Messages to the Bahá’í World: 1950–1957

I hail, with feelings of thankfulness and relief, the signature, on the eve of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s ascension, of a contract for the immediate expropriation, by the Israeli Finance Minister, on the recommendation of the Mayor of the City of Haifa, of a thirteen-hundred meter plot, owned by the sister of Fareed, notorious enemy of the Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant. This historic act paves the way for the early transfer of the title deed of this plot by the State of Israel to the Bahá’í Community, now engaged in establishing and consolidating its World Administrative Center in the Holy Land.

The truculence, greed and obstinacy, of this breaker of the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh, demonstrated by her persistent refusal to sell and by the exorbitant price subsequently demanded, raised, during more than thirty years, an almost insurmountable obstacle to 74 the acquisition of an area which, however circumscribed, occupies a central position amidst the extensive Bahá’í domains in the heart of God’s Holy Mountain, is situated in the vicinity of the Báb’s Sepulcher, overlooks the Tomb of the Greatest Holy Leaf, and adjoins the resting-places of the Brother and the Mother of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and which, through deliberate neglect, has been allowed to become an eyesore to all those who throng the embellished precincts of a Mausoleum rightly regarded as the second holiest Shrine in the Bahá’í world.

The ownership of this plot will now enable us to locate the site, excavate the foundations, and erect the structure, of the International Bahá’í Archives, designed by the Hand of the Cause, Mason Remey, President of the International Bahá’í Council, which will serve as the permanent and befitting repository for the priceless and numerous relics associated with the Twin Founders of the Faith, with the Perfect Exemplar of its teachings and with its heroes, saints and martyrs, and the building of which constitutes one of the foremost objectives of the Ten-Year Plan.

The raising of this Edifice will in turn herald the construction, in the course of successive epochs of the Formative Age of the Faith, of several other structures, which will serve as the administrative seats of such divinely appointed institutions as the Guardianship, the Hands of the Cause, and the Universal House of Justice. These Edifices will, in the shape of a far-flung arc, and following a harmonizing style of architecture, surround the resting-places of the Greatest Holy Leaf, ranking as foremost among the members of her sex in the Bahá’í Dispensation, of her Brother, offered up as a ransom by Bahá’u’lláh for the quickening of the world and its unification, and of their Mother, proclaimed by Him to be His chosen “consort in all the worlds of God.” The ultimate completion of this stupendous undertaking will mark the culmination of the development of a world-wide divinely-appointed Administrative Order whose beginnings may be traced as far back as the concluding years of the Heroic Age of the Faith.

This vast and irresistible process, unexampled in the spiritual history of mankind, and which will synchronize with two no less significant developments—the establishment of the Lesser Peace and the evolution of Bahá’í national and local institutions—the one outside and the other within the Bahá’í world—will attain its final consummation, in the Golden Age of the Faith, through the raising of the standard of the Most Great Peace, and the emergence, in 75 the plenitude of its power and glory, of the focal Center of the agencies constituting the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh. The final establishment of this seat of the future Bahá’í World Commonwealth will signalize at once the proclamation of the sovereignty of the Founder of our Faith and the advent of the Kingdom of the Father repeatedly lauded and promised by Jesus Christ.

This World Order will, in turn, in the course of successive Dispensations of the Bahá’í Cycle, yield its fairest fruit through the birth and flowering of a civilization, divinely inspired, unique in its features, world-embracing in its scope, and fundamentally spiritual in its character—a civilization destined as it unfolds to derive its initial impulse from the spirit animating the very institutions which, in their embryonic state, are now stirring in the womb of the present Formative Age of the Faith.

Advise share this message with the Hands of the Cause and the members of the National Spiritual Assemblies throughout the Bahá’í world.