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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."
103 stories on this theme.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, ‘. . . all effort and exertion put forth by man from the fullness of his heart is worship, if it is prompted by the highest motives and the will to do service to humanity. This is worship: to serve mankind and to…
At one time a high official in the federal government of the United States questioned ‘Abdu’l-Bahá about the best way to serve his people and his government. The Master had a ready answer: ‘You can best serve your country . . . if you…
Bahiyyih Randall was only thirteen years old when she went to Haifa to see the Master. She recalled that ‘there was a perfectly wonderful person who always sat on the right of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at dinner. His name was Haydar-‘Ali and he had…
Shoghi Effendi's tribute to Bahíyyih Khánum recalls the years of crisis in Baghdád — when Mírzá Yaḥyá's faithlessness had unsettled the Bábí community and Bahá'u'lláh had retreated for two years to the mountains of Sulaymáníyyih — and the delicate, grave tasks the teenaged Greatest Holy Leaf undertook to hold the household together.
During the Great War, Haifa was crowded with the destitute, the orphaned, and the sick. From the household at the foot of Mount Carmel, the Greatest Holy Leaf — already in advanced age — distributed daily food, money, clothing, and remedies she had herself prepared.
A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the small recurring scene of 'Abdu'l-Bahá visiting Western pilgrims who fell ill in 'Akká, sitting at the bedside until the fever passed, and writing personally to the family at home.
A brief paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the small recurring practice of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in His American cities: the warm conversation with each cab driver who carried Him, the personal inquiry into the driver's family, and the larger tip than the fare required.
A short paraphrase from the bahaistories.com archive on the steady, almost invisible presence of Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, at the elbow of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká: the running of the household, the receiving of women pilgrims, the small reassurances the Master Himself relied on.
When Bahá'u'lláh passed away, His Son could have borne any title in the world. He asked to be known by only one: the Servant of Bahá.
In 1912, on the Feast of Naw-Rúz in Alexandria, Egypt, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the meaning of the blessed days appointed in every dispensation — days for rejoicing together, for unity, and for leaving "tangible philanthropic or ideal traces" reaching all mankind.
A Persian Hidden Word — Bahá'u'lláh's tender vision of the believer who walks the world bearing within the inward fragrance of the divine love.
In 1914 The Christian Commonwealth carried words of praise for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: ‘It is wonderful to see the venerable figure of the revered Bahá’í leader passing through the narrow streets of this ancient town [Akká], where he lived for forty…
On an April night in 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to the Bowery Mission to address three hundred of New York's destitute men — and then stood at the door and pressed a coin and a gaze into the hand of every one of them. A retelling from the Diary of Juliet Thompson.
In June 1912 in New York, the painter Juliet Thompson was given an unprecedented privilege: 'Abdu'l-Bahá agreed to sit for her. The Diary preserves the moment He stopped her on the street, took her hand, and said *come tomorrow and paint;* and the cramped basement studio where He asked her to paint not the man but the *Servitude.*
A young cook named Husayn tried to save every little piece of coal — and one day Bahá'u'lláh let him know that even his quiet, careful kindness had been noticed.
A man named Áqá Muḥammad gave up everything he had to follow the Faith of God, and found his greatest joy in the humblest work of all — sweeping the ground before Bahá'u'lláh's door.
Three hundred poor men crowded into a hall to meet 'Abdu'l-Bahá. He gave each one a coin — but He gave them something even more precious too.
When everyone wanted to give 'Abdu'l-Bahá the grandest title in the world, He picked the humblest name He could find — and made it beautiful.
On the first day of spring in a city by the sea, 'Abdu'l-Bahá told His friends that the best way to celebrate a special day is to do something kind that helps the whole world.
Leaving a grand mansion full of important guests, 'Abdu'l-Bahá asked to see someone else first — the cooks and the maids who worked behind the scenes.
When it was time to say goodbye to His friends in Minneapolis, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave them one last wish — not to remember Him, but to go and care for others.
Many people sent stones for the very first stone of a great temple — but on the big day, only the stone a poor seamstress had dragged across the whole city had actually arrived.
One night 'Abdu'l-Bahá set aside His busy plans to visit four hundred poor men, calling each one His brother and pressing a coin into every hand.
Lua crossed a whole ocean hoping to do something great for 'Abdu'l-Bahá — and the small, hard task He gave her turned out to be the greatest thing of all.
After a long day of talking to crowd after crowd, 'Abdu'l-Bahá came home so tired He had to be helped inside — and then, fifteen minutes later, His strong voice rang out again.
A lady looked out her window and saw 'Abdu'l-Bahá do something surprising for a poor old man on the street.
Leaving a great mansion in California, 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not say His farewells to the wealthy guests first. He called for the cooks, the maids, and the butler — and the room of elegant onlookers fell silent. A retelling from Mahmúd's Diary.
As 'Abdu'l-Bahá prepared to leave Minneapolis, the friends gathered around Him in sorrow. His parting counsel was not about Himself, but about the orphans, the hungry, and the poor. A retelling from Mahmúd's Diary.
On May 1, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá traveled north of Chicago to lay the cornerstone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the West. Many stones had been sent from Bahá'í communities for the ceremony. Only one — found in a builders' rejection pile and dragged to the site by Nettie Tobin, a Chicago seamstress — had actually arrived. The Master asked for hers.
Mahmúd's Diary records that on the evening of April 19, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá interrupted His program of formal receptions to go in person to the Bowery Mission in New York. He spoke to four hundred poor men, distributed coins to each from His own hand, and returned to His hotel near midnight.
'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Áqá Ḥusayn-i-Áshchí — the household cook of Bahá'u'lláh through the long years of exile, whose patient service in the kitchen sustained the daily life of the prophetic Household for decades.
'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Áqá Riḍá of Shíráz — the steadfast companion who served the household of Bahá'u'lláh through the years of exile from Baghdád to 'Akká, never failing in his attendance on his Lord.
'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Ḥájí Amín — the Trustee of Ḥuqúqu'lláh, whose lifetime of patient travel through the Persian provinces, collecting and disbursing the offerings of the believers, sustained the financial life of the Cause for fifty years.
'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute to Pahlaván Riḍá — the strong man, the wrestler of Yazd, who heard the Cause of God and turned the whole frame of his powerful life into the service of the Beloved.
In the flower of his youth Nabíl-i-Zarandí bade farewell to his family in Zarand and set out to find the One his soul was seeking. From that day he never turned back. Poet, traveller, herald, recluse — he spent his whole life pouring himself out in service to Bahá'u'lláh, holding nothing of the world in reserve, until at the end he could endure separation no longer.
Keith Ransom-Kehler was a gifted American lecturer who could have spent her later years in comfort. When the Guardian asked her to undertake a long, hard teaching journey to Persia on behalf of her persecuted fellow believers, she accepted at once — with no Persian, no pioneering experience, and not in robust health. She gave the rest of her life to it, dying in Iṣfáhán in 1933, and Shoghi Effendi named her the first American Bahá'í martyr.
When the Great War ended, the partial freedom of His last years brought 'Abdu'l-Bahá not rest but an even heavier round of labour — pilgrims streaming back to His door, Tablets flowing out to the believers of every land, the poor of Haifa still waiting each morning. He poured out the last of His strength in the work of the Cause until, worn and longing for home, He laid the burden down.
On the Friday before His passing in 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá rose, attended the noonday congregational prayer, and then — as He had done for as long as anyone could remember — distributed alms to the poor of Haifa with His own hand. It was His last public act of the service that had filled His whole life.
In The Chosen Highway, the women of the Holy Family remember the days that followed Bahá'u'lláh's ascension in 1892. Their grief was beyond words — yet through it all moved one steady figure. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the Most Great Branch, took upon Himself the care of the family, the friends, and the Cause, chanting the funeral prayer, feeding hundreds for nine days, and giving to the poor.
A respected jurist of Najaf-Ábád gave up rank and safety to follow Bahá'u'lláh, and devoted the rest of his life to copying out the sacred Writings in a hand so exact that his transcriptions became the standard by which others are verified to this day. Bahá'u'lláh named him Zaynu'l-Muqarrabín — the Ornament of the Near Ones.
A travelling believer of such transparent honesty that Bahá'u'lláh named him Amín — the Trusted One — and entrusted to him the sacred funds of the Faith. For nearly half a century, on foot and on horseback across Persia and beyond, Ḥájí Abu'l-Ḥasan-i-Ardikání carried that trust without a shadow upon it.
For some forty years Shaykh Salmán walked, once each year, from Persia to the Holy Land and back — carrying the believers' letters to Bahá'u'lláh and bearing His Tablets home again, never losing a single one. In Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá honours him as a courier without equal, a living thread of the Covenant binding the scattered friends to their Lord.
From His sickbed in Haifa, near the very end of His life, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave Agnes Parsons a single charge: to arrange in Washington a convention for unity between the white and the coloured people. In May 1921, in a city still bound by segregation, some fifteen hundred Americans of both races gathered together for the first such convention ever held — and into it the Master sent a message declaring that no more important gathering had been held since the beginning of time.
On pilgrimage to 'Akká, Lua Getsinger longed to serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá. He gave her the chance — and sent her to a poor, sick, friendless man in the filthiest quarter of the city. When she recoiled from the squalor, the Master taught her the hardest and most beautiful lesson of her life: whoever would serve God must serve his fellow man, for in every human being is the image and likeness of God.
On Christmas night of 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went to a shelter in Westminster where about a thousand of London's homeless and friendless men had gathered for a Christmas meal. He told them that His company had ever been with the poor, that He counted Himself one of them, and that in the sight of God poverty was greater than wealth — and He left money so the men might feast again on New Year's night.
At the close of His first visit to the West, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gave a farewell address at a London settlement house built to serve the working poor and disabled children. To a hall of some four hundred and sixty people of every background, He likened the whole of humanity to a single tree — the nations its branches, the peoples its leaves and buds and fruits — and declared the whole earth one home, bathed in the oneness of God's mercy.
In a city where almost every believer had crept into hiding for fear of his life, one man came and went openly, fearless and upright. Muḥammad-Muṣṭafá Baghdádí — wise, brave, generous, and faithful to the end — became 'Abdu'l-Bahá's picture of a rounded excellence of character: a soul that was bold before tyrants, gracious to every pilgrim, and unshakeable in the Covenant, whom the Master remembered simply as "a blazing light."
Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, brought to everything he touched a standard of exactness and beauty that those closest to him never forgot. The Priceless Pearl preserves the portrait: a young man who taught himself English to perfection in quiet Oxford rooms, then laboured year after year by lamplight to render the Sacred Writings in cadenced, faultless prose — showing that the patient pursuit of excellence can itself be a form of worship.
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.
Through the prison years the Báb's faithful amanuensis, Siyyid Ḥusayn-i-Yazdí, set down His revealed verses by candlelight and never left His side. On the last night the Báb bade him outwardly deny his faith — not to save himself, but to live and carry to the believers the things he alone had heard. It was to him the Báb was speaking when the soldiers came; and two years later he gave the life he had once been spared.
Mírzá Maḥmúd of Káshán and Áqá Riḍá of Shíráz walked on foot beside the howdah of Bahá'u'lláh from Baghdád to Constantinople, through famine and exhaustion, cooking and serving the believers far into each night and rising again at dawn. In poverty so deep that seven of them once dined on a single handful of dates, they counted themselves in Heaven — for, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's account, their sole desire was to please Bahá'u'lláh, and they were perfectly content with whatever the will of God sent them.
Ḥájí Abu'l-Ḥasan-i-Amín — the Trustee of the Right of God — spent some fifty years travelling the length of Persia on foot and by mule, sustaining the financial life of the Cause and carrying nothing of his own. Twice imprisoned for his open faith, he bore each captivity with the very same calm and good cheer with which he bore the endless roads, and after every release returned quietly to his work — content, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's tribute, with whatever the will of God appointed for him.
For forty years 'Abdu'l-Bahá was a prisoner of the Ottoman state, and through every threat of exile to the deserts of North Africa and every renewed tightening of His confinement He remained serene, accepting each turn as the will of God. When in 1908 the gates of 'Akká at last swung open and He walked free, He met the long-awaited liberation with the very same tranquillity He had shown in captivity.
Darvísh Ṣidq-'Alí was a wandering Sufi, free and detached, who roamed the path of the mystics in search of God. When he found Him in Baghdád in the person of Bahá'u'lláh, he laid down his old independent life at once and begged only to walk beside the caravan of exile as a humble groom — tending the horses by night, singing his Lord's praises by day, and counting that lowly service the highest sovereignty.
Through the long years of His confinement in the prison-city of 'Akká, 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the care of the poor and the sick His own daily work — a Friday almsgiving at the gate, a warm garment each winter for every one of the city's poor, and morning rounds to the bedsides of the feeble, the forgotten, and the dying.
For nearly half a century Corinne True gave herself to a single labour of service — the raising of the first Bahá'í House of Worship of the West on the shore of Lake Michigan at Wilmette. Across two world wars and a great depression she gathered the dimes and dollars of working believers, held the project together through every discouragement, and lived to see the temple she had served dedicated to public worship. 'Abdu'l-Bahá called her the Mother of the Temple.
A slight, quiet newspaperwoman from western Pennsylvania, Martha Root gave the last twenty years of her life to a single errand of service — carrying the message of Bahá'u'lláh to the whole world. Between 1919 and her death in 1939 she circled the globe four times, living out of a suitcase, often ill, often with little money, planting the Cause in lands where it had never been heard. Shoghi Effendi called her the foremost Hand raised up in the West in His time.
In the city of 'Ishqábád, in Russian Turkistan, the Bahá'í community raised the first House of Worship the world had ever seen — a stately, nine-sided edifice set in gardens, ringed by the institutions of practical service the Cause ordains beside its temples: schools, a traveller's hospice, a clinic. Shoghi Effendi numbers its construction among the signal triumphs of the Faith's early history.
On a green hillside above a river in Maine, Sarah Farmer founded a summer gathering where people of every religion and philosophy could meet, listen to one another, and seek the truth in peace. When she made her pilgrimage to 'Akká and recognised in the Bahá'í teachings the very unity she had been reaching for, she gave Green Acre into the keeping of the Cause — and it became one of the first enduring Bahá'í centres of learning in the West.
Scattered across an enormous continent, the early American believers could not build a House of Worship one city at a time. So in 1909 the delegates of their far-flung communities met in Chicago and brought into being Bahá'í Temple Unity — the first national institution of the Western Faith, the instrument through which a whole people could act as one to raise the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West.
Near the end of His earthly life, from the green countryside outside the prison-city of 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Lawḥ-i-Dunyá — the Tablet of the World — a charter for the ordering and betterment of human society, in which the Lord of manifest dominion turned the eyes of His followers away from themselves and toward the welfare of all mankind.
Hájí Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí, the Afnán — a cousin of the Báb known as the Vakílu'd-Dawlih — gave up his comfort, his business, and his estates and hastened to 'Ishqábád, where he poured out nearly all he possessed to raise the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the world, becoming, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words, "the first builder of a House to unify man."
The first American to embrace the Faith did not rest in the distinction. For the next eighteen years Thornton Chase quietly built the institutions of a young community — chairing the Chicago House of Spirituality, founding its publishing work, and writing the patient circular letters that knit the scattered believers of a continent together. 'Abdu'l-Bahá named him Thábit, the Steadfast.
Long before he had ever heard of the Bahá'í Faith, the French-Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois believed his life's work was to build a universal temple of Truth for all humanity. When he found the Cause, he found his commission — and poured the rest of his life into the luminous nine-sided House of Worship at Wilmette, a building whose ornament gathers the symbols of all the world's religions into one.
In the prison-city of 'Akká and later in Haifa, 'Abdu'l-Bahá kept the festivals of the Bahá'í year — and Naw-Rúz above all — in a way that turned joy outward: toward the hungry, the sick, the widow and the stranger. The Greatest Holy Leaf and the ladies of the household, whose memories Lady Blomfield gathered, remembered a home where the new year was a season of open doors and open hands.
The festival of Riḍván was made ready by loving hands. Drawing on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, this retelling honours the companions who served the Holy Family through the twelve days outside Baghdád — pitching the tent, gathering and tending the roses, keeping watch through the nights — and who helped the household across the Tigris on the ninth day.
At fifty-eight, when many would be winding down, Dr. Susan I. Moody closed her Chicago medical practice and travelled alone to Tehran at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's call — to carry the light of healing to the sick and the light of learning to the daughters of a country that did not yet think girls worth teaching. Her first letters home carried one quiet, decisive sentence: "The girls' school is assured."
Through the years of the Great War, with a naval blockade strangling the coast and famine stalking the Holy Land, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — Himself again a prisoner — fed the hungry of every religion in 'Akká and Haifa. The grain He had quietly stored against the crisis kept a whole region alive; for it, a victorious empire offered Him a knighthood, which He accepted and quietly laid aside.
For thirty-six years Shoghi Effendi carried the cares of the entire Bahá'í world from a small room in Haifa. The Priceless Pearl preserves the compassion at the heart of that labor — a Guardian who felt the believers' sorrows as his own, answered each in his own hand, and spent his strength without stint to comfort and protect them.
In the prison-city of 'Akká, where disease festered in the damp and the poor died unattended, 'Abdu'l-Bahá made the care of the sick His personal calling. He brought physicians to the bedsides of the destitute, paid for their medicines, sat with the dying, and ministered to the bodies and spirits of the people the city had abandoned — winning, by mercy alone, the love of an entire town.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to Paris in 1911 He was honoured by the great and the cultivated of the city. But the people who drew His tenderness most surely were the poor, the friendless, and the troubled who found their way to His door — to whom He gave money, comfort, and an unhurried love, as though each were the only person in the world.
Through exile, imprisonment, famine, and bereavement, Bahíyyih Khánum — the Greatest Holy Leaf, daughter of Bahá'u'lláh — made herself the tender refuge of everyone around her: nursing the sick, consoling the grieving, sharing what little the household had with the poor, and binding up the sorrows of a whole community with a mercy that asked nothing for itself.
Isfandíyár had been a servant in the household of Bahá'u'lláh, freed when Bahá'u'lláh emancipated His father's slaves. When persecution scattered the family and the Sháh's officers hunted him, he had every chance to flee — yet he refused, because he owed money to the shopkeepers of Ṭihrán and would not let it be said that a servant of Bahá'u'lláh had taken goods without paying. Half a century later, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called him a perfect man.
The recollections gathered in The Chosen Highway preserve a way of living that astonished every visitor to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's household: He treated servants as honoured family, received the poorest as cherished guests, and accepted no deference for Himself. To the people the world overlooked, He gave the one thing they were never given — dignity. It is a portrait of honour not claimed but bestowed.
An unlettered villager of no rank or wealth, Shaykh Salmán walked on foot from Persia to Baghdád, to Adrianople, and to the prison of 'Akká once every year for some forty years, carrying the letters of the believers and the Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh — until 'Abdu'l-Bahá declared there had never in history been a courier so worthy of trust.
Mírzá Muḥammad was a man of gentle birth and high learning, accustomed to being waited upon. For the love of Bahá'u'lláh he left every comfort behind, walked to the prison of 'Akká, and spent himself as a servant at the believers' hospice — he who had been the master was now the servant, and counted it the highest honour of his life.
When the convoy left Baghdád on the twelfth day of Riḍván, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was a young Man of eighteen, already beloved by the people of the city and wholly devoted to His Father. In the spoken chronicle gathered in The Chosen Highway, the years of exile are remembered through the family who lived them — and the eldest Son stands out as the one who carried the burdens, comforted the household, and gave Himself entirely to Bahá'u'lláh.
Lua Getsinger had crossed an ocean to sit at the feet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the prison-city of 'Akka. She longed to serve Him — and the task He gave her was not the one she expected. A retelling from Howard Colby Ives's Portals to Freedom.
After a day of speaking that would have flattened a younger man, 'Abdu'l-Bahá returned so exhausted He had to be helped from the car. Fifteen minutes later His voice rang out, stronger than ever. A retelling from Howard Colby Ives's Portals to Freedom.
A woman watching from her inn window saw 'Abdu'l-Bahá call back a shabby old man from the street — and quietly give away the clothes off His own body. A retelling from Howard Colby Ives's Portals to Freedom.
On June 15, 1912, in a home on West Seventy-eighth Street in New York, 'Abdu'l-Bahá explained the kind of distinction He wished for the Bahá'ís — not financial or worldly eminence, but a distinction of love, character, and steadfast service.
At Coronation Hall in Montreal on September 3, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá addressed socialists and labour leaders. Drawing on the body's nervous system as His metaphor, He laid out a vision of economic justice in which no member of the human family could be permitted to remain in want.
On May 4, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called at Hull House in Chicago, the pioneering settlement house founded by Jane Addams in 1889 in the immigrant West Side district. He addressed the assembled residents, social workers and immigrant neighbors in the small main hall and later took tea with Miss Addams herself.
At the home of Dr. and Mrs. Florian Krug on Park Avenue in New York on July 15, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá distinguished between thanks given by the tongue and thanks given by the conduct of a life — and asked the friends to send Him away from New York with the sight of unity among them.
In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the pilgrimage of Aḥmad-i-Yazdí — a believer of about sixty who walked, on foot, the 1,700 kilometres from Baghdád to Constantinople in search of Bahá'u'lláh in Adrianople. The Tablet that reached him by the wayside, the *Tablet of the Nightingale,* turned him from pilgrim into teacher and sent him another 2,240 kilometres back into Persia.
Service to God, to Bahá’u’lláh, to family, to friends and enemies, indeed to all mankind this was the pattern of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s life. He wished only to be the Servant of God and man. To serve rather than being demeaning and…
A short story preserved by Hand of the Cause Furutan in *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh*: an aged believer who set out on foot from Persia to attain the presence of Bahá'u'lláh in 'Akká, and the welcome that met him at the door when he arrived, exhausted, decades younger in his soul.
Mr. Furutan preserves, in *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh,* the family recollection of an evening in the snowbound forests of Núr when the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí walked alone into the storm to visit a sick villager — and the household that, the next morning, found Him sitting calmly by the cottage fire as if the journey had been an errand of an ordinary noon.
In 1920 the Star of the West printed Corinne True's report on the acquisition of the Temple property at Wilmette, on the shore of Lake Michigan — the small group of acres on which, by the Master's direction, the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár of the West would in time be raised.
In April 1918 the Star of the West relayed an account, from talks of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the Holy Land in early 1914, of a former servant of Bahá'u'lláh's household named Esfandayár, who had remained quietly devoted to the family of the Blessed Beauty through years of persecution.
In a 1913 issue of the Star of the West, the Master praised the American journalist Mrs. Fraser for her newspaper articles on the Bahá'í Cause and gave her a charge that would echo through the vocations of many later teachers: *You must become like a burning torch, that you may melt mountains of snow.*
In 1926 the Star of the West printed the obituary of Howard MacNutt, the early New York believer who had compiled and edited The Promulgation of Universal Peace from the stenographic records of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's American talks of 1912.
Juliet Thompson's diary entries, printed in the Star of the West in April 1917, preserve a small image from the Master's first days in New York in April 1912 — His insistence on distributing silver quarters from His own hand to the men of the Bowery Mission, with the brief direction: *Surely, give to the poor!*
In 1920 the *Star of the West* carried the news of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's investiture as a Knight of the British Empire — an honour conferred in recognition of His humanitarian work in feeding the population of Haifa and surrounding districts during the food crisis of the First World War.
In Issue 1 of Volume 2 of the Star of the West, dated March 1911, the editors reported on the work of the Persian-American Educational Society — a small body of American Bahá'ís that had enrolled sixty-three scholarships and remitted seven hundred dollars to support the Bahá'í schools in Tehran. The Master had asked them, in particular, for *one… efficient in science and arts.*
In 1916 the Star of the West introduced its readers to the young Japanese Bahá'í Saichiro Fujita, who had come from Yamaguchi to study in California, found the Faith there, and would in time travel to Haifa to spend the rest of his life in the household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi.
In June 1913 the Star of the West printed a brief obituary, written by Edward Theodore Hall, for Sarah Ann Ridgway of Manchester, England — a silk weaver who had given her quiet evenings, for years, to teaching the Faith in the working-class district of Pendleton.
In a talk given at Los Angeles on October 19, 1912, and later printed in the Star of the West, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out a small but radical arithmetic: two souls of strong character can equal, in the spiritual measure, the whole world — and the eleven disciples of Christ are the proof.
In Julia Grundy's pilgrim notes from 'Akká in 1905, the Master takes up the practical question every believer must eventually face: how do you love the person who is unpleasant, ungrateful, or actively hostile? His answer points to Christ as the standard, and to the tree as the model.
There are many stories about beloved Grace Robarts Ober who, for so very many years, dedicated every moment of her life to the service of our glorious Cause. And this experience, she felt, was the 'first small step' - to use her words,…
This man who was close to the Divine Threshold was the respected son of Ali-'Askar-i-Tabrizi. Full of yearning love, he came with his father from Tabriz to Adrianople, and by his own wish, went on with joy and hope to the Most Great…
Upon His arrival in Jaddih, the Báb donned the pilgrim's garb, mounted a camel, and set out on His journey to Mecca [to perform His pilgrimage]. Quddus, however, notwithstanding the repeatedly expressed desire of his Master, preferred to…
*World Order* magazine carried, in a 1980s issue, an appreciation of Marzieh Gail — the American Bahá'í translator whose six-decade career rendered into English a substantial portion of the Persian and Arabic Bahá'í Writings, including major works of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi.