The Dawning-Place: The House of Worship of 'Ishqábád

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which records the building of the 'Ishqábád House of Worship among the achievements of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's ministry. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

There is a word at the heart of the Bahá'í idea of community, and it is a beautiful one: Mashriqu'l-Adhkár — the Dawning-Place of the Praise of God. It is the name Bahá'u'lláh gave to the House of Worship He ordained for every Bahá'í community in the world; and the first of these dawning-places ever to be raised above the earth was built not in the lands where the Faith was born, nor in the West where it was spreading, but in a city most readers today would struggle to find on a map: 'Ishqábád, in Russian Turkistan, on the far side of the mountains from Persia. The story of that building is one of the quiet triumphs of the Faith's early history, and Shoghi Effendi sets it among the signal achievements of the ministry of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

To understand why a House of Worship should have risen first in so unlikely a place, one must remember the times. Through the nineteenth century the believers in Persia, the cradle of the Faith, lived under recurring persecution; to build anything openly, least of all a great public edifice for Bahá'í worship, was unthinkable. But across the border, in the territory the Russian empire then governed, conditions were different. There a sizable Bahá'í community had gathered — Persian believers who had emigrated to 'Ishqábád and prospered there, free for the first time to live and to build as their faith directed. And so it fell to that community, of all the communities of the world, to be the first to fulfil one of the central provisions of Bahá'u'lláh's revealed law: to raise a Mashriqu'l-Adhkár.

The believers of 'Ishqábád undertook it together, and they undertook it on a scale worthy of the name. They did not put up a modest meeting-hall. Guided and encouraged by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who followed the enterprise closely from the Holy Land and sent His counsel and His blessing across the distance, they planned a stately edifice of nine sides — for the number nine, the highest of the single numbers, became from the first the signature of the House of Worship, a sign of comprehensiveness, of all things gathered into unity. They set it in the centre of gardens, with walks and fountains and trees, so that the approach to it should itself lift the heart. The cost was very great, and it was borne by the community out of its own substance — by the generous and by the poor alike, each giving as he could, so that the temple when it stood was in the truest sense the gift of a whole people rather than the monument of any single donor. Foremost among the sacrificers was a kinsman of the Báb, a merchant who poured out the greater part of his fortune upon the work; but around his great gift were the smaller gifts of hundreds, and the building belonged to them all.

Yet the most distinctive thing about the Dawning-Place of 'Ishqábád was not the beauty of the central edifice. It was what the believers built around it — for in the Bahá'í conception a House of Worship is never meant to stand alone, a place of prayer cut off from the life of the people. Bahá'u'lláh had ordained that about the central temple of worship there should cluster a ring of institutions of practical service: a school for the education of children, a hospice for the care of travellers and the destitute, a place for the healing of the sick, a home for the aged and the orphaned. The temple is the heart; the surrounding institutions are the hands. Worship rises in the centre, and out of that worship flows service to the whole surrounding world — the two held together as a single act of devotion to God.

The community of 'Ishqábád built toward exactly this vision. Beside their House of Worship they established the humanitarian dependencies the Faith ordains — provision for the schooling of the young, for the relief of the traveller and the poor, for the care of the unwell. The Dawning-Place of the Praise of God became, as it was meant to be, also a dawning-place of practical goodness: a centre from which children were taught, the stranger was sheltered, and the sick were tended. Anyone who wished to understand what the Bahá'í Faith meant by community could see it embodied there in stone and garden and deed — a people who prayed together at the centre and served together at the edges, and who understood the two as one thing.

When at last the edifice stood complete, it was a wonder. Travellers and officials who had no connection with the Faith remarked upon its dignity and its loveliness; it became one of the notable buildings of the region, a visible testimony, raised in the heart of a distant empire, to the reality of a religion that most of the world still scarcely knew existed. For the believers it was more than a building. It was the first realized image of a pattern Bahá'u'lláh had promised would one day rise in every land: a House of Worship open to the adherents of every religion and to people of none, where the holy Word of God of every age might be read and chanted, ringed by the works of mercy that turn worship into action.

The later history of that first Dawning-Place is, in its way, a part of the same testimony. In time the building suffered — damaged by earthquake, and then taken from the community altogether under a hostile regime that suppressed the Faith in those lands and at length demolished the edifice entirely. The first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár no longer stands. But it had already done its appointed work. It had proved that Bahá'u'lláh's vision of the House of Worship was not a dream but a thing that a community of ordinary believers could actually build; it had shown the world the union of prayer and service that lies at the centre of Bahá'í community life; and it had become the model and the inspiration for the Houses of Worship that have since risen on every continent of the earth.

This is why the Dawning-Place of 'Ishqábád belongs to a Feast of Mulk, of Dominion. The dominion of God is established in the world not by conquest but by communities that build — that raise, out of their own devotion and their own sacrifice, places where the praise of God may dawn and from which service to humanity may flow. The believers of one distant city were the first to do it. They built the first dawning-place, and ringed it with works of mercy, and showed all who came after what a Bahá'í community is for.

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/