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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."
33 stories on this theme.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá tested both the faith and courage of many of the Bahá’ís He met and Corinne True was one He really challenged. First, He had put her in charge of the Temple project, a woman dealing with many men. Then, as they stood at the…
At a later period of danger and crisis the Spanish Consul put an Italian freighter at the disposal of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in order that He might escape during the night, but He refused to flee to safety, though the Bahá’ís begged Him to do so.…
Brought from Chihríq to Tabríz in the summer of 1848 to be examined by the most senior religious scholars of the realm, the Báb made an open declaration of His station before the assembled clergy: *I am the promised One.* The chapter records the bastinado that followed, and the denunciatory epistle He wrote upon His return to Chihríq.
After the destruction of the defenders of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Bahá'u'lláh — who had set out to join them — was arrested in the town of Ámul, beaten in the local mosque until His feet bled, and stoned in the streets. Shoghi Effendi reads this episode as the moment Bahá'u'lláh stepped into the centre of the stage left vacant by the Báb.
Shoghi Effendi's account, in *God Passes By*, of the conference at Badasht in 1848 — and the moment when Ṭáhirih, "adorned yet unveiled," announced that the day of the new Dispensation had begun.
Brought before the most powerful judges in the land, the Báb was asked who He claimed to be — and He answered with three brave words that no one could forget.
On a frightening morning in a city square, the Báb showed a courage so steady that even the soldiers could not understand it.
Bahá'u'lláh set out to help His friends in danger, and when the road was closed and He was hurt in a faraway town, He bore it all with quiet courage.
In a quiet garden long ago, a fearless woman named Ṭáhirih stood before a roomful of startled men and announced that a brand-new day had begun.
Mullá Ḥusayn was the very first person to believe in the Báb. Years later, surrounded by an army, he showed the world what it means to be truly brave.
ʻAlí-Muḥammad Varqá, a poet and devoted teacher of the Faith, was imprisoned in Ṭihrán with his twelve-year-old son Rúḥu'lláh and a company of believers. When the murder of the Sháh was used as a pretext to crush them, father and son were threatened, tormented, and at last killed — the boy bearing witness with a serenity and courage before overwhelming power that astonished even his executioners.
During the long siege of Zanján, a young village woman named Zaynab could not bear to stand idle while her companions fell. She put on a man's garments, took up sword and gun, and begged the leader of the defenders for leave to fight. For days she stood in the front of the battle with a courage that astonished the army arrayed against her — a single peasant girl defying both an empire and the expectations of her age.
In the city of ʻIshqábád, a respected Bahá'í named Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá was set upon in broad daylight by assassins sent to terrorize the believers into silence. The murder was meant to make the community cower. Instead it produced something never seen before: a public trial under the Russian authorities in which the Bahá'ís were, for the first time in their history, openly distinguished from their persecutors and their innocence proclaimed before the world.
Mullá ʻAlí-Akbar of Shahmírzád — known as Ḥájí Ákhúnd, and later named a Hand of the Cause — taught the Faith so openly in Ṭihrán that he was the first to be seized whenever trouble broke out. Again and again he was chained, jailed, and threatened with the sword; a famous photograph shows him sitting in his fetters utterly composed. 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered him in a single unforgettable line: openly at odds with his oppressors, he defied them, and he was never vanquished.
Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl of Gulpáygán was among the most learned men in Persia — head of a religious college before he ever heard the name of Bahá'u'lláh. Won to the Faith by the proofs he had once tried to refute, he was imprisoned three times for it and stripped of his worldly standing. He gave the rest of his life to defending the Cause with his pen and his voice across three continents, the very power of his learning laid at the feet of the Faith he had embraced.
From His prison in 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh addressed a Tablet to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia. A seventeen-year-old believer named Badíʻ asked for the honour of carrying it. Alone and on foot he crossed an empire, stood in plain sight before the royal camp, and delivered it — then bore three days of torture with a serenity his executioners could not break.
The Báb sent His disciple Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí into the great centres of Islamic learning with words that named his fate before he set out: "You are the first to leave the House of God and to suffer for His sake." Dragged before an unprecedented joint tribunal of the foremost divines, he would not deny what he had found — and became the first believer to give his life for the Faith.
Mírzá Qurbán-ʻAlí, a revered dervish with thousands of devoted admirers, was arrested as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. The all-powerful Grand Vizier, besieged by pleas for the holy man's life, all but offered him a way out. The dervish refused it — declaring that he had weighed the Báb with the scales of justice, and would seal that judgement with his blood.
When a commission of the Ottoman government arrived in 'Akká empowered to recommend His exile or execution, 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the threat without a trace of fear. He declared His readiness to submit to any sentence they chose, refused a consul's offer of escape, and went on planting trees and presiding at a wedding feast — until the empire that menaced Him collapsed and He was set free.
Mullá Ṣádiq — known in Persia as "the saintly," and remembered as Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq — was one of the most honoured divines of his day. When he began to teach the new Faith openly in Shíráz, his enemies hung a halter on him and led him through the streets and bázárs to shame him into silence. 'Abdu'l-Bahá recorded what happened: composed and smiling, he kept on speaking, and was not silenced.
In a city where almost every believer had crept into hiding for fear of his life, one man came and went openly, fearless and upright. Muḥammad-Muṣṭafá Baghdádí — wise, brave, generous, and faithful to the end — became 'Abdu'l-Bahá's picture of a rounded excellence of character: a soul that was bold before tyrants, gracious to every pilgrim, and unshakeable in the Covenant, whom the Master remembered simply as "a blazing light."
Summoned from His mountain prison to be examined before the Crown Prince and the assembled clergy of Tabríz, the Báb was meant to be silenced and shamed. Instead, in that hostile hall, He openly affirmed the station He had come to proclaim — and the very tribunal convened to extinguish His Light became the stage on which it shone before the powers of the land.
When Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í and his companions reached the hostile town of Bárfurúsh, a mob rose to bar their way and cut them down. In that moment of utmost danger, the first to believe in the Báb answered not with the sword but with his voice — bidding the call to prayer be raised, and proclaiming the advent of the new Day before the very crowd that had come to kill him.
Hidden behind a curtain in Bahá'u'lláh's house in Ṭihrán, Táhirih listened as the celebrated divine Vahíd discoursed on the proofs of the new Day. Then she raised her voice and interrupted him with a few burning sentences that turned the whole meaning of speech inside out — calling not for more learned words, but for the deeds and the bold utterance that would promote the Word of God.
Besieged with a few hundred companions in the forest fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Quddús held the failing band together not chiefly with the sword but with his voice — composing a commentary whose verses made the hungry forget their hunger, and rising under the roar of the enemy's cannon to bid his companions fear neither the threats of the wicked nor the clamour of the ungodly.
When the Sháh of Persia came to Paris in 1902, 'Abdu'l-Bahá charged the young American teacher Lua Getsinger to carry to him a message protesting the persecution of the Bahá'ís in his realm. She — a farmer's daughter with no rank and no standing — found her way to the monarch and delivered the Master's word, a single act of bold testimony that earned her the name of Banner-Bearer.
Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání was the foremost and most fearless divine of the city of Zanján. When the message of the Báb reached him and he recognised its truth, he did not keep his conviction to himself: he proclaimed the new Cause openly from his place of authority, won a great multitude of his townsmen, and bore imprisonment rather than be silenced.
Brought back a prisoner to His native Shíráz and slandered with claims He had never made, the Báb went up into the pulpit of the city's chief mosque on a Friday and addressed the assembled congregation directly — affirming His true mission and disowning the falsehoods spread in His name, before the very people who had been turned against Him.
Besieged and starving in the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, the companions of the Báb were forbidden by their leader, Mullá Ḥusayn, ever to begin a fight, ever to pursue a fleeing enemy, and ever to strike a man already down. In a country drowning in cruelty, this little band held — even toward those who had come to destroy them — to a discipline of mercy.
When the message of the Báb spread through Shíráz, its cruel governor, Ḥusayn Khán, set himself to crush the new Faith by force. He arrested its Herald, had Him struck, and bound Him with threats — yet every weapon of the state failed against a serene and majestic dignity, and the governor's own power was soon broken by a plague he could not command.
One of the most striking examples of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s imperturbability was His reaction to possible personal tragedy, further exile or execution. His troubles stemmed from the Covenant-breakers, those Bahá’ís who did not accept…
Think, for example, how the enemy had completely hemmed in the Fort, and were endlessly pouring in cannon balls from their siege guns. The believers, among them Ismu'llah, went eighteen days without food. They lived on the leather of their…
While in Paris, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá received a letter warning Him that if He visited a certain country, He would be in danger. When He learned of this, He smilingly remarked to Lady Blomfield, ‘My daughter, have you not yet realized that never,…