kings

Shoghi Effendi's account, in *God Passes By*, of Bahá'u'lláh's most consequential undertaking of the Adrianople period (1863-1868) — the composition and transmission of the great Tablets to the rulers of His era, addressing each by name and summoning the world's governors to recognise the new Day of God.

In *The Promised Day Is Come*, Shoghi Effendi surveys the fall of the great monarchies of Europe and the Middle East during the cataclysm of the First World War — reading the collapses as the historical fulfilment of the warnings Bahá'u'lláh had sent to those same monarchs in the Adrianople period.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the revelation in Adrianople of the Súriy-i-Mulúk, the Súrih of the Kings — Bahá'u'lláh's first general address to the rulers of the world collectively, calling them to recognise the One Who had appeared in their midst and to lay down the arms with which they oppressed their peoples.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the second of two Tablets that Bahá'u'lláh addressed to Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The first had been received with disdain. The second, sent in 1869, contained the explicit prophecy that Napoleon's empire would be wrested from him by failure of arms. Within a year the prophecy was fulfilled.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the Tablet that Bahá'u'lláh, prisoner in the fortress of 'Akká, addressed in 1868 to Pope Pius IX in the Vatican. The Tablet proclaimed that the Father had come, summoned the Pope to recognise Him, and counselled him to renounce temporal authority in favour of the spiritual ministry of his calling.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the context of one of the great Tablets to the Kings: the Tablet addressed by Bahá'u'lláh from 'Akká to Queen Victoria of Britain in the early 1870s. The Tablet praised her abolition of slavery and her elective parliamentary system, and called upon all rulers to lay down their arms in favour of collective security.

An excerpt from the Báb's earliest book, the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá' — a commentary on the Súrih of Joseph revealed in the first hours of His Declaration in May 1844. In this passage, the Báb summons the kings of the world to carry His verses to the peoples of Turkey, India, and the lands of East and West.