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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."
15 stories on this theme.
After our liberation from the barracks and the termination of this affair, my brother was able to mingle freely with the people of Akká, and he at once began to establish friendly relations with them. As illustrating the manner in which he…
Economic justice, even in small matters, was important to the Master. Once in Egypt ‘Abdu’l-Bahá obtained a carriage in order that He might offer a ride to an important Pasha, who was to be His luncheon guest. When they reached their…
The second Hidden Word in Arabic names justice — *the best beloved of all things in My sight* — and explains it not as rule of law but as the soul's capacity to see with its own eyes and know with its own knowledge.
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 exile and prison, the young Bahá'u'lláh was already beloved in Persia for the open hand He stretched out to the destitute and the fearless voice He raised for the wronged. Taherzadeh gathers the witness of the early years — how a Nobleman of rank turned away from the comforts of His station to become, in the people's own phrase, the Father of the Poor.
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.
Before He declared His mission, the Báb spent His youth as a merchant in the port of Búshihr. Those who traded with Him never forgot the beauty of His character — His perfect honesty, the charm of His manners, His refusal to cheat even when custom invited it. From clerics to shopkeepers, all who knew Him were drawn to praise Him.
In A Traveler's Narrative, written for the world beyond Persia, 'Abdu'l-Bahá sets down the martyrdom of the Báb with the calm precision of a witness to sacred history: the order of the Grand Vizier, the Christian regiment ranged in three files, the volleys that severed the ropes, and the deep truth He draws from it — that persecution, in matters of conscience, only strengthens what it means to destroy.
It was the chief minister of Persia, Mírzá Taqí Khán the Amír-Niẓám, who decreed the Báb's death and pressed it through against the reluctance of others. Shoghi Effendi describes him as arbitrary, bloodthirsty, and reckless. Within little more than a year of the martyrdom he had ordered, the all-powerful minister was stripped of his office, banished, and secretly put to death — a downfall the Bahá'í histories read as no mere accident of court intrigue.
The longest of all the Tablets Bahá'u'lláh addressed to a single sovereign was sent from His prison to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia. In it the Prisoner sought nothing for Himself, pleaded the cause of the oppressed believers, and made the king an astonishing offer — to be brought face to face with the divines, that the truth might be settled before the throne itself.
Among the childhood stories Hand of the Cause Furutan gathered into his *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh* is the recollection of how the young Mírzá Ḥusayn -‘Alí — long before His Declaration — would refuse to settle a quarrel among His playmates without first hearing both sides, and how the household began to recognize a quiet authority in the boy.
Soon after the arrival of Bahá’u’lláh and His party in 'Akka the Governor visited the barracks for inspection. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, accompanied by a few believers, went to see him. But the Governor was discourteous and spoke to them in a…
There was a Christian merchant in Akka who, like many of his fellow citizens, held the Bahá’ís in scant respect. It happened that he came upon a load of charcoal which some of the Bahá’ís had been permitted to buy outside Akka. (Inside the…
Thomas Breakwell, the first English believer, went to the prison city of ‘Akka as a pilgrim. In conversation with the Master, he described his position in the cotton mills of the South in the United States. Breakwell told ‘Abdu’l-Bahá…
When Bahá’u’lláh along with His family and a number of His companions were travelling from Baghdad to Constantinople an incident took place near the city of Mardin which provides us with a wonderful example of Bahá’u’lláh's high sense of…