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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."
19 stories on this theme.
In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont preserves 'Abdu'l-Bahá's recollection of His Father's boyhood: by the age of thirteen or fourteen, the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-'Alí had already become known across the scholarly circles of the Núrí district for being able to converse on any subject and resolve any problem put to Him.
'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Shaykh Muḥammad-'Alí — the scholar of Khurásán who, after years of distinguished ecclesiastical study in Najaf and Karbalá, embraced the Cause and became, in his maturity, one of the great teachers of the Faith in eastern Persia.
In His youth, before the Báb had declared His mission, Bahá'u'lláh paused one day to listen to a famous divine of Núr lecturing to his disciples — and resolved in a few words a question none of them could answer. The learned man was left troubled, and then was visited by two dreams that told him, in images he could not mistake, Who the young Nobleman really was.
When his teacher Siyyid Káẓim died, Mullá Ḥusayn — already among the most learned of his generation — did not stay to claim the empty seat. He withdrew for forty days of fasting and prayer, purified his heart, and set out to find the Promised One whose nearness his teacher had foretold. The search ended at the gate of Shíráz, where the knowledge he carried met the Knowledge it had been seeking.
Late in His life in the Holy Land, Bahá'u'lláh answered a question put to Him by the learned Bábí scholar Nabíl-i-Akbar about the place the philosophy of Greece and Persia should hold among the believers. The reply, the Tablet of Wisdom, surveys the great philosophers by name, traces the lineage of their light, and sets out the proper relation between human inquiry and divine Revelation — a charter for the life of the mind.
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.
Hippolyte Dreyfus was a brilliant young Parisian lawyer with everything the world prizes when he encountered the Bahá'í teachings. Recognising their truth, he did something few Western believers had done: he set himself to master Persian and Arabic so that he could read the Writings in their own words and carry them to the French-speaking world. He became the first French Bahá'í and one of the Faith's earliest Western scholars and translators.
Before the Báb declared His mission, two great scholars spent their lives preparing the way. Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í and his successor Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí turned the full force of their learning toward a single end: to read the prophecies of the past so faithfully that they could ready a generation to recognise the Promised One. Theirs is the story of knowledge used not for its own glory but to open the eyes of others to a coming Day.
A young American woman travelled again and again to the prison-city of 'Akká, sat at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's table, and asked Him question after question — about God, the soul, the prophets, the meaning of the Scriptures. Out of three years of patient asking came *Some Answered Questions,* a book that includes the Master's teaching on the four ways human beings try to know the truth — and why only one of them is sure.
An Aberdeen physician in failing health, trained to weigh evidence and trust nothing he could not examine, found a small pamphlet about the Bahá'í Faith in a sanatorium. He did not simply believe it. He studied for years, learned Persian late in life to read the Writings in the original, and wrote the careful introduction by which the English-speaking world would come to know the Cause.
He was the most favoured disciple of the foremost religious teacher of his day, the one student raised to the rank of mujtahid, "a universal man, in himself alone a convincing proof." Then Áqá Muḥammad-i-Qá'iní met Bahá'u'lláh — and the scholar who had mastered theology, philosophy, and mysticism found a knowledge before which all his learning bowed.
The first African-American Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard-trained philosopher, Alain Locke became the guiding intellect of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also a Bahá'í who put the whole of his learning to the service of human oneness — teaching that the deepest work of the mind is to discover the "common denominators" on which a united world can stand.
A Harvard-trained teacher, proud of the Latin, algebra, and geometry he drilled into his pupils, met 'Abdu'l-Bahá and was asked one quiet question that exposed the great gap in modern education. Stanwood Cobb spent the rest of his long life — he lived to 101 — trying to put back what his schooling had left out.
Quddús was the youngest and the last of the Báb's first eighteen disciples, the Letters of the Living — and the one He raised highest. A youth of luminous refinement, learning, courtesy, and serenity, Quddús was chosen as the Báb's sole companion on the pilgrimage to Mecca, poured out commentaries of astonishing depth even under arrest and siege, and bore himself through every ordeal with a perfection of character that his companions never forgot.
Long before she was a heroine and a martyr, Ṭáhirih was simply the most gifted mind anyone in Qazvín had ever seen in a girl — a scholar, a poet, and a debater whose brilliance made her own father lament that she had not been born a son. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute in Memorials of the Faithful preserves the portrait of a soul whose God-given talents were carried to a rare perfection and then poured out wholly in the path of God.
Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí was the most learned, most eloquent, and most influential divine in all Persia — a man who had committed thirty thousand traditions to memory and before whom whole assemblies fell silent. Sent by the Sháh himself to examine the Báb and expose Him, this perfected scholar found instead that true greatness of mind lies not in what one knows but in the humility to bow before the truth.
Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl had perfected nearly every branch of human knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, the sciences — and headed a renowned college before he was thirty. When he became a Bahá'í, he did not lay his learning aside; he laid it at the feet of the Cause, becoming its peerless scholar and carrying its proofs from Cairo to Paris to Green Acre, where Harvard and Columbia professors came to listen.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá relates the encounter between Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known as Vaḥíd, the most learned cleric of his generation in Persia — and the Báb. Three audiences. In the third, a request for a commentary on the Súrih of Kawthar; and the Báb's spontaneous, written reply that emptied the room of every doubt.
*World Order* magazine carried, in a profile of the late twentieth century, an appreciation of Firuz Kazemzadeh — the Persian-American historian, professor of Russian history at Yale, and member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, whose lifetime of scholarship and institutional service shaped the American Bahá'í community across half a century.