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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."
27 stories on this theme.
Shoghi Effendi's own narration, in *God Passes By*, of the events of late 1921 and early 1922 — the Master's passing, the discovery of the Will and Testament naming the young Shoghi as Guardian, and the formal beginning of the Formative Age of the Faith.
A young man far away at school received sad news, hurried home, and discovered that a sealed letter had named him to care for the whole Bahá'í Faith.
On a quiet mountain slope full of pine trees, one man walked back and forth for years, imagining a great curving path and beautiful buildings that did not exist yet.
When it was time to build a beautiful crown over the Shrine of the Báb, Shoghi Effendi turned to a famous architect who happened to be his own father-in-law.
In a small hotel in London, a beloved leader called the Guardian grew ill and passed away — and the woman who loved him most was there beside him.
In one small room in Haifa, with a typewriter and a lamp, Shoghi Effendi answered letters far into the night — and from that desk he guided friends all over the world.
A small barefoot boy stood in a doorway watching his grandfather, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and the gentle nod he was given held a secret no one could quite put into words.
A young man was given the hardest task in the whole Bahá'í world, and before he could carry it, he went up into the high mountains to walk, and think, and pray.
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.
In His Will and Testament 'Abdu'l-Bahá named His grandson Shoghi Effendi the Guardian of the Cause of God — "the sign of God," "the chosen branch," "the priceless pearl that doth gleam from out the Twin Surging Seas." The young man who received this towering station asked only to be known by the simple name his Grandfather had used, and signed himself, in lifelong humility, the servant of the threshold.
When the Báb's father died in His early childhood, the boy passed into the care of His maternal uncle, Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid 'Alí, a merchant of Shíráz who reared Him as his own son. He watched over the Child's schooling and His youth — and in the end, having known Him from the beginning, gave his very life for Him.
Before the world knew he would be the Guardian, Shoghi Effendi went to Oxford with one private purpose: to perfect his English so that he might serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá as His translator. In quiet rooms at Balliol, with English literature, a dictionary, and a notebook, he forged the very instrument by which the Sacred Writings would later reach the Western world — a lifetime's labour of learning poured out in service.
The vast ocean of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation lay almost entirely in Persian and Arabic, beyond the reach of the growing communities of the West. Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Faith, set himself to gather from that ocean and to render its waters into a stately, faithful English — producing, in *Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh*, a book through which the West could at last drink directly from the Word.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts how Shoghi Effendi, walking the slope of Mount Carmel year after year, conceived and laid out the great Arc of buildings — the International Archives, the Universal House of Justice site, the Centre for the Study of the Texts, the Teaching Centre — on which the world administrative institutions of the Faith would in time stand.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum tells the story of her own marriage to Shoghi Effendi in the spring of 1937 — a private ceremony in the room of the Greatest Holy Leaf, witnessed by a handful of family members, that joined two streams of the Cause and was deliberately kept free of fanfare.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum's *The Priceless Pearl* recounts how, in 1942, Shoghi Effendi asked his own father-in-law — the celebrated Canadian architect William Sutherland Maxwell, then resident in Haifa — to design the arcade and superstructure of the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel. The colonnade of Baveno granite and the Chiampo arches were the answer.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum gives the most reliable account of her husband's last days — a brief illness in a London hotel, the flu that turned to a heart attack, and the night of the fourth of November 1957 when the Guardian of the Cause of God passed from the world at the age of sixty.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the small household office from which Shoghi Effendi guided the Bahá'í world for thirty-six years — a room with a typewriter, a stack of cables, a Hebrew-Arabic-Persian shelf of dictionaries, and a Guardian who answered each letter himself in the long hours after Haifa had gone to sleep.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the months Shoghi Effendi spent at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1920–1921, perfecting his English so that he might one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá as His translator — a small private programme of self-discipline that would, only months later, bear an unimaginable wider fruit.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the years the young Shoghi Effendi spent at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut — later the American University of Beirut — where the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the West for the first time inside a Western classroom, and was prepared, without knowing it, for the office that lay ahead.
Rúḥíyyih Khánum's *The Priceless Pearl* preserves a moment from Shoghi Effendi's boyhood in 'Akká: a small barefoot figure in a doorway, eyes on his grandfather, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá's slow nod of recognition that the bond between them was not only physical, but something else.
In Rúḥíyyih Khánum's biography *The Priceless Pearl* she describes the moment in November 1921 when a young Shoghi Effendi, reading the cable in Major Tudor Pole's London office, learned that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had passed — and how, only on his return to Haifa, the opening of the Master's Will revealed an office he had never imagined for himself.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the months in 1922 and after when the young Shoghi Effendi, crushed by the weight of his appointment, withdrew to the Alps — walking long mountain paths, praying, gathering the strength he would need to take up the task the Master's Will had laid on him.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the moment in the spring of 1953 when Shoghi Effendi, looking out from the newly completed Shrine of the Báb on the centenary of its Founder's enthronement, summoned the Bahá'í world to the most ambitious teaching plan in its history — to settle believers in every remaining unopened country and territory of the planet.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the years of patient nightly labour by which Shoghi Effendi rendered Nabíl's Persian chronicle of the Bábí period into the cadenced English that became *The Dawn-Breakers* — the volume that, more than any other, made the heroic story of the Báb's followers available to the Western world.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the slow, exacting labour by which Shoghi Effendi rendered Bahá'u'lláh's *Hidden Words* into the English in which generations of Western believers have come to know them — a translation built one aphorism at a time, in the silent hours of his Haifa office.
In 1922 the Star of the West printed Mountfort Mills' account of his visit to Haifa in the months following 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing — the first encounter of a Western pilgrim with the new Guardian of the Cause, Shoghi Effendi, then only twenty-five years old and already, in Mills' words, *the center of the world today.*