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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
62 stories in the library.
Amatu'l-Bahá Rúhíyyih Khánum in one of her memories says that she was once in a fireside with a group of Persian and British pioneers. One of the seekers was a black man who was sitting there and was listening carefully. Suddenly the door…
One of the most beautiful stories we have is the one of May Maxwell (the mother of Rúhíyyih Khánum) and Thomas Breakwell. This was in the very early days, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was still a prisoner in Acca and May Maxwell was a young girl…
When my father fell desperately ill in the winter of 1949-50 his condition was despaired of by his doctors. He reached a point where he seemed to have no conscious mind left, could not recognize me, his only and idolized child, at all, and…
Mullá ‘Alí Ján and ‘Alavíyyih Khánum, not content with the conversion of the inhabitants of Máhfurúzak to the Bahá’í Faith, started to organize the life of the village on a spiritual basis. They encouraged each family to set aside a…
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. ** William Sutherland…
A husband and wife loved their little village so much that they filled it with prayer, schools, and kindness — and even when the hardest things happened, their love never stopped.
The word "eliminate" was often on his lips; he would eliminate non-essentials, get rid quickly of secondary matters, push away the trivial debris of life. He used carry this process of elimination into his newspaper. He knew exactly which…
Bahá'í Chronicles preserves the biographical record of May Bolles Maxwell — one of the first pilgrims to 'Akká, the woman who established the Bahá'í community of Paris and of Montreal, the mother of Rúḥíyyih Khánum, and the travel-teacher whom Shoghi Effendi would name a martyr of the Faith after her death in Buenos Aires in 1940.
A young woman from America heard of a new Faith in Paris, journeyed across the sea to meet the Master, and spent the rest of her long life helping others find Him too.
At family meals in 'Akká, the children watched and waited for one special spoonful that always tasted better than anything else — because it was given with love.
On another occasion, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was resting and May emphatically told Mary, "Don't you disturb the Master. He is very, very tired, and don't you make any noise." But the moment her mother's back was turned, she shot into the room.…
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes a small ritual at the family table in 'Akká: Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, would spoon a small bite from her own plate — *the mouthful of Khánum* — to one of the grandchildren, and the grandchildren would watch for whose turn it was.
A number of times during his life, particularly in the years immediately following the Ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi retired to Switzerland to regain health, energy and self-confidence. He lived a very physically rigorous life…
At the time my father was invited by the Guardian to come and live with us in the Holy Land, after my mother's unexpected death in Argentina in March 1940, Shoghi Effendi decided, for reasons of his own, to go to England. For those who…
Over his mother's signature, but drafted by the Guardian, the following cable was sent to America: “Announce Assemblies celebration marriage beloved Guardian. Inestimable honour conferred upon handmaid of Baha'u'llah Ruhiyyih Khanum Miss…
Dr. Bagdadi states that when Shoghi Effendi was only five years old he was pestering the Master to write something for him, whereupon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote this touching and revealing letter in His own hand: He is God! O My Shoghi, I have no…
During one or two of those summers early in Shoghi Effendi's ministry he told me he had bought a bicycle and cycled over many passes. His bicycle--the poor man's car--became a favourite of Shoghi Effendi. He sometimes climbed the highest…
Every time one goes into the details of any particular period in the Guardian's life one is tempted to say "this was the worst period", so fraught with strain, problems, unbearable pressures was his entire ministry. But there is a pattern,…
From early morning until dark, often more than eight hours on his feet, day after day and month after month he directed the work. It was certainly not his work to do this, but he was determined to ensure it was done not only quickly, but…
I want to give you just one day in the Guardian’s life so you can appreciate a little bit more what it is to be the head of a faith like the Bahá’í Faith. Shoghi Effendi usually arose in the morning about 5:30. And then he had his period…
In reading over my diaries - so very little of which I have quoted out of hundred of pages written off and on throughout the years - it seems strange to me there is practically no reference to the World War raging everywhere during almost…
In the early summer of 1923 Shoghi Effendi again left Haifa and sought some restoration of health and solace in the solitude of the high mountains of Switzerland. But, unlike later years, when he continued to keep in constant touch with…
Interlaken is in the heart of the Bernese Oberland and the starting point for innumerable excursions into the surrounding mountains and valleys. Often long before sunrise Shoghi Effendi would start out, dressed in knee breeches, a Norfolk…
A curious girl from Canada who could not stop reading and learning grew up to do something nobody expected — and to serve the whole world.
On a quiet mountain slope full of pine trees, one man walked back and forth for years, imagining a great curving path and beautiful buildings that did not exist yet.
A young woman from Canada crossed the whole world to marry the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith — in the smallest, quietest wedding you can imagine.
When it was time to build a beautiful crown over the Shrine of the Báb, Shoghi Effendi turned to a famous architect who happened to be his own father-in-law.
In a small hotel in London, a beloved leader called the Guardian grew ill and passed away — and the woman who loved him most was there beside him.
In one small room in Haifa, with a typewriter and a lamp, Shoghi Effendi answered letters far into the night — and from that desk he guided friends all over the world.
In quiet rooms at a great English college, a young man taught himself English so perfectly that he could one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá — never guessing how much that quiet work would one day matter.
A boy named Shoghi Effendi went far away to school in Beirut, where he studied hard and learned new languages — and was being made ready for something great he could not yet see.
A small barefoot boy stood in a doorway watching his grandfather, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and the gentle nod he was given held a secret no one could quite put into words.
A young man named Shoghi was studying far from home when sad news arrived — and only later did he learn that a special task had been waiting just for him.
A young man was given the hardest task in the whole Bahá'í world, and before he could carry it, he went up into the high mountains to walk, and think, and pray.
Standing in the light of a golden dome, Shoghi Effendi asked the Bahá'ís of the world to do something that sounded impossible — and they said yes.
Night after night in a quiet house in Haifa, Shoghi Effendi sat at his desk and turned a great old book from Persian into English, so the whole world could read it.
Shoghi Effendi sat at a quiet desk and turned a beautiful little book of holy words into English, working one tiny line at a time until it was just right.
May Maxwell, the mother of Rúhíyyih Khánum, died only a few weeks after pioneering to South America, and was declared a martyr by Shoghi Effendi. (Her story can be read in the Bahá’í World, Vol. VIII, pp. 631-642.) There is no question…
My mother was the one who had first known Shoghi Effendi as a child, when she came to the Holy Land at the end of the last century; she had come again, in 1909, with my father but I do not know how much contact, if any, they had at that…
Now, people have asked, “Did the Guardian have any conception that he was going to pass away? Did he have fore-knowledge, being divinely guided, that he was going to pass away? Again, friends, the answer to the question is that we don’t…
In His Will and Testament 'Abdu'l-Bahá named His grandson Shoghi Effendi the Guardian of the Cause of God — "the sign of God," "the chosen branch," "the priceless pearl that doth gleam from out the Twin Surging Seas." The young man who received this towering station asked only to be known by the simple name his Grandfather had used, and signed himself, in lifelong humility, the servant of the threshold.
Before the world knew he would be the Guardian, Shoghi Effendi went to Oxford with one private purpose: to perfect his English so that he might serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá as His translator. In quiet rooms at Balliol, with English literature, a dictionary, and a notebook, he forged the very instrument by which the Sacred Writings would later reach the Western world — a lifetime's labour of learning poured out in service.
The vast ocean of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation lay almost entirely in Persian and Arabic, beyond the reach of the growing communities of the West. Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Faith, set himself to gather from that ocean and to render its waters into a stately, faithful English — producing, in *Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh*, a book through which the West could at last drink directly from the Word.
Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, brought to everything he touched a standard of exactness and beauty that those closest to him never forgot. The Priceless Pearl preserves the portrait: a young man who taught himself English to perfection in quiet Oxford rooms, then laboured year after year by lamplight to render the Sacred Writings in cadenced, faultless prose — showing that the patient pursuit of excellence can itself be a form of worship.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts how Shoghi Effendi, walking the slope of Mount Carmel year after year, conceived and laid out the great Arc of buildings — the International Archives, the Universal House of Justice site, the Centre for the Study of the Texts, the Teaching Centre — on which the world administrative institutions of the Faith would in time stand.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum tells the story of her own marriage to Shoghi Effendi in the spring of 1937 — a private ceremony in the room of the Greatest Holy Leaf, witnessed by a handful of family members, that joined two streams of the Cause and was deliberately kept free of fanfare.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum's *The Priceless Pearl* recounts how, in 1942, Shoghi Effendi asked his own father-in-law — the celebrated Canadian architect William Sutherland Maxwell, then resident in Haifa — to design the arcade and superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel. The colonnade of Baveno granite and the Chiampo arches were the answer.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum gives the most reliable account of her husband's last days — a brief illness in a London hotel, the flu that turned to a heart attack, and the night of the fourth of November 1957 when the Guardian of the Cause of God passed from the world at the age of sixty.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the small household office from which Shoghi Effendi guided the Bahá'í world for thirty-six years — a room with a typewriter, a stack of cables, a Hebrew-Arabic-Persian shelf of dictionaries, and a Guardian who answered each letter himself in the long hours after Haifa had gone to sleep.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the months Shoghi Effendi spent at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1920–1921, perfecting his English so that he might one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá as His translator — a small private programme of self-discipline that would, only months later, bear an unimaginable wider fruit.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the years the young Shoghi Effendi spent at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut — later the American University of Beirut — where the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the West for the first time inside a Western classroom, and was prepared, without knowing it, for the office that lay ahead.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum's *The Priceless Pearl* preserves a moment from Shoghi Effendi's boyhood in 'Akká: a small barefoot figure in a doorway, eyes on his grandfather, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá's slow nod of recognition that the bond between them was not only physical, but something else.
In Rúḥíyyih Khánum's biography *The Priceless Pearl* she describes the moment in November 1921 when a young Shoghi Effendi, reading the cable in Major Tudor Pole's London office, learned that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had passed — and how, only on his return to Haifa, the opening of the Master's Will revealed an office he had never imagined for himself.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the months in 1922 and after when the young Shoghi Effendi, crushed by the weight of his appointment, withdrew to the Alps — walking long mountain paths, praying, gathering the strength he would need to take up the task the Master's Will had laid on him.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the moment in the spring of 1953 when Shoghi Effendi, looking out from the newly completed Shrine of the Báb on the centenary of its Founder's enthronement, summoned the Bahá'í world to the most ambitious teaching plan in its history — to settle believers in every remaining unopened country and territory of the planet.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the years of patient nightly labour by which Shoghi Effendi rendered Nabíl's Persian chronicle of the Bábí period into the cadenced English that became *The Dawn-Breakers* — the volume that, more than any other, made the heroic story of the Báb's followers available to the Western world.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the slow, exacting labour by which Shoghi Effendi rendered Bahá'u'lláh's *Hidden Words* into the English in which generations of Western believers have come to know them — a translation built one aphorism at a time, in the silent hours of his Haifa office.
Surely the simplicity of the marriage of Shoghi Effendi - reminiscent of the simplicity of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's own marriage in the prison-city of 'Akká - should provide a thought-provoking example to the Bahá’ís everywhere. No one, with the…
The great kindness that was such a prominent feature of Shoghi Effendi's character is shown in the manner in which he conveyed to Khánum the news of the death of her beloved mother, May Maxwell: The devastating news of May Maxwell's…
Today the car was stolen! [A gift to Shoghi Effendi from Roy Wilhelm. The Guardian had had no car for years as the old one was sold during the war owing to no spare parts.] My God what a day! At 2:30, as Gladys and I sat over our coffee at…
When my father fell desperately ill in the winter of 1949-50 his condition was despaired of by his doctors. He reached a point where he seemed to have no conscious mind left, could not recognize me, his only and idolized child, at all, and…
When Shoghi Effendi was beginning to write The Advent of Divine Justice he was one day expatiating on this theme and suddenly stated that the United States was the most corrupt country politically in the world. I was simply stupefied by…