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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."
6 stories on this theme.
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.
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.
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.