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WORLD ORDER
THE BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE
MAY, 1947
The Bahá’í Basis for Human Relations
David S. Ruhe
The Poet Laureate
Marzieh Gail
“They Understand Not,” Editorial
Bertha H. Kirkpatrick
The Song, Poem
Nancy Douglas Bowditch
Bahá’í View of UNESCO
Gertrude B. Fleur
The Quest, Poem
Gertrude W. Robinson
The Mature Man
Bahá’í Words for Meditation
With Our Readers
20c
World Order was founded March 21, 1910 as Bahá’í News, the first organ of the American Bahá’ís. In March, 1911, its title was changed to Star of the West. Beginning November, 1922 the magazine appeared under the name of The Bahá’í Magazine. The issue of April, 1935 carried the present title of World Order, combining The Bahá’í Magazine and World Unity, which had been founded October, 1927. The present number represents Volume XXXVIII of the continuous Bahá’í publication.
WORLD ORDER is published monthly in Wilmette, Ill., by the Publishing
Committee of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United
States and Canada. EDITORS: Eleanor S. Hutchens, William Kenneth Christian,
Gertrude K. Henning, Horace Holley, Bertha Hyde Kirkpatrick.
Publication Office
110 LINDEN AVENUE, WILMETTE, ILL.
C. R. Wood, Business Manager
Editorial Office
Mrs. Gertrude K. Henning, Secretary
69 ABBOTSFORD ROAD, WINNETKA, ILL.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: $2.00 per year, for United States, its territories and possessions;
for Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America. Single copies, 20c.
Foreign subscriptions, $2.25. Make checks and money orders payable to World
Order Magazine, 110 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois. Entered as second class
matter April 1, 1940, at the post office at Wilmette, Ill., under the Act of March
3, 1879. Content copyrighted 1947 by Bahá’í Publishing Committee. Title
registered at U. S. Patent Office.
ONE MONTH IN ADVANCE
V-J DAY in Chicago—one
drop in the torrent of frantic joy
that overflowed the world when
War ended. But the end of War
is not the beginning of Peace. The
story of Peace is the story of the
Bahá’í Revelation. Month by
month that story is offered you in
the pages of World Order Magazine.
Acme Photo
THE New World Order of Bahá’u’lláh displays a uniquely universal power of appeal. It reaches people of every class, of every degree of intelligence or culture . . . It appeals to the Occidental scholar or business man, as well as to the untutored peasants of Asia.
THE Bahá’í Faith, like all great
spiritual forces, shows the power of annihilating
prejudice and of uniting members of
different religions, different races, and different
nations into one living brotherhood. This
is the kind of miracle of which the Bahá’í
Faith boasts. It bases its proofs, not upon
miraculous births or miraculous deeds of its
founders, but upon miracles in the transformation
of human character, especially in the
way of abolishing prejudices and emotional
barriers. It is bringing together Jews, Zoroastrians,
Moslems, Christians, Buddhists, Confucianists
—welding them into an organic
whole, a living breathing body of brotherhood
and love.
Excerpts from
Security for a Failing World
By STANWOOD COBB
WORLD ORDER
The Bahá’í Magazine
VOLUME XIII MAY, 1947 NUMBER 2
The Bahá’í Basis for Human Relations
DAVID S. RUHE, M.D.
IN the bony skull case of man
lives the soft brain stuff which
alone has placed mankind today
on the top of evolution’s biological
heap. In this brain lies the
emotional force of the soul, the
power of the mind with its gift of
reason, and the spiritual capacity
to know and love God and His
Prophets. From this intricate and
amazing neuronic material has
come the fullness of emotional
life, the discoveries of nature’s
laws, and the wit to live by the
precepts of the Bibles of all
Faiths. In, by, and from such a
brain we each must seek to
achieve a balanced personality,
creative, tough, sensitive, attuned
to eternal truths.
The Bahá’í teachings predicate three great factors for a balanced and whole human development: (1) sound emotional or soul development, for sound emotional life produces fullness of experience no matter what physical equipment we have been given; (2) sound intellectual or mental growth, for the intellect is our instrument to understand and bend nature; (3) sound spiritual development, for contact with the divine world is the vital element which makes the other two truly significant. None of the three are readily separable. Each closely interlocks with the other. Lack of development in one area is reflected in over-compensation or shrivelling in the others.
But the brain which rules each
one of us is also our great sore
spot. The enormous complexity
of its mechanism makes each
brain an incredible creative tool.
But such complexity means also
the possibility of every kind and
degree of emotional, intellectual
and spiritual difficulty. It has
wisely been said that each one of
us is a mite crazy. We each recognize
peculiarities in other personalities.
Especially we recognize
the tragedy of insanity, that
serious breakdown in personality
[Page 40]
structure which all of us know
somewhere among our acquaintances.
As infectious diseases
fade upon the medical horizons,
civilization’s greatest threat
looms: mental disease. We must
concern ourselves also about the
degenerative diseases of the old.
But our great focus must be the
mental disease which disorders
those in the prime of their life
activities. Mental disease lives inside
the skull case, in the lumpy
and wrinkled brain mass. Here
lives the peril of our times. But
here, too, is the talisman which
must be wakened to the life of
the spirit and educated to intellectual
maturity and emotional
fullness.
Insanity cripples its afflicted ones. Such severe derangement of the mind places its victims in institutions, where they are a burden upon, but not a danger to society. The great hazard to mankind today lies not in its cripples, but in the apparently sound and healthy persons whose brain educations have been bent into psychopathologic trends. Most persons do not even recognize these forms of mental illness, although history has shown how virulent some of them are. Some who are themselves victims of these dangerous psychologic illnesses would of course strongly object to their being called by this name. But it is nothing new that humans have difficulty achieving perspective upon themselves. The social scene is so complex that great variations from the norm are permissible and so often we are misled in what is true pathology. Let us examine a few of these mental problems which so concern us today, because they blight and obstruct society’s pathway.
Individuals whose emotional life has been disrupted in one way or another manifest all the vast conglomeration of effects which crowd our psychiatric textbooks, which fill our clinics, and which vex our wisest physicians. These persons are the emotionally maladjusted, the compulsive, the impulsive, the homosexuals, the despairing, the fugitive—the whole torrent of those who suffer from the neuroses.
There are those who educate
the intellect to the virtual exclusion
of the other areas of the
brain capacity for growth. Broadly
speaking, these persons suffer
from one or another of the forms
of materialism. The scientist becomes
a worshiper of material
laws, although his altruism may
frequently be very praiseworthy.
The economist or business
man worships the flow of material
things, and may call himself
a capitalist or a communist. The
[Page 41]
common man worships the skills
and knowledges required to bring
him physical comfort, pleasure
and security. If he ever heard the
word, he might call himself a
hedonist. But how is this materialism
an illness? We have only
to look through the leaves of history
books to discover that civilizations
have fallen because of
this “dreary bog of materialism.”
This bog slowly suffocates
morality, ethics, religion, sucked
under into an airless muck rich
in organic resources, but fatally
water-logged. The intellect is our
weapon of survival. It is a poor
fate for such a weapon to let it
hack suicidally at itself without
a guiding spiritual hand.
And those whose spiritual development has been stifled or retarded or twisted have many curious psychologic complexes or disease. Some churchmen have a strange sickness called religious literalism; others have what is called secularism; perhaps these may be described as materialism in the sphere of religion. Some churchmen too have a mental aberration called monasticism, which generally produces a simultaneous physical, mental and social sterility. Others own a brain arterio-sclerotic process which we might call dogmatism. Some church systems have that group mental pathology which in Germany, Italy and Japan was called fascism, and which in this case is termed authoritarianism. And almost all churchmen suffer from that egocentricity which is unwilling to settle for the great similarities of faith as against the petty differences of interpretation; we can call this very simply sectarianism.
Laymen who have carried religion too far and too blindly have fallen, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, “into the slough of superstition.” Superstitions in our day of enlightened scientific observations certainly comprise a sympton-complex of at least a mild illness. Many have fallen into a blind idolatry of worship of form in the church against its substance. The golden calf is not in our past, but lives in our present. The technically trained person of today has generally fallen into the sceptical and cynical processes of agnosticism. And there are those who question the infinite and are atheists.
As we observe groups of people
and their interrelationships,
we can observe certain group
aberrations. Possibly these are
the most dangerous of all to mankind.
We are all familiar with
the concept of classes of society.
It is far too easy to forget the
ever-shifting nature and boundaries
of so-called classes. The
[Page 42]
lines arbitrarily drawn by students
of sociology for their observations
are all too readily borrowed
as flat realities by demagogues,
or by organizers who put
labor at management’s throat, or
the poor to storming the gates of
the rich. And those who believe
in classism are living with a subtly
dangerous mental disease. In
some countries classism has a
singular mold called casteism.
But both are the same mirage of
theorists and politicians.
Most dangerous of all, the dynamite in our civilization’s very foundation, is racism. Racism is a gnawing fungus psychopathy eating through all levels of our thoughts and personalities. It is the clear source of many wars. And in this day of fearful atomic energy release, we must look upon any obvious and blatant cause of war with great foreboding. Racism exists everywhere in the world in greater or less degree. It is found in every community in our land, and in every other land. Most ominous of all, it lies rooted in the brains of each of us, a little, or often a great deal.
Rabbi Lee Levinger and other Jewish leaders have pointed to the modern tragedy of the Jews. The Jew has virtually abandoned the religion of his fathers in favor of the materialism of his times, but anti-Semitism keeps him in a perennial limbo of social unacceptability.
The true native Americans, the Indians, have been the victims of racistic white aggressions which might be pardoned today, if the so-called democracy of our land gave him now his justifiable birthright as a full citizen. But pure red-skinned racism holds him from his franchise.
From Florida and the Southwest to the Straits of Magellan racism has made the Latin-American and his mestizo offspring a racistic nightmare to “pure white folks,” and even to themselves.
Our Japanese-American fragment of population performed splendidly in the recent war, and demonstrated the fundamental errors of yellow-skinned racism when applied to our own Nisei. And our ally China played so important a war role that it made more emphatic the social isolation of Chinese-Americans.
The opening battles of the Philippines and the guerilla fighting of four long years on the islands have been an honor to the brown Filipino, but a dilemma to the racist. And who has visited the melting-pot of Hawaii without vivid impressions of the success of one race experiment?
Nazi Germany died in ashes,
[Page 43]
victim of her fatal absurdities
of Aryan racism. Holland walks
gingerly, and in retreat, upon the
flowing lava of Indonesian brown
racism, converted to nationalism.
Britain sits in sombre study over
its volcano of brown India. Russia
sits psychologically serene in
her structure of racially equalitarian
soviet republics. South
Africa has split its national personality
by its well-concealed
disfranchisement of its native
Africans.
And America—ah! America whom we would like to see as the moral leader of our world— America sits in unbelievable indecision and and even confusion upon the problems of her minorities. America permits democratic constitution, its laws and legal machinery to be systematically flouted by an anachronistic mental pathology which focuses on ten million unfortunate Negroes. In wonderful America a tenth of her population are half-citizens because of racism—racism in a great and honorable nation which prides itself upon “liberty and justice for all”.
The color line is the battle line of racism in America. That a color line is completely unreal may of course be observed by any child who sees the variety of complexions in our so-called white population. That there is no sound reason for this variety of racism can be readily substantiated on anatomic, intellectual, social or moral grounds. That the racism nonetheless exists in poisonous forms is very obvious. And it is also obvious that this type of vicious racistic emotional sickness has grown in our regional and national personalities for observable reasons out of clear-cut physical and social circumstances. Lillian Smith, courageous liberal who dared to write Strange Fruit, distills the racism of Mr. White Man of the South into one sentence: “It is unfortunate that we white Southerners learn about God, sex and segregation at about the same time in our lives; and so we become confused.”
We have recognized some of the mental sickness of our day. Let us outline a two-part program of treatment, for ourselves —for each of us has a little of these ailments—and for our land.
One: We must join and support
the strong, determined and
sound beginnings made toward
curing our land’s mental diseases.
Fortunately, these United
States are rich in men and women
of vision. Some are awake,
some drowsing, some still asleep.
In the South, the Southern Conference
for Human Welfare carries
[Page 44]
on its excellent and courageous
work with a slim membership.
It makes of racism a fundamentally
economic rather than a
human issue; this is sound strategy
for those who cannot see that
Negro-hating is a red herring of
native fascists. The Southern Regional
Council enlists the aid of
another slim minority of liberals;
but it always hovers delicately
balanced on the problem of
alienating its timorous membership
by too enthusiastic advocacy
of inter-racial amity. The Christian
churches are making some
of the necessary concessions, but
have not yet opened their doors
to inter-racial worship. The social
agencies and the recreational
ones are taking quiet steps forward,
but forward. The labor organizations
offer strong hopes of
an ultimate clearing away of
some of the debris of racism;
here again it is the economic approach
rather than the human
one. The Bahá’í Faith and its
contribution must not be overlooked.
Perhaps America can
conquer racism before it stunts
our international growth, before
we demonstrate abroad the perverse
attitudes of the insecure
man instead of the generous and
considerate strength of a great
power. The psychiatric and social
retraining of our vast living
and adult population is an enormous
labor. But we have a beginning.
Two: We have recognized that the primary source of these illnesses is the human brain. We must therefore, like Father Flanagan of Boys Town, like the policemen sponsors of Boys Clubs far and near, or like the Dallas, Texas, businessmen and their Boys Ranch, start with that brain early, preferably about one minute after the child has been born. This brain stuff must be educated in the three-fold manner we have analyzed. It must be given love and security. It must be given the vitality-imbuing tonic of spiritual education. The molding experiences of real human contacts must be freely encouraged, cut loose from the sterilities of segregations, and from the popular folk myths concerning racial superiorities or inferiorities. The fundamental principle of sound human relations is now, as always, the equality and organic oneness of mankind. Our children must have this idea, even if we have been cheated of it.
In these children emotional
education will fall to the lot of
the parents, to you and me; but
it will also be the function of the
peaceful and well-ordered social
structure of our communities.
Material education of this precious
brain tissue will fall to the
[Page 45]
parents again, but especially to
the teachers; we must all be
teachers, vigorous and clear-minded
ones. But much the most
important education is that of the
spirit. The public schools have
barred instruction in the area of
religion, because sectarians have
naturally found the schools convenient
battlegrounds for their
differences. Elimination of religious
instruction in the schools has
also been part of the separation
of church and state. And if truth
were told, perhaps the educators
might themselves not be enthusiastic
about religious teachings
so generally out of joint with
modernity, so cluttered with
man’s imaginations.
So out of joint with modernity. But you who have known of the Bahá’í Faith know of a religion which is of the essence of our Twentieth Century. You know of a religion which is built of the great law of evolutionary change which Einstein has mathematically proved. You have become acquainted with a community of believers each of whom has assumed the responsibility for religious learning, teaching, and living. You have seen the National Bahá’í House of Worship, that “Place of the Mention of God” built out of the spirit of men’s hopes for the Most Great Peace, at the behest of the new great prophetic voice of our Age: Bahá’u’lláh. We who are Bahá’ís feel convinced that this religion will be the basis for human relations, will give the blueprint for the education of the world in that most vital area—its own spirit.
Every Bahá’í community aids in preventing the neuroses of its followers by offering both community and individual love and guidance.
Every Bahá’í community aids in preventing materialism by broadening the base of our approach to life.
Every Bahá’í community has outgrown literalism, monasticism, secularism, sectarianism, authoritarianism. Every individual Bahá’í slowly outgrows his superstitions, has lost his unconscious idolatries, has grown far beyond agnosticism.
And the Administrative Order, with the great fundamental Bahá’í teaching of the oneness of mankind, has eliminated classism and that miserable situation called racism.
Within the bony skull of man
is presented the problem and the
solution of our day. A bony skull
is stripped of skin, hair and
muscles, of every tissue which
makes it and us readily identified
as of one race or another. Laymen
[Page 46]
must guess a racial identity,
if anthropologists need not.
There the great social obstacle
has disappeared. It is plain that
racism is only skin deep. And the
brain beneath the bony sheath is
the same warm human material.
What lives there is the same for
each of us—the same emotions,
illimitable desires, thoughts, the
same spiritual reality.
We can each have the solution at the price of one decision for action. On the one hand lies mental disease and personal confusion; on the other, lies education of the soul, mind and spirit with the Bahá’í Faith.
The Revelation proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh, His followers believe, is divine in origin, all-embracing in scope, broad in its outlook, scientific in its method, humanitarian in its principles and dynamic in the influence it exerts on the hearts and minds of men. The mission of the Founder of their Faith, they conceive it to be to proclaim that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is continuous and progressive, that the Founders of all past religions, though different in the non-essential aspects of their teachings, “abide in the same Tabernacle, soar in the same heaven, are seated upon the same throne, utter the same speech and proclaim the same Faith.” His Cause, they have already demonstrated, stands identified with, and revolves around, the principle of the organic unity of mankind as representing the consummation of the whole process of human evolution. This final stage in this stupendous evolution, they assert, is not only necessary but inevitable, that it is gradually approaching, and that nothing short of the celestial potency with which a divinely ordained Message can claim to be endowed can succeed in establishing it.
The Poet Laureate
MARZIEH GAIL
NABÍL was a shepherd. He
was born in the village of
Zarand, July 29, 1831. Since his
family could not supply him
with teachers and books, he
memorized verses from the
Qur’án and chanted them, walking
after his flocks. He liked to
be alone in the night, and look at
the stars. Off by himself in the
desolate countryside, he turned
his face toward Mecca and
prayed for guidance.
When his father took him to Qum he listened to the sermons of the great mujtahids. He disliked these men. He thought they were hypocrites. He longed for belief, but he could not have the teachers and books he needed to prove things for himself.
One day in the village mosque he overheard, quite by accident, a conversation between two men.
“The Siyyid-i-Báb is on His way to Țihrán,” said one.
The other did not understand. The first explained: a Man called the Báb had declared a mission, had won over disciples and done great deeds, been arrested, been condemned to death in Ișfáhán, and was now on His way under guard to the capital.
The shepherd boy’s life was decided from that moment. It was the 12th day of the New Year’s festival, 1847. All the wanderings, the suffering, the tests, the dangers, the missions, the collecting of the history, the setting it forth, and then that last anguish which was too much to bear, so that he could not live in the world any more—all those events to come were folded up in that hour.
He went home. He could not eat or sleep. His father wondered what was wrong. The boy said nothing, because he was afraid his father would keep him from this new thing that had come into his life—take it away somehow. He made friends with a newcomer to the village and since he had to speak, he confided in the friend. To his great joy, this man was himself a convert to the Báb.
“My cousin saw Him at Ișfáhán,” the man said. “It was at the High Priest’s. My cousin heard Him revealing a commentary on the Qur’án.”
This new friend had set out
on foot, hurrying after the Báb,
Who was then a captive, riding
under escort to Țihrán. Along
the way he met a believer stationed
by the Báb, with a message
for any friends who might
[Page 48]
be following; the message was,
to go their way and serve the
Cause, until some day His followers
might worship their God
in freedom.
After this, Nabíl was more at peace. With his new friend, he read a work of the Báb. Nabíl had been studying the Qur’án with a man who he began to see could not teach him; he wanted to learn more about the Cause, and his friend advised him to visit Qum, where there would come a teacher, Siyyid Ismá’íl. Nabíl induced his father to send him to Qum, ostensibly to improve his knowledge of Arabic; he was careful not to give his real reason for leaving, because the Muslim leaders in the village would have kept him from going.
The family visited him while he was at Qum—that is, his mother, sister and brother, and on this visit he taught both mother and sister of the Faith. Then at last Siyyid Ismá’íl arrived; Nabíl questioned him closely and was completely won over. The Siyyid talked to Nabíl at those faraway meetings in Qum, much as Bahá’í teachers do now; except that Bahá’ís of today know more of the story than was then dreamed of: the great Beings who were to come, were still, except for the First, undisclosed; Nabíl’s own book was then not imagined; most of the events he describes had not yet taken place.
Siyyid Ismá’íl told Nabíl about the continuity of Divine Revelation, that it was never interrupted, but flowed on forever, from Prophet to Prophet—all of whom were fundamentally one, and closely bound up with the mission of the Báb. He also told Nabíl about Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Káẓim, forerunners of the Báb; the youth, who was later to spread their fame around the world, had never heard of them before. Then Nabíl asked what he should do for the Cause. The answer was to go to Mázindarán, to the Fort in the forest, and join the believers who were starving and dying there, hemmed in by an army. First, he was to await a summons from Siyyid Ismá’íl, himself on his way to the Fort, but destined elsewhere. It was this man who, in later years, would sweep the approaches to Bahá’u’lláh’s house in Baghdád with his own turban, and who at last, on the river bank, gave up his life as a sacrifice. If Nabíl had accompanied him to the Fort, The Dawn-Breakers would probably never have been written.
The message did not come,
and Nabíl, impatient, went on to
Țihrán. It was 1848 or soon
[Page 49]
after. The momentous Year 60
was four years past.
At last he received his summons, and was about to leave when news came that the defenders of the Fort had been tricked into surrender and butchered, and the Fort levelled with the ground. There was no more Shaykh Ṭabarsí—except that it will always be with us, living in memory; our stronghold, and posterity’s after us, wherever we and they may be. Only the material pattern was annulled; for who can say that the Fort itself was battered down, or that its defenders lost the battle, or that they died?
Siyyid Ismá’íl sent Nabíl back to Zarand. He brought his brother into the Faith. He pled with his father, and got permission to go back to Țihrán, where he had a cell in the same madrisih, (school attached to a mosque), as ‘Abdu’l-Karím. From the beginning, he had wanted to meet this man, because of ‘Abdu’l-Karím’s vision of the white dream-bird that had prophesied the advent of the Báb. Placed in his charge by Siyyid Ismá’íl, Nabíl became so attached to him that thirty-eight years later, he recalls in the Narrative the love of ‘Abdu’l-Karím, whom Bahá’u’lláh also called Mírzá Aḥmad, and who worked all day as a public scribe, and spent his nights copying out the writings of the Báb, which he then gave away as gifts.
Several times Nabíl carried such copies to a young woman whose husband had left her. She had a baby named Raḥmán, after one of the Names of God; I do not know what became of the child, or whether he lived to grow up, but time has preserved his memory; because the father had left both mother and child to go to the defense of Ṭabarsí.
This is the man who appears
suddenly in history, rising above
the wall of the Fort. It was in
the days when the besieged were
boiling the grass and eating it;
when they had made a flour from
grinding up bones; when they ate
saddle leather and the scabbards
of their swords; when they had
dug up their leaders’ horse, dead
of its battle wounds, and shared
it together. The man on the wall
embodies all this. His sword was
strapped on over his long white
garment; around his head, he
had a white band, and the Muslim
who had come with a safe-conduct
to take him home was
frightened of his face: it was as
flaming and unyielding as his
sword. The Muslim tried to move
this man: “Come back to your
child,” he said; “your little Raḥman,
who longs to see you.”
[Page 50]
“Tell him,” said the man on the
wall, “that the love of the true
Raḥmán has filled my heart; it
has left no place for any love
but His.” When the Muslim saw
that nothing could take this man
from his post, he wept. “May
God assist you,” he said. “He
has indeed assisted me,” said the
man on the wall. “How else
could I have come to this exalted
stronghold?” And then he vanished.
The young Nabíl learned that Ṭáhirih had been brought to Ṭihrán and imprisoned in the mayor’s house. Now he was in the same city with Bahá’u’lláh, with the Master Who was then a Child of six, with the Navváb, with the future Most Exalted Leaf, and with Ṭáhirih.
Nabíl had been suffering from an eye disease; the Master’s mother, the Navváb, healed it, preparing an ointment which she sent him in care of ‘Abdu’l-Karím. One day the latter took him to the house of Bahá’u’lláh, and the first one they met there was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He stood at His Father’s door, and smiled at Nabíl, who was led past that room, quite unaware of its Occupant’s station, or his own future relationship to Him. He was presented to Mírzá Yaḥyá; seeing and listening to Yaḥyá, Nabíl was astonished at the divergence between the man and the exalted position claimed for him.
Another time they asked him to take ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to school, as the servant had not yet returned from market. The Child was very beautiful; He came out of His Father’s room, dressed for the street in a lambskin cap and His overcoat, and walked down the steps. Nabíl reached down to pick Him up. Instead, He took Nabíl’s hand and said, “We shall walk.” They went out of the gate, hand in hand, chatting together, the young man and the Child.
Nabíl also met the Báb’s uncle, who had been a second father to Him, and heard him say that he longed to die for the Faith—that he would not leave Ṭihrán, no matter what the danger, but would go to martyrdom as a guest to a banquet. It was not long after this that the leading merchants of Ṭihrán begged this man to recant his faith, and offered to pay his ransom. He replied that whatever he knew of Moses and Jesus and Muḥammad, and all the Prophets of the past, he had seen in the Báb; and that he therefore craved to be the first to die for his well-loved Kinsman.
This man became the first of
the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. As
he went to his death he called out
[Page 51]
and reminded the populace that
they had longed for a thousand
years to see the Qá’im, and that
now He was come they had imprisoned
Him on a mountain in
Ádhirbáyján and were killing
His people. Then he prayed for
their forgiveness and the last
thing he said was a verse from
Rúmí: “Cut off my head that
Love may give me a head”—and
then the lips closed and were
silent.
Our moderns, and particularly
Americans, do not care for
martyrs. This is because they do
not know what a martyr is. To
them, a martyr is an individual
who could be as happy as the
next man, but who prefers to
suffer, probably as a self-inflicted
punishment for uninteresting
sins, and to impose a
feeling of guilt on his friends because
he suffers. An individual,
passively aggressive, who suffers
for spite, because he chooses to.
This is a false conception. There are undoubtedly thousands of unhappy persons who make martyrs of themselves as a subtle means of self-chastisement and aggression. But the Dawn-Breakers were not like this. They were normal people, going about their business, until the Báb came. Great numbers of them were successful, leaders in their communities; their American equivalent would be college presidents, popular ministers of the Gospel, substantial men of affairs. They died because, after what they had seen in the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, nothing else in the world could hold their attention. They found what is most desirable, and took it. They wore their lives carelessly after that, and hardly knew whether it was their headgear or their heads that fell. The Master once said to a pilgrim that a martyr in relation to this world is like a man running away from a thief, who strips off his coat and flings it to him and runs on.
The Arabic and Persian word “shahíd” means the same as the English “martyr”: it means “witness.” We have forgotten the meaning of our word. The martyr has witnessed; his death is a proof of what he has seen. He is not a wretched, whimpering creature, he is a lover going to his Beloved. The martyr always appears in the early days of a Faith; he is not the dregs of humanity, he is the wine.
One day Nabíl came back to
his room and found a package
and a letter. The letter was from
‘Abdu’l-Karím; it said that both
he and Nabíl and others had
been denounced as Bábís, that
[Page 52]
the package contained all the
sacred writings in his possession,
that if Nabíl ever got to his room
alive he should deliver the package
to a certain caravanserai and
then, if he could, make his way
through the city, now in tumult,
and come to the mosque where
‘Abdu’l-Karím had taken sanctuary.
Meanwhile Bahá’u’lláh,
ever watchful, had sent word to
the mosque that since the authorities
were about to violate
the sanctuary of the building and
take the Bábís out, ‘Abdu’l-Karím
should leave in disguise
for Qum, and Nabíl should return
to Zarand.
That year Nabíl kept the Naw-Rúz —New Day—with his family. It was the New Year’s Day that coincided with the day the Báb had declared His mission, six years before. The Báb in His prison wrote of this Naw-Rúz that it was the last He would see on earth.
The young Nabíl could not be happy, or enjoy the thirteen days of feasting, the new clothes, the thin gold coins, the fruits, candies and saffron rice dishes that go with Naw-Rúz. His heart was with his friends, back in Ţihrán. When word finally came from them, his suspense changed to horror.
Fourteen of them had been imprisoned in the mayor’s house —all this time Ṭáhirih was a captive on the upper floor—and beaten and tortured for information. None of them spoke out. One of them, Muḥammad-Ḥusayn, would not utter even a syllable. His torturers questioned the man who had converted him to the Faith:
“Is he dumb?”
“He is mute, but not dumb,” was the answer; “he is fluent of speech.”
And indeed, he was eloquent the day they killed him—running forward and pleading so to die before the rest that he, the seventh of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán, was beheaded at the same moment with the fifth and sixth.
For three days, these seven had lain in the streets unburied. Thousands of devout Muslims during these days circled around their bodies, kicked them, spit on the dead faces, cursed them, stoned them, threw refuse on them, mutilated them in shameful ways. No one protested. At last what was left was gathered up and buried in one grave, out by the moat.
After this, Nabíl left home,
trying to find ‘Abdu’l-Karím. He
went to Qum, having told his
parents he was going to visit the
shrine there. Then he went to
Káshán, because he heard of a
[Page 53]
man there who would know of
‘Abdu’l-Karím’s whereabouts.
This man took him to another,
and finally he was directed to
Hamadán, where still another
guide sent him to Kirmánsháh,
and at last he found his friend,
collecting and transcribing the
sacred writings of the Báb, as
directed by Bahá’u’lláh.
‘Abdu’l-Karím had taught the Faith to a prince-governor, Ildirím Mírzá, who was stationed in the mountains with an army. Now he wished to send the prince one of the Báb’s writings, the “Seven Proofs.” Nabíl was elated to be chosen as the bearer of this gift. With a Kurdish guide, he went through forests and over mountains for six days and nights to the camp, delivered the trust and returned with a letter. He mentions this journey quite casually, yet judging by contemporary accounts of travels through Persia, it must have been dangerous and full of hardships. He was young and willing and tough, used to sleeping on bare ground or a bare floor, and his life was always in peril anyhow.
When he reached Kirmánsháh, Bahá’u’lláh had arrived there; with ‘Abdu’l-Karím, Nabíl was taken into His presence; they found Him reading the Qur’án, since it was the month of the Ramaḍán fast. Of the prince’s apparently friendly letter, Bahá’u’lláh remarked that its writer was not sincere; that the prince sought to win over the Bábís, because he believed that they would one day kill the Sháh, and hoped that when that time should come, they would place him, Ildirím Mírzá, on the throne of Persia. Not long afterward this very prince tortured and killed a believer, the great, blind Siyyid of India, come to Persia to find the Perfect Man whose advent his ancestors had foretold.
Bahá’u’lláh then directed Nabíl to conduct Mírzá Yaḥyá from Ṭihrán to a fort near Sháhrúd, and remain there with him. ‘Abdu’l-Karím was to stay at the capital; he was to carry with him a box of sweets to be forwarded to Mázindarán, where the Master and His mother were living.
But Mírzá Yaḥyá disobeyed,
and forced Nabíl to deliver some
letters for him in Qazvín. Then
Nabíl’s relatives again stepped
in—they seem forever to have
been interrupting his work for
the Faith—and made him return
home. Two months later he was
back in Ṭihrán again, living with
‘Abdu’l-Karím in a caravanserai
outside the city gates. All winter
[Page 54]
they were there, the older man
occupied in transcribing the
writings of the Báb.
By Nabíl’s hand, ‘Abdu’l-Karím then sent a copy of the “Seven Proofs” to an official, a siyyid; soon afterward this man denounced the Book at a gathering where the brother of Bahá’u’lláh was present. He said the teachings were “highly dangerous.” From his description of the youth who had brought the Book, Áqáy-i-Kalím knew at once that he meant Nabíl. Immediately, he warned Nabíl to leave for Zarand, and ‘Abdu’l-Karím for Qum; before they left, Nabíl was able to retrieve the Book from the siyyid, an achievement that must have required audacity and tact. The two friends now set out to the South, and when they reached the shrine of Sháh ‘Abdu’l-‘Aẓím, they parted; they were never to meet again in this life.
The Báb had been martyred
in Tabríz. The Prime Minister
who had caused His death had
himself been killed by the Sháh,
his veins opened in a public
bath. Bahá’u’lláh had left Țihrán
for Karbilá and had returned.
Then two believers, ignorant,
confused, in despair at all the
blood they had seen, stood waiting
one morning along the Sháh’s
line of march. When he rode
past, they checked his horse and
shot him. The pearl tassel around
the horse’s neck was severed; the
Sháh, slightly wounded in the
arm and side, was carried into
a garden; for an hour Persia was
in chaos: trumpets, drums, fifes,
called up troops; officers shouted
commands; couriers galloped
here and there; nobles crowded
into the garden.
After that rivers of blood flowed in Persia. Two irresponsible youths had attempted a crime; therefore, every real or imagined follower of the Báb in Persia must be rooted out. The clergy saw their chance, and the Sháh’s mother was insatiable of revenge: life after life was cut down, in exchange for her son’s slight wound, and still it was not enough and still she wanted more. Of the great massacre at Țihrán, Renan was to write that it was a day perhaps without parallel in the history of the world. Clergy, nobles, high officials, killed the believers with their own hands.
Then Persia trembled, and for
those who loved the Báb there
was death, dungeons, the whip,
the sword, the candles burning in
jagged wounds, the red-hot
screws, the cannon’s mouth. One
of the two youths who attacked
the Sháh was murdered on the
[Page 55]
spot; they tore his body in two
halves, and suspended them at
the city gates. The other, with a
third accomplice, was obscenely
tortured, and at last died. It was
then that Ṭáhirih was killed, and
Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán, and the
amanuensis of the Báb, and a
thousand others. Bahá’u’lláh’s
palace in Ṭihrán was despoiled;
the lovely house at Tákur was
stripped and ruined, the village
itself sacked and burned, the villagers
shot down. Bahá’u’lláh
was chained four months underground
in the dark, criminals
beside Him, on the earth filth
and vermin. And still the mother
of the Sháh was not appeased,
because the prize life, the One
she wanted to destroy, the One
for whom all the rest were only
substitutes—still lived; and at
last, preserved from death, He
was taken from the dungeon, exonerated
from all blame, and
banished forever.
Nabíl hastened after Him.
When he reached Baghdád, he
found that Bahá’u’lláh had gone
away—for this was the period
that He spent alone in the mountains
of Kurdistán. The Faith
seemed quenched. Mírzá Yaḥyá,
nominee of the Báb, cowered behind
locked doors. Nabíl left for
Karbilá and lived there. Bahá’u’lláh
returned, the friends revived,
Nabíl hurried to Him and
wrote odes for Him, so that later
an Englishman, writing of Nabíl,
was to describe him as the poet
laureate of Bahá’u’lláh.
Afterward Nabíl went to Persia
and was severely tested by association
with Siyyid Muḥammad,
but he triumphed and returned
to Bahá’u’lláh in Baghdád,
and was sent on a mission
to Kirmánsháh and again returned.
When the Manifestation
was exiled to Constantinople,
Nabíl put on the dress of a dervish
and followed on foot and
caught up with the exiles. From
Constantinople he was directed
to return to Persia, teach the
Cause and inform the Friends of
what had taken place. His mission
fulfilled, he went to Adrianople
where the public declaration
of Bahá’u’lláh was made.
He taught widely and fervently
all this time. Then Bahá’u’lláh
was exiled again, and Nabíl followed
Him to the Most Great
Prison; he came through the
‘Akká gate in disguise, dressed
as a man of Bokhara, but the
Covenant-breakers, always on the
alert, found him out and betrayed
him to the authorities and
they banished him. Heart broken,
he went to Şafad; then he
went over to Mount Carmel and
lived alone in a cave, weeping
and praying. At last the doors of
[Page 56]
the prison were opened and Nabíl
hurried to the presence of
Bahá’u’lláh and spent his time
composing poems for his Beloved.
Here are lines from one of
his odes, especially praised by
the Master:
- Though the Night of Parting endless
- seem as Thy night-black hair,
- Bahá, Bahá,
- Yet we meet at last, and the gloom
- is past in Thy lightning’s glare,
- Bahá, Bahá!
- To my heart from Thee was a signal
- shown that I to all men should
- make known
- That they, as the ball to the goal
- doth fly, should to Thee repair,
- Bahá, Bahá!
- At this my call from the quarters
- four men’s hearts and souls to Thy
- quarters pour:
- What, forsooth, could attract them
- more than that region fair, Bahá,
- Bahá?
- The World hath attained to Heaven’s
- worth, and a Paradise is the face
- of earth,
- Since at length thereon a breeze hath
- blown from Thy nature rare,
- Bahá, Bahá!
- Bountiful art Thou, as all men know:
- at a glance two Worlds Thou
- e’en bestow
- On the suppliant hands of Thy direst
- foe, if he makes his prayer, Bahá,
- Bahá![1]
Nabíl wrote The Dawn-Breakers for Bahá’u’lláh. He started the chronicle in 1888 and finished it in about a year and half. Mírzá Músá helped him with it; some parts of the manuscript were reviewed by Bahá’u’lláh, and some by the Master.
He lived in ‘Akká then, and when he had brought his narrative down to the point where the story of the Seven Martyrs was ended, he submitted the finished portions to Bahá’u’lláh, Who sent for him on December 11, 1888, a date Nabíl records as one he will never forget. On that occasion, his Lord gave him an account of various historical episodes, including the gathering at Badasht.
Nabíl was very exact, always citing references, cautious in his appraisals, frank as to the degree of his information, hunting for eye-witnesses and survivors, eagerly questioning: “Many, I confess, are the gaps in this narrative, for which I beg the indulgence of my readers. It is my earnest hope that these gaps may be filled by those who will, after me, arise to compile an exhaustive and befitting account of these stirring events, the significance of which we can as yet but dimly discern.” He was not omniscient, rhetorical, boastful, as contemporary Eastern historians; and he offers precise detail rather than the rhyming generalizations so often preferred by them.
[Page 57]
It is amazing, the rapidity of
his accomplishment, and the
care; and too, the variety of his
work—it takes a copious writing
vocabulary to range from military
campaigns to poetical expression;
and then the skilful
timing and pacing, the deploying
of events, the massing of facts.
Especially, we notice the feeling and life in the work; authentic everywhere, he is particularly sensitive when recording tenderness and love, which he understood so well that in the end he could not live with the knowledge of it, could not contain it. There is, for instance, that passage where he explains the bonds between the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, and shows how they matched agony for agony; then he says: “Such love no eye has ever beheld, nor has mortal heart conceived such mutual devotion. If the branches of every tree were turned into pens, and all the seas into ink, and earth and heaven rolled into one parchment, the immensity of that love would still remain unexplored, and the depths of that devotion unfathomed.”
These were not to him only Persian words. His life story shows that he was not like the people who know all the words, none of the meanings. Nabíl must have been acquainted with the Persian story of the moths, for he typifies it. It seems that the moths held a meeting to learn about the flame; they sent out a messenger to investigate it; he circled around the candle and returned and explained it most eloquently, but they could not understand. They sent another moth and this one flew close to the flame, and when he came back they saw his wings were singed and they began, dimly, to know. But they were not yet clear in their minds as to the nature of the flame. They sent a third moth to the candle; this one flew straight into the center of the flame, and he never came back; and then they understood.
How happy he would be now, if he could see his book; the admirable English text, enriched with further sources, photographs, and explanatory data, presenting his story to the West. Never during life could Nabíl have known that in a few short years leading public, university and privately-owned libraries in the faraway American continent would include his work. “He who is associated with a great Cause becomes great,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once told a pilgrim. Here is the shepherd of Zarand, on the same shelves with aṭ-Ṭabarí and Ibn Khaldún and the others who will never die.
[Page 58]
And then Bahá’u’lláh fell ill.
Once during this sickness, this
last of all the sufferings that life
inflicted on the Glory of God,
Nabíl was allowed to enter the
room and be there alone with his
Lord. He must have known when,
with a lover’s keenness of sight
and his own natural awareness,
he looked on the face of Bahá’u’lláh,
that this was the last
time. He must have seen, when
he came in the doorway and
stood there by the bed, what no
one in the Household would say,
that this fever was not like another,
and would not pass and be
forgotten. Here was the only
thing they had really been
afraid of, during forty years of
constant peril, and now it had
come. There must have been a
horror over Bahjí in those days.
The plains and mountains, the
trees and sky, must have looked
fixed and strange, as if jutting
out from a dream.
Nabíl was inarticulate when he tried to tell it. “Methinks,” he wrote, “the spiritual commotion set up in the world of dust had caused all the worlds of God to tremble. . . .” Trying to explain, he looked from the Event to its effects, and shows us the villagers of ‘Akká and other towns, crowding around Bahjí and sobbing and beating their heads. Life arranges that there shall be universal mourning when it is due.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, with His own anguish, and with the fate of the Cause in His hands, and everyone’s burden to carry, was mindful of Nabíl. It must have been to console him that the Master gave him something to do for Bahá’u’lláh; he was chosen to select those passages which constitute the “Tablet of Visitation” now recited in the Most Holy Tomb.
Surely Nabíl went over and over, in his mind, the wrongs that the world had inflicted on Bahá’u’lláh. The utter rejection; the cruelty and mockery and scorn; the spittle and stones; the bastinado, the chaining in the Black Pit, the exile, the poison; the stopping of His lips and of His pen, the calumnies, the humiliations, the prison. He must have felt the wounds and seen the scars again, and seen how there was nothing he could ever do to make up for it or atone for it, or cause it not to have been, or bring even some little joy to his Lord to mean that he was aware of it and that his heart was broken.
And then he must have gone
back in his memory to other
days: perhaps to the times when,
returned from a journey, he was
permitted to see Bahá’u’lláh; or
[Page 59]
the evenings, carefully recorded
in the Narrative, when he had
come to Him. Or to the long-ago,
happy days in Baghdad, when
the self-exiled, impoverished believers
were so drunk with the
new Revelation that the outer
world meant nothing any more;
palaces looked like spider webs
to them, and they held celebrations
that kings never dreamt of.
The days when Nabíl and two
others lived in a room with no
furniture. He must, many a time,
have seen Bahá’u’lláh entering
that room again, and heard Him
saying again,
“Its emptiness pleases Me . . . it is preferable to many a spacious palace, inasmuch as the beloved of God are occupied in it with the remembrance of the Incomparable Friend . . .” He must have remembered how Bahá’u’lláh Himself, in those days, had no change of linen, so that the one shirt He owned would be washed, dried and worn again.
He must have recalled, and the joy of it must have mocked him now, how “many a night no less than ten persons subsisted on no more than a pennyworth of dates. No one knew to whom actually belonged the shoes, the cloaks, or the robes that were to be found in their houses. Whoever went to the bazaar could claim that the shoes upon his feet were his own, and each one who entered the presence of Bahá’u’lláh could affirm that the cloak and robe he then wore belonged to him. Their own names they had forgotten, their hearts were emptied of aught else except adoration for their Beloved . . . O, for the joy of those days, and the gladness and wonder of those hours!”
Never before, had he been lost; his Lord had been there always, waiting for him. Now there was the unanswering grave. Always before, he had known he would come back to Him somehow; during all those separations he had patiently waited —“Though the night of parting endless seem as Thy night-black hair, Bahá, Bahá!”
It is not for us to take our own
life. If Nabíl longed for death,
and could have stopped to think,
he might have gone away to a
savage country and taught the
Faith and been killed for it. Anyone
who thinks about it can
throw himself into some battle
and either die or get beyond the
need for death, so that it is no
longer a matter of any concern
and may come when it wishes. It
is not for us to interrupt time,
impede the general rhythm, disrupt
the infinite interrelated
events of the planet, open the
[Page 60]
way for others to follow us into
illicit death; or to leave our bodies
as a reproach, an accusation
against our fellows and an extra
burden which they will carry
around with them as long as they
live.
But look at his face, flaming and longing; he could not weigh or calculate. This time it was not something to write in a history, it was not an extra syllable in a verse, it was his life. He only knew that he must hurry into the sea and find Bahá’u’lláh. When he was sure of this he wrote out the date of his death in a single Arabic word. The number-value of the letters totaled the year 1310. The word was: “Drowned.”[2]
How it was, there, when he came to meet his Beloved, I do not know. Whether the sea lay ivory and shell-colored then, as it is twilights and dawns, with the sunset wind or the dawn wind blowing, and the harp in the pines; or whether the soft night waited for him. However it was, we of the future who read his book and know and love him were there. It was a moment that time will always keep, when he came to his Lord.
This is the first in a series of articles
on early heroes of the Bahá’í Faith.
The Bahá’í Faith recognizes the unity of God and of His Prophets, upholds the principle of an unfettered search after truth, condemns all forms of superstition and prejudice, teaches that the fundamental purpose of religion is to promote concord and harmony, that it must go hand-in-hand with science, and that it constitutes the sole and ultimate basis of a peaceful, an ordered and progressive society. It inculcates the principle of equal opportunity, rights and privileges for both sexes, advocates compulsory education, abolishes extremes of poverty and wealth, exalts work performed in the spirit of service to the rank of worship, recommends the adoption of an auxiliary international language, and provides the necessary agencies for the establishment and safeguarding of a permanent and universal peace.
“They Understand Not”
Editorial
TODAY religion is reborn.
More than once in His meditations
Bahá’u’lláh interpolates,
“yet they understand not.” And
at one time we find Him exclaiming,
“O, would that the world
could believe Me!” That religion
must be renewed, reborn from
age to age, that it always has
been and always will be, and
that today it is again reborn, this
the people do not understand.
Many people in the world, probably most, believe in God and many believe that somehow an all-merciful and all-powerful God will rebuild the civilization that is decaying before our eyes. Some believe, rather, as a recent writer has it, that even if civilization as we know it is destroyed the “indestructible vision” of the human spirit will as in the past guide in building the new.
There are those, too, who believe that a revival of religion will come. If such ones are Christians they hold it must be a revival of Christianity; if Moslems, that it must be a revival of Islám that will save the world.
But how many cherish the hope that God will speak again through His chosen Prophet, His Manifestation in human form, as He spoke through Christ? That His words will give rise to a new religion, pure and powerful, and with a new Name, a religion that will revivify humanity and bring a new civilization? Of such a miracle we find little expectancy, little understanding.
Bahá’ís declare that the miracle has already occurred. In Persia a hundred odd years ago there was, among a certain group of Moslems, great expectancy. A study of prophecies told them that the time had come for the return of God’s Messenger. And these faithful ones were not disappointed. It was on May 23rd, 103 years ago that a young man seemingly like other young men, announced quietly in His own home to Mullá Ḥusayn, another young man, that He was God’s chosen Mouthpiece, that He was the Báb, the Gate to the New Age. Mullá Ḥusayn, spiritually alive, believed. Soon all Persia was aflame with the Glad Tidings. But the burning rage of those who disbelieved and denied became, outwardly, a greater fire.
Does it not signify something
to those who do not understand
that in spite of the greatest effort
[Page 62]
to stamp out this “heresy”, in
spite of the fact that they killed
the Báb and thousands of His
followers, the Flame He lighted
could not be extinguished?
Shoghi Effendi compares the mission of the Báb to that of Jesus Christ. He says: “The passion of Jesus Christ, and indeed His whole public ministry, alone offer a parallel to the mission and death of the Báb, a parallel which no student of comparative religion can fail to perceive or ignore.”
People should know too, that just as the Báb declared, Bahá’u’lláh arose to carry forward the work the Báb had inaugurated. The enemies, still on the alert, exiled Bahá’u’lláh from place to place and finally made Him a prisoner for life in ‘Akká, in the Holy Land. But wherever He was sent the Flame grew brighter, so that Bahá’u’lláh exclaimed: “The flame of every fire hath been extinguished except the Flame which the hands of Thine omnipotence hath kindled, and whose radiance thou hast, by the power of Thy Name, shed abroad before all that are in Thy heaven and all that are on Thy earth. As the tribulations deepen, it waxeth hotter and hotter.”
Bahá’u’lláh’s long life and ministry came to a close in 1892. On the 29th of May Bahá’ís observe the anniversary of His ascension. Almost fifty years elapsed between the Declaration of the Báb and The Ascension of Bahá’u’lláh. These years were, Shoghi Effendi declares, “except for a short interval of three years, a half century of continuous and progressive Revelation . . . a period which in many ways is unparalleled in religious history . . . God’s newborn Faith had been fully and unreservedly proclaimed . . . The promise of the unification of the whole human race, of the inauguration of the Most Great Peace, of the unfoldment of world civilization, had been incontestibly given.”
As one reflects upon these stupendous statements, upon the claims of the Báb and of Bahá’u’lláh, it comes to one that the reason people do not understand and believe may be because such claims are too overwhelming, too great, to be believed. One must approach this matter gradually, investigate, and pray for spiritual insight. This is an age of great understanding in science and invention. Let us pray that our spiritual understanding may be equally quickened lest the greatest event in history find us unaware.
THE SONG
Dedicated to the Báb
NANCY DOUGLAS BOWDITCH
- Many a sweet song has been heard
- From human voice and singing bird
- On sequestered mountain-side
- In primal wood where wild things hide;
- In the summer evening hush
- I have heard the hermit thrush
- His silvery liquid notes outpour
- For those who listen to adore;
- But no music have I heard
- Like the white Shírazí bird!
- At the ebon instrument
- With a face of grave intent
- The musician sat at ease,
- Pale white hands on ivory keys,
- And the glimmering candle flare
- Lighted roses in her hair;
- She, interpreting a song
- That the world had loved so long.
- Still no music have I heard
- Like the white Shírazí bird!
- When the songs of children rise
- Under summer sunset skies
- From young hearts so free and gay
- And youthful joy has claimed the day,
- Dancing down the flower-strewn lane
- Free from all old grief and pain,
- This seems only a small part
- To still the tumult of the heart,
- Such a calming song is heard
- From the white Shírazí bird.
- Be still! What wondrous thing is here?
- The instruments are tuned to ear;
- The leader, mounting on his stand,
- Takes lightly his baton in hand,
- When lo! a mighty praise in notes
- Through the lofty chamber floats;
- The hearts are calmed, the minds are stilled,
- The souls with heavenly rapture filled.
- And yet—above this joyful throng
- I hear the glad Shírazí Song!
Bahá’í View of UNESCO
GERTRUDE B. FLEUR
In Collaboration with Bertha H. Kirkpatrick
IN PARIS, not far from the Arc
dp Triomphe, in the beautiful
Majestic Hotel is now established
the headquarters of
UNESCO, an arm of the United
Nations, whose purpose as expressed
in its constitution “is to
contribute to peace and security
by promoting collaboration
among the nations through education,
science and culture in order
to further universal respect
for justice, for the rule of law
and for human rights and fundamental
freedoms which are affirmed
for the peoples of the
world, without distinction of
race, sex, language or religion,
by the Charter of the United
Nations.”
If we weigh some of the phrases and sentences of the preamble to the constitution of UNESCO it will help us to understand how supremely important it is that this organization be successful in carrying out its stated aims. We read in this preamble:
“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”
“Ignorance of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of mankind, of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which their differences have all too often broken into war.”
A peace “based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of the governments” is not sufficient but must “be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.”
At the first general session of UNESCO held last November at its headquarters Dr. Julian Huxley, eminent biologist and scientific scholar, was elected director general.
In looking for a working philosophy
on which to approach
UNESCO’s problems it is interesting
to note that Dr. Huxley
finds that such a philosophy can
be based on none of the religions
of the world such as Judaism,
Christianity, Hinduism, Islám,
and others since they are divisive
rather than unifying. So it is with
political and economic theories
such as socialism, democracy,
capitalism, communism, and
others. Dr. Huxley therefore accepts
humanism in its broadest
and best sense as the working
[Page 65]
philosophy of UNESCO. Such a
humanism, he says, must be
scientific, evolutionary and global.
In an interview Dr. Huxley stated: “Humanity will only be saved if it acts now, and promptly, to overcome insecurity, frustration and despair, everywhere in the world. Man must find a new belief in himself, and the only basis for such a belief lies in his vision of world society as an organic whole, in which rights and duties of men are balanced deliberately, as they are among the cells of the body. Economic values must yield in importance to social values, because the latter are the ones that are most important. By working together, we must lay a conscious basis for a new world order, the next step in our human evolution.”
This “conscious basis for a new world order” must come about in the minds of the masses of the peoples of the world. Governments may set up machinery to bring about a political unity of the world, but unless there is a consciousness of unity in the hearts and minds of the people of the world, such a political unity is built upon a foundation of sand and cannot endure.
To build this consciousness of unity in minds and hearts a free flow of communications is necessary. There must be no barriers to obstruct the free flow of books, scientific reports, news reports, radio broadcasts, constructive motion pictures and other avenues which are man’s access to the truth of world events and facts in regard to the religious, scientific and cultural progress of all peoples, so that the entire world may have the opportunity of knowing and cultivating the potentialities lying within the minds and hearts of men.
What some of the leaders in UNESCO have said about its scope indicates both their breadth of vision and also the immense task ahead. Dr. Kuo-yu-Show, the famous Chinese scholar who heads the education program says that one-half of the world’s population can neither read nor write. On his agenda we find: the elimination of illiteracy in adults, and the education of children; the revision of textbooks to eliminate dangerously nationalistic influences; the adjustment of education to present day needs, according to various areas and by vocational guidance to make the utmost of their lives and talents.
Dr. Joseph Needham, noted
British bio-chemist, who heads
the department of science says:
“Our consciences demand that
the power of science be henceforth
[Page 66]
released in constructive enterprises,
those that contribute to
the well-being of men, women
and children throughout the
world.”
Dr. Mohomed Bey Awad, an Egyptian educated in the schools of Cairo and Alexandria, the University of London and the London School of Economics looks forward to UNESCO HOUSE becoming the center of cultural institutions where young people may come to get professional experience in the international aspects of their chosen fields.
H. Howard Arnason, the American representative to UNESCO says: “UNESCO is the most important adventure in the world today, the United States is backing it to the hilt! It differs from the Security Organization in that it is designed actively to promote peace, by finding the common relationships between peoples and nations. If the nations get behind it, it can be the greatest single factor in promoting understanding. It must not for a moment be allowed to be simply an organization of scholars dealing in rarified specialties. It must deal not only in professional but mass interests, with education for democracy in its widest sense, on the state of basic education throughout the world.”
At its first meeting UNESCO made these tentative plans: for the review of textbooks in as many nations as possible in order to eliminate what would cause hatred between nations, races and religions; for developing education on a world-wide basis; for promoting the exchange of such books as make for understanding of other peoples; for a worldwide conference to insure just international copyright laws. One hope for UNESCO is that in the not too distant future a world-wide radio network may be established. In order to carry out plans UNESCO must have abundant funds supplied by the various member nations and there must be special organizations in nations to cooperate in carrying out projects.
Bahá’ís watch the progress of
UNESCO with great interest for
we recall ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s assertion
that “the unity of mankind
can in this day be achieved.”
Surely UNESCO can be one
means of increasing the light of
some of those candles which
‘Abdu’l-Bahá says must burn
with great brightness ere this
unity is assured. In its plans we
see a brightening of the candle
which is “unity of thought in
world undertakings,” and of the
[Page 67]
candle which is “unity in freedom.”
But the most important
candle which is “unity in religion”
and which is “the cornerstone
of the foundation itself”
UNESCO cannot light. Only
those who carry the Message of
Bahá’u’lláh can light this candle.
But the success of UNESCO will
open doors for this Message. Is
it not also true that where the
Bahá’í Message takes root the
doors are already open for
UNESCO?
THE QUEST
GERTRUDE W. ROBINSON
- Oh, Master, tell me, where is the Sun of Truth,
- The ancient desire of the seeking heart of youth?
- The Sun of Truth is in every clime, my son,
- Pervading all life, though its human course be run.
- But, Master, after the sunset, what of the night,
- Of the dark, dark shadows that creep in the wake of light?
- The darkness of night is past. The Sun this hour
- Is flooding creation with limitless oceans of power.
- But, Master, so many are blind; they cannot see
- The splendor that shines from a vast Eternity.
- I shall pray, my son, for the healing of their eyes
- That they may behold the dawn of new world skies.
- There are others, too; the deaf who cannot hear
- The praise of this radiant Truth that seekers revere.
- For these I shall pray, and for hearts in every land
- That grace may be given to all to understand.
- But, Master, leaders of men have charmed my thought
- With noble dreams; yet I found not what I sought.
- Beloved, turn to the Spirit to guide thy course
- To Truth. No dark can be found at light’s own source.
The Mature Man
BAHÁ’Í WORDS FOR MEDITATION
These selections are from Bahá’í World Faith.
My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that
thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting. (p. 155)
The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. (p. 156)
Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes. (p. 156)
Thou art My stronghold; enter therein that thou mayest abide in safety. My love is in thee, know it, that thou mayest find Me near unto thee. (p. 157)
Noble I made thee, wherewith dost thou abase thyself? (p. 157)
Thou are My dominion and My dominion perisheth not, wherefore fearest thou thy perishing? (p. 157)
Breathe not the sins of others so long as thou art thyself a sinner. (p. 159)
Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds. (p. 160)
I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve? (p. 160)
My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. (p. 162)
Should prosperity befall thee, rejoice not, and should abasement come upon thee, grieve not, for both shall pass away and be no more. (p. 162)
My eternity is My creation, I have created it for thee. (p. 164)
Gaze toward justice and equity under all circumstances. (p. 169)
The best of all to Me is Justice. (p. 169)
[Page 69]
Knowledge is one of the greatest benefits of God. To acquire knowledge
is incumbent on all. (p. 171)
Be not occupied with yourselves. Be intent on the betterment of the world . . . (p. 174)
Glory is not his who loves his native land; but glory is his who loves his kind. (p. 175)
He who is endowed with courtesy is endowed with a great station. (p. 175)
Truly, I say, the fear of God hath ever been the perspicuous protection and solid fortress for the whole community of the world. (p. 180)
If thou lookest toward mercy, regard not that which benefits thee, and hold to that which will benefit the servants. (p. 180)
This span-wide world is but one native land and one locality. (p. 182)
Abandon that glory which is the cause of discord, and turn unto that which promotes harmony. (p. 182)
To the people of Bahá glory is in knowledge, good deeds, good morals and wisdom—not in native land, or station. (p. 182)
Moderation is desirable in every affair, and when it is exceeded it leads to detriment. (p. 183)
As long as the ego is subject to carnal desires, sin and error continue. (p. 184)
Charity is beloved and acceptable before God, and is accounted the chief among all good deeds. (p. 184)
Knowledge is the means of honor, prosperity, joy, gladness, happiness and exultation. (p. 189)
Waste not your time in idleness and indolence, and occupy yourselves with that which will profit yourselves and others beside yourself. (p. 195)
The most despised of men before God is he who sits and begs. (p. 195)
Every soul who occupies himself in an art or trade—this will be accounted an act of worship before God. Verily this is from no other than His great and abundant favor! (p. 195)
WITH OUR READERS
“The Bahá’í basis for Human Relations”
by David Ruhe was first presented
as a public address at the
Bahá’í House of Worship, Sunday,
December 8, 1946, at the time of the
Bahá’í conference on Race Relations.
Dr. Ruhe received his bachelor and
master degrees from Michigan State
College and his degree of Doctor of
Medicine from Temple University,
Philadelphia. His work since 1942
has been in the United States Public
Health Service and covers a variety
of experience, especially in the field
of preventive medicine. “It is my
intention,” he says, “to stay from
this time forward in the field of medical
education. Incidentally, at odd
moments for the past nineteen years
I have been developing skill in art;
this has stood me in good stead in
the area of visual aids; motion pictures,
film strips, exhibits, etc. require
a fundamental artistic sensitivity.”
Dr. Ruhe’s official title is Senior
Assistant Surgeon, Regular
Corps, U. S. Public Health Service.
His home is in Atlanta where he and
Mrs. Ruhe are active in Bahá’í service.
Under the title “The Poet Laureate”
Marzieh Gail gives us the story
of the life of Nabíl, known to Bahá’ís
and to those familiar with the early
history of the Bahá’í Faith as the
faithful chronicler of the stirring
events of those years in the middle
of the last century. We plan to follow
this story with others in a series
which will acquaint our readers with
many of the Bábí heroes whom
nothing could prevent the giving of
their lives, their all, for the Cause
of God. We believe many will be
glad of these retold stories since
Nabíl’s Narrative, The Dawn-Breakers,
is now out of print. Understanding
of the Bahá’í Faith is incomplete
without knowledge of its early history,
its miraculously swift spread
throughout Persia, the land of its
birth. The Dawn-Breakers is the book
of which Shoghi Effendi has written:
“It has its thrilling passages,
and the splendor of its central theme
gives to the chronicle not only great
historical value but high moral
power. Its lights are strong; and
this effect is more intense because
they seem like a sunburst at midnight.
The tale is one of struggle and
martyrdom; its poignant scenes, its
tragic incidents are many . . . The
main features of the narrative (the
saintly heroic figure of the Báb, a
leader so mild and serene, yet eager,
resolute and dominant; the devotion
of His followers facing opposition
with unbroken courage and often
with ecstasy; the rage of the jealous
priesthood inflaming for its own
purpose the passions of a bloodthirsty
populace)—these speak a
language which all may understand.”
Mrs. Gail contributes frequently
to this magazine. “The Coming of
the Beloved” was in our recent
March issue. Among her other contributions
are: “The White Silk
Dress,” “Dawn Over Mt. Hira,”
“Headlines Tomorrow,” “Event in
Hamadán,” “The Peace in San Francisco.”
[Page 71]
Mrs. Gail now lives in San
Francisco.
Gertrude B. Fleur, who in collaboration
with Bertha Kirkpatrick,
contributes “A Bahá’í View of
UNESCO” is a registered nurse
whose home is in Seattle, Washington.
She writes: “I am one of the
executive nurses and organizers but
not a writer. However, am so vitally
interested in the spiritual progress of
humanity that the development of
UNESCO inspired me greatly, and I
could see how the door to better understanding
could be opened through
such a lofty avenue thereby enabling
UNESCO to spread the Message
throughout the world.” She
also says: “Since sending the article
to you I have had the opportunity of
hearing Dr. Julian Huxley broadcast
from Paris on UNESCO. He informed
us of two very important
UNESCO meetings, the first in Paris,
February 13, the second in Philadelphia
in the early spring.”
Two important Bahá’í anniversaries
occur in the month of May. Hundreds
of thousands of Bahá’ís all
over the world feel a great unity in
observing these anniversaries, yet we
do not forget the great number who,
as pointed out in the editorial by
B. H. K., “understand not.”
Nancy Douglas Bowditch who contributes
the poem, “The Song,” is an
artist, and writer and producer of
pageants as well as a poet. She is
the daughter of the well known
American portrait painter George De
Forest Brush and has been commissioned
by Shoghi Effendi to
paint portraits of the outstanding
early American Bahá’ís for preservation
in the Haifa archives. Mrs.
Bowditch’s home is in Brookline,
Massachusetts.
Gertrude W. Robinson’s poem entitled
“The Quest” is her first contribution
to World Order. Mrs. Robinson’s
home is in Circleville, Ohio.
Special features which the editors
hope to continue are: the illustration
and comment on page one; the
quotation elucidating the Bahá’í
Faith on page 2; the two pages of
short selections for meditation and
study.
The inside back cover which has listed the Bahá’í literature will continue to do so but with another plan for presenting the books. In April the works of Bahá’u’lláh were listed, this month the works of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in June those of Shoghi Effendi, and in July books by Bahá’í authors. These four listings will appear in rotation through the year. We hope the mentionings will be helpful to our readers in knowing the Bahá’í sacred writings and other Bahá’í books.
* * *
One of our readers tells of his experience
before he became firm in
the Bahá’í Faith. He compared the
Bahá’í Faith with some of the modern
cults which place great emphasis
on health and became critical of
the Bahá’í Faith. Then he was influenced
to re-examine the Bahá’í
Teachings. “I quickly saw,” he says,
“that it was I who had been at fault
for not reading the Writings enough.
A very puerile mistake. I found the
teachings on health, healing and
positive thinking were all there and
much more sanely handled and more
[Page 72]
completely than elsewhere.” He recommends
a study of Dr. Esslemont’s
chapter on “Health and Healing” in
Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era. One
might add the chapters on “Healing”
in Some Answered Questions by
‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the healing prayers
of Bahá’u’lláh. And one could hardly
stop there. Since physical health
is so closely connected with spiritual
health, do we not need all of the
Bahá’í teachings?
* * *
A subscriber renewing for World Order writes: “The positive and affirmative character of the magazine matches the exalted character of the Faith—never a negative note anywhere, perhaps the only publication in human history of which this might be said.”
Is this, as someone suggests, too sweeping a statement? At any rate it gives our magazine a high goal for its aim.
Another subscriber emphasizes the friendly feeling she receives from the magazine when she writes:
“World Order magazine is a most helpful and enjoyable means of contact with the many friends who contribute to its pages as well as the source of fresh inspiration each month. It comes like a welcome friend.”
From Brazil comes these words: “We find the World Order a great help in teaching and wonderful in spreading the Cause. The September, 1946, issue is laden with excellent material. We look forward here in Bahia to our copies.”
One subscriber asks for articles which give a keener analysis of the Faith’s principles. And several ask for more articles which show the Faith in action and which give inspiration for daily living.
This department welcomes letters giving personal experiences which would be helpful to others in teaching or daily living. We should like to hear more from pioneers both in this country and abroad. We realize that Bahá’ís, for the most part, are too busy doing things to find time to write about them, but writing may be a service, too. We need short incidents of one or two hundred words for this department and longer ones for the main pages of the magazine.
Several have suggested that World Order have a question and answer page. This department welcomes questions in regard to the Bahá’í Faith. We ask for and appreciate the help of our readers and contributors.
Bahá’í Sacred Writings
Works of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Distributed by Bahá’í Publishing Committee
110 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois
A TRAVELER’S NARRATIVE
The late Prof. Edward G. Browne received this work in manuscript from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at ‘Akká while investigating the developments in the Faith since the Martyrdom of the Báb. Its authorship was not known by Prof. Browne. Translated and edited by him, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explanation of the meaning of the Báb’s Revelation and the Declaration of Bahá’u’lláh was first published by Cambridge University but the rights have been acquired by the Publishing Committee. This text was written by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at some date prior to 1892.
SOME ANSWERED QUESTIONS
This text is based on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s oral replies to questions addressed to Him by Laura Clifford Barney at Haifa in 1907. Her notes were later approved by Him. The work is divided into sections, dealing with the Prophets, the nature of man, interpretation of prophecy and religious symbol, and some social questions.
THE PROMULGATION OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
Prepared from stenographic records of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s public addresses in the United States and Canada from April to December, 1912, and His intimate talks delivered to Bahá’í groups during that period. Here is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá confronting the West on the eve of the collapse of its civil, cultural and religious civilization signalized by the outbreak of the first World War, warning the leaders and masses of their peril, summoning them to heed the Advent of the Promised One of all nations, and establishing in America the principles and ideals which have since become the program of the liberal and progressive spirit. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the same time clearly explained the nature of the new spiritual community which alone can apply this program to society and produce a new world order.
TABLETS OF ‘ABDU’L-BAHA
For many years ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, His outer life restricted by the conditions of exile and imprisonment inflicted upon Him by the Turkish church-state under Islám, shared His spirit and His beneficient wisdom with Bahá’ís of many countries who addressed communications to Him, some as individuals, others as members of Bahá’í bodies. Three volumes were compiled in America based on Tablets dated prior to 19. These pages invited one to enter an inner place, as it were, glowing with the fire of a love sustained by God. (Some other Tablets are found in Chapters VIII and IX of Bahá’í World Faith
TRUTHS FOR A NEW DAY
promulgated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Throughout North America in 1912
These teachings were given by Bahá’u’lláh
over seventy years ago and are to be
found in His published
writings of that time.
The oneness of mankind.
Independent investigation of truth.
The foundation of all religions is one.
Religion must be the cause of unity.
Religion must be in accord with science and reason.
Equality between men and women.
Prejudice of all kinds must be forgotten.
Universal peace.
Universal education.
Spiritual solution of the economic problem.
A universal language.
An international tribunal.