Destroy This Room: The Two Dreams 'Abdu'l-Bahá Related

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which records the dreams 'Abdu'l-Bahá related in His final weeks. The words in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own, as preserved in that history.

In the last weeks of His earthly life, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke to those around Him with a serenity that, only afterward, they understood. He was unhurried. He set His affairs in order. He spoke gently, almost as one speaks of a journey home, of His own passing. And in those weeks He related to His family two dreams — dreams whose meaning would not become clear until He was no longer among them.

The first He told them about two months before He passed.

"I seemed," He said, "to be standing within a great mosque, in the inmost shrine, facing the Qiblih, in the place of the Imám himself." As He stood there, He went on, He became aware that people were flocking into the mosque. "More and yet more crowded in, taking their places in rows behind Me, until there was a vast multitude." There, in the place of the leader of prayer, with the great congregation gathered at His back, He raised His voice. "As I stood I raised loudly the call to prayer."

Then, He said, a thought came to Him: to go out from the mosque. And when He found Himself outside, He reflected within Himself on what He had done. "For what reason came I forth," He asked, "not having led the prayer?" And then came the answer that is the heart of the dream — an answer of perfect, quiet confidence: "But it matters not; now that I have uttered the Call to prayer, the vast multitude will of themselves chant the prayer."

Consider what that dream holds. The Master had summoned the multitude. He had raised the call. And then, going forth, He left the prayer itself to the great company gathered behind Him — trusting that, the call once given, they would carry it on of their own accord. For nearly thirty years He had been the heart and centre of the Cause, the One to whom all the believers of the world had turned. Now, in a dream, He saw Himself withdraw — and saw the multitude take up the worship He had begun.

A few weeks later, while He was occupying a solitary room in the garden of His house, He recounted a second dream to those who were with Him.

"I dreamed a dream," He said, "and behold, the Blessed Beauty came and said to Me: 'Destroy this room.'" Bahá'u'lláh — His own Father, the Manifestation of God for this age — had appeared to Him and given Him that single, mysterious command.

None of those who heard it understood what it meant. It was a strange thing to say, and they could make nothing of it. The Master did not explain. The days went on as the household's days went on, and the dream lay unexplained among them like a sealed letter.

Then 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed away.

It was only after His ascension, Shoghi Effendi records, that the meaning broke upon them all. By the "room" Bahá'u'lláh had not meant any room of stone and plaster. He had meant the temple of His Son's body — the earthly frame in which the Master's spirit had dwelt and laboured and suffered for so long. "Destroy this room" was the summons home. Bahá'u'lláh had come, in a dream, to call 'Abdu'l-Bahá out of the house of the body and into the realms above. And the Master, who feared nothing and clung to nothing of this world, had received the command as He received all His Father's commands — without protest, with a heart already turned homeward.

Set the two dreams side by side, and they speak together. In the first, the Master sees that the Cause will go on without His visible presence: the call given, the multitude will chant the prayer of itself. In the second, He receives the call to depart. He was being prepared, and He was preparing those He loved, for the parting that was almost upon them. Within days of the second dream He would breathe His last in the small hours of the twenty-eighth of November, 1921.

This is why the community pauses each year over these final weeks. The Ascension of 'Abdu'l-Bahá is a day of mourning. Yet folded inside that grief is the quiet assurance the first dream carried: He had raised the call, and the multitude — believers across a whole world — would chant the prayer still. The voice that had summoned them was withdrawn. The worship it began did not cease.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/