Loading…
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Loading…
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
By Rúhíyyih Khánum · 1969 · Bahá'í Publishing Trust
Modern era (1957–present) · in copyright
Biography of Shoghi Effendi by his wife.
About Rúhíyyih Khánum
Born Mary Sutherland Maxwell. Wife of Shoghi Effendi from 1937 until his passing in 1957; later appointed Hand of the Cause. Her *The Priceless Pearl* is the definitive biography of the Guardian.
1910–2000 · Hand of the Cause; wife of Shoghi Effendi
Stories by era covered
Featured figures
“Designing the Arc on Mount Carmel”
“A Quiet Wedding in Haifa: Shoghi Effendi and Mary Maxwell”
“He Asked His Father-in-Law to Design It: The Shrine of the Báb”
“The grandchildren used to watch for a mouthful of Khánum's food”
“that she would give to this or that one as it always tasted best.”
Stories of Bahá'u'lláh
Secondary RetellingAli-Akbar Furutan · 1986
Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá
Primary SourceVarious Compilers · 2000
Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání
Primary SourceMírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání · 1998
bahaistories.com archive
Secondary RetellingVarious · 2024
The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (4 volumes)
Secondary RetellingAdib Taherzadeh · 1974
Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání
Secondary RetellingMírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání · 1998
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.
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.
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.
Keith Ransom-Kehler was a gifted American lecturer who could have spent her later years in comfort. When the Guardian asked her to undertake a long, hard teaching journey to Persia on behalf of her persecuted fellow believers, she accepted at once — with no Persian, no pioneering experience, and not in robust health. She gave the rest of her life to it, dying in Iṣfáhán in 1933, and Shoghi Effendi named her the first American Bahá'í martyr.
For most of His life 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been a prisoner of the state. When He passed in Haifa in 1921, the very governments that had once exiled and confined Him hastened to do Him honour — telegrams of condolence from Winston Churchill and the British Crown, from Viscount Allenby, from the ministers of 'Iráq, and the High Commissioner himself standing among the mourners.
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.
In 1953 the golden dome of the Shrine of the Báb was at last raised over Mount Carmel, completing the monument Shoghi Effendi loved to call the "Queen of Carmel" — a structure of surpassing majesty over the remains of a Prophet whom His own land had martyred in obscurity.
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.
After the firing squad, the remains of the Báb began a journey unlike any other in religious history — wrapped in a cloak, hidden in a silk factory, carried to Ṭihrán, buried beneath shrine floors, walled into a mosque, smuggled at last across mountains and seas to the Holy Land. For nearly sixty years the faithful passed this Most Holy of trusts from hand to hand, guarding it through every danger until 'Abdu'l-Bahá could lay it to rest on Mount Carmel.
For thirty-six years Shoghi Effendi carried the cares of the entire Bahá'í world from a small room in Haifa. The Priceless Pearl preserves the compassion at the heart of that labor — a Guardian who felt the believers' sorrows as his own, answered each in his own hand, and spent his strength without stint to comfort and protect them.
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 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.
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.
See also: all sources · editorial process · library stats