The Cable in London: Shoghi Effendi Learns of His Appointment

Rúḥíyyih Khánum’s biography of her husband devotes one of its most carefully written chapters to the days in late November 1921 when a twenty-four-year-old Oxford student became, without his prior knowledge, the Guardian of the Cause of God.

Shoghi Effendi was at Balliol College, finishing his studies and preparing to return to Haifa to serve at his grandfather’s side. On 29 November 1921 a cable arrived in London bearing news of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing. The cable was delivered to the office of Major Wellesley Tudor Pole, the British Bahá’í who served as one of the conduits for messages between the West and the Holy Land. Tudor Pole, recognising what the cable said, sent for Shoghi Effendi.

When the young man read it he collapsed. There was no ceremony to the moment, no warning, no preparation. He was overcome by a grief whose proportion the surrounding company could not yet fathom. Friends took him into their care, helped him to compose himself, and made arrangements for his return to Haifa.

He arrived at the household in the last week of December. Only then was the Master’s Will and Testament opened. No one in the Bahá’í world knew, Rúḥíyyih Khánum writes, until that moment, that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had named His grandson as His successor — the priceless pearl that doth gleam from out the Twin Surging Seas. The young man who had crossed Europe to mourn his grandfather discovered, on entering his grandfather’s house, that he had also been appointed to lead the Faith his grandfather had headed.

Rúḥíyyih Khánum is honest about what followed. The weight of the appointment was almost more than the young Guardian could bear. He wrote in February 1922:

The task is so overwhelmingly great I cannot but give way and droop whenever I face my work.

He withdrew, for a period in 1922, to the mountains of Switzerland — partly to grieve, partly to compose himself, partly to find the strength to take up what had been laid on him. His mother eventually came to fetch him. He returned to Haifa, and from that return there flowed the thirty-six years of construction and consolidation that built the Bahá’í administrative order.

In one of the first letters of his Guardianship he asked the believers, simply,

I desire to be known by no other name save the one our Beloved Master was wont to utter.

The name was Shoghi. The office, Shoghi Effendi. He took up the office, and never set it down.

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

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.