Designing the Arc on Mount Carmel

*A retelling based on **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum (1969). Quotations are from the book.*

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Bahá'u'lláh had visited Mount Carmel and revealed there His Tablet of Carmel, and on its slope 'Abdu'l-Bahá had raised the Shrine where the remains of the Báb were laid to rest in 1909. Rúḥíyyih Khánum writes that the Guardian, grasping the hidden import of the Tablet of Carmel, entombed the Greatest Holy Leaf near the Shrine of the Báb, brought her mother and brother to rest beside her, and designated that spot as the heart of a world-wide administration.

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Almost every day he was in Haifa, she writes, he went up to the Shrine area. He studied the barren mountain side and developed it piece by piece, year after year. When a spot needed it he had it surveyed, but very often he laid out the curves and long lines himself. Above the resting-places of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's closest relatives he drew an arc. Its lines, she records, he had studied very carefully on the ground, and it sweeps around the mountain in the form of a gigantic bow.

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On 27 November 1954 he told the Bahá'í world that a long-desired piece of land had at last been secured, so that the International Bahá'í Archives could be built. That building, he wrote, would herald the construction, in successive epochs of the Formative Age, of other structures to serve as the administrative seats of the Hands of the Cause and the Universal House of Justice: "These Edifices will, in the shape of a far-flung arc, and following a harmonizing style of architecture, surround the resting-places" of the Greatest Holy Leaf, of her brother and of their mother.

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Behind this lay the purchase of land, which Rúḥíyyih Khánum says he pursued throughout his ministry. Through the generosity of individual believers, their bequests, and funds he held at the World Centre, he created great protective rings of land around the Shrines.

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The Archives, the first building on the arc, was finished in his lifetime. In his last Riḍván Message, in 1957, he announced its completion, and that "the plan designed to insure the extension and completion of the arc serving as a base for the erection of future edifices constituting the World Bahá'í Administrative Centre, has been successfully carried out." He passed away that November. The other buildings on the arc were raised after him.

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*A retelling based on **The Priceless Pearl** (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, 1969). For the fuller account, see the original.*

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