The Charter He Left Behind: The Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which describes the Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The short phrase in quotation marks is from the Will itself, as rendered in the authorized English translation.

When the believers gathered in grief after 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing in November 1921, they faced the same unspoken question that the followers of every Founder have faced at the end: now that He is gone, to whom shall we turn? And just as Bahá'u'lláh had answered that question for them three decades earlier in His own Book of the Covenant, so 'Abdu'l-Bahá had answered it for the generations to come. He had written down, in His own hand, exactly where the believers should turn when He was gone.

That document was His Will and Testament — and the story of its writing is itself part of the story of His life.

Shoghi Effendi records that 'Abdu'l-Bahá composed it not in a season of peace but in days of grave danger. The Master had been a prisoner for most of His life, and even after the wider world had begun to honour Him, the old enmities had not died. In the years when a hostile commission was sent to investigate Him and His very life stood in peril, He took up His pen and began to set down the provisions by which the Cause should be guided after His death. The first portion of the Will belongs to that perilous time; the whole was written over a period of years, in three successive parts, in His own handwriting. Here was a Man whose own future was in doubt, calmly providing for the future of a worldwide community He would one day leave behind.

He kept the document in His own safekeeping, sealed, through all the years that followed. No one knew its contents. It would not be opened until He had passed from this world.

When at last it was opened and read — after His ascension, in the presence of His family and the believers — the Bahá'í world learned what He had provided. The Will did three great things.

First, it appointed a successor. 'Abdu'l-Bahá named His eldest grandson, Shoghi Effendi, as the Guardian of the Cause of God — the "priceless pearl that doth gleam from out the Twin Surging Seas" — and the authorized interpreter of the Bahá'í teachings. As Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant had turned every heart toward 'Abdu'l-Bahá, so 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Will now turned every heart toward the Guardian. There would be no contested succession, no splintering into rival camps, because the Centre of the Faith had named, in writing and in advance, the one to whom the community must turn.

Second, it provided for the Universal House of Justice — the elected body ordained by Bahá'u'lláh to legislate on matters not expressly revealed in the sacred Text. The Will set out its standing and the reverence due to its decisions, knitting together the elected and the appointed institutions of the Faith into a single, enduring system.

Third, taken whole, the Will laid the foundations of what Shoghi Effendi would call the Administrative Order — the framework of local and national and international institutions through which the affairs of a global community could be conducted in unity for centuries to come. It was, in Shoghi Effendi's words, the very child of the Covenant Bahá'u'lláh had established: the offspring resulting from the mystic union of the Author of the Faith and its appointed Centre. With Bahá'u'lláh's own Most Holy Book and this Will of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the charter of the new world order had been completed.

It is worth pausing over what this meant for a grieving community. The believers had lost the Master they loved — the One who had walked among the poor of Haifa, crossed oceans to proclaim the oneness of humanity, and shown them in a single human life what the love of God looks like. Their grief was real and deep. But they were not left bewildered, and they were not left divided, because He had not left them unguided. He had thought of them, and provided for them, long before — even in days when His own life hung in the balance.

This is why the Ascension of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, for all its sorrow, is not a day of shipwreck. The visible presence of the Master was withdrawn. But the way forward had already been written down in His own hand, and sealed, and kept, against the day it would be needed. His Will and Testament was His parting gift: a sure anchor set in advance, so that the ship of the Cause would ride out the storm of His departure and sail on.

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/