How God Passes By Was Written

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Khánum. Words in quotation marks are from that account.

On 20 March 1942, as Shoghi Effendi sat working on God Passes By, two army fighter planes on a practice flight touched wings, lost control and crashed. One came down over the roof of the house, so low that Rúhíyyih Khánum thought it would shear through the ceiling of his room. It landed and burst into flames not a hundred yards away, at the foot of the street.

The book was a review of the first hundred years of the Bahá'í Faith. The Guardian was racing against time to give it to the Bahá'ís of the West on the hundredth anniversary of their Faith. Between the two of them it was simply "the book"; it received its title only at the end. It took more than two years to write.

He began by reading. For a year, Rúhíyyih Khánum records, he read every book of the Bahá'í Writings in Persian and English, every book written about the Faith by Bahá'ís, published or in manuscript, and everything by non-Bahá'ís that referred to it in any significant way. She reckoned it at least two hundred books. As he read he made notes and marshalled his facts, deciding between a date given in one source and a date given in another. At the same time he was preparing for the Centenary and making decisions about the design of the superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb.

Then he wrote the chapters out in longhand, and often rewrote them. After that came the typing, which he did himself at a small portable typewriter, "hammering away with a few fingers, sometimes ten hours on end."

When the day's typing was over, the two of them sat side by side at the table in his bedroom, each with three copies of the typescript, and read proof late into the night. He read aloud while they corrected the pages and put in by hand the thousands of accents on the transliterated words, until his eyes were bloodshot and blurred and his back and arms were stiff with exhaustion. They worked on until whatever he had typed that day was finished.

"It had to be done," she writes. "There was no possibility of working at a slower pace."

He was already carrying the weight of twenty years of the Guardianship. The war threatened the Holy Land, and his home was convulsed by Covenant-breaking that now affected his own family. In July 1942, with the invasion of Egypt in the news, she wrote that he was wondering which would be worse, to stay or to go, if things became very bad in Haifa. Early in 1943 he came into her room, upset over his work, and she asked why he did not read other books like the one he was writing, to be stimulated by them.

"I have no time, no time. For twenty years I have had no time!"

He often said "this book is killing me," and she invariably answered "me too."

It was not his purpose, he said, to write a detailed history of those hundred years, but to review the salient features of the birth and rise of the Faith, the establishment of its administrative institutions, and the series of crises that had propelled it forward, through the release of the divine power within it, "from victory to victory." In its pages he described the four periods of that century as successive acts of one "indivisible, stupendous and sublime drama, whose mystery no intellect can fathom, whose climax no eye can even dimly perceive, whose conclusion no mind can adequately foreshadow."

He mailed the corrected manuscript to America in instalments, but conditions in the United States delayed publication, and the book was not off the press until the middle of November 1944. Rúhíyyih Khánum called it "the only true book we have from his pen," since all his other writings took the form of letters to particular communities.

He then turned to the Bahá'ís of Persia, Bahá'u'lláh's native land, and began a second, shorter review of the same hundred years in Persian, "different in nature but no less splendid." She did not sit with him through that one. His Persian, liberally sprinkled with Arabic, was beyond her; she could catch only three or four words in ten. But he would read, or rather chant, passages to her, and she could hear the majesty of the words even without following their meaning.

"I remember how, as I approached his room, I would hear his voice chanting his composition to himself as he wrote, infinitely plaintive, infinitely beautiful."

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Khánum.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.