonism. In their Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels declared class warfare. The threat of a violent confrontation between socialism and capitalism became and has remained a characteristic part of contemporary civilization, and 134 years later it still provides the ideological justification for the cold war that, in a very real sense, has brought humanity to the brink of a nuclear holocaust.

The Triumph of Nationalism. If the Marxians and all the other varieties of socialists were dividing the world horizontally (between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie), nationalism separated mankind vertically. It was during the course of the nineteenth century that nationalism grew from a vague sentiment into a veritable cult. None of the intellectual giants of the Age of Enlightenment could have even conceived that it was the destiny of Europe to be split into national states, with boundaries to be decided primarily by linguistic and cultural ties and each in intense competition with one another. Before the nineteenth century the nation-state was a dynastic entity rather than a state of people. Europe’s response to the Napoleonic wars helped to make nationalism even more than a condition of geography. It became a state of mind. As the religious force of Christianity faded, nationalism found a fertile ground in the Romantic landscape of Europe and provided [Page 28] a substance that could fill Europe’s spiritual void. More people were willing to sacrifice for the glory of the flag than for the honor of the Cross. Nationalism developed its new rituals and symbolism, composed its own hymns, and created its own high priests.

One of those high priests, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), the great leader of Italian nationalism, in a series of essays written between 1844 and 1852, argued that, though the unification of humanity was God’s ultimate plan, the perfection of nationalism was the first step.

Your first Duties—first, at least, in importance, are, as I have told you, to Humanity. . . .

The individual is too weak and Humanity too vast. . . . But God gave you this means when he gave you a Country, when, like a wise overseer of labour, who distributes the different parts of the work according to capacity of the workmen, he divided Humanity into distinct groups upon the face of our globe, and thus planted the seeds of nations. . . . Without Country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the People. You are the bastards of Humanity, Soldiers without a banner. Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection, none will be sureties for you.

Maurice Barrès (1862-1923), an outstanding French nationalist, defined “integral nationalism” as the identification of the individual spirit with the national past and of individual life with that of the nation:

Our soil gives us a discipline, for we are the continuation of our dead. That is the reality on which we should build. . . .

The dead! What would a man mean to himself if he stood only by himself? When each of us looks backward he sees an endless train of mysteries whose recent embodiment is called France. We are the product of a collective being which speaks to us. Let the influence of the ancestors be enduring and the sons will be vigorous and upright, and the nation one. . . . In vain does the foreigner in naturalization, swear that we will think and live as a Frenchman: in vain has he found interests with ours, blood persists in following the order of nature against all vows, against all laws. . . .

Nationalism expressed itself not only in political terms but also in art, literature, philosophy, and even music. Historians began to collect and publish public documents and wrote long accounts of their country’s past. If written records were lacking or inadequate, myths and ballads were assembled to “reveal” national character. Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) collected German fairy tales that had passed from one generation to another for exactly such a purpose. Novelists, composers, poets, painters, and other creative artists based much of their work on historical or mythical subjects. In this manner the Romantic’s love for the past was combined with the patriot’s search for tradition. Unfortunately, this cultural awakening caused further separations between nations. As the nations began to look more inward, they became less sensitive to the common bonds that held the family of man together. In fact, the passions of nationalism often were further inflamed by the fuel of hatred of other nations, or groups, or races. With the possible exception of religious bigotry, no other force in history had manipulated the destructive nature of man as successfully as that of nationalism. Its challenge to human dignity, intelligence, and good will is as real today as it was a century and a half ago.

[Page 29] The Rise of Relativism. As socialism and nationalism by the mid-nineteenth century undermined the ideological foundation of the old order, new scientific discoveries and speculations also challenged the Victorians’ confidence in an essentially stable world with absolute values and permanent physical matter.

Geology in England, it is said, had become the favorite outdoor sport of the landed upper-class. The British were fascinated by the subject, and their geological discoveries through the eighteenth century began more and more to focus attention on the appearance and disappearance of species over a very long period of time and to cause a revolution in the conception of the age of the earth. In 1785 James Hutton published his significant study Theory of the Earth, in which he proposed his uniformitarian hypothesis.

The Frenchman Jean Lamarck (1744-1829) published in 1809 his work on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He argued that an animal subject to changes in its environment acquires new habits that are reflected in structural changes. The structural changes are then transmitted to the offspring with the result that, after a series of generations, a new species of animal is produced. But it was in 1844 that the Scottish publicist Robert Chambers proposed his sensational theory of biological evolution. He lacked adequate data, however, and it was left for Charles Darwin to provide the evidence that fundamentally challenged the traditional concepts of the cosmos, man, and nature.

Darwin, who was born in 1809, came from a line of physicians. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been a pioneer evolutionist. Charles also studied medicine and then prepared at Cambridge University for theology; but in 1831 he obtained an appointment as a naturalist without pay on H.M.S. Beagle, which was to go on a scientific expedition around the world. The Beagle’s voyage lasted five years. Upon his return Darwin served as secretary of the Geological Society and was in close association with Charles Lyell (1797-1875), whose revolutionary book Principles of Geology (1830-33) had emphasized the immensity of geological time and the principle of uniformity of nature. In the 1830s Darwin read Malthus’ Essay on Population and was deeply impressed by the author’s theory that throughout the world of nature more are born than can survive, that food supplies cannot meet the needs of an expanding population, and that, consequently, the weaker must, and will, perish in the struggle for food. Illness forced Darwin to retire to the county seat at Down where he experimented further with plants and collected data. After almost twenty years he presented his epoch work The Origin of Species (published in 1859). Here in his own words are the essential principles of his theory:

I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified, during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favorable variations, aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts, and in an unimportant manner, that is in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously.

Darwin explained that man and other forms of animal life were descended from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. He also held forth the possibility that all plant and animal life had a common ancestor.

It was not, however, until Darwin published his Descent of Man in 1871 that he theorized that man had sprung from some [Page 30] ape-like ancestor long since extinct but probably a common forebear of the existing anthropoid apes and man. Thus the Spinozian concept that humanity was a kingdom within a kingdom and excluded from the laws of the wider universe was replaced by the belief that a fundamental continuity existed between the various aspects of human life and the rest of nature.

The significance of Darwin’s work was that he had done far more than collect data for evolution. He had offered a theory for the evolutionary process that provided an explanation of change. His conclusion that there was “natural selection” through the survival and propagation of the fittest, and variations in the struggle for existence, cast aside the eighteenth-century belief in a harmonious and mechanical universe. It was inevitable that his hypothesis would cause a profound intellectual and moral crisis for his generation and for generations to come. Copernicus and Galileo had demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe, created to be the abode of divinely created man. On this tiny planet, Darwin now concluded, man was in no way unique but was just another species that had evolved from lower forms of life and thus by nature was not free to divorce himself completely from his animal instinct and become totally a creature of reason and moral freedom. As one of our contemporary historians has pointed out, Darwin’s hypothesis had

undermined faith in the concept of regularity and equilibrium, which Newtonian physics had suggested as axioms for scientific and social thought. How could one predict results in an evolutionary process where fortuitous variations defied the application of fixed rules? Natural selection, too, supported the claims of the new school of geologists that the earth’s age must be counted in many millions of years, for evolution by means of chance variations took eons of time. . . . Darwin’s hypothesis was revolutionary also in that it challenged the doctrine of creation by design.

The traditional concepts concerning the nature of man were also thoroughly challenged by the new theories advanced by psychologists. Psychology had been considered a minor branch of philosophy and reserved for deductive philosophical speculation. In 1873 a German, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), published his Principles of Physiological Psychology, which suggested that the human mind should be studied by the same laboratory methods as physiology. The Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) in 1904 won a Nobel Prize for his theories and experiments on conditioned reflexes. The American William James also contributed significantly to the emergence of psychology as a significant and independent field of study.

None, however, did more to change the traditional concepts concerning the human mind than Sigmund Freud. The existence in the mind of an “ego” and, in a sense, the “super-ego” had been recognized since the Age of Enlightenment. But Freud added the “id”—the belief that man was governed as much by the unconscious mind as by reflective thinking. He and his disciples argued that reasoning is only the tip of the iceberg and emphasized the role of irrational and unconscious drives. Much of human thought, according to Freudians, is only rationalization. It is thinking that not the reality principle but the “id” dictates, and the “id” contained not only a sex instinct but also a destructive instinct. Man was not a gentle and loving creature but one who possessed a powerful measure of desire for aggression. Hence “reasoning” could not get directly to the “id”; only the slow process of psychoanalysis might accomplish the task. The Enlightenment’s faith that the rationality of man was the prerequisite to his perfection and happiness was seriously challenged. How could man, this bundle of unsocial or antisocial [Page 31] drives, create a harmonious community?

As Freud explored man’s inner life, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) extended his vision toward the limits of the universe and concluded that both space and time were cross sections of “space-time”—that “time” was the fourth dimension—and theorized that a “curved” universe made possible the eventual return of light waves to their starting point. The distinction between energy and matter, between animate and inanimate objects became blurred. The theory of relativity “replaced the earlier belief in inexorable natural laws that determine all events according to cause and effect by a system of thought in which events took place in accordance with the laws of statistical probability—that is, in more or less random fashion. The concepts of cause and effect, certainty, and the absolute, which underlay so much nineteenth century thought, no longer appeared either certain or absolute.”

The Europeanization of the World. Ideologically, as it has been pointed out, the eighteenth century had been the age of hope and optimism; the nineteenth century, that of controversy and “isms.” But the remarkable scientific, technical, and material advances that had begun in Europe in the seventeenth century accelerated in each of the next two centuries and propelled its civilization outward. By 1900, Europeans had taken their world with them to the heartlands of the Americas and Australia, divided Africa among themselves, and brought much of Asia and the Muslim world under their influence. Between 1875 and 1900 four-fifths of Africa was taken over by European states. Great Britain added 4,500,000 square miles to its empire; France 3,500,000; Germany 1,000,000; Belgium 900,000; Russia 500,000; Italy 185,000; and the United States 125,000. A fourth of the population of the world lived as colonies of the West and many more in its spheres of influence.

Industrialization had caused a population explosion in Europe. In 1650 it is estimated that Europeans constituted about one-fifth of the world’s population. A century later the fraction was almost the same. But by 1850 Europeans accounted for over a fourth of the world’s population and by 1950 for almost a third. By sheer weight of growing numbers Europeans and their civilization began to exert increasing influence after 1800. As their numbers increased, millions of Europeans migrated throughout the world, taking their civilization with them, and in the process of doing so creating a new form of imperialism.

Past imperial systems—whether African, Asian, native American, or European—had all tended to integrate their victims into larger sociocultural units. But they all, after having conquered their neighbors (most of whom were similar in race, if not in language and culture), had lost their energies along the marches, leaving the so-called barbarian peoples relatively free from domination and not absorbed, administratively. With the expansion of Europe, however, the picture had changed. “For the first time in world history,” Elliot Skinner has written, “an expanding imperial people came into violent contact with populations that differed from them in about every way: race, language, and culture. Moreover, this expanding population had the technical means to conquer, control, and influence all of the peoples of the world.” Arnold Toynbee believed that the impact of Western civilization upon all the other living societies of the world of that day was the great event of the twentieth century:

[Page 32]

They will say of this impact that it was so powerful and so pervasive that it turned the lives of all of its victims upside down and inside out—affecting the behavior, outlook, feelings, and beliefs of individual men, women, and children in an intimate way, touching chords in human souls that are not touched by mere external material forces—however ponderous and terrifying.

Yet the fact remains that, while the West conquered, controlled, and influenced “all of the peoples of the world” and “turned the lives of all of its victims upside down and inside out,” it had no spiritual force to regulate human conduct on the physically universalized earth. By its scientific, technological, and economic achievements the West had laid the material foundation for an emerging global civilization. But its once powerful, cohesive spiritual force, Christianity, had been gravely weakened by the challenges of materialism, nationalism, and relativism, and its moral resilience was exhausted by continued doctrinal controversies and disputes—and neither could nor did quench the spiritual thirst of the non-Christian world.

It is not that Christians had not tried to impart their religion to the “unbelievers” or to enforce it, if they could. The explorers and the conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were zealous missionaries who saw the hand of God in their discoveries and conquests; where they set their feet, they also set the Cross. The civilization that was to grow daily more materialistic did not lack missionary enthusiasm. The Romantic movement was accompanied by a widespread religious revival. But it was during the first half of the nineteenth century that a new religious awakening spread throughout Western and Central Europe and the United States. The main reason for this second “great awakening” was the strong conviction among Protestants in particular that the millennium was at hand and that Christ’s return was imminent. There was nothing new in such belief. The return of Christ had been predicted by some as early as the moment of His crucifixion. But never in the past was the return more widely expected than at the the beginning of the nineteenth century, and never in the past had the general assumption so deeply prevailed that the Second Coming would follow rather than precede the conversion of the world to Christianity. That explains the magnitude of the missionary effort.

Americans in particular, with their youthful energy and ideological commitment, were to cross the oceans to find souls ready to accept Christ as their Lord. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1819 sent its first two young missionaries, Pliny Fisk and Leni Parsons, to the Ottoman Empire. From New England, the Puritan heartland, hundreds of dedicated souls went to Hawaii, China, and Japan. By the middle of the century American missionaries were on their way to Africa and other distant parts of the world. The national support these missionary enterprises received [Page 33]

[Page 34] was also an impressive reminder that American isolationism did not extend to its cultural relations; because Americans had such a strong conviction that their civilization was superior to all others, they had no hesitation in exporting features of their ideology along with fish, wheat, and rum. But Americans were not alone. The British, the Germans, the Dutch, the French, and many other Europeans joined the great missionary enterprise.

The revolutionary improvements in communication and transportation and technological changes further facilitated the expansion of missionaries. Priests, clergymen, lay brothers, laymen, nuns, and Protestant women went to the far reaches of three continents in search of souls ready to accept the Gospel. Though some ten million persons were converted to Christianity in Africa and Asia during that century, the bulk of the nations remained indifferent, if not hostile to the efforts at Christianization.

Missionaries’ efforts to convert the world, on the whole, proved to be a failure.

The failure is not hard to explain. If over the 1,900 years of its existence Christianity had failed to provide harmony among its own adherents, how could it be expected to bring about reconciliation among the multitude of diverse spiritual outlooks of the world? Religious controversies had marked the entire course of the Christian dispensation; and the Reformation, in particular, had unleashed such fanaticism and caused such bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants that it had irrevocably sapped its spiritual vitality. As Arnold Toynbee observed:

(A) quarter of a millennium of religious toleration, has, after all, not availed to rehabilitate the West’s ancestral religion for the moral discredit brought upon it by the Wars of Religion; and the corrosive effects of this moral discredit have been reinforced by the intellectual skepticism that the triumph of the scientific outlook has brought with it.

The Protestants, though theologically more flexible than Catholics, were divided, lacked cohesion, and often competed among themselves in their missionary endeavors. The Catholic Church at first tried to take refuge in the past. During the era of conservatism associated with the age of Metternich (1815-48) it was not only the European monarchy and the aristocracy that appealed to tradition and order against the new forces unleashed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The Church was as active in combatting change as the secular leadership. Pope Pius IX (Pontif, 1846-78) undaunted by the revolutions of 1848 issued, on 8 December 1864, his Syllabus of the Principal Errors of Our Time in which he rejected many social theories and institutions that were not consecrated by centuries of tradition. He criticized the influence of modernism on ecclesiastical life and condemned liberalism, individualism, secularism, materialism, agnosticism, nationalism, pantheism, naturalism, rationalism, and anticlericalism, among other things. The pope claimed for the Church the control of culture, science, and education, while denying to other creeds freedom of religion, conscience, and worship. In 1870 the Vatican Council, the first General Church Council since the Reformation, proclaimed that the pope by virtue of his apostolic power was infallible when he spoke ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. Finally, he had triumphed over the bishops and the council of the Church. Yet only two months later the papal states ceased to [Page 35] exist, and Rome was incorporated into the Italian Kingdom, which soon announced the separation of Church and state.

Another significant explanation of the failure of Christianity to bring the whole world under its own banner has been supplied by Horace Holley, a Bahá’í scholar, who pointed out that Christianity functions in terms of the individual, not in terms of society. Christ possessed that “unique property of desocializing the individual and making him, for the time being, an elemental and eternal soul.” Hence Christianity worked for individuals with undiminished success; “its failure . . . consist[ed] in its lack of a social control.”

If Christianity’s lack of success in unifying humanity has been singled out, it is because Christianity was the religion of the new conquerors. The emerging global civilization had created challenges that no other traditional religion could have succeeded in meeting either. “The tenets of Christianity and those of other living higher religions,” Toynbee observed, “are incompatible in their traditional form with the scientific vision of the nature of the Universe.” “It seems improbable,” he concluded, “that, in this traditional form, they can ever recapture their former hold on hearts and minds; and, if this were possible, surely it would not be desirable.” Scientific, technological, and ideological revolutions had destroyed the old order but could not create a new one. Traditional religions were unable to impose their tenets on one another or create a new synthesis. Yet the need for a new spiritual order was felt more than ever before. “No matter what lip service to general weal may continue to be paid in Sunday observances or other rituals,” a contemporary scholar has observed, “we become communities without any visible means of moral support. Every orthodoxy not withstanding, we are confronted with an ever more urgent need to find a new morality, a new means of humanizing man in society, a new civilization; or else shake ourselves to pieces.”

The Twentieth Century: The Age of Perpetual Crisis. The perceptive, erudite, and urbane American historian and philosopher Henry Adams was six years old in 1844. When some sixty-three years later he reflected on the meaning of his life and his time, he saw a special significance in that date and commented in his autobiography that his “old universe was thrown into the ash heap and a new one was created.”

He and his eighteenth century, troglodytic Boston were suddenly cut apart—separated forever—in act if not in sentiment, by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the Presidency. This was in May, 1844. His new world was ready for use, and only fragments of the old met his eyes.

But in the twentieth century that new world had failed to bring happiness, tranquility, or fulfillment to man. Adams saw that industry was crushing human spirit beneath the weight of its machines. Whereas the Virgin Mother had given meaning to every aspect of life during the Middle Ages, in his world only the dynamo, observed Adams, seemed to provide a force comparable to that of the Virgin. And Adams could not bring himself to worship at the shrine of this modern deity. He saw no spiritual cohesive force for keeping humanity together. “The child born in 1900, would, then be born into a new world which would not be a unity [Page 36] but a multiple.” How incredibly incomprehensible this new century was.

Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature. . . . He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law; and the perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the perpetual building up of authority by force; and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it, the perpetual symbolism of a lower one; the perpetual victory of principles of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred.

“As a matter of taste,” Adams admitted, he “greatly preferred his eighteenth century education when God was a father and nature was a mother and all was for the best in a scientific universe.” But accelerated change he saw as a law of history: “The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence and rapid in acceleration.” And to Adams man’s material progress had outrun his social wisdom. Power of reason and intellect that had made possible man’s triumph over nature had failed to make him master of himself. A look at the course of twentieth-century history shows how accurate Adams was in his predictions concerning the new age. Wars, tensions, and violence have characterized the new “multiverse.” The catastrophic worldwide conflict that began in 1914 was interrupted by twenty years of truce, resumed in 1939, and became a “cold war” in 1945, and remains as yet unresolved. Each chapter of that war has spawned new violence, brutality has increased steadily, and it is feared that the next stage may well be a nuclear holocaust that will eliminate the human species.

Not that man has not attempted to secure peace or has lacked the blueprints for a world order. Over the last one hundred years there have grown up over twelve hundred international organizations. The creation of the International Telecommunications Union in 1868, the Universal Postal Union in 1874, the World Meteorological Organization in 1878, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1889 were all for the purpose of providing international cooperation. In the twentieth century the number of international organizations has grown enormously and covers almost every human activity. Most of these efforts, however, have little to do with governments, though two attempts have been made to secure collective security and promote international cooperation among the nations of the world.

Before 1914 a balance of power among the strongest states had been assumed to be the world’s chief means of preserving peace. The shock of the devastation and slaughter in the first chapter of the World War (1914-18) persuaded a number of leading statesmen to support the idea of a peacekeeping international body. Hence with the unceasing support and pressure of President Woodrow Wilson the League of Nations was created. But collective security was doomed to failure so long as nations were unwilling to give up part of their sovereignty. The League remained a passive witness of events. It could not, and did not, take part effectively in any of the international conflicts from the invasion of Manchuria by Japan in 1931 to the conquest of Poland by Germany and Russia in 1939.

With a great deal of hope and fanfare the charter of the United Nations was adopted in San Francisco in 1945; but in the [Page 37] face of a persistent, aggressive, and vigorous nationalism, it too remains impotent to discharge its main objective—that of maintaining peace and security through collective actions. In the year that the United Nations’ charter was written wars of various sizes broke out on three continents. Thirty-six years later the fear of nuclear weapons keeps the superpowers from direct confrontation, but no one can be certain that the truce will last indefinitely. It was a sad commentary on the state of contemporary civilization that on the day that the world was supposed to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations (in October 1970) the United States, the U.S.S.R., and the People’s Republic of China resumed massive nuclear testing. As James Reston observed, the action not only symbolized the great powers’ preoccupation with military strength but also their “indifference to the principles of the United Nations.”

As if the threat of war is not enough of a challenge, the crisis of world poverty and hunger must be dealt with. In the past famine and epidemics, along with war, checked population growth. But as epidemics have been brought under control, more children survive and reach the age at which they can themselves become parents. Most of the underdeveloped nations have an annual growth rate of 2 to 3½ percent in comparison to 1 percent for Europe and 1.6 percent for the United States. At the rate of 1 percent Europe’s population is expected to double in seventy years. For the less developed nations the prospects are much more disheartening. Latin America’s 1970 population of 275 million is expected to become 756 million by the year 2000; China’s 755 million to increase to 1.5 billion; India’s from 542 million to 1.259 billion; and Africa’s 338 million to 800 million.

It is estimated that in the year 1 A.D. there were some 250 million people occupying the earth. It took sixteen hundred years before another 250 million were added. However, in only ten years—from 1960 to 1970—the world’s population increased by that number. Dr. Arthur H. Westing, professor of ecology and dean of natural sciences at Amherst College, wrote in the July-August 1981 issue of the journal BioScience that there have been an estimated 50 billion humans on the earth. Today’s population is about 4.4 billion. That means that the people alive today represent 9 percent of all who have lived over a period of 300,000 years. Put another way, there are more people alive today than have lived over 85 percent of the entire human tenure on earth. No wonder that demographers consider their discipline one of the most crucial and feel desperately that ways must be found to check population growth before time runs out. The earth’s resources cannot provide for the minimal needs of all. Sooner or later, nations and individuals are going to devour one another in their struggle for survival. Famine still tragically takes its toll. In 1978, designated the Year of the Child by the United Nations, eight million children died from hunger in Africa.

More than half of the world’s population in the 1980s live in countries where per [Page 38] capita yearly income is less than $100. The economic gap between the developed and underdeveloped countries is widening. A relatively small number of nations, mostly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere (and Japan), enjoy the fruits of modern science and technology and live in luxury scarcely dreamed of a generation before. Their technological and industrial advances have brought about a happy paradox: their population has increased but so has their standard of living. Free from the necessity to devote the bulk of their manpower to the production of food, these countries have been able to diversify their productive capacities. To a remarkable degree the economic benefits of these industrial nations have been diffused widely among the people.

However, the industrialized nations have raised their standard of living not simply by their technological skills but also by their access to the world’s natural resources. When the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota was exhausted, the industrialist could rely on new fields in Labrador. The oil wells of Texas and Oklahoma could be supplemented by those in Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates. America, with less than 6 percent of the world’s population, was, in 1970, consuming 40 percent of the world’s pulp, 36 percent of the fossil fuel, and 10 percent of the world’s food products. Other industrialized nations were not far behind in their gross consumption. Malthus’ warning almost two centuries before that there were simply not enough resources for everyone is becoming a reality. London, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Berlin are not the prototype of the cities of tomorrow. Calcutta, Philip Appleman claimed, was a city of the future: a city hopelessly incapable of providing even the most basic needs of food, housing, medical, and educational facilities for its hundreds of thousands of street people.

As war and famine continue to plague humanity, modern technology has added a new major source of concern for the futurists. Automobiles, jets, electric power, detergents have increased man’s comfort and well-being, but the cost is the pollution of the air and water and the disfiguring of the land. Pesticides and a great number of synthetic products that are not biologically degradable have been discharged into nature. Rapidly increasing quantities of lead are being discovered in the snows of the Antarctic, thousands of miles away from the congested highways of the Northern Hemisphere. The smog that settled over London in 1952 caused four thousand deaths. In the United States the death rate from bronchitis and emphysema increased 900 percent between 1949 and 1969.

The construction of dams is silting rivers, and nitrate is accumulating at a faster rate than the surrounding soil can absorb. The great Aswan Dam has increased the water supply of Egypt and provided electricity, but it has also cut down the flow of algal nutrients to the Mediterranean Sea with a damaging effect on the fishing industry.

The Malaysian government has used DDT extensively in some remote areas of the country to stamp out malaria. But the spraying has not only killed the mosquitos but the cockroaches as well. The dead cockroaches have been eaten by the cats, who thus, to the delight of the rats, were eliminated. Then the rats experienced a population explosion that threatened the spreading of other diseases. At last the government has had to airlift fresh supplies of cats to restore the balance of nature.

Thus as the twentieth century is coming to its close, humanity contemplates in despair its fate and its future. Every day it endures old crises and confronts new ones. In the areas of science, technology, and intellect, human accomplishments are marvelous. Man [Page 39] has landed on the moon, sent mechanical explorers to probe the distant reaches of space, perfected computers that are performing miracles, eradicated poliomyelitis, and created new forms of life. When one makes a catalogue of all human achievements between 1844 and 1982, one is overwhelmed by their quality and quantity. But in the sphere of spirit there have apparently been no breakthroughs. There is no more concern or compassion for other human beings in 1982 than there was in 1844. Man has created a civilization that has the body of a giant and the soul of a dwarf. And yet, though human “inborn instinct is to try to make the Universe revolve round himself, his spiritual task in life is to overcome his self-centeredness in order to put himself in harmony with the absolute spiritual Reality that is the true centre of everything in the phenomenal world,”

As Toynbee observed, man has a spiritual endowment that cannot be suppressed and “condemns him to a life-long struggle to reconcile himself with the Universe into which he has been born.”

This “flight of the alone to the alone” is the goal of Man’s endeavours. His yearning to reach this goal is the only motive strong enough to break through the barrier of self-centeredness that stands in the way. Neither science nor the ideologies have anything to say about this spiritual crux. On the other hand, all the higher religions and philosophies are concerned with it. Their visions may be partly delusions; their counsels may be partly misguided; their very concern with the soul’s ultimate problem and task may be almost smothered under a heap of irrelevant accretions: ritual, observances, social regulations, astronomical theories, and what not. Yet in spite of all their manifest weaknesses the higher religions are the only ways of life, known to Man so far, that do recognize what is the soul’s true problem and true quest, and do offer Man some guidance for reaching his spiritual goal.

Again, to use the great historian’s words, “The rising gale of scientific discovery has blown away the chaff of traditional religion, and in doing this it has done mankind a service; but it has blown so hard that it has blown away the grain with the husk; and this has been a disservice, since neither science nor the ideologies have grain of their own to offer as a substitute.”

The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh

“Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead.”

—Bahá’u’lláh

“Delicate and strenuous though the task may be, however arduous and prolonged the effort required, whatsoever the nature of the perils and pitfalls that beset the path of whoever arises to revive the fortunes of a Faith struggling against the rising forces of materialism, nationalism, secularism, racialism, ecclesiasticism, the all-conquering potency of the grace of God, vouchsafed through the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, will, undoubtedly, mysteriously and surprisingly, enable whosoever arises to champion His Cause to win complete and total victory.

—Shoghi Effendi

IN 1844 the Báb, by the declaration of His mission to Mullá Ḥusayn, had planted that spiritual grain, which through 138 years of violent changes and revolutionary currents has not been blown away with the husk. He began His ministry on the night of 22 May with a written document—the Commentary on the Súrih of Joseph—and during the next six years, before His martyrdom in Tabríz, He wrote a “vast number of commentaries, of prayers, . . . of homilies and orations.”

[Page 40] He claimed that He had brought to an end a cycle that had begun with Adam and had progressively expanded through the revelations of Abraham, Moses, Christ, and Muḥammad. He was the Primal Point, the Mihdí, and the Báb—the Gate to a new and glorious spiritual era that would unify the entire human race. By bringing His own laws and ordinances to replace those specified in the Qur’án He was symbolically annulling the past religious traditions and proclaiming the independence of His own Faith and the establishment of the new age. He also made it clear that His mission was to prepare His followers for the coming of “the One Whose advent He characterized as the fruit and ultimate purpose of His Dispensation.”

For His claims the Báb was arrested, imprisoned, exiled from city to city, and ultimately martyred in the main square of Tabríz on 9 July 1850. His followers were systematically persecuted, tortured, and killed by fanatical mobs with the approval and encouragement of ecclesiastic and civil authorities. But as in the past, once such potent spiritual energy was released, its flow could not be checked even by the most barbaric exercise of human cruelty. On the contrary, the blood of the martyrs caused the firm establishment of the new Faith in its native soil.

In the annals of religious history the Báb’s short ministry stands out for its unique relationship to the dispensation to follow. “Unlike the Prophets gone before Him, . . .” Shoghi Effendi observed, “the Báb chose to intersperse His Book of Laws, the Persian Bayán, with unnumbered passages, some designedly obscure, mostly indubitably clear and conclusive, in which He fixes the date of the promised Revelation, extols its virtues, asserts its pre-eminent character, assigns to it unlimited powers and prerogatives, and tears down every barrier that might be an obstacle to its recognition.” Bahá’u’lláh Himself wrote in His Kitáb-i-Badí‘: “‘He [the Báb], verily, hath not fallen short of His duty to exhort the people of the Bayán and to deliver unto them His Message. In no age or dispensation hath any Manifestation made mention, in such detail and in such explicit language, of the Manifestation destined to succeed Him.’” Thus it is not surprising that the bewildered and shocked followers of the Báb, after His martyrdom, looked forward to the day when the Promised One would assume His station.

Prophet-Founder of the Faith

IN God Passes By, the magnificent panoramic view of the history of the first one hundred years of the Bahá’í era, Shoghi Effendi divided the life of Bahá’u’lláh into four stages:

1. The first twenty-seven years of His life (1817-44), “characterized by the care-free enjoyment of all the advantages conferred by high birth and riches, and by unfailing solicitude for the interest of the poor, the sick and the down-trodden.”

2. His nine years “of active and exemplary discipleship in the service of the Báb.”

3. His imprisonment of four months’ duration in the Síyáh-Chál (1852) at the close of which there occurred “the sudden eruption of the forces released by an overpowering, soul-revolutionizing Revelation.”

4. His exile from Persia (1853-92).

It was during the fourth stage of His [Page 41] life that a new Covenant between God and man promised by the Báb was sealed and the foundations of a new world order were established. Those forty years constituted one “of the most eventful and momentous epochs in the world’s religious history. . . . a ministry which, by virtue of its creative power, its cleansing force, its healing influences, and the irresistible operation of the world-directing, world-shaping forces it released, stands unparalleled in the religious annals of the entire human race.”

Two significant events in the life of Bahá’u’lláh before His exile, however, were most notable in fashioning the Bahá’í Faith. The first was His journey to Badasht (June 1848) where He presided over a conference of eighty-one disciples of the Báb, an occasion during which the independence of the Bábí Faith from its Islamic past was openly proclaimed. “Each day of that memorable gathering witnessed the abrogation of a new law and the repudiation of a long-standing tradition.” As Nabíl, the first chronicler of the new dispensation, observed, in Badasht “The veils that guarded the sanctity of the ordinances of Islám were sternly rent asunder. . . .”

IN the words of Shoghi Effendi it was there that “the divinely-ordained and man-made precepts of the Faith of Muḥammad” were both repudiated, and “the shackles of its antiquated system” shaken off.

The primary purpose of that gathering was to implement the revelation of the Bayán by a sudden, a complete and dramatic break with the past—with its order, its ecclesiasticism, its traditions, and ceremonials. The subsidiary purpose of the conference was to consider the means of emancipating the Báb from His cruel confinement in Chihríq. The first was eminently successful; the second was destined from the outset to fail.

From Chihríq the young Prophet was taken to the army barracks of Tabríz where He was martyred by a firing squad at noon on 9 July 1850. On 3 August 1852 an attempt on the life of Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh was made by three deranged followers of the Báb, causing a brutal reprisal by the political as well as ecclesiastical leaders against the already much-persecuted Bábí community. Bahá’u’lláh was among those arrested and sent to the Síyáh-Chál (the Black Dungeon) of Ṭihrán. In that dreadful prison, amidst one hundred fellow prisoners, “thieves, assassins, and highwaymen,” Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation began.

I was but a man like others, asleep upon my couch, when lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over me, and taught me the knowledge of all that hath been. . . . And He bade Me lift up My voice between earth and heaven. . . . Can any one speak forth of his own accord that for which all men, both high and low, will protest against him?

For ten years Bahá’u’lláh made no public declaration of His own mission. As Shoghi Effendi explained:

The process whereby the effulgence of so dazzling a Revelation was unfolded to the eyes of men was of necessity slow and gradual. . . . A period of no less than ten years had to elapse ere its far-reaching [Page 42] implications could be directly divulged to even those who had been intimately associated with Him—a period of great spiritual ferment, during which the Recipient of so weighty a Message restlessly anticipated the hour at which He could unburden His heavily laden soul, so replete with the potent energies released by God’s nascent Revelation.

After keeping Bahá’u’lláh prisoner for three months in the Black Dungeon, the Persian government decided that by sending Him out of the country the spiritual fire that seemed to be consuming Persian society might be quenched. Thus with the cooperation of the Ottoman government, Bahá’u’lláh was exiled to Baghdád. His journey began on 12 January 1853. After three months of incredible hardships He and members of His family arrived in Baghdád on 8 April 1853. He lived in that city for the next ten years, except for a two-year retirement into the mountains of Kurdistán and occasional visits to Najaf, Karbilá, and Káẓimayn. During the ten years’ exile He provided in His writings a rich spiritual legacy for the new Faith. The two-year retreat in Kurdistán added many more odes, prayers, and soliloquies, in prose and verse, in Arabic and Persian.

Upon Bahá’u’lláh’s return to Baghdád, the new Faith found a “firm anchorage” and “a fixed and accessible center to which its adherents could turn for guidance, and from which they could derive continuous and unobstructed inspiration.” The outpouring of His pen during the Baghdád exile is one of the distinguishing features of that period. Much of what He dictated or wrote Himself, unfortunately, has been lost. Some of His works, by His own orders, were cast into the river. Yet three of His best known books that were revealed in Baghdád survive: The Hidden Words, The Seven Valleys, and the Kitáb-i-Íqán.

The Hidden Words, revealed in Persian and Arabic in 1858 A.D., and originally designated as the “Hidden Book of Fáṭimih,” is, according to Shoghi Effendi, a “dynamic spiritual leaven cast into the life of the world for the reorientation of the minds of men, the edification of their souls, and the rectification of their conduct.”

The Seven Valleys may be regarded as one of Bahá’u’lláh’s greatest mystical compositions. Written to a learned Ṣúfí, it describes the seven stages the seeker must traverse in his spiritual quest. These are the valleys of search, love, knowledge, unity, contentment, wonderment, true poverty, and absolute nothingness. “It is a gem of mystical prose matchless in its beauty, simplicity, and profundity.”

In the Kitáb-i-Íqán, written in answer to questions sent by an uncle of the Báb, “Bahá’u’lláh offers a logical, illuminating and irrefutable explanation of the symbolism and the enigmatic texts of the Scriptures of the past, establishes the facts of progressive revelation, and adduces proofs to substantiate the divine mission of the Báb.” The Kitáb-i-Íqán was revealed “within the space of two days and two nights” in the year 1862 and “occupies a position unequalled by any work in the entire range of Bahá’í literature, except the Kitáb-i-Aqdas.”

As the Faith found its new anchor in the city of Baghdád and Bahá’u’lláh became recognized almost universally by the followers of the Báb as their inspired leader, it found new spiritual energies and expanded rapidly in its native soil. Iranian authorities, now concerned about the growth of the infant Faith, decided that Baghdád was too close to the Iranian border, and that Bahá’u’lláh should be banished further away. The [Page 43] Turkish government granted the request to remove Bahá’u’lláh from Baghdád. On Wednesday afternoon, 22 April 1863, He and His family set forth on the first stage of a four-month journey to Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. Ferried across the Tigris River, Bahá’u’lláh stayed in the Najíbíyyih Garden (Riḍván) on the opposite shore until 3 May. His arrival in that garden signalized “the commencement of what has come to be recognized as the holiest and most significant of all Bahá’í festivals, the festival commemorating the Declaration of His Mission to His Companions.”

Of the exact circumstances attending that epoch-making Declaration, we, alas, are but scantily informed. The words Bahá’u’lláh actually uttered on that occasion, the manner of His Declaration, the reaction it produced, its impact on Mírzá Yaḥyá, the identity of those who were privileged to hear Him, are shrouded in an obscurity which future historians will find it difficult to penetrate.

With the arrival of Bahá’u’lláh in Constantinople (16 August 1863) “the grimmest and most calamitous and yet the most glorious chapter in the history of the first Bahá’í Century may be said to have opened.” Though no charges were brought against Him by the Turkish government, Bahá’u’lláh was held a prisoner and after a four-month stay in the capital was ordered to proceed to Adrianople. But it was in that magnificent, ancient capital of the Byzantines and the Ottomans that Bahá’u’lláh’s proclamation to the world was initiated by a communication to Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, who thus became the first among all the rulers to receive the divine summons.

The journey in December “across a bleak and windswept country, to a city characterized by Bahá’u’lláh as ‘the place which none entereth except such as have rebelled against the authority of the sovereign,” lasted for twelve days. Through the winter He and His family lived in the three rooms of a “comfortless and vermin-infested” small house. But it was from that unpretentious abode that Bahá’u’lláh publicly announced His mission to the world.

During the four-and-a-half year stay in Adrianople Bahá’u’lláh composed divine verses “in such number that it was impossible to record them.” Among His writings were the Tablet of Aḥmád, the Tablet of Riḍván, the Súrih of Kings (in which the monarchs of the East and the West were collectively addressed), the first Tablet to Napoleon III, the Tablet to the King (Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh), Súriy-i-Ra’ís (to ‘Alí Páshá, the Turkish Grand Vizier), prayers for Fasting, and the Kitáb-i-Badí‘. The Súriy-i-Ghuṣn (the Tablet of the Branch), revealing the station of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—a matter of much significance for the future of the Bahá’í Faith—was also revealed in Adrianople.

As the full impact of the proclamation of Bahá’u’lláh dawned on the Bábí community, a violent conflict arose between those who [Page 44] accepted His claim and those who chose to follow the claim of His half-brother Mírzá Yaḥyá. The painful tension culminated in an attempt on the life of Bahá’u’lláh and led to the separation and banishment of the two groups by the Turkish authorities. Mírzá Yaḥyá was sent to Famagusta on Cyprus. Bahá’u’lláh, His family, and some friends were banished to the prison city of ‘Akká.

On the afternoon of 31 August 1868 the company of exiles disembarked on the shore infamous for its foul air and putrid water. It was “the final stage, and indeed the climax of the banishment in which the whole of that ministry was spent.” By the order of Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, dated 26 July 1868, Bahá’u’lláh and His companions were not only condemned to perpetual exile, but also were restricted in their incarceration and not allowed to associate with either each other or with the local inhabitants. They were housed in an old army barracks; each day four carefully guarded men were allowed to go outside the prison doors to buy food. Added to all the tribulations of Bahá’u’lláh and His family was the bitter grief of the sudden tragedy of the death of His twenty-two year old son, the noble and pious Mírzá Mihdí, who, while “pacing the roof of the barracks in the twilight,” “wrapped in his customary devotions . . . fell through the unguarded skylight onto a wooden crate, standing on the floor beneath, which pierced his ribs. . . .”

Rigorous imprisonment lasted for two years, but then a mobilization of the Turkish troops forced the government to use the facilities for the army. Bahá’u’lláh and His family were transferred to a private house while His companions were accommodated in a caravansery in the town. Bahá’u’lláh lived in that house for seven years. Finally allowed by the Turkish authorities to leave the confines of the city wall, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá rented for His Father ‘Abdu’lláh Páshá’s residence, known as Mazra‘ih, four miles north of the city. After two years living in Mazra‘ih, the family moved to the mansion of Bahjí, where Bahá’u’lláh spent the rest of His life. Near Bahjí the believers also rented the beautiful Na‘mayn garden in which the Exile spent many days, sleeping at night in a little cottage. Bahá’u’lláh renamed it the Garden of Riḍván.

He visited Haifa four times, the final visit lasting three months. It was in the course of one of these visits (in 1890) when He had pitched His tent on Mount Carmel, in the vicinity of the Carmelite Monastery, that the Tablet of Carmel was revealed, a Tablet remarkable for its allusions and prophecies. On another occasion, as He stood on the slope of the mountain, he pointed out to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá the site that was to be the permanent resting place of the Báb.

It was at Bahjí in 1890 (15-20 April), that the distinguished British orientalist, Edward G. Browne, the only Western scholar to have an interview with the Author of the Bahá’í Faith, met Bahá’u’lláh and recorded his impressions.

Bahá’u’lláh’s writings during His confinement in the prison in ‘Akká surpass even those of Baghdád and Adrianople. “This unprecedented extension in the range of His Writings . . .” Shoghi Effendi has observed, “must rank as one of the most vitalizing and [Page 45] fruitful stages in the evolution of His Faith.” He has divided Bahá’u’lláh’s writings during this period into three categories. The first contains those constituting the sequel to the proclamation of Bahá’u’lláh’s Mission in Adrianople, such as the Tablets to Queen Victoria; Emperor of the French, Napoleon III (this was a second Tablet to him sent through the French agent in ‘Akká); Alexander II Nikolaevich, the Tsar of Russia; William I, King of Prussia and the new Emperor of Germany; Francis-Joseph, the Emperor of Austria and heir to the Holy Roman Empire; Pope Pius IX; ‘Alí-Páshá, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire (a second Tablet); kings of the earth; the rulers of America and the Presidents of the Republics; and specific summons to the patriarchs of the Christian Church; the followers of Christ; the entire body of Muslim ecclesiastics; the Jewish people; the “‘high priests’” of the Zoroastrian Faith, as well as the followers of the Báb.

No less significant are the words addressed separately by Him to the “people of the Bayán,” to the wise men of the world, to its poets, to its men of letters, to its mystics and even to its tradesmen, in which He exhorts them to be attentive to His voice, to recognize His Day, and to follow His bidding.

The second category of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings includes the laws and ordinances of His Dispensation, recorded, for the most part, in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. This book is, as Shoghi Effendi has remarked, “the Charter of the future world civilization,” and “a still mightier revelation of the creative power of its Author,” and “what may well rank as the most signal act of His ministry,” the Most Holy Book, “whose provisions must remain inviolate for no less than a thousand years.” Not only are the basic laws and ordinances revealed in this Book, but also “the necessary institutions through which the integrity and unity of His Faith” can be safeguarded and the function of interpretation conferred upon His Successor.

The third category of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings includes those “Tablets which partly enunciate and partly reaffirm the fundamental tenets and principles underlying that Dispensation.” Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, the last major Tablet revealed by Bahá’u’lláh, was addressed to a clergyman of Iṣfahán, “an inveterate and notorious enemy of the Faith” and a “rapacious priest” who was exhorted “to repent of his acts.” The book also “adduces proofs establishing the validity” of Bahá’u’lláh’s Cause and provides a representative [Page 46] selection from the vast volumes of His writings. Lawḥ-i-Ḥikmat (the Tablet of Wisdom) and the Tablet of Visitation, revealed in honor of Imám Ḥusayn, are two additional Tablets in this third category.

The ascension of Bahá’u’lláh took place at the hour of dawn on 29 May 1892, in the seventy-fifth year of His age—in the year 48 B.E. The direct revelation begun by the Báb’s declaration on 22 May 1844 and the writing that same evening of His commentary on the Súrih of Joseph culminated in Bahá’u’lláh’s Will and Testament. The new Faith thus had accumulated over the span of almost half a century a magnificent literature from the hands of its two Authors, covering in scope every dimension of human experience. Of all the major religions only Islám had provided a definite written literature by the time of the death of its Founder—the Qur’án. Now there was a new dispensation that had left a legacy of a hundred volumes of authenticated writings upon which its adherents could lay the foundation of a new civilization.

In surveying the 138 years of the Bahá’í era, one finds that its first years are characterized by “continuous and progressive Revelation —a period which by its duration and fecundity must be regarded as unparalleled in the entire field of the world’s spiritual history.”

The Administrative Order

THE NEXT eighty-eight years of the Bahá’ís are distinguished from corresponding periods in Christian, Islamic, and other religions’ histories by the development and expansion of a divinely ordained administrative order. The authority of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as the Interpreter of the Bahá’í writings was established by Bahá’u’lláh in His Will and Testament, which is a unique document. “For nowhere in the books pertaining to any of the world’s religious systems,” Shoghi Effendi has commented, “not even among the writings of the Author of the Bábí Revelation, do we find any single document establishing a Covenant endowed with an authority comparable to the Covenant which Bahá’u’lláh had Himself instituted.” Bahá’u’lláh wrote His will with His own hand, and it was read nine days after His ascension. He had designated ‘Abdu’l-Bahá His successor and very carefully and clearly defined His station. He was

first and foremost, . . . the Center and Pivot of Bahá’u’lláh’s . . . Covenant, His most exalted handiwork, the stainless Mirror of His light, the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, the unerring Interpreter of His Word, the embodiment of every Bahá’í ideal, the incarnation of every Bahá’í virtue. . . . He is, above and beyond these appellations, the “Mystery of God” —an expression by which Bahá’u’lláh Himself has chosen to designate Him. . . .

In each of the past religions the absence of a will and testament of the Founder caused schism within the community of believers immediately after the Prophet’s departure and left the followers confused and in conflict. In each case doctrinal controversies sapped the spiritual energy that had been released. Such tragedy was not to be repeated in the new dispensation. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s station as the Center of the Covenant was not only confirmed in the Book of the Covenant but also alluded to in other references made about Him in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Kitáb-i-‘Ahd, and in the Súriy-i-Ghusn [Page 47] (the Tablet of the Branch). By designating ‘Abdu’l-Bahá His successor, Bahá’u’lláh “prolonged His own ministry for well-nigh thirty years.” “Revelation ceased, but the form, the mode, the pattern and the criterion were set up to assure the creation of a religious society unconditioned by the racial, creedal and nationalistic attitudes of the believers themselves.”

It was during those thirty years of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ministry that the Bahá’í Faith spread to Europe, America, and the Far East. In 1894 the first Bahá’í established his residence in Chicago, teaching the Faith there and in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Thornton Chase became the first American Bahá’í. In 1899 a council board of seven was elected by the Bahá’ís of Kenosha. In 1908 the Bahá’í Bulletin was published in New York, soon to be followed (in 1910) by Star of the West (previously Bahai News) in Chicago.

In March 1909 some thirty-nine delegates, representing thirty-six cities, assembled in Chicago to establish a permanent national organization known as Bahai Temple Unity, which was incorporated as a religious corporation. At the same convention a constitution was framed, and the first Executive Board of Bahai Temple Unity was elected.

Meanwhile, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had told a number of Western pilgrims who visited the Holy Land, including Mrs. Phoebe Hearst (on 10 December 1898) that He would visit the West as soon as He was released from the confinement imposed by the Turkish government. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which freed ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, finally provided the opportunity. In 1911 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sailed with a party of four on the S.S. Corsica for Marseilles, then proceeded to London where He arrived on 4 September 1911 and stayed for one month. After staying nine weeks in Paris He returned to Egypt by December 1911. His second journey to the West began on 25 March 1912, when He boarded the S.S. Cedric for New York (via Naples) and arrived in the United States on 11 April. He toured that country and Canada for eight months and returned from New York to Liverpool on the S.S. Celtic. Then He travelled by train to London, staying there until 21 June 1913. After visiting Paris, Munich, Stuttgart, Budapest, and Vienna He returned to Haifa on 5 December 1913. During this historic trip, through the newspapers and in person, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá brought to the attention of a multitude of Europeans and Americans the message of Bahá’u’lláh. It was the inauguration of the mass proclamation of the Faith in the Western world. By the time of His passing in the seventy-seventh year of the Bahá’í era—28 November 1921—the outer form of an international Bahá’í community “had been fairly defined in many localities and impressed upon the habits as well as thoughts of the believers.” The Heroic and Apostolic Age of the Bahá’í dispensation came to an end at the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, but He, though Himself belonging to that Age, had inaugurated the Formative Age. Holley has observed that

The administrative aspect of the Bahá’í Cause is in reality no mere set of external regulations but the very fruit of its universal spirit. Bahá’í administration is nothing less than a worldwide ethic, the special characteristic of which is to transform subjective faith into positive cooperative action—unifying the whole being of each believer through his unity with his [Page 48] spiritual brothers.

Transforming “subjective faith into positive cooperative action” was one of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s great accomplishments. Bahá’í administration did proceed from Bahá’u’lláh’s own writing, but it was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Who defined and expounded the principles established by His Father, and for thirty years lovingly guided the expanding Bahá’í community and safeguarded it from confusion or division.

He planted the administrative seed of the Faith. But until the seed yielded its golden fruit, continual nurturing care was necessary. Thus ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His Will and Testament designated His eldest grandson Shoghi Effendi as the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, who was qualified and authorized to interpret the sacred writings as well as to preside over the deliberations of the Universal House of Justice. It is certain, as Holley explained,

that the worldwide Bahá’í community could not have survived the shock of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, and perpetuated its complex unity into the future, had He not made definite provision for a point of unity acceptable to all the believers and a continuance of that administrative authority which is the body of the soul of faith.

The very last sentence of the Will left no doubt as to how the new religion was to keep its precious unity: “All must seek guidance and turn unto the Center of the Cause and the House of Justice. And he that turneth unto whatsoever else is indeed in grievous error.”

Thus once again in 1921 the Covenant established by the Báb in 1844 was extended for another thirty-six years, until the passing of Shoghi Effendi in 1957. For 113 years the new religion was tested and purified at successive stages by bitter persecution and incredible opposition, experienced the Ascension of the two authors and of the Examplar of the Faith, spread to the five continents of the world, received within its fold converts representing every race, religious tradition, and diverse cultural, social, and economic background, and yet through the authority and the power of the Covenant, it kept its unity, and by evolving its own institutions demonstrated that “the whole man, and the wholeness of his relationship to society, now has a spiritual meaning and sanction.” Shoghi Effendi called the Administrative Order the framework of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Will and Testament and commented that “as it expands and consolidates itself,” it “will no doubt manifest the potentialities and reveal the full implications of this momentous Document.” The Administrative Order was not to be conceived as a substitute for the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh but an instrument and “a channel through which His promised blessings may flow.”

By the time of the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá the organization of the World Order was fully defined but not established. It was during the next thirty-six years, under the remarkable leadership of Shoghi Effendi, that the institutions of the World Order, as embedded in the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh and outlined in the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá began to emerge. The Administrative Order was only a blueprint when Shoghi Effendi became the Guardian; he led it to its maturity. The rudimentary Bahá’í forms of governance [Page 49] established during the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in several local communities, were knitted and expanded into a regular and worldwide system. During the first two decades of the Guardianship, national spiritual assemblies were formed and elected in the British Isles, Germany, India, Egypt, the United States and Canada, Persia, and Australia. Assembly constitutions were drawn, special committees to administer various aspects of the community’s works were created, and procedures were developed for the incorporation of assemblies so that they could hold property, and obtain official recognition of Bahá’í holy days, marriage, and burial.

Beside the development of the administrative institutions there was also a great expansion in teaching the Faith. The first comprehensive book on the new religion was written by J. E. Esslemont, a Scottish physician, and published in 1922. Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era by 1970 had been translated into fifty-eight languages. Itinerant teachers, the most distinguished of whom was the American journalist Martha Root, carried the message of Bahá’u’lláh to almost every corner of the world. In 1937 Shoghi Effendi inaugurated several carefully designed national plans for a more systematic teaching effort by various national spiritual assemblies —including a Seven Year Plan for the United States and Canada by the end of which there were to be Bahá’í communities in every state of the Union, every province of Canada, and every republic of Latin America. Despite the World War all these goals were achieved by 1944, the centennial anniversary of the birth of the Bahá’í Faith. Other teaching plans followed. In 1953 a Ten Year Crusade was inaugurated by Shoghi Effendi with the main goal of establishing a Bahá’í community in virtually every country of the world, an attainment that would have been worthy of commemoration at the centennial anniversary of Bahá’u’lláh’s public declaration of His mission in the Garden of Riḍván in 1863. The Crusade was an outstanding success, particularly in Africa, India, and Latin America. Shoghi Effendi had hoped for 5,000 Bahá’í localities where Bahá’ís would reside by the end of the Crusade. It ended with more than 13,000. Twelve national spiritual assemblies launched the Plan; there were fifty-six in 1963.

It was, indeed, a great tragedy for the Bahá’í world that Shoghi Effendi did not live to see the triumph of his masterful effort. In November 1957 he died in London unexpectedly after an attack of Asian flu. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend or appreciate the contributions that Shoghi Effendi made to the evolution of the Bahá’í community and to the development of its institutions. He was personally in touch and in correspondence with Bahá’í groups in every part of the world; and if ever all of his letters were to be collected one can only imagine the number of volumes they would comprise. He translated into English many of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as well as The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl’s massive history of the early years of the Bahá’í Dispensation. He wrote in English The Advent of Divine Justice, God Passes By, The Promised Day Is Come, and numerous letters collected in several volumes, among them The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, Citadel of Faith, and Bahá’í Administration. His official correspondence to various national spiritual assemblies, defining the nature and functions of the Administrative Order, would comprise yet more volumes. He also wrote books and letters in Persian for the followers of the Faith in its native land.

He planned the construction of the buildings on Mount Carmel, which was to become the administrative center of the worldwide Bahá’í Community. He saw to the completion of the majestic Shrine of the Báb on that mountain. He was the masterful architect of the magnificent gardens on Mount Carmel and around the Bahjí mansion, and bought [Page 50] the land in the vicinity of the Shrine of the Báb on which, a quarter of a century after his passing, buildings of the Universal House of Justice and its ancillary institutions would be erected.

At the same time, all through his life Shoghi Effendi had to deal with the painful problem of the persecution of Bahá’ís, not only in Írán, but in Turkey, Russia, ‘Iráq, Egypt, Germany (under the Nazis), and elsewhere. That challenge alone could have exhausted the physical and mental energies of any ordinary man.

Since Shoghi Effendi had no children, he appointed no successor. The institution of the Guardianship, therefore, came to an end with the death of Shoghi Effendi. However, he had set in motion the evolution of an institution that would assist him and, after his passing, would continue to function under the guidance of the Universal House of Justice. On 24 December 1951, in conformity with the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi announced to the Bahá’í world the appointment of his first twelve Hands of the Cause of God. Two months later he increased the number to nineteen. The institution of the Hands was, in fact, one of the first institutions of the Bahá’í Faith inaugurated by Bahá’u’lláh, Who appointed the first of them and praised their services. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also appointed Hands of the Cause and in His Will and Testament specified their functions as protectors and propagators of the Faith, referring to them as “‘pillars’” of the Faith and mentioning them immediately after the Guardian and the members of Bahá’u’lláh’s family. They were the ones who “‘declared His proofs, proclaimed His faith, published abroad His Law, detached themselves from all things but Him, stood for righteousness in this world, and kindled the Fire of the Love of God in the very hearts and souls of His servants.’”

In announcing the appointment of nineteen Hands of the Cause, Shoghi Effendi further clarified their station. Their twofold function was the propagation and preservation of the unity of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, and they were “destined to assume individually in the course of time the direction of institutions paralleling those revolving around the Universal House of Justice, the supreme legislative body of the Bahá’í World.” In October 1957 the number of the Hands of the Cause was increased to twenty-seven. In what proved to be his last message to the Bahá’í world Shoghi Effendi referred to them as the “Chief Stewards of Bahá’u’lláh’s embryonic World Commonwealth.” Thus for six years, from the passing of the Guardian in 1957 to the election of the first Universal House of Justice in 1963, those twenty-seven Hands of the Cause had, as the “Chief Stewards,” the responsibility of conducting the affairs of the Bahá’í world, protecting the Faith from schism, carrying on the teaching plans, and stimulating the believers to fulfill the goals of the Ten Year Crusade. They carried out those responsibilities magnificently, but the continuity and the flow of the Administrative Order was also a great testimony to Shoghi Effendi’s labor in setting such a strong foundation for its operation that no tremor could damage the superstructure. A well-rehearsed orchestra, suddenly and briefly without a conductor, paid the highest tribute to its conductor by finishing the piece on its own. Twelve national spiritual assemblies, hundreds of local spiritual assemblies, and 4,500 Bahá’í centers scattered throughout the world, shaken but not paralyzed by the tragedy of the death of Shoghi Effendi, carried out their functions and their plans.

By 1963 all the goals established in the Ten Year Plan were achieved. The Hands of the Cause arranged for a centennial celebration [Page 51] of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His mission to be held in London and announced the plan for the election of the Universal House of Justice. In April of 1963 members of fifty-six national and regional spiritual assemblies met in Haifa and elected the nine members of the august body that Bahá’u’lláh had called the “infallible” center of His World Order, that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had referred to as the “source of all good” and “freed from all error,” and that Shoghi Effendi had alluded to as the “Apex” of “Bahá’í Administration,” the “Supreme Organ” of the “Bahá’í Commonwealth,” and the “Sole Refuge for a tottering civilization.”

With the election of the Universal House of Justice the Hands of the Cause were released from all administrative activity. That institution that was brought into existence in the time of Bahá’u’lláh had by the Will of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá become an auxiliary institution of the Guardianship. Its members were chosen and appointed by Shoghi Effendi. After his passing the Universal House of Justice decided that it could not legislate to make possible the appointments of further Hands of the Cause, but in order to extend into the future the functions of protection and propagation that rested in that body, it became necessary to create a new institution. As the first step, in November 1964, the Universal House of Justice formally related the Institution of the Hands to itself:

Responsibility for decisions on matters of general policy affecting the institution of the Hands of the Cause, which was formerly exercised by the beloved Guardian, now devolves upon the Universal House of Justice as the supreme and central institution of the Faith to which all must turn.

In June 1968 the formation of the institution of the Continental Boards of Counselors for the protection and propagation of the Faith was announced, and the duties of its members specified. They included the direction of the Auxiliary Boards, bodies that had earlier served and been directed by the Hands of the Cause, in their respective areas; consultation and collaboration with national spiritual assemblies; and the responsibility of keeping the Hands of the Cause and the Universal House of Justice informed of the conditions of the Cause in their areas. The Hands of the Cause residing in the Holy Land were given the task of acting as liaison between the Universal House of Justice and the Boards of Counselors.

On 8 June 1973—the centennial year of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (the Book of Laws)—the Universal House of Justice announced to the Bahá’ís of the world the formation of yet another “long anticipated” institution “ordained by Bahá’u’lláh, anticipated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and elucidated by Shoghi Effendi”: the International Teaching Center. All the Hands of the [Page 52] Cause were to be members of that body as well as other individuals appointed by the Universal House of Justice. The duties assigned to the International Teaching Center were to direct the activities of the Continental Boards of Counselors and to offer advice and counsel on all matters involving the propagation and protection of the Faith.

Thus the organic and divinely rooted Administrative Order has kept evolving.

The Bahá’í world community, growing like a healthy new body, develops new cells, new organs, new functions and powers as it presses on to its maturity, when every soul, living for the Cause of God, will receive from that Cause, health, assurance, and the overflowing bounties of Bahá’u’lláh which are diffused through His divinely ordained Order.

The institutions of the Administrative Order are the “integral, inseparable components of a living organism, inter-dependent and inclusive, not independent and exclusive,” and the “health, strength and success of each is closely affected by the conditions of the whole.”

In its first 138 years—by 21 March 1982 —that organism had grown remarkably; there were Bahá’ís in 100,000 localities throughout the entire planet; there were 125 national spiritual assemblies and over 29,000 local spiritual assemblies; all directed their energies and resources, in unison, toward the establishment of the same world order. There was one Bahá’í community. Something new in religious history was happening. Unity in diversity had become a demonstrated fact, and that unity had released immeasurable spiritual energy that was propelling the emerging world order upward and outward.

The core of the Bahá’í Faith, like that of all other major religions before, was the quickening of human spirit. It still addressed itself to the basic needs of each individual soul for inner peace, and it offered a means of communication between man and his Creator. But around the core there was the totality of the religion. The Bahá’í Faith encompassed all of life. The redemption of the individual could not be completed without the redemption of humanity. Viewing mankind as one entity, Bahá’ís could not and would not hesitate to subordinate every particular interest, be it personal, regional, or national, to the overriding interests of the generality of mankind, knowing full well that “in a world of interdependent peoples and nations the advantage of the part is best to be reached by the advantage of the whole, and that no lasting result can be achieved by any of the component parts if the general interests of the entity itself are neglected.”

Laying the Foundation of a New Civilization

IN THE year 138 B.E. Bahá’ís endeavored collectively to lay the foundations of a new civilization—a civilization whose form was sketched by Shoghi Effendi:

Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which human society is now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city-state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. Nation-building has come to an end. The anarchy inherent in state sovereignty is moving towards a climax. A world, growing to maturity, must abandon this fetish, recognize the oneness and wholeness of human relationships, and establish once for all the machinery that can best incarnate this fundamental principle of its life.

[Page 53]

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. A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity. A world metropolis will act as the nerve center of a world civilization, the focus towards which the unifying forces of life will converge and from which its energizing influences will radiate. A world language will either be invented or chosen from among the existing languages and will be taught in the schools of all the federated nations as an auxiliary to their mother tongue. A world script, a world literature, a uniform and universal system of currency, of weights and measures, will simplify and facilitate intercourse and understanding among the nations and races of mankind. In such a world society, science and religion, the two most potent forces in human life, will be reconciled, will cooperate, and will harmoniously develop. The press will, under such a system, while giving full scope to the expression of the diversified views and convictions of mankind, cease to be mischievously manipulated by vested interests, whether private or public, and will be liberated from the influence of contending governments and peoples. 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.

National rivalries, hatreds, and intrigues will cease, and racial animosity and prejudice will be replaced by racial amity, understanding and cooperation. The causes of religious strife will be permanently removed, economic barriers and restrictions will be completely abolished, and the inordinate distinction between classes will be obliterated. Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership on the other, will disappear. The enormous energy dissipated and wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and technical development, to the increase of the productivity of mankind, to the extermination of disease, to the extension of scientific research, to the raising of the standard of physical health, to the sharpening and refinement of the human brain, to the exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet, to the prolongation of human life, and to the furtherance of any other agency than can stimulate the intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.

A world federal system, ruling the whole earth and exercising unchallengeable authority over its unimaginably vast resources, blending and embodying the ideals of both the East and the West, liberated from the curse of war and its [Page 54] miseries, and bent on the exploitation of all the available sources of energy on the surface of the planet, a system in which Force is made the servant of Justice, whose life is sustained by its universal recognition of one God and by its allegiance to one common Revelation—such is the goal towards which humanity, impelled by the unifying forces of life, is moving.

By the year 138 B.E. the Bahá’í world had responded and fulfilled almost all the goals set for it by the Universal House of Justice in the Nine Year Plan and the Five Year Plan and was working toward the realization of the goals set forth in the Seven Year Plan then in progress. Four times, members of all national spiritual assemblies had met at World Conventions in the Holy Land for the election of the Universal House of Justice (in 1963, 1968, 1973, and 1978). The last convention was attended by representatives from some three hundred countries, territories, and islands. The completion of the House of Worship in Panama, “the crossroads of the two continents” and the soon-to-be completed Houses of Worship in Samoa and India—added to the ones already in existence in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Australia—gave testimony to the ever-spreading Bahá’í commonwealth. Well over twenty international, intercontinental, and oceanic teaching conferences had been held; two Bahá’í radio stations had been established in South America, and more were to come. The first reigning monarch, His Highness Malietoa Tanumafili II of Samoa, had embraced the Faith. And the Bahá’í International Community had been granted consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.

In 138 years the progress and expansion of the Bahá’í Faith had, indeed, been, in the words of William Sears, “thrilling, inspiring and overwhelming.”

But at the same time no Bahá’í in the year 138 B.E. believed that the establishment of the “Kingdom of God on earth” would come about quickly or painlessly. The number of Bahá’í was small; the time was short; and the forces of opposition, formidable. When national and international political crises persisted and compounded, no one knew how long the temporary truce would last and the nuclear holocaust would be avoided. Bahá’ís resided in over 100,000 localities, but there were few of them, only a few million. How could they, in a short time, share their message with four and a half billion souls? The obstacles were many, and “materialism, nationalism, secularism, racialism,” and “ecclesiasticism” presented the most potent forces of opposition. But the triumph of any religion always has had an element of mystery. Believers cannot look at the forces outside and feel threatened. They have to focus inward and concentrate on the strength of the spiritual forces within, do what is demanded, and leave the future in the hands of God. Had not the Báb assured His followers:

“Heed not your weaknesses and frailty; fix your gaze upon the invincible power of the Lord, your God, the Almighty. Has He not, in past days, caused Abraham, in spite of His seeming helplessness, to triumph over the forces of Nimrod? Has He not enabled Moses, whose staff was His only companion, to vanquish Pharaoh and [Page 55] his hosts? Has He not established the ascendancy of Jesus, poor and lowly as He was in the eyes of men, over the combined forces of the Jewish people? Has He not subjected the barbarous and militant tribes of Arabia to the holy and transforming discipline of Muḥammad, His Prophet? Arise in His name, put your trust wholly in Him, and be assured of ultimate victory.”

Had not Bahá’u’lláh comforted His followers:

“Beware, O people of Bahá, lest the strong ones of the earth rob you of your strength, or they who rule the world fill you with fear. Put your trust in God, and commit your affairs to His keeping. He, verily, will through the power of truth, render you victorious, and He, verily, is powerful to do what He willeth, and in His grasp are the reins of omnipotent might.”

The Bahá’í community in 138 B.E. could well remember Shoghi Effendi’s admonition of some forty years before:

The vastness of the field, the smallness of of your numbers, the indifference of the masses, must neither discourage nor appall you. You should at all times fix your gaze on the promise of Bahá’u’lláh, put your whole trust in His creative Word, recall the past and manifold evidences of His all-encompassing and resistless power and arise to become worthy and exemplary recipients of His all sustaining grace and blessings.

In one of his last communications to the American Bahá’í community, Shoghi Effendi had promised that “the all-conquering potency of the grace of God, vouchsafed through the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, will, undoubtedly, myteriously and surprisingly, enable whosoever arises to champion His Cause to win complete and total victory.”

Already in the year 138 B.E. “mysteriously and surprisingly,” the world was becoming aware of the Bahá’í Faith to an unprecedented degree. In Iran, the stage upon which this great drama of man’s search for reality and God’s expression of love for man in this age had first begun to unfold in 1844, the fanatical Muslim clergy and its hateful and cruel followers thought that they could obliterate the Faith by committing genocide against the Bahá’ís. In the course of three years, hundreds were brutally martyred, thousands became refugees, and hundreds of thousands were harassed, sent to prison, or deprived of the means of gaining their livelihood. Their properties, collective or individual, worth hundreds of millions of dollars were confiscated, looted, or destroyed. Their holy places were seized and the house of the Báb in which He announced His mission to Mullá Ḥusayn was leveled to the ground by bulldozers. But the courage, the faith, and the steadfastness in the face of all the adversities by that innocent and noble community had aroused the concern and admiration of the world. When the Bábí-Bahá’í revelation began in Iran, twenty thousand of its followers were put to death by Muslim fanatics in the hope that its light would be extinguished. But it was the blood of the martyrs that helped to establish the Faith in Iran. One hundred and thirty years later, the new martyrs were, by their sacrifices, helping to spread their Faith throughout the world. How ironic that those who thought that they could crush the new religion by persecuting its adherents were, in fact, helping to spread it.

The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, in the year 138 B.E., had gone beyond the embryonic [Page 56] age. It was a living, healthy, and functioning organism. Its existence was as much a fact as the death of the old order. When would it replace the old order? No one could predict. God’s salvation had been offered; it was for man to receive it:

The mystic and wondrous Bride, hidden ere this beneath the veiling of utterance, hath now, by the grace of God and His divine favor, been made manifest even as the resplendent light shed by the beauty of the Beloved. I bear witness, O friends! that the favor is complete, the argument fulfilled, the proof manifest and the evidence established. Let it now be seen what your endeavors in the path of detachment will reveal. In this wise hath the divine favor been fully vouchsafed unto you and unto them that are in heaven and on earth. All praise to God, the Lord of all worlds.

139 B.E.

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE SACRED TEXTS OF THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH AND OTHER RELATED WORKS

1. The Báb

Selections from the Writings of the Báb. Compiled by Research Department of the Universal House of Justice. Translated by Habib Taherzadeh et al. Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1976. The most comprehensive selection of the Báb’s writings yet published in English.

2. Bahá’u’lláh

Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. Rev. ed. Translated by Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1953. Bahá’u’lláh’s reaffirmation of the validity of His Cause. His last major Tablet and, though addressed to one man, intended for all humanity.

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. 2d rev. ed. Translated by Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahai’ Publishing Trust, 1976. Excerpts from Bahá’u’lláh’s writings on the Manifestations of God; the potency of this age of unity; spiritual aspects of the coming world order; the divine nature of man and his responsibilities to God and society; the spiritual meaning of life; and the soul and immortality.

The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh. Translated by Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1939. Called by Shoghi Effendi the “dynamic spiritual leaven cast into the life of the world.” Verses of meditation on principles of spiritual reality.

The Kitáb-i-Íqán: The Book of Certitude. 2d ed. Translated by Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1950. Ranked by Shoghi Effendi as second only to the Kitáb-i-Aqdas in the treasury of Bahá’í literature. The book unlocks the mystery of spiritual symbolism and describes the principle of progressive revelation.

Prayers and Meditations. Translated by Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1938. A selection of nearly two hundred prayers and devotional passages.

The Proclamation of Bahá’u’lláh to the Kings and Leaders of the World. Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1967. Bahá’u’lláh’s letters to the kings and rulers of the world, to its religious leaders, and to mankind.

Selected Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. 2d ed. Compiled by the Bahá’í Publishing Committee. Wilmette, Ill: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1979. A brief compilation of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh divided into six sections focusing on spiritual teachings.

The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys. 3d ed. Translated by Ali-Kuli Khan and Marzieh Gail. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1978. A magnificent commentary on the mystical stages of spiritual development.

A Synopsis and Codification of The Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Most Holy Book of Bahá’u’lláh. [Compiled by the Universal House of Justice.] Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1973. A synopsis of the laws and ordinances of Bahá’u’lláh and notes explaining them, as well as comments by the Universal House of Justice.

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Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Compiled by Research Department of the Universal House of Justice. Translated by Habib Taherzadeh et al. Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1978. Sixteen of Bahá’u’lláh’s most significant Tablets, some published in English for the first time.

3. Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Bahá’í World Faith: Selected Writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. 2d ed. Wilmette, Ill: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1956. A comprehensive selection of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá covering many facets of the Bahá’í Faith.

4. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Foundations of World Unity: Compiled from Addresses and Tablets of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Wilmette, Ill: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1945. A compilation of addresses and Tablets on the spiritual foundations of world unity and the principles of the inevitable coming world order.

Memorials of the Faithful. Translated by Marzieh Gail. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1971. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s remembrances of seventy-nine early believers. The biographical sketches focus on the quality of soul and the attributes of the spirit, rather than on the materials aspects of the believers’ lives.

Paris Talks: Addresses Given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris in 1911, 11th ed. London: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1969. A series of informal talks on a variety of Bahá’í teachings, given in Paris and London in 1911 and 1913.

The Promulgation of Universal Peace: Talks Delivered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the United States and Canada in 1912. Comp. Howard MacNutt. 2d ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982. A compilation of informal talks and discourses given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His 239-day visit to North America in 1912. The book was first printed in two volumes in 1922 and 1925 and was combined into one volume in 1939.

The Secret of Divine Civilization. 2d ed. Translated by Marzieh Gail and Ali-Kuli Khan. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1970. Analyzes unity as the basis of true civilization. Written in 1875, it was a message to the rulers and people of Persia that is applicable to the general state of modern civilization.

Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Compiled by Research Department of the Universal House of Justice. Translated by a Committee at the Bahá’í World Centre and Marzieh Gail. Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1978. Covers many topics including Bahá’í marriage, the education of children, serving the poor, physicians and healing, and life after death.

Some Answered Questions. Compiled and translated by Laura Clifford Barney. 5th ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1981. Described by Shoghi Effendi as “priceless explanations” of such topics as the Manifestations of God, Christian doctrines, and fundamental aspects of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh. Answers to questions asked by Laura Clifford Barney.

Tablets of the Divine Plan: Revealed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the North American Bahá’ís. Rev. ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1977. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s “mandate” and “supreme charter for teaching” the Bahá’í Faith, revealed in 1916 and 1917, in which the United States and Canada were named coexecutors of the Divine Plan and given a master plan for carrying out the Will of God for the present age.

A Traveler’s Narrative: Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Báb. Translated by Edward G. Browne. New and corrected edition. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1980. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s engrossing account of the rise of the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths. First published in 1891.

Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1944. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s charter for a future world civilization, the document delineates the major features of the administrative institutions of the Bahá’í Faith and ensures the protection of the integrity and unity of the Faith.

5. Shoghi Effendi

The Advent of Divine Justice. 3d rev. ed. Wilmette, Ill: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1969. First published in 1939. A letter to the American Bahá’ís setting out the spiritual, intellectual, and social prerequisites for success in every facet of Bahá’í life.

Bahá’í Administration: Selected Messages 1922-1932. 7th rev. ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974. Includes excerpts from the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi’s letters to the American National Spiritual Assembly and the Bahá’ís in that country from 21 January 1922 to 17 July 1932, outlining [Page 58] the fundamental principles upon which local and national Bahá’í institutions are established.

Call to the Nations: Extracts from the Writings of Shoghi Effendi. [Compiled by the Universal House of Justice.] Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1977. Extracts from Shoghi Effendi’s letters on the theme of world order disclosing the reason for the present worldwide moral and social chaos, explaining the principle of the oneness of mankind, setting forth a pattern for future society, and foretelling the coming world commonwealth.

Citadel of Faith: Messages to America, 1947-1957. Wilmette, Ill: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1965. Shoghi Effendi’s letters describing for the American Bahá’ís their world mission and reminding them of their responsibilities as the trustees of the Divine Plan of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

God Passes By. Rev. ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974. First published in 1944. Shoghi Effendi’s superb and masterful survey of the outstanding events in the Bahá’í Faith’s first one hundred years.

Messages to the Bahá’í World, 1950-1957. Rev. ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1971. Shoghi Effendi’s reports on and guidance for the developing institutions of the Bahá’í Administrative Order.

The Promised Day Is Come. 3d ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1980. First published in 1941. An authoritative perspective on current world events analyzing the main trends of the first one hundred years of the Bahá’í Faith and finding the underlying cause of the crises of our age in man’s rejection of Bahá’u’lláh’s Teachings.

Selected Writings of Shoghi Effendi. Compiled by the Bahá’í Publishing Committee. 2d ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1975. A compact and thorough summary of the history and aims of the Bahá’í Faith.

The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: Selected Letters. 2d ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974. First published in 1938. The relation of the Bahá’í Faith to the present-day society and its solutions to contemporary problems, explained by Shoghi Effendi in seven letters to the Bahá’ís of the West, written between 1929 and 1936 on the theme of world order. Preface by Horace Holley.

6. The Universal House of Justice

Messages from The Universal House of Justice 1968-1973. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1976. Selected messages from the Universal House of Justice, many dealing with the worldwide growth and expansion of the Bahá’í Faith.

Wellspring of Guidance: Messages, 1963-1968. 2d ed. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1976. Major messages of the Universal House of Justice from its establishment in 1963 through April 1968.

7. Biographical Studies of the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith

Definitive biographical studies of the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith are as yet to come, as more sources and documents are made available to future historians. Already excellent biographies providing a great deal of insight and information have been written, particularly by H. M. Balyuzi and Rúḥíyyih Khánum Rabbani. Their biographies of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and Shoghi Effendi are indispensable for the understanding of the evolution of the Bahá’í Faith. See:

Balyuzi, H. M. Bahá’u’lláh: The King of Glory. Oxford: George Ronald, 1980.

———. The Báb: The Herald of the Day of Days. Oxford: George Ronald, 1973.

———. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: The Centre of the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh. London: George Ronald, 1971.

Rabbani, Rúḥíyyih. The Priceless Pearl. London: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1969. This magnificent biography of Shoghi Effendi by his wife is a worthy tribute to the first and only Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith.

8. Other Biographical Studies and Source Materials

For biographies of those associated with the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith and for additional source material see:

Balyuzi, H. M. Khadíjih Bagum: The Wife of the Báb. Oxford: George Ronald, 1981. The author is a descendant of one of the cousins of the Báb. The poignant story of Khadíjih Bagum was published on the first anniversary of the author’s death as “his final act of homage.”

Gail, Marzieh. Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf. Oxford: George Ronald, 1981. The story of Bahá’u’lláh’s daughter has been published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of her death. It provides a glimpse of the family of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and of the young Shoghi Effendi.

Bahíyyib Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf. Compiled by the Research Department at the Bahá’í World Centre. Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1982. A compilation of passages about Bahá’u’lláh’s daughter written [Page 59] by Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (her brother), and Shoghi Effendi (her nephew), as well as ninety-two of her own letters. Introduction by Amatu’l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum, the wife of Shoghi Effendi.

Momen, Moojan, ed. The Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts. Oxford: George Ronald, 1981. A compilation of source materials relating to the development of the Bábí and Bahá’í religions in the Middle East drawn from reports of European diplomatic and consular staffs, missionaries, and travelers, as well as newspapers, magazines, and books.

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Beyond the Rag-and-Bone Shop

REVIEWS OF ROGER WHITE’S Another Song Another Season: Poems and Portrayals (OXFORD: GEORGE RONALD, 1979), XI+ 162 PAGES, AND The Witness of Pebbles: Poems and Portrayals (OXFORD: GEORGE RONALD, 1981), XV + 199 PAGES, NOTES

BY ALEX ARONSON

ROGER WHITE’S Another Song Another Season is a book of poems about exceptional people living in a commonplace age in frequently undistinguished surroundings. It is poetry that praises—by implication rather than emphasis—the virtues of compassion, selflessness, and martyrdom. The poet’s approach to such qualities and to the people possessing them is one of humility and the awareness of his own inadequacy. These poems neither preach nor provide moral precepts. Those who look for the sentimental and the melodramatic will be disappointed. A lesser poet could easily have yielded to intellectual pretentiousness and emotional self-indulgence. It is refreshing and encouraging to know that such poetry can still be written in an age such as ours, afflicted as it is with the self-centeredness of the spiritually sterile and the neurotic complexities of inner division.

For these poems were not written to arouse interest in the poet’s ego, nor do they exhibit the contemporary symptoms of a split personality. They are poems expressing faith—and it seems to me irrelevant in this context whether the reader approves or disapproves of it since they were not written to convince or proselytize —a faith in possibilities of existence that are based on a potentially integrated human being, indeed on all that is indivisible in man’s thought. It is the kind of faith that should naturally and effortlessly appeal to those among the readers of these poems who themselves have experienced the anguish of divisiveness and separation in their own personal life or in their unavailing struggle against social disintegration and politically motivated evil. It is, thus, a book of poems that takes a particular reader for granted—sensitive to the problematic nature of our age and aware of the need of affirming a unified vision of life for all men—a reader capable of self-realization, indeed an exceptional reader.

It may be said that most readers of poetry today are exceptional people. To be able to resist the facile temptations put in our way by so large a variety of mass media, by the slogans put out by political parties and their ubiquitous leaders, by the many shortcuts to knowledge available today for the stupid, the mentally lazy, and the immature, is in itself an achievement of considerable magnitude. To take up a book of poems, not as a refuge from disillusionment and frustration but as a form of affirmation of all that still has meaning and significance in individual life, is almost more than one had reason to hope for.

White’s poems do not provide shelter and spiritual comfort to the alienated, the misfit, and the outcast. The faith they proclaim does not require ritual and mystery, for “there is no mystery here: / only fidelity and service.” They speak of “the heart’s frail ladder” and “reason’s faulty bridge” and [Page 61] accept the vulnerability of the human condition. When, finally, they are face to face with the humility of self-effacing faith they are

. . . grateful to be spared discipleship

and a gratuitous verbal tour of those landmarks

that trace the outermost fringes of the stronghold of belief

or a recital of those polite bywords we erect as barriers

at the remotest courtyard of identity

to discourage rather than invite entry or homecoming.

By the time the reader closes Another Song Another Season he knows that White too has passed through the agonies of “the hapless / of Nagasaki, Warsaw, Buchenwald” and that, when the final count is made, he “is not resigned to evil.” The world this poet has built for himself is “real,” it “stay[s] put,” it “does not slip / or warp or wobble.” It is a civilized world where human contact is easy and regulated by standards of mutual tolerance, where human relationships are portrayed as precarious, yet necessary, attempts at establishing a significant balance in human terms—in protest, as it were, against the chaos imposed upon us by the meaningless violence of human history. If anyone wants to know more about the author of these poems, let him read “New Song,” which begins with “the small-town smugness /of your childhood” in Canada and ends with the earth “flooded with the felicity of this new song,” which is a melody heard everywhere and at all times if only men are ready to listen and to respond.

One word more should be said about Roger White’s use of irony in these poems. There is no bitterness nor anger here, no violent tearing to pieces, no strutting and fretting. It is an irony born of wisdom and sympathetic understanding. When the poet, riding in a bus, remarks an ad overhead postulating “that loneliness is cured by choice of toothpaste” or observes the secretary racing “into the subway’s cargo of / psychotic, kind and mediocre men,” or visualizes her in “the cool, chrome chaos / of her familiar working day” among “suave and flannelled men” greeting her with “metallic ‘good-mornings’ spilling like paperclips / under the brutal neon tubes,” the reader is made to realize the brittleness and fragility of a civilization which has become fragmented, a surface polish and gloss held together by the power of money and politics.

It is very rare in contemporary poetry that a reader experiences compassionate irony of this kind. Such irony, which is almost a form of tenderness, opens vistas of integration and wholeness beyond the present moment of fatuity. It addresses the mind of the reader in a language not merely intelligible but revealing dimensions of living [Page 62] reality he had long ago consigned to oblivion. It is good to be reminded of the availability of “other songs” and “other seasons” than the ones we live among in the triviality of our everyday existence.

ROGER WHITE’S second collection of poems, The Witness of Pebbles, testifies, once again, to his commitment to the perennial values of the spirit and to his uncompromising defense of human integrity. To this reader, accustomed to the study and teaching of contemporary poetry, the book is an astounding and somewhat intimidating experience: what is so evidently lacking in much modern poetry—the unified response of a mature mind to the twentieth-century dissociation of sensibility on all possible levels of human thought and emotion—has found expression in these poems. That such poetry can be written today is even more remarkable, for White ranges freely over a wide expanse of experience, dealing with an infinite variety of dilemmas with which modern man in search of his soul is confronted—the religious, the social, the political, the aesthetic. The poet’s convictions are passionately held; he avoids no emphasis, however shocking, when it is needed to drive home his message; he conveys with equal force the moment of worship in the temple and the moment of self-deception and disillusionment in the seclusion of the bedroom. He stresses the spiritual rather than the material life of man. Such an emphasis is only natural for one intent on upholding those values that, ultimately, may guarantee man’s spiritual survival.

White’s is a voice crying in the wilderness. Who can write religious poetry today, one may well ask, without appearing to be an anachronism, without exposing oneself to the reproof of “pious insincerity,” an absence of “intellectual discipline,” “some spattering indulgence of emotion”? T. S. Eliot, who speaks of these flaws in religious poetry that is not of the highest order, contrasts them with what he calls “the most terrible concentration and ascesis” and declares that, “Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss.” White compels the reader to look into the abyss. This is why his religious poetry eschews dogma, does not indulge in an overflow of gratuitous emotion, but portrays human beings whose most outstanding characteristic is their love for other human beings, their tolerance even when faced with “the worst” form “of passionate intensity” (to quote Yeats’ Second Coming, to which Geoffrey Nash refers in his Introduction), their aspiration toward some ultimate, yet simple, truth that would transcend, if not the tragedy, at least the very real complexity of what constitutes the human condition today.

Yeats, who comes to mind more than once when reading The Witness of Pebbles, wrote less than a year before his death that he “must be satisfied with [his] heart,” for all the “old themes” had been exhausted, themes “of the embittered heart” (as he calls them), the “heart-mysteries” that perplexed and enchanted him in the past. Now that he has been “deserted” by “those masterful images,” his mind must once again return to where it all began, and he must “lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” We also watch White’s heart in its progress from awareness of frailty to affirmation of strength. The rag-and-bone shop is there as well, but beyond the humble ladder and the abyss of mental anguish into which he looked, there beats a “heart exulting unaggrieved,” the “unbribable heart” of one who is ready to forgive and show compassion where a lesser poet might have exhibited [Page 63] a petulant indifference to human suffering.

White makes the transition from deeply felt religious poetry to poems of social satire easily. Indeed, the one seems to complement the other. The attraction of “the fleeting and the false,” “the shoddy and the second-rate,” the “mendacious, mercenary and unmemorable” are as much part of White’s experience as the heart-rending sacrifice of a believer in truth who might have taken the easy life but chose, instead, humiliation, suffering, and death. In such a context of purity death itself becomes “irrelevant,” and man’s power of endurance transcends what physical torture or mental torment may inflict on his always vulnerable body and the fragility of his soul.

Many of the poems in the The Witness of Pebbles, though inspired by simple faith in truth as an absolute criterion by which to measure human conduct, speak of the “stunned and stubborn flesh,” “the outworn bones” in order to affirm “with lung and liver, limb and loin” the one and only way to perfection. Most frequently, with the simplicity of all revelation, the way from body to soul, from physical endurance to the recognition of some ultimate freedom of the spirit, is revealed not as an unexplored mystery but as a rediscovered innocence, yet also as something imperishable because pertaining to the heart. In a way, Roger White has left the rag-and-bone shop of the heart far behind him. Though his ladder starts among all the things that grow and experience the joy of growing, surrounded as it is by earthly joy and the body’s affirmation of all life, it leads beyond the moment’s bitterness and alienation toward a more comprehensive, a more all-inclusive wholeness.

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Authors & Artists

ALEX ARONSON is a professor in the Department of English at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He was born in Germany and received part of his education there. He holds a Ph.D. degree in comparative literature from the University of Toulouse, and B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Cambridge. He taught English literature at Rabindranath Tagore University, West Bengal, and has published extensively on educational and literary topics. Among his works are Rabindranath Through Western Eyes (1943, 1978), Europe Looks at India (1946, 1979), Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare (1972), and Music and the Novel (1980).

BRET BRENEMAN is an English teacher who loves to travel; he has lived most recently in Japan, the East Caroline Islands, and Australia, where he has been accepted as a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney. He holds a B.A. degree from Stanford University and M.A. degrees in English literature from the University of Sussex and in teaching from New Mexico State University. His poems have appeared in Bahá’í Studies, and an article was published in English and Spanish in the Japanese magazine P.H.P. He has several book-length manuscripts in preparation.

NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH is a professor of history at Lewis and Clark College. He holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in political science, international relations, and history from Stanford University. His varied contributions to World Order include: “Three Studies on Religion and Society: Christianity, 138 A.D.” (Spring/ Summer 1980); “Islám: The First 138 Years” (Fall 1980/Winter 1981); “Melting Pot or Boiling Cauldron: The Ethnic Experience in America” (Winter 1975-76); “Of Time, Space, and Man: Reflections on Progressive Revelation” (Summer 1974); and “The Non-Hero in History” (Fall 1967). Among his other publications are A Bibliography of Persian Gulf Sheikdoms and White Revolution of Írán.

JOAN IMIG TAYLOR, whose poems have appeared in World Order a number of times, has published stories and poems also in England and India, and she has recently had a book accepted for publication. A music and theatre buff, she has worked for Sunset Magazine and the Examiner in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 1, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 3, photograph by courtesy of the Bahá’í National Archives of the United States; p. 8, photograph by Camille O’Reilly; p. 33, photograph by John Conow; p. 64, drawing by Bill Dennisuk.

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