Designing the Arc on Mount Carmel

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum gives an account of one of the long, slow projects of her husband’s Guardianship: the laying-out of the great Arc on the northern slope of Mount Carmel.

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The mountain had been consecrated, in Bahá’í history, by the visit of Bahá’u’lláh in 1891 and by the burial of the Báb’s remains in the small Shrine ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had built on its slope in 1909. From the early 1930s onward Shoghi Effendi began to think of what would, in time, rise around it. The Master had foreseen a city of administrative institutions. The Guardian took the foreseeing forward, year by year, into precise lines on a map.

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He walked the slope himself. Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the afternoon expeditions. He carried a stick. He paced distances. He looked through the pine trees toward the bay; he looked from the proposed sites back at the Shrine of the Báb. He drew, in his notebooks, the curving line that would in time be called the Arc — a great stone path bending across the upper slope of Mount Carmel, with five buildings ranged along its length to house the future world institutions of the Faith.

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He purchased land patiently and quietly across the years, often through Bahá’í intermediaries, often at considerable personal cost; he negotiated boundaries; he fought planning battles in the Mandate-period and later Israeli administrations. He designed approaches and stairways. He chose the Italian marble that would clad the buildings he himself would not live to see constructed. He did not see, in his own lifetime, more than the beginning. The International Archives, the first of the Arc’s buildings, was completed in 1957 — only months before his passing.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum is candid that the Arc was the longest of his projects. She is candid, too, that he laboured on it knowing that the work would be finished by hands not yet born. The mountain that had been a wooded slope when he came to it became, across thirty-six years, the spiritual and administrative centre of a worldwide religious community — laid out, walked, measured, and prayed over by one quiet man with a stick and a notebook.

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*Paraphrased from The Priceless Pearl (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1969); see original for full text.*

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