Eighteen Hundred Students: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at Stanford

On the morning of October 8, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and His party travelled by train south from San Francisco to the Palo Alto campus of Leland Stanford Junior University. Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, who recorded the event in his diary, estimates the audience that gathered in the university chapel that morning at approximately 1,800 students and 180 professors — the largest single audience of the entire American tour.

The president of the university, David Starr Jordan, presented the Master to the assembly. He had no need to perform a long introduction. The mere fact that he, the head of one of the youngest and most ambitious universities on the West Coast, was introducing an aged Eastern religious figure to his student body was, in 1912, statement enough. He spoke briefly, naming the guest who would speak.

The Master then took the platform. Mahmúd records the talk’s governing claim in a sentence the audience later remembered:

The religion of brotherhood, of good will, of friendship between men and nations is as old as good thinking and good living may be.

The talk that followed — recorded both in Mahmúd’s Diary and in The Promulgation of Universal Peace — laid out the case for a unified humanity not as a future hope but as a fact already present in the deepest stratum of the great religions. He spoke of war’s waste, of science’s promise, of the absurdity of prejudice in a world in which the railway and the telegraph had already made the human family a single household.

When He had finished, the president stood again and named the significance of what they had heard. He thanked ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for this illuminating expression of the brotherhood of man and the value of international peace.

The students filed out into the autumn light. Many of them, the diary records, lingered to greet the Master in person. He greeted each one He could reach. He had been a prisoner of the Ottoman state until four years before; now He was the guest of honour of the Western university that, more than any other on the Pacific coast, would carry the next century’s thought.

Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for October 8, 1912; see original for full text.

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání*. George Ronald.