The Promised Day: The Fall of the Monarchies

The Promised Day Is Come, the long letter Shoghi Effendi addressed in 1941 to the Bahá'ís of the West, is the Guardian's most extensive treatment of the rise and fall of the great political and religious institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in light of the warnings that Bahá'u'lláh had directed to them in the Adrianople period.

The Guardian's treatment proceeds by surveying, in turn, the fates of the principal monarchies and ecclesiastical authorities to whom Bahá'u'lláh had addressed the great Tablets of the 1860s.

The French Empire of Napoleon III. Bahá'u'lláh had addressed the Emperor in a Tablet that contained, among its other provisions, a specific prophecy of the Emperor's downfall if he did not respond to the call to recognise the new Revelation. The Emperor did not respond. He was overthrown in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War. The French monarchy itself was dissolved. The Third Republic that succeeded it would, in the Guardian's reading, prove the first of the many republican governments that would replace the European monarchies in the century to come.

The Russian Empire of the Czars. Bahá'u'lláh had addressed the Czar Alexander II, acknowledging a small service rendered by the Russian diplomatic corps and calling the Czar to the recognition of the new Revelation. Alexander II did not respond. He was assassinated in 1881. His successors continued to refuse the call. The Romanov dynasty was overthrown in the February Revolution of 1917. The royal family was executed by Bolshevik forces in July 1918. The Czarist Empire ceased to exist.

The German Empire of the Hohenzollerns. The Kaiser Wilhelm I and his successors had been the inheritors, through the German constitutional history of the nineteenth century, of the warnings Bahá'u'lláh had issued to the European monarchical class as a whole. The Hohenzollern dynasty was overthrown in November 1918 in the wake of the German defeat in the First World War. Kaiser Wilhelm II went into exile in the Netherlands. The German monarchy ceased to exist.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs. The same Tablet that had addressed the European monarchs collectively had addressed, through them, the Habsburg imperial structure. The Habsburg empire collapsed in 1918, dissolved into the small successor states of central Europe. The dynasty went into exile. The empire ceased to exist.

The Ottoman Empire of the Sulṭáns. The Ottoman ruling class — which had imprisoned and exiled Bahá'u'lláh Himself — was deposed in the Turkish revolution of 1922. The Ottoman Sulṭánate, which had been the principal political authority in the Islamic world for some four centuries, ceased to exist.

The Persian Empire of the Qájárs. The Qájár dynasty, which had executed the Báb and had imprisoned and banished Bahá'u'lláh, was deposed in the Persian revolution of 1925. The Qájár family went into exile. The dynasty ceased to exist.

The Guardian's reading does not present these events as direct supernatural punishments visited on the persons of the monarchs concerned. It presents them as the visible working-out, across the historical process, of the withdrawal of divine confirmation from political institutions that had refused the call to renewal. The kings of the earth, the Guardian writes in summary, had been summoned. The summons had not been received. The consequences were now unfolding.

Paraphrased from The Promised Day Is Come (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1941); see original for full text.

Effendi, S.. (1941). *The Promised Day Is Come*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.