The Cable from Haifa: News of the Master's Passing

Late on the afternoon of the 29th of November, 1921, the Western Union office in Chicago handed across the counter to the *Star of the West* editorial staff a cable that had been sent from Haifa twenty-four hours before. The cable was six words long.

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> The Master has ascended.

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The editors of the *Star,* whose December issue was already in the press, stopped the press. They tore out the planned opening. They set, in the largest possible type, the brief notice of the passing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. They wrapped the issue with a black border. They sent the issue out to its subscribers across the United States and Canada.

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In the issues that followed, through January and February of 1922, the *Star* gave its pages to the careful documentation that the household at Haifa, even in the deepest grief, had begun to send across the ocean. There was the account of the last hours: the Master's small final illness; His last words to those of His household who were near; the moment of His ascension in the small early-morning hours.

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There was the account of the funeral procession: the great crowd that had gathered, on no formal call, of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Druze, all the peoples of Haifa and the surrounding villages, walking together up the slope of Mount Carmel; the eulogies given by the religious leaders of all the local communities; the burial in the chamber adjacent to the Shrine of the Báb on the mountain.

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There was, in the issue that followed, the text of the Will and Testament of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in which the Master had named His grandson Shoghi Effendi as the Guardian of the Cause, and had laid out the constitution of the future World Order of Bahá'u'lláh. The Will was, for the friends in America who had not yet heard of any plan for succession, the second great event of these months: a clear charter of continuity given, under the Master's own hand, to the next generation.

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The *Star of the West,* in those months, became the friends' single reliable line of communication between the changing Bahá'í world centre at Haifa and the scattered communities of North America.

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The careful documentation, day by day, of what had happened and of what would now happen — the Guardian's youth; his return from Oxford; his first messages; the first pilgrims' accounts of meeting him — went out from Chicago to believers in San Francisco and Boston, in Montreal and St. Louis, in scattered isolated cities where one or two friends might be the only Bahá'ís for many miles.

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The Cause survived the loss of its Centre, in part because the *Star,* in its December and January issues, helped the friends to grieve and to grasp at once.

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