Launching the Ten Year Crusade in 1953

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the spring of 1953 as the high tide of her husband’s Guardianship. The superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb was newly inaugurated; its golden dome had been lit; pilgrims from forty countries had come to Haifa for the centenary of Bahá’u’lláh’s spiritual birth in the Síyáh-Chál. From that hour, with all of these forces gathered, the Guardian unfolded a plan that exceeded every prior plan of the Faith.

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He called it the *World Crusade.* Its formal name in the Bahá’í community has been the *Ten Year Crusade.* It would run from Riḍván 1953 to Riḍván 1963. It would set the worldwide Bahá’í community — at that time still a small fellowship of fewer than two hundred thousand believers — to a list of specific tasks.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum lists them, in her chapter, with the blunt clarity of the original cables. The friends were to settle believers in 131 new countries and territories that had no resident Bahá’í. They were to construct the first Houses of Worship in Africa, Australia, and Europe. They were to obtain permanent national administrative endowments. They were to acquire international Bahá’í properties at the World Centre. They were to translate Bahá’í literature into a hundred new languages. They were to multiply the National Spiritual Assemblies of the world.

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The list was, on its face, impossible. The community was small; the financial resources were modest; many of the named territories were closed by colonial regulation, by language barrier, by climate, or by religious law. The Guardian named each one anyway. He published the list. He asked the friends to respond.

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They did. Rúḥíyyih Khánum’s chapter is partly a record of those who left, in the months and years that followed, for the named goals — leaving careers, families, and continents behind to sit on the docks of unfamiliar islands or in the cold capitals of unlikely countries. They were not all heroic in temperament; many were quite ordinary. But the plan organized them, and the plan was, by the end of its decade, very largely fulfilled.

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Shoghi Effendi did not live to see the close of the Crusade. The work he lit in 1953 burned for ten years; the world community that emerged from its flame was, by the end, four times the size of the one that had begun. The plan was the final and most expansive labour of his Guardianship.

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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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