Chapter 2

In the society and culture the Master was developing, spiritual energies expressed themselves in the practical affairs of day-to-day life. The emphasis in the teachings on education provided the impulse for the establishment of Baha'i schools--including the Tarbiyat school for girls,(11) which gained national renown--in the capital, as well as in provincial centres. With the assistance of American and European Baha'i helpers, clinics and other medical facilities followed. As early as 1925, communities in a number of cities had instituted classes in Esperanto, in response to their awareness of the Baha'i teaching that some form of auxiliary international language must be adopted. A network of couriers, reaching across the land, provided the struggling Baha'i community with the rudiments of the postal service that the rest of the country so conspicuously lacked. The changes under way touched the homeliest circumstances of day-to-day life. In obedience to the laws of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, for example, Persian Baha'is abandoned the use of the filthy public baths, prolific in their spread of infection and disease, and began to rely on showers that used fresh water.

All of these advances, whether social, organizational or practical, owed their driving force to the moral transformation taking place among the believers, a transformation that was steadily distinguishing Baha'is--even in the eyes of those hostile to the Faith--as candidates for positions of trust. That such far-reaching changes could so quickly set one segment of the Persian population apart from the largely antagonistic majority around it was a demonstration of the powers released by Baha'u'llah's Covenant with His followers and by 'Abdu'l-Baha's assumption of the leadership this Covenant invested uniquely in Him.

Throughout these years Persian political life was in almost constant turmoil. While Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah's immediate successor, Muzaffari'd-Din _Sh_ah, was induced to approve a constitution in 1906, his successor, Muhammad-'Ali _Sh_ah, recklessly dissolved the first two parliaments--in one case attacking with cannon fire the building where the legislature was meeting. The so-called "Constitutional Movement" that overthrew him and compelled the last of the Qajar kings, Ahmad _Sh_ah, to summon a third parliament was itself riven by competing factions and shamelessly manipulated by the _Sh_i'ih clergy. Efforts by Baha'is to play a constructive role in this process of modernization were repeatedly frustrated by royalist and popular factions alike, both of which were inspired by the prevailing religious prejudice and saw in the Baha'i community merely a convenient scapegoat. Here again, only a more politically mature age than our own will be able to appreciate the way in which the Master--setting an example for future challenges that the Baha'i community must inevitably encounter--guided the beleaguered community in doing all it could to encourage political reform, and then in being willing to step aside when these efforts were cynically rebuffed.

It was not only through His Tablets that 'Abdu'l-Baha exercised this influence on the rapidly developing Baha'i community in the cradle of the Faith. Unlike Westerners, Persian believers were not distinguished from other peoples of the Near East by dress and appearance, and so travellers from the cradle of the Faith did not arouse the suspicion of the Ottoman authorities. Consequently, a steady stream of Persian pilgrims provided 'Abdu'l-Baha with another powerful means of inspiring the friends, guiding their activities, and drawing them ever more deeply into an understanding of Baha'u'llah's purpose. Some of the greatest names in Persian Baha'i history were among those who journeyed to 'Akka and returned to their homes prepared to give their lives if necessary for the achievement of the Master's vision. The immortal Varqa and his son Ruhu'llah were among this privileged number, as were Haji Mirza Haydar 'Ali, Mirza Abu'l Fadl, Mirza Muhammad-Taqi Afnan and four distinguished Hands of the Cause, Ibn-i-Abhar, Haji Mulla Ali Akbar, Adibu'l-Ulama and Ibn-i-Asdaq. The spirit that today sustains Persian pioneers in every part of the world and that plays so creative a role in the building of Baha'i community life runs like a straight line through family after family back to those heroic days. In retrospect, it is apparent that the phenomenon we today know as the twin processes of expansion and consolidation itself had its origin in those marvellous years.

Inspired by the Master's words and the accounts brought back from the Holy Land, Persian believers arose to undertake travel-teaching activities in the Far East. During the latter years of Baha'u'llah's Ministry, communities had been established in India and Burma, and the Faith carried as far as China; and this work was now reinforced. A demonstration of the new powers released in the Cause was the erection in the Russian province of Turkestan, where a vigorous Baha'i community life had also developed, of the first Baha'i House of Worship in the world,(12) a project inspired by the Master and guided, from its inception, by His advice.

It was this broad range of activities, carried out by an increasingly confident body of believers and stretching from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, that built the base of support from which 'Abdu'l-Baha was able to pursue the promising opportunities which, as the new century opened, had already begun to unfold in the West. Not the least important feature of this base was its embrace of representatives of the Orient's great diversity of racial, religious and national backgrounds. This achievement provided 'Abdu'l-Baha with the examples on which He would repeatedly draw in His proclamation to Western audiences of the integrating forces that had been released through Baha'u'llah's advent.

The greatest victory of these early years was the Master's success in constructing on Mount Carmel, on the spot designated for it by Baha'u'llah and through immense effort, a mausoleum for the remains of the Bab, which had been brought at great risk and difficulty to the Holy Land. Shoghi Effendi has explained that whereas in past ages the blood of martyrs was the seed of personal faith, in this day it has constituted the seed of the administrative institutions of the Cause.(13) Such an insight lends special meaning to the way in which the Administrative Centre of Baha'u'llah's World Order would take shape under the shadow of the Shrine of the Faith's Martyr-Prophet. Shoghi Effendi sets the Master's achievement in global and historical perspective:

For, just as in the realm of the spirit, the reality of the Bab has been hailed by the Author of the Baha'i Revelation as "the Point round Whom the realities of the Prophets and Messengers revolve," so, on this visible plane, His sacred remains constitute the heart and center of what may be regarded as nine concentric circles,(14) paralleling thereby, and adding further emphasis to the central position accorded by the Founder of our Faith to One "from Whom God hath caused to proceed the knowledge of all that was and shall be," "the Primal Point from which have been generated all created things."(15)

The significance in 'Abdu'l-Baha's own eyes of the mission He had accomplished at such cost is movingly depicted by Shoghi Effendi:

When all was finished, and the earthly remains of the Martyr-Prophet of _Sh_iraz were, at long last, safely deposited for their everlasting rest in the bosom of God's holy mountain, 'Abdu'l-Baha, Who had cast aside His turban, removed His shoes and thrown off His cloak, bent low over the still open sarcophagus, His silver hair waving about His head and His face transfigured and luminous, rested His forehead on the border of the wooden casket, and, sobbing aloud, wept with such a weeping that all those who were present wept with Him. That night He could not sleep, so overwhelmed was He with emotion.(16)

By 1908, the so-called "Young Turk Revolution" had freed not only most of the Ottoman empire's political prisoners, but 'Abdu'l-Baha as well. Suddenly, the restraints that had kept Him confined to the prison-city of 'Akka and its immediate surroundings had fallen away, and the Master was in a position to proceed with an enterprise that Shoghi Effendi was later to describe as one of the three principal achievements of His ministry: His public proclamation of the Cause of God in the great population centres of the Western world.

* * * * *

Because of the dramatic character of the events that occurred in North America and Europe, accounts of the Master's historic journeys sometimes tend to overlook the important opening year spent in Egypt. 'Abdu'l-Baha arrived there in September 1910, intending to go on directly to Europe, but was compelled by illness to remain in residence at Ramleh, a suburb of Alexandria, until August of the following year. As it turned out, the months that followed were a period of great productivity whose full effects on the fortunes of the Cause, in the African continent especially, will be felt for many years to come. To some extent the way had no doubt been paved by warm admiration for the Master on the part of _Sh_ay_kh_ Muhammad 'Abduh, who had met Him on several occasions in Beirut and who subsequently became Mufti of Egypt and a leading figure at Al-Azhar University.

An aspect of the Egyptian sojourn that deserves special attention was the opportunity it provided for the first public proclamation of the Faith's message. The relatively cosmopolitan and liberal atmosphere prevailing in Cairo and Alexandria at the time opened a way for frank and searching discussions between the Master and prominent figures in the intellectual world of Sunni Islam. These included clerics, parliamentarians, administrators and aristocrats. Further, editors and journalists from influential Arabic-language newspapers, whose information about the Cause had been coloured by prejudiced reports emanating from Persia and Constantinople, now had an opportunity to learn the facts of the situation for themselves. Publications that had been openly hostile changed their tone. The editors of one such newspaper opened an article on the Master's arrival by referring to "His Eminence Mirza 'Abbas Effendi, the learned and erudite Head of the Baha'is in 'Akka and the Centre of authority for Baha'is throughout the world" and expressing appreciation of His visit to Alexandria.(17) This and other articles paid particular tribute to 'Abdu'l-Baha's understanding of Islam and to the principles of unity and religious tolerance that lay at the heart of His teachings.

Despite the Master's ill health that had caused it, the Egyptian interlude proved to be a great blessing. Western diplomats and officials were able to observe at first-hand the extraordinary success of 'Abdu'l-Baha's interaction with leading figures in a region of the Near East that was of lively interest in European circles. Accordingly, by the time the Master embarked for Marseilles on 11 August 1911, His fame had preceded Him.

III

A Tablet addressed by 'Abdu'l-Baha to an American believer in 1905 contains a statement that is as illuminating as it is touching. Referring to His situation following the ascension of Baha'u'llah, 'Abdu'l-Baha spoke of a letter He had received from America at "a time when an ocean of trials and tribulations was surging...":

Such was our state when a letter came to us from the American friends. They had covenanted together, so they wrote, to remain at one in all things, and ... had pledged themselves to make sacrifices in the pathway of the love of God, thus to achieve eternal life. At the very moment when this letter was read, together with the signatures at its close, 'Abdu'l-Baha experienced a joy so vehement that no pen can describe it....(18)

An appreciation of the circumstances in which the expansion of the Cause in the West occurred is vital for present-day Baha'is, and for many reasons. It helps us abstract ourselves from the culture of coarse and intrusive communication that has become so commonplace in present-day society as to pass almost unnoticed. It draws to our attention the gentleness with which the Master chose to introduce to His Western audiences the concepts of human nature and human society revealed by Baha'u'llah, concepts revolutionary in their implications and entirely outside His hearers' experience. It explains the delicacy with which He used metaphors or relied on historical examples, the frequent indirectness of His approach, the intimacy He could summon up at will, and the apparently limitless patience with which He responded to questions, many of whose assumptions about reality had long since lost whatever validity they might once have possessed.

Yet another insight that a detached examination of the historical situation to which the Master addressed Himself in the West helps provide for our generation is an appreciation of the spiritual greatness of those who responded to Him. These souls answered His summons in spite, not because, of the liberal and economically advanced world they knew, a world they no doubt cherished and valued, and in which they had necessarily to carry on their daily lives. Their response arose from a level of consciousness that recognized, even if sometimes only dimly, the desperate need of the human race for spiritual enlightenment. To remain steadfast in their commitment to this insight required of these early believers--on whose sacrifice of self much of the foundation of the present-day Baha'i communities both in the West and many other lands were laid--that they resist not only family and social pressures, but also the easy rationalizations of the world-view in which they had been raised and to which everything around them insistently exposed them. There was a heroism about the steadfastness of these early Western Baha'is that is, in its own way, as affecting as that of their Persian co-religionists who, in these same years, were facing persecution and death for the Faith they had embraced.

In the forefront of the Westerners who responded to the Master's summons were the little groups of intrepid believers whom Shoghi Effendi has hailed as "God-intoxicated pilgrims" and who had the privilege of visiting 'Abdu'l-Baha in the prison-city of 'Akka, of seeing for themselves the luminosity of His Person and of hearing from His own lips words that had the power to transform human life. The effect on these believers has been expressed by May Maxwell:

"Of that first meeting," ... "I can remember neither joy nor pain, nor anything that I can name. I had been carried suddenly to too great a height, my soul had come in contact with the Divine Spirit, and this force, so pure, so holy, so mighty, had overwhelmed me...."(19)

Their return to their homes became, Shoghi Effendi explains, "the signal for an outburst of systematic and sustained activity, which ... spread its ramifications over Western Europe and the states and provinces of the North American continent...."(20) Fuelling their endeavours and those of their fellow believers, and drawing into the Cause growing numbers of new adherents, was a flood of Tablets addressed by the Master to recipients on both sides of the Atlantic, messages that threw open the imagination to the concepts, principles and ideals of God's new Revelation. The power of this creative force can be felt in the words with which the first American believer, Thornton Chase, sought to describe what he was seeing:

His [the Master's] own writings, spreading like white-winged doves from the Center of His Presence to the ends of the earth, are so many (hundreds pouring forth daily) that it is an impossibility for him to have given time to them for searching thought or to have applied the mental processes of the scholar to them. They flow like streams from a gushing fountain....(21)

These sentiments add their own perspective to the determination with which the Master arose to undertake a venture so ambitious as to dismay many of those immediately around Him. Setting aside concerns expressed about His advanced age, His ill health, and the physical disabilities left by decades of imprisonment, He set out on a series of journeys that would last some three years, carrying Him eventually to the Pacific coast of the North American continent. The stresses and risks of international travel in the early years of the century were the least of the obstacles to the realization of the objectives He had set Himself. In the words of Shoghi Effendi:

He Who, in His own words, had entered prison as a youth and left it an old man, Who never in His life had faced a public audience, had attended no school, had never moved in Western circles, and was unfamiliar with Western customs and language, had arisen not only to proclaim from pulpit and platform, in some of the chief capitals of Europe and in the leading cities of the North American continent, the distinctive verities enshrined in His Father's Faith, but to demonstrate as well the Divine origin of the Prophets gone before Him, and to disclose the nature of the tie binding them to that Faith.(22)

* * * * *

No more brilliant a stage for the opening act of this great drama could have been desired than London, capital city of the largest and most cosmopolitan empire the world has ever known. In the eyes of the little groups of believers who had made the practical arrangements and who longed for the sight of His face, the trip was a triumph far surpassing their brightest hopes. Public officials, scholars, writers, editors, industrialists, leaders of reform movements, members of the British aristocracy, and influential clergymen of many denominations eagerly sought Him out, invited Him to their platforms, classrooms, homes and pulpits, and showered appreciation on the views He expounded. On Sunday, 10 September 1911, the Master spoke for the first time to a public audience anywhere, from the pulpit of the City Temple. His words evoked for His hearers the vision of a new age in the evolution of civilization:

This is a new cycle of human power. All the horizons of the world are luminous, and the world will become indeed as a garden and a paradise.... You are loosed from ancient superstitions which have kept men ignorant, destroying the foundation of true humanity.

The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion. War shall cease between nations, and by the will of God the Most Great Peace shall come; the world will be seen as a new world, and all men will live as brothers.(23)

After an additional two months' stay in Paris and a return to Alexandria for a winter sojourn and the recuperation of His health, 'Abdu'l-Baha sailed on 25 March 1912 to New York City, arriving on 11 April of that year. At even the simplest physical level, a programme packed with hundreds of public addresses, conferences and private talks in over forty cities across North America and an additional nineteen in Europe, some of them visited more than once, was a feat that may well have no parallel in modern history. On both continents, but especially in North America, 'Abdu'l-Baha received a highly appreciative welcome from distinguished audiences devoted to such concerns as peace, women's rights, racial equality, social reform and moral development. On an almost daily basis, His talks and interviews received wide coverage in mass-circulation newspapers. He Himself was later to write that He had "observed all the doors open ... and the ideal power of the Kingdom of God removing every obstacle and obstruction."(24)

The openness with which He was met permitted 'Abdu'l-Baha to proclaim unambiguously the social principles of the new Revelation. Shoghi Effendi has summed up the truths thus presented:

The independent search after truth, unfettered by superstition or tradition; the oneness of the entire human race, the pivotal principle and fundamental doctrine of the Faith; the basic unity of all religions; the condemnation of all forms of prejudice, whether religious, racial, class or national; the harmony which must exist between religion and science; the equality of men and women, the two wings on which the bird of human kind is able to soar; the introduction of compulsory education; the adoption of a universal auxiliary language; the abolition of the extremes of wealth and poverty; the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of disputes between nations; the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service, to the rank of worship; the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society, and of religion as a bulwark for the protection of all peoples and nations; and the establishment of a permanent and universal peace as the supreme goal of all mankind--these stand out as the essential elements of that Divine polity which He proclaimed to leaders of public thought as well as to the masses at large in the course of these missionary journeys.(25)

At the heart of the Master's message was the announcement that the long-promised Day for the unification of humanity and the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God had come. That Kingdom, as unveiled in 'Abdu'l-Baha's letters and talks, owed nothing whatever to the other-worldly assumptions familiar from the teachings of traditional religion. Rather, the Master proclaimed the coming of age of humankind and the emergence of a global civilization in which the development of the whole range of human potentialities will be the fruit of the interaction between universal spiritual values, on the one hand, and, on the other, material advances that were even then still undreamed of.

The means to achieve the goal, He said, had already come into existence. What was needed was the will to act and the faith to persist:

All of us know that international peace is good, that it is the cause of life, but volition and action are necessary. Inasmuch as this century is the century of light, capacity for achieving peace has been assured. It is certain that these ideas will be spread among men to such a degree that they will result in action.(26)

Although expressed with unfailing courtesy and consideration, the principles of the new Revelation were set out uncompromisingly in both private and public encounters. Invariably, the Master's actions were as eloquent as the words He used. In the United States, for example, nothing could have more clearly communicated Baha'i belief in the oneness of religion than 'Abdu'l-Baha's readiness to include references to the Prophet Muhammad in addresses to Christian audiences and His energetic vindication of the divine origin of both Christianity and Islam to the congregation at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. His ability to inspire in women of all ages confidence that they possessed spiritual and intellectual capacities fully equal to those of men, His unprovocative but clear demonstration of the meaning of Baha'u'llah's teachings on racial oneness by welcoming black as well as white guests at His own dinner table and the tables of His prominent hostesses, and His insistence on the overriding importance of unity in all aspects of Baha'i endeavour--such demonstrations of the way in which the spiritual and practical aspects of life must interact threw open for the believers windows on a new world of possibilities. The spirit of unconditional love in which these challenges were phrased succeeded in overcoming the fears and uncertainties of those whom the Master addressed.