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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."
8 stories on this theme.
On a great ship crossing the wide Atlantic Ocean, 'Abdu'l-Bahá sailed all the way to America to meet His friends — and to share the truth with a whole new land.
Mahmúd's Diary records the long Atlantic crossing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His small party aboard the S.S. Cedric in March and early April 1912 — the ten days at sea during which the Master, in His sixty-eighth year, prepared for the great American tour by simple devotions and long conversations with His attendants.
A poet from the village of Zarand left everything to follow Bahá'u'lláh, and in the end was given the task of recording the whole heroic story of the Faith's beginnings. Bahá'u'lláh conferred on him the name Nabíl-i-A'ẓam — a name whose very letters, by the old reckoning, add to the same sum as the name Muḥammad.
Before the world knew Him, the young Báb married Khadíjih Bagum, a kinswoman of His own family, and made with her a quiet home in Shíráz. In her own remembrances she tells of the dreams that prepared her heart, of His long hours of prayer, and of the strange "account books" that were not a merchant's ledgers at all.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes the Báb's youth in the plainest terms: a young Merchant of holy descent who traded in the Gulf port of Búshihr and was known among all who dealt with Him for godliness, devoutness, virtue, and piety — the quiet signs of a station the world had not yet guessed.
In the years before His Declaration, the young Báb was known in Shíráz not for any claim or office but for the depth of His devotion — a Youth of great personal beauty and gentle manner, unfailing in His prayers and fasts, who obeyed not merely the outward forms of His religion but lived, even then, in the very spirit of its teachings.
Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, brought to everything he touched a standard of exactness and beauty that those closest to him never forgot. The Priceless Pearl preserves the portrait: a young man who taught himself English to perfection in quiet Oxford rooms, then laboured year after year by lamplight to render the Sacred Writings in cadenced, faultless prose — showing that the patient pursuit of excellence can itself be a form of worship.
In 1916 the Star of the West introduced its readers to the young Japanese Bahá'í Saichiro Fujita, who had come from Yamaguchi to study in California, found the Faith there, and would in time travel to Haifa to spend the rest of his life in the household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi.