The Sudden Passing in London, November 1957

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum gives the most reliable account of her husband’s last days. She was the only person who sat with him through them; her chapter is plainly written and without ornament.

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In late October 1957 Shoghi Effendi had travelled, as he often did, to Europe — partly for medical attention, partly for rest, partly to conduct the planning meetings of the Ten Year Crusade that were ongoing in those years. He had been in Switzerland and in Germany. He arrived in London on the evening of the twenty-eighth of October. He stayed at a small hotel.

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A few days later, Rúḥíyyih Khánum records, he developed what seemed at first to be an ordinary case of Asian flu — the strain that had been moving through Europe that autumn. He took to bed. The fever rose. A doctor was called. The doctor was not unduly alarmed at first; the patient was sixty, in good general health, fatigued from work but not gravely ill.

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In the early hours of the fourth of November the situation changed. The fever had moved to the lungs; complications followed; the heart, perhaps weakened by years of unrelenting work, gave way. The Guardian of the Cause of God passed from this world, quietly, in the small hours of that morning. Rúḥíyyih Khánum was at his side.

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The cable she sent to the Bahá’í world later that day was the shortest of her life. It announced the passing, asked the friends to pray, and undertook to make arrangements for the burial. There was no Will. The Guardian had appointed no successor under the conditions named in the Master’s Testament. The Hands of the Cause of God, named by Shoghi Effendi himself in 1951, would carry the affairs of the Faith through the next six years until the election of the first Universal House of Justice in 1963.

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He was buried at the New Southgate Cemetery in north London. The grave is marked by a tall marble pillar surmounted by a globe and an eagle. Rúḥíyyih Khánum chose, in conferring with the British community, to leave him among the Western believers he had himself raised up. The pilgrimage of the Bahá’í world has, since 1957, passed through London on its way to Haifa.

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The thirty-six years of his Guardianship were ended. The worldwide community he left behind was four times the size of the one he had inherited. The grief at his passing was, the chapter records, the heaviest the believers had known since the ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

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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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