The Appointment of Shoghi Effendi as Guardian

In *God Passes By,* Shoghi Effendi devotes the closing substantial passage of the book to the events of late 1921 and early 1922 — the passing of his grandfather 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the discovery of the Master's *Will and Testament,* and the formal beginning of the Guardianship that would shape the Formative Age of the Faith.

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The narrative reads, in its principal outlines, as follows. The Master ascended on the morning of 28 November 1921 in His house in Haifa, after a brief illness. The Holy Family was present. The young Shoghi Effendi, then a student at Oxford, was not. He was at his Oxford rooms when the cable arrived informing him of the passing.

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He returned to the Holy Land with such speed as the post-war travel conditions permitted. He arrived in Haifa before the end of December. The Holy Family received him and informed him of the existence — not previously disclosed — of a *Will and Testament* of the Master.

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The Will, which had been written by the Master in His own hand and held in trust by Bahíyyih Khánum, had not been opened. The Master had given specific direction that it remain sealed until the assembled members of the Holy Family and certain principal believers were present.

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The opening took place on 3 January 1922 in the Master's house in Haifa. The principal members of the Family, the senior Persian believers resident in the Holy Land, and a small number of the visiting Western believers were present. The document was opened and read aloud.

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The Will named, with a precision that left no ambiguity, Shoghi Effendi as the Guardian of the Cause of God. It defined the institution of the Guardianship in its full sweep: the Guardian as the authoritative interpreter of the Bahá'í Writings, the head of the Universal House of Justice when that institution should in time be established, the centre of the Cause's spiritual authority in the post-Master period.

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The young Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian's own narrative records, received the appointment with such weight of responsibility that he was for some weeks unable to take up the work. The household, under the steadying hand of Bahíyyih Khánum, sustained the daily affairs of the Cause through the interval. By spring of 1922 Shoghi Effendi had recovered sufficiently to begin the active conduct of the Guardianship.

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The Guardianship would last thirty-six years — from 1922 to the Guardian's own passing in late 1957. In those years he would translate the principal Writings of the Faith into English; he would build the framework of the Bahá'í administrative order; he would oversee the construction of the superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel; he would prosecute the Ten-Year Crusade that would carry the Faith to virtually every country on earth.

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The narrative the Guardian gives of his own appointment in *God Passes By* is brief and self-effacing. He records the events without commentary on his own role in them. The appointment, in his telling, was simply the next ordained step in the long providential ordering of the Cause. The interpreter of the Word of God, the Centre of the Covenant, had passed. The Guardian had been named. The work continued.

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*Paraphrased from God Passes By (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1944); see original for full text.*

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