Keith Ransom-Kehler in Iran

In late 1933 the closing volumes of the Star of the West and its successor publication, The Bahá'í World, carried the news that the American believer Keith Ransom-Kehler had died at Isfahán in Iran on the twenty-third of October. She was fifty-seven years old. She had been on a teaching mission to the Iranian Bahá'í community for fifteen months. The cause of death was smallpox.

Keith had embraced the Bahá'í Faith in 1921. She had become, in the next decade, one of the most active travel teachers of the American community — visiting almost every state of the Union and many countries of the world to give talks on the Faith. By 1932 the Persian Bahá'í community, then under severe pressure from the Pahlaví regime, had asked through Shoghi Effendi for an American teacher to come and intercede, in the name of the Faith, with the Persian government. The Persian Bahá'í educational institutions, including the Tarbíyat schools at Tihrán, had been closed. The American believers were being asked to send someone whose American citizenship would give them at least the protection of the United States consulate in any contact with the regime.

Keith had gone. She had spent fifteen months in Iran. She had travelled by car and on horseback to Bahá'í communities in Tihrán, Mashhad, Yazd, Shíráz, and many smaller towns. She had presented petitions, in person and through the consulate, to the highest reaches of the Persian government, including the Sháh himself. She had not succeeded in reopening the schools. She had succeeded in carrying to the Iranian believers, in person, the love and solidarity of their American sisters and brothers — a thing they had not had before.

In Isfahán in October 1933 she had contracted smallpox in the course of her travels. The disease had killed her in days.

She is the first American Bahá'í martyr.

The phrase was Shoghi Effendi's. He had cabled the title at once on receiving news of Keith's death. He had specified in subsequent cables that her body was to be buried with full honour in the Bahá'í cemetery at Isfahán, and that her grave was to be marked as a place of pilgrimage. The Persian Bahá'ís of Isfahán would care for the grave through all the hard decades that followed.

The Star of the West had ceased monthly publication by 1933, but its closing extras and the new Bahá'í World yearbook gave Keith's death the long obituary notice it warranted. She had carried, with her own life, the cost of the Faith's solidarity between East and West. The American community would, after Keith, never again think of the Iranian believers as someone else's responsibility. Her death had made them, in fact, family.

Source: Star of the West / The Bahá'í World, late 1933, report on the death of Keith Ransom-Kehler at Isfahán. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1933). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_24