Loading…
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Loading…
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
35 stories on this theme.
Brought from Chihríq to Tabríz in the summer of 1848 to be examined by the most senior religious scholars of the realm, the Báb made an open declaration of His station before the assembled clergy: *I am the promised One.* The chapter records the bastinado that followed, and the denunciatory epistle He wrote upon His return to Chihríq.
Nabíl's chronicle preserves the day of July 9, 1850 in the public square of Tabríz. The Báb and His youthful companion Anís were suspended by ropes against a wall. The first volley of seven hundred and fifty muskets severed the ropes; the smoke cleared on an empty scene. The Báb was found in His cell, completing a conversation. A second volley was required to fulfil the sentence.
In the years between His release from the Síyáh-Chál and His exile to Baghdád, Bahá'u'lláh travelled to the holy city of Karbilá. There the faithful Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí — to whom the Báb had once given a written promise that he would behold the One whom God shall make manifest — saw Bahá'u'lláh in the streets and recognized Him, before any public Declaration had yet been made.
Following the Báb's instruction sent from Máh-Kú, Mullá Ḥusayn left Mashhad in the summer of 1848 wearing the Báb's own green turban, the Black Standard unfurled before him. He was, the Master had told him, to march to *the Verdant Isle* — Mázindarán — and the seventy-two companions who would die at his side were already gathering.
Nabíl's chronicle opens with the figure of Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í, the Arabian scholar who, at the age of forty, set out from al-Aḥsá in 1216 A.H. to prepare a generation of disciples for the imminent appearance of the promised One. He recognized the birth of Bahá'u'lláh in Núr in 1233 A.H. as the secret event that justified his entire ministry.
As his life drew to a close in Karbilá in 1259 A.H., Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí gathered his disciples and gave them the charge that the Dawn-Breakers treats as the immediate prologue to the Báb's Declaration: scatter yourselves over the face of the earth, detach yourselves from all earthly things, and seek the Promised One who is now manifest.
Nabíl's chronicle records the final months of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí in late 1843 and early 1844 — the second of the two great preparatory teachers of the dawn of the Revelation. He told his closest students that the Promised One would appear in their own lifetime; that he himself would not live to see Him; that they must scatter across Persia in search of Him.
A man named Shaykh Ḥasan had waited many years for a special promise to come true — and one day, on a busy street, he saw the very One he had been waiting for.
A wise old teacher spent his whole life getting ready for Someone he believed was coming soon — and he taught his students to watch and be ready too.
A wise old teacher knew his time was almost over, so instead of saying goodbye, he gave his students one last task: scatter everywhere and find the Promised One.
An old and tired teacher told his students a wonderful secret: the One they had all been waiting for would come very, very soon — and they must go out and find Him.
For years Bahá'u'lláh was a prisoner within the barred gates of 'Akká. Yet His earthly life ended not behind those walls but in a green and gracious house in the countryside beyond — the Mansion of Bahjí. Adib Taherzadeh recounts how the prison terms eased, how 'Abdu'l-Bahá secured the Mansion for His Father, and how the closing years unfolded in a place that fulfilled a prophecy spoken long before.
From within His imprisonment, on the death of one of the Ottoman ministers who had persecuted Him, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Tablet of Fu'ád — and in it foretold, in order, the downfall of the other minister who shared the guilt and of the Sulṭán above them both. Within a few years it had all come to pass. The sovereignty of His Word over the mightiest powers of the age is a splendour the Feast of Bahá remembers.
While Bahá'u'lláh was still a child in the house of Núr, His father, the Vazír Mírzá Buzurg, dreamed of his Son swimming alone in a boundless ocean, His body aglow, His long hair spread upon the waves, with a multitude of fishes clinging each to a lock of His hair. A summoned interpreter read the vision as the foretelling of a Cause that would one day encircle the world.
When Bahá'u'lláh was born in Tihrán in 1817, He entered the world through a family line that reached back, in Shoghi Effendi's account, to Abraham, to Zoroaster, and to the royal house of ancient Persia. The Holy Day of His birth is also the remembrance of the long preparation, across millennia, for His coming.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá tells how a young Merchant of Shíráz, in His twenty-fifth year, began to declare the rank of Bábhood — proclaiming Himself the Gate to a greater One soon to come. With that declaration in 1844 a new cycle in the religious history of humanity began, and the long expectation of the Promised One started to be fulfilled.
In His own writings the Báb called Himself "a letter out of that most mighty book and a dewdrop from that limitless ocean," and pointed always to One yet to come. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's A Traveler's Narrative records how that promise ripened — until, in a garden by the Tigris, the Ocean the Báb had heralded appeared.
Years before the Garden of Riḍván, the Báb had filled His writings with promises of "Him Whom God shall make manifest" — and had pointed, in veiled and exact words, to "the year nine" and to nineteen years that must elapse before the Promised One would appear. In April 1863, nineteen years after the Báb's own Declaration, that promise was kept.
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.
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.
When Dr. John Esslemont set out to introduce the Báb to Western readers, he told the story of the barrack-square plainly: the two suspended by ropes, the regiment's volley, the smoke clearing upon two figures unhurt, and a second regiment summoned to finish what the first would not. He saw in that "pure and beautiful soul" a Forerunner — like John the Baptist of old — who insisted to the end that One greater than Himself was coming.
On the night before His martyrdom, lodged under guard in the barracks of Tabríz, the Báb's countenance shone with a joy such as had never before been seen in Him. To His grieving companions He gave words of comfort and quiet assurance, untroubled by the death that awaited Him at dawn. When the chief attendant came to lead Him away, the Báb warned that no earthly power could silence Him until He had said all He wished to say.
Before the Sun of the new Day rose over Shíráz, two luminaries appeared above the horizon to herald its coming — Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í and his successor Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí. For half a century they taught a generation to read the signs, to detach themselves, and to watch for the Promised One; and when his hour drew near, the dying Siyyid sent his disciples scattering across Persia to find the dawning Light.
From His exile in Adrianople and 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh addressed the most powerful monarch in Europe — Napoleon III of France — twice. The first message the Emperor is said to have cast aside with a contemptuous word; in the second Tablet Bahá'u'lláh warned him plainly that for what he had done his kingdom would be thrown into confusion and his empire pass from his hands. Within a few short years the prophecy was fulfilled to the letter, while the Cause the exile proclaimed continued to spread.
In A Traveler's Narrative, 'Abdu'l-Bahá looks back on the rise of the Faith and observes a strange law its enemies never understood: every blow the thrones rained down upon it only made it stronger. Persecution bred constancy, suppression bred eagerness, and the more the powers of the age tried to extinguish the Cause, the faster it spread. A reflection on the sovereignty of a Cause that no earthly power could quench.
From His prison in 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh addressed a Tablet to the Emperor of all the Russias — one of the great Tablets to the Kings. It acknowledged a past kindness shown by the Russian minister in the darkest hour of the Síyáh-Chál, summoned the Czar to recognise the One Who had appeared, and warned that earthly sovereignty endures only when it bows to the sovereignty 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 Promised Day Is Come* (1941), with Europe in flames and the world at war for the second time in a generation, Shoghi Effendi diagnosed the upheavals of the twentieth century as a single judgment-and-redemption: a tempest unprecedented in its violence, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequence.
Two years before the First World War, 'Abdu'l-Bahá stood in the Assembly Hall of the Hotel Sacramento on October 26, 1912, and warned His audience that Europe had become *like an arsenal* in which a single spark might detonate the whole continent. The remedy, He said, was not in the chancelleries but in the spiritual recognition that all the religions are renewals of one revelation.
In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the Tablet of Carmel — the Tablet revealed by Bahá'u'lláh on one of His four visits to Mount Carmel in the closing years of His life. The Tablet is read as the charter of the future Bahá'í World Centre.
Adib Taherzadeh's account, in *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh*, of the revelation of the *Tablet of the Holy Mariner* in Baghdád shortly before the Riḍván declaration of 1863 — and of the dread the Tablet's imagery cast over the believers who heard it chanted in their gathering.
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 *Some Answered Questions*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addresses Laura Clifford Barney's question on the prophecies of Isaiah — identifying specific passages of the Hebrew prophet that, in His reading, speak of the Bahá'í Revelation and the age it inaugurates.
In *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh* the Hand of the Cause Mr. 'Alí-Akbar Furútan preserves two early memories of the Blessed Beauty's childhood: His unusual composure as an infant, who almost never cried, and a prophetic dream He described at age five or six in which He stood unharmed amid attacking sea creatures and birds — interpreted by a noted dream-reader as a foreshadowing of His future Cause.