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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
25 stories on this theme.
On November 28, 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá ascended at His home in Haifa. The next day, before a procession of ten thousand mourners — Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze — He was carried up the slopes of Mount Carmel to the Shrine of the Báb, where nine speakers from three faiths delivered His funeral orations.
From 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Memorials of the Faithful: when Bahá'u'lláh ascended in 1892 at Bahjí, His chronicler Nabíl-i-Zarandí was inconsolable. He calculated the numerical value of the word "shidád" — "year of stress" — at 309, and found that Bahá'u'lláh had foretold the date in His own writings.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed away in Haifa, ten thousand people of every kind walked together up Mount Carmel to say goodbye to the friend they all loved.
A man named Nabíl spent his whole life searching for Bahá'u'lláh and following Him — and his great love for Him is still remembered today.
For most of His life 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been a prisoner of the state. When He passed in Haifa in 1921, the very governments that had once exiled and confined Him hastened to do Him honour — telegrams of condolence from Winston Churchill and the British Crown, from Viscount Allenby, from the ministers of 'Iráq, and the High Commissioner himself standing among the mourners.
At the end of the great funeral on Mount Carmel in 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was laid to rest not in a tomb of His own but in a chamber of the Shrine of the Báb — the very Shrine He had laboured for years to raise over the remains of His Lord's Forerunner. The Builder of that holy House became one of its treasures.
When the Great War ended, the partial freedom of His last years brought 'Abdu'l-Bahá not rest but an even heavier round of labour — pilgrims streaming back to His door, Tablets flowing out to the believers of every land, the poor of Haifa still waiting each morning. He poured out the last of His strength in the work of the Cause until, worn and longing for home, He laid the burden down.
In an early classic of Bahá'í literature, the Scottish physician J. E. Esslemont set down for the West the account of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing — how peacefully He went, how every community of the land walked behind His coffin, and how that gathering of Jew, Christian, and Muslim was itself a living proof that His lifelong labour for unity had not been in vain.
Days before His passing, the believers of Springfield cabled 'Abdu'l-Bahá for His blessing on a second convention for unity between the races. His reply — "Approved; God confirms" — is believed to be His last word sanctioning a public service of the American Bahá'ís. The grief-stricken friends carried it out in His memory, and the Star of the West preserved it.
On the Friday before His passing in 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá rose, attended the noonday congregational prayer, and then — as He had done for as long as anyone could remember — distributed alms to the poor of Haifa with His own hand. It was His last public act of the service that had filled His whole life.
In the weeks before His passing, 'Abdu'l-Bahá told His family of two dreams. In one He stood in a great mosque and raised the call to prayer before a vast multitude; in the other Bahá'u'lláh came to Him and said, "Destroy this room." Only after His ascension did those around Him understand what the dreams had foretold.
On Friday the 25th of November 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá attended the noon prayer, gave alms to the poor, and that afternoon received the notables of Haifa. Two nights later, surrounded by His family, He spoke His last quiet words and passed peacefully in the small hours of the 28th of November.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed in 1921, His grandson and appointed successor, Shoghi Effendi, was a grief-stricken young man not yet able to take up his burden. In that hour the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahíyyih Khánum — who had served the Cause since she was a child of six — steadied the whole community and held its affairs in her hands.
Years before His passing, in days of great danger, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set down in His own hand a Will and Testament. Opened after His ascension in 1921, it appointed Shoghi Effendi as Guardian, provided for the Universal House of Justice, and laid the foundations of the Administrative Order — His parting gift to a community He would not leave unguided.
At three in the morning on the anniversary of His ascension, and whenever a pilgrim enters the Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh, Bahá'ís chant the Tablet of Visitation. Adib Taherzadeh recounts how this most beloved of devotional texts came to be — gathered, in the days of mourning, by the grief-stricken chronicler Nabíl from Bahá'u'lláh's own revealed words, and given authority by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.
For years Bahá'u'lláh was a prisoner within the barred gates of 'Akká. Yet His earthly life ended not behind those walls but in a green and gracious house in the countryside beyond — the Mansion of Bahjí. Adib Taherzadeh recounts how the prison terms eased, how 'Abdu'l-Bahá secured the Mansion for His Father, and how the closing years unfolded in a place that fulfilled a prophecy spoken long before.
In Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembers Muḥammad-Muṣṭafá Baghdádí — famed in Iraq for his love of Bahá'u'lláh, who settled near the coast and made himself the host and helper of every pilgrim journeying to attain the presence of the Blessed Beauty. When the Sun of Bahá set, he stood unshaken, loyal to the Covenant, "a blazing light" to the end.
In The Chosen Highway, the women of the Holy Family remember the days that followed Bahá'u'lláh's ascension in 1892. Their grief was beyond words — yet through it all moved one steady figure. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the Most Great Branch, took upon Himself the care of the family, the friends, and the Cause, chanting the funeral prayer, feeding hundreds for nine days, and giving to the poor.
Bahá'ís do not call the twenty-ninth of May the day of Bahá'u'lláh's death. They call it His Ascension. Drawing on Esslemont's Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, this retelling reflects on the serene close of His earthly life, on the Tomb at Bahjí that became the Qiblih of a world religion, and on why the language of a rising Sun and a homeward journey, rather than of ending, is the truer way to speak of His passing.
Six days before His ascension in 1892, Bahá'u'lláh — already weakened by fever — summoned the entire company of believers and pilgrims gathered at the Mansion of Bahjí into His presence one last time. Leaning against one of His sons, He thanked them for their services, urged them to remain united, and gave them His final blessing.
In His final years at Bahjí, Bahá'u'lláh did what no Founder of a world religion had ever done before: He wrote out, in His own hand, a Will and Testament naming His successor. The Kitáb-i-'Ahd — the Book of the Covenant — turned every believing heart toward the Most Mighty Branch, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and made division impossible for anyone who chose to remain faithful.
In the small hours of the twenty-ninth of May, 1892, Bahá'u'lláh ascended at Bahjí in the seventy-fifth year of His age. A telegram bearing the words "the Sun of Bahá has set" carried the news to the Sultan; and for a full week, mourners of every faith and station — Muslim and Christian, Jew and Druze, rich and poor — gathered at the Mansion to grieve and to pay tribute.
In His final year at Bahjí, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the last major work of His pen — the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf — addressed to a cleric of Isfáhán whose father had ordered the deaths of two of the most beloved believers. Into it Bahá'u'lláh gathered passages from across His own Writings, leaving, near the end of His life, a summing-up of the Cause He had brought.
Long before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh had begun to unveil the station of His eldest Son. In the Tablet of the Branch — the Súriy-i-Ghuṣn, revealed years earlier in Adrianople — He called 'Abdu'l-Bahá "the Limb of the Law of God" and "the Trust of God." When the Book of the Covenant was opened after His passing, it brought to fruition what this Tablet had quietly sown.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed in Haifa in 1921, some ten thousand people — Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Druze; the High Commissioner and the poor of the lanes alike — climbed the slopes of Mount Carmel behind His coffin, and nine speakers of three faiths rose in turn to mourn Him. The majesty of that day was not borrowed from any office He held, for He held none; it was the grandeur a life of pure love had quietly built.