An Iranian and a Japanese, Meeting in Love

*A retelling based on **Mahmúd's Diary** by Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald), from the entry for 4 October 1912. The narrative is retold in our own words; the short line in quotation marks is verbatim from the diary. Read the [full text](https://bahai-library.com/zarqani_mahmuds_diary) for the original entry.*

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It was the 4th of October, 1912, in San Francisco, when two Japanese believers came to call upon 'Abdu'l-Bahá at His residence.

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To an onlooker it might have seemed an ordinary visit — a few guests paying their respects. But 'Abdu'l-Bahá saw it differently. He was filled with joy, and He called the meeting historic. Think of it, He said in effect: here, on the far western shore of America, an Iranian and a people from Japan have come together — from opposite ends of the earth, from nations and cultures that had scarcely known one another — and they meet not as strangers or rivals but in genuine love and harmony.

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That, He told them, was no small thing. It was a sign of the power that Bahá'u'lláh had released into the world: a power able to dissolve the oldest distances between peoples and gather them, across every barrier of race and language and nation, into one family. As He put it:

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> The power of Bahá'u'lláh makes all difficulties simple.

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He spoke warmly of the Japanese people — their intelligence, their boldness, their gift for carrying through whatever they set their hearts upon — and He encouraged His visitors to share the teachings of the Faith with their own nation, even giving them His blessing to write of it for the Japanese press. He did not treat them as recipients of charity, but as capable souls with a great destiny of their own to fulfill.

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It is an easy scene to pass over, and a quietly radical one. In 1912, when so much of the world was busy ranking peoples and races against one another, here was a Persian nobleman in an American city greeting two men from Japan as cherished equals and partners — and seeing in that simple meeting the shape of the future He had crossed the world to announce: one earth, one human family, every people precious, no distance too great for love to close.

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*This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted line is verbatim from Mahmúd's Diary (Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, George Ronald). See the source for the original entry.*

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