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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."
12 stories where diligence appears.
In one small room in Haifa, with a typewriter and a lamp, Shoghi Effendi answered letters far into the night — and from that desk he guided friends all over the world.
In quiet rooms at a great English college, a young man taught himself English so perfectly that he could one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá — never guessing how much that quiet work would one day matter.
A boy named Shoghi Effendi went far away to school in Beirut, where he studied hard and learned new languages — and was being made ready for something great he could not yet see.
Night after night in a quiet house in Haifa, Shoghi Effendi sat at his desk and turned a great old book from Persian into English, so the whole world could read it.
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.
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.
A Scottish doctor heard of the Bahá'í Faith in 1914 and did what a careful physician does with any new claim: he investigated it methodically. He read, he learned Persian, he wrote out what he understood — and then he travelled to Haifa and laid his manuscript before 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself for correction. The book that resulted, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, has since carried answers to seekers in some sixty languages.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the small household office from which Shoghi Effendi guided the Bahá'í world for thirty-six years — a room with a typewriter, a stack of cables, a Hebrew-Arabic-Persian shelf of dictionaries, and a Guardian who answered each letter himself in the long hours after Haifa had gone to sleep.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the months Shoghi Effendi spent at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1920–1921, perfecting his English so that he might one day serve 'Abdu'l-Bahá as His translator — a small private programme of self-discipline that would, only months later, bear an unimaginable wider fruit.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum recounts the years the young Shoghi Effendi spent at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut — later the American University of Beirut — where the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the West for the first time inside a Western classroom, and was prepared, without knowing it, for the office that lay ahead.
In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum describes the years of patient nightly labour by which Shoghi Effendi rendered Nabíl's Persian chronicle of the Bábí period into the cadenced English that became *The Dawn-Breakers* — the volume that, more than any other, made the heroic story of the Báb's followers available to the Western world.