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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."
10 stories on this theme.
Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Khurásání was a famous, austere, and exacting divine — a man who had spent his life among the learned and was not easily moved. When word of the Báb reached Iṣfahán, he did not accept it on rumour, nor reject it from pride. He put it to the test. He set the young Quddús a hard examination of proofs — and when the answers came, the proud scholar was undone, and became one of the most steadfast heralds of the new Day.
Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí, called Vaḥíd, was sent by the Sháh himself to examine the Báb and report on His claim. The most learned man in Persia came armed with the hardest questions he could devise. Across three audiences his doubts were answered one by one — until in the last, the Báb fulfilled the very test Vaḥíd had silently resolved to set Him, and the great scholar's questioning ended in certitude.
Howard Colby Ives was a Unitarian minister with a restless, questioning mind and a heart full of unanswered longing. When he first encountered 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 1912, he did not believe — he struggled, argued inwardly, and held back for months. His memoir, Portals to Freedom, is the honest record of a thinking man's doubts slowly giving way, not to argument, but to a love that answered the questions beneath his questions.
Fáṭimih Baraghání — known to history as Ṭáhirih, "the Pure One" — was a woman of extraordinary learning in an age that gave women little room to learn. For years she searched the writings of Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Káẓim for the truth they promised was near. When the Báb declared His mission far away in Shíráz, she recognized Him through her own study and a letter she sent ahead — believing in Him before she had ever seen His face.
Long before the Báb declared His mission, two remarkable teachers — Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í and his successor Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí — spent their lives preparing a generation to recognize the Promised One who was at hand. They did not tell their disciples whom to follow; they taught them to detach, to purify their hearts, and to go out and seek. When Siyyid Káẓim died, his last charge was simple: scatter, and find Him.
A young American woman came to 'Akká with a notebook and a head full of questions — about God and the soul, evil and free will, the prophets and the life to come — and over visits stretching across the years 1904 to 1906 she laid them, one by one, before 'Abdu'l-Bahá at the lunch table. The answers He gave her, recorded and reviewed, became one of the best-loved books of the Faith: Some Answered Questions.
Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání was among the boldest and most independent-minded religious leaders of Persia — a man unafraid to break with the crowd of clerics when his own judgment told him otherwise. When word of the Báb reached Zanján, he did not rush to condemn or to follow. He sent a trusted messenger to investigate — and when the answer came back, he was ready to act on the truth whatever it cost him.
A young Englishman on his way to America stopped in Paris in the summer of 1901, was introduced to a Bahá'í teacher, and spent three days asking everything he needed to ask. His questions answered, he wrote a two-line letter of belief to 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and then faced one more question, about the source of his own income, that turned his new faith into action.
An Irish clergyman who rose to be Canon of St. Patrick's Cathedral and Archdeacon of Clonfert spent decades wrestling with a single question: was the long-promised Day of God already here? He had recognized the Bahá'í Faith as true as early as 1921, yet it took him until old age to follow that conviction all the way — resigning his orders and declaring openly what he had quietly believed.
A Scottish doctor heard of the Bahá'í Faith in 1914 and did what a careful physician does with any new claim: he investigated it methodically. He read, he learned Persian, he wrote out what he understood — and then he travelled to Haifa and laid his manuscript before 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself for correction. The book that resulted, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, has since carried answers to seekers in some sixty languages.