Keith Ransom-Kehler's Mission to Persia

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum, her life of Shoghi Effendi, with details from Shoghi Effendi's God Passes By. Words in quotation marks are quoted from those books.

In the early 1930s the Bahá'ís of Persia were still a hated and downtrodden community, and Bahá'í literature was banned from entering the country. Early in 1932 Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Faith, asked the American Bahá'ís to appeal to the Persian government and the Sháh to lift the ban. The request was refused.

At about this time an American believer, Keith Ransom-Kehler, arrived in Haifa as a pilgrim. Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes her as "a woman of outstanding ability and character." Before becoming a Bahá'í she had been a minister of a Christian church, and she was "a fiery and able speaker." Shoghi Effendi decided to send her to Persia. He kept her in Haifa for many weeks, briefing her on the country and on what he hoped she could do there to win greater freedom for the Faith and some measure of recognition. In 1932 he cabled the American Bahá'ís to petition the Sháh, introducing her as their "chosen representative."

In Persia she pleaded, in Shoghi Effendi's words, "in numerous interviews with ministers, ecclesiastics and government officials the cause of her down-trodden brethren in that land." She addressed no fewer than seven petitions to the Sháh. He refused to receive her, and her mission did not achieve its purpose.

Yet, Rúḥíyyih Khánum writes, her visit had "an historic effect on the Persian Bahá'í Community." She had been thoroughly instructed by the Guardian in how the Administrative Order should develop, and she stirred a "frequently intimidated, always downtrodden and sometimes apathetic community" to a new awareness of its future and of the work that lay before it.

Feeling the failure of her mission keenly, she wrote from Persia: "I have fallen, though I never faltered. Months of effort with nothing accomplished is the record that confronts me." And she added: "Nothing in the world is meaningless suffering least of all. Sacrifice with its attendant agony is a germ, an organism. Man cannot blight its fruition as he can the seeds of earth. Once sown it blooms, I think forever, in the sweet fields of eternity."

She was no longer young, and her health was poor. Shoghi Effendi writes that, "heedless of the warnings of age and ill-health," she "at last succumbed in Isfáhán." She died there in October 1933.

On 28 October 1933 the Guardian cabled America: "Keith's precious life offered up sacrifice beloved Cause in Bahá'u'lláh's native land." He called her the American believers' "first and distinguished martyr," and said her services entitled her to an "eminent rank among Hands of Cause of Bahá'u'lláh."

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

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