Century of Light

On this landscape of false confidence and deep despair, of scientific enlightenment and spiritual gloom, there appeared, as the twentieth century opened, the luminous figure of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The journey that had brought Him to this pivotal moment in the history of humankind had led through more than fifty years of exile, imprisonment and privation, hardly a month having passed in anything that resembled tranquillity and ease. He came to it resolved to proclaim to responsive and heedless alike the establishment on earth of that promised reign of universal peace and justice that had sustained human hope throughout the centuries. Its foundation, He declared, would be the unification, in this "century of light", of the world’s people:

During the long years of imprisonment and banishment that followed Bahá’u’lláh’s refusal to serve the political agenda of the Ottoman authorities, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was entrusted with the management of the Faith’s affairs and with the responsibility of acting as His Father’s spokesman. A significant aspect of this work entailed interaction with local and provincial officials who sought His advice on the problems confronting them. Not dissimilar needs presented themselves in the Master’s homeland. As early as 1875, responding to Bahá’u’lláh’s instructions, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá addressed to the rulers and people of Persia a treatise entitled The Secret of Divine Civilization, setting out the spiritual principles that must guide the shaping of their society in the age of humanity’s maturity. Its opening passage called upon the Iranian people to reflect on the lesson taught by history about the key to social progress:

The Secret of Divine Civilization presaged the guidance that would flow from the pen of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in subsequent decades. After the devastating loss that followed the ascension of Bahá’u’lláh, the Persian believers were revived and heartened by a flood of Tablets from the Master, which provided not only the spiritual sustenance they needed, but leadership in finding their way through the turmoil that was undermining the established order of things in their land. These communications, reaching even the smallest villages across the country, responded to the appeals and questions of countless individual believers, bringing guidance, encouragement and assurance. We read, for example, a Tablet addressing believers in the village of Kishih, mentioning by name nearly one hundred and sixty of them. Of the age now dawning, the Master says: "this is the century of 9 light," explaining that the meaning of this image is acceptance of the principle of oneness and its implications:

Extraordinarily, the small company of persecuted believers, living in this remote corner of a land which still remained largely unaffected by the developments taking place elsewhere in social and intellectual life, are summoned by this Tablet to raise their eyes above the level of local concerns and to see the implications of unity on a global scale:

Here, the call of the Master is not only to a new level of understanding, but implies the need for commitment and action. In the urgency and confidence of the language it employs can be felt the power that would produce the great achievements of the Persian believers in the decades since then—both in the world-wide promotion of the Cause and in the acquisition of capacities that advance civilization:

Wherefore, rest ye not, be it for an instant; seek ye not a minute’s respite nor a moment’s repose. Surge ye even as the billows of a mighty sea, and roar like unto the leviathan of the ocean of eternity. 10

Social historians of the future, with a perspective far more dispassionate and universal than is presently possible, and benefiting from unimpeded access to all of the primary documentation, will study minutely the transformation that the Master achieved in these early years. Day after day, month after month, from a distant exile where He was endlessly harried by the host of enemies surrounding Him, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was able not only to stimulate the expansion of the Persian Bahá’í community, but to shape its consciousness and collective life. The result was the emergence of a culture, however localized, that was unlike anything humanity had ever known. Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself.

Although suffering intermittent atrocities at the hands of the Muslim clergy and their supporters—without protection from a succession of indolent Qájár monarchs—the Persian Bahá’í community found a new lease on life. The number of believers multiplied in all regions of the country, persons prominent in the life of society were enrolled, including several influential members of the clergy, and the forerunners of administrative institutions emerged in the form of rudimentary consultative bodies. The importance of the latter development alone would be impossible to exaggerate. In a land and among a people accustomed for centuries to a patriarchal system that concentrated all decision-making authority in the hands of an absolute monarch or Shí‘ih mujtáhids, a community representing a cross section of that society had broken with the past, taking into its own hands the responsibility for deciding its collective affairs through consultative action. 11

In the society and culture the Master was developing, spiritual energies expressed themselves in the practical affairs of day-to-day life. The emphasis in the teachings on education provided the impulse for the establishment of Bahá’í schools—including the Tarbíyat school for girls, 6 which gained national renown—in the capital, as well as in provincial centres. With the assistance of American and European Bahá’í helpers, clinics and other medical facilities followed. As early as 1925, communities in a number of cities had instituted classes in Esperanto, in response to their awareness of the Bahá’í teaching that some form of auxiliary international language must be adopted. A network of couriers, reaching across the land, provided the struggling Bahá’í community with the rudiments of the postal service that the rest of the country so conspicuously lacked. The changes under way touched the homeliest circumstances of day-to-day life. In obedience to the laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, for example, Persian Bahá’ís abandoned the use of the filthy public baths, prolific in their spread of infection and disease, and began to rely on showers that used fresh water.

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

Throughout these years Persian political life was in almost constant turmoil. While Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh’s immediate successor, Muẓaffari’d-Dín Sháh, was induced to approve a constitution in 1906, his successor, Muḥammad-‘Alí Sháh, 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 Qájár kings, Aḥmad Sháh, to summon a third parliament was itself riven by competing factions and shamelessly manipulated by the Shí‘ih clergy. Efforts by Bahá’ís to play a constructive role in this process of modernization were repeatedly frustrated by royalist 12 and popular factions alike, both of which were inspired by the prevailing religious prejudice and saw in the Bahá’í community merely a convenient scapegoat. Here again, only a more politically mature age than our own will be able to appreciate the way in which the Master—setting an example for future challenges that the Bahá’í community must inevitably encounter—guided the beleaguered community in doing all it could to encourage political reform, and then in being willing to step aside when these efforts were cynically rebuffed.

It was not only through His Tablets that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá exercised this influence on the rapidly developing Bahá’í community in the cradle of the Faith. Unlike Westerners, Persian believers were not distinguished from other peoples of the Near East by dress and appearance, and so travellers from the cradle of the Faith did not arouse the suspicion of the Ottoman authorities. Consequently, a steady stream of Persian pilgrims provided ‘Abdu’l-Bahá with another powerful means of inspiring the friends, guiding their activities, and drawing them ever more deeply into an understanding of Bahá’u’lláh’s purpose. Some of the greatest names in Persian Bahá’í history were among those who journeyed to ‘Akká and returned to their homes prepared to give their lives if necessary for the achievement of the Master’s vision. The immortal Varqá and his son Rúḥu’lláh were among this privileged number, as were Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar ‘Alí, Mírzá Abu’l Faḍl, Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí Afnán and four distinguished Hands of the Cause, Ibn-i-Abhar, Ḥájí Mullá Alí Akbar, Adíbu’l-Ulamá and Ibn-i-Aṣdaq. The spirit that today sustains Persian pioneers in every part of the world and that plays so creative a role in the building of Bahá’í community life runs like a straight line through family after family back to those heroic days. In retrospect, it is apparent that the phenomenon we today know as the twin processes of expansion and consolidation itself had its origin in those marvellous years.

Inspired by the Master’s words and the accounts brought back from the Holy Land, Persian believers arose to undertake travel-teaching activities in the Far East. During the latter years of Bahá’u’lláh’s Ministry, communities had been established in India and Burma, and the Faith carried as far as China; and this work was now reinforced. A demonstration of the new powers released in the Cause was the 13 erection in the Russian province of Turkestan, where a vigorous Bahá’í community life had also developed, of the first Bahá’í House of Worship in the world, 7 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-Bahá was able to pursue the promising opportunities which, as the new century opened, had already begun to unfold in the West. Not the least important feature of this base was its embrace of representatives of the Orient’s great diversity of racial, religious and national backgrounds. This achievement provided ‘Abdu’l-Bahá with the examples on which He would repeatedly draw in His proclamation to Western audiences of the integrating forces that had been released through Bahá’u’lláh’s advent.

The greatest victory of these early years was the Master’s success in constructing on Mount Carmel, on the spot designated for it by Bahá’u’lláh and through immense effort, a mausoleum for the remains of the Báb, 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. 8 Such an insight lends special meaning to the way in which the Administrative Centre of Bahá’u’lláh’s World Order would take shape under the shadow of the Shrine of the Faith’s Martyr-Prophet. Shoghi Effendi sets the Master’s achievement in global and historical perspective:

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

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

Because of the dramatic character of the events that occurred in North America and Europe, accounts of the Master’s historic journeys sometimes tend to overlook the important opening year spent in Egypt. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá arrived there in September 1910, intending to go on directly to Europe, but was compelled by illness to remain in residence at Ramleh, a suburb of Alexandria, until August of the following year. As it turned out, the months that followed were a period of great productivity whose full effects on the fortunes of the Cause, in the African continent especially, will be felt for many years to come. To some extent the way had no doubt been paved by warm admiration for the Master on the part 15 of Shaykh Muḥammad ‘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 Mírzá ‘Abbás Effendi, the learned and erudite Head of the Bahá’ís in ‘Akká and the Centre of authority for Bahá’ís throughout the world" and expressing appreciation of His visit to Alexandria. 12 This and other articles paid particular tribute to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s understanding of Islam and to the principles of unity and religious tolerance that lay at the heart of His teachings.

Despite the Master’s ill health that had caused it, the Egyptian interlude proved to be a great blessing. Western diplomats and officials were able to observe at first-hand the extraordinary success of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s interaction with leading figures in a region of the Near East that was of lively interest in European circles. Accordingly, by the time the Master embarked for Marseilles on 11 August 1911, His fame had preceded Him. 16 17