A Tempest Sweeping the Earth: Shoghi Effendi on the Modern Crisis

In March 1941, with Britain alone in Europe and the United States not yet in the war, Shoghi Effendi sent to the Bahá’ís of the West a long letter that was published as *The Promised Day Is Come.* It was a reading of the world crisis from inside the Bahá’í Faith — a reading that did not blink at the violence of the years, but read it as something other than mere catastrophe.

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The opening was unforgettable.

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> A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its > course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably > glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping > the face of the earth.

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The Guardian read the present convulsion as a *dual phenomenon* — the simultaneous collapse of an obsolete world order and the emergence of the divine order destined to replace it. The agonies of the years were not, in his reading, meaningless. They were both *judgment* and *preparation* — humanity called to give an account of its past actions, and at the same time being purged for the work that lay ahead.

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He located the moral responsibility carefully. The kings and emperors of the nineteenth century, He reminded the friends, had received Tablets from Bahá’u’lláh’s own pen — Queen Victoria, Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz, Pope Pius IX, Tsar Alexander II, Napoleon III, Wilhelm I. The summons had been delivered. The summons had been refused. The ecclesiastical hierarchies of the world’s great religions had, with very few exceptions, joined the rejection.

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The world had not chosen the path Bahá’u’lláh had offered. The present crisis, Shoghi Effendi argued, was, among other things, the unfolding consequence of that refusal.

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Yet the Guardian did not end in lamentation. The whole letter is written *toward* the future. The wreck of the old order, in his reading, is the labour of birth. What lies on the far side of it is the order of *the Most Great Peace* foretold by Bahá’u’lláh.

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The friends, then in the hardest hour of the century, were to be people who held that future steadily in view, and who began, in their own communities, to live as if it had already begun.

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

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