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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."
10 stories where grandeur appears.
From a borrowed house in the Ottoman town of Adrianople, an exile stripped of homeland, wealth, and freedom revealed the Súriy-i-Mulúk — the Tablet of the Kings — and, addressing the whole concourse of the world's sovereigns at once, bade the rulers of the earth lay down their pride, deal justly with their peoples, and turn to the Day of God. Shoghi Effendi ranks it among the most momentous Tablets of the entire Bahá'í Revelation.
In Baghdád, in answer to the questions of an uncle of the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh revealed in the span of two days and two nights the Kitáb-i-Íqán — the Book of Certitude — a work of such sweep and majesty that it unveils the meaning of all the Scriptures of the past and stands among the greatest doctrinal works of His entire Revelation. Adib Taherzadeh recounts the awe of its outpouring.
Shut away in remote mountain fortresses on the edge of the Persian empire, with no library, no leisure, and no help, the Báb poured forth Writings of such volume and such speed — commentaries, expositions, and prayers composed without pause or premeditation — that friends and adversaries alike recognized in the sheer torrent of His revealed Word a sign no human power could counterfeit.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed in Haifa in 1921, some ten thousand people — Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Druze; the High Commissioner and the poor of the lanes alike — climbed the slopes of Mount Carmel behind His coffin, and nine speakers of three faiths rose in turn to mourn Him. The majesty of that day was not borrowed from any office He held, for He held none; it was the grandeur a life of pure love had quietly built.
In 1912 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid with His own hand the foundation stone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship of the Western world, on the shore of Lake Michigan at Wilmette. Over the next forty years a community of working people — giving in dimes and dollars, across two world wars and a great depression — raised above that stone a temple of lacelike grandeur, a gift that most of its builders gave knowing they would never see it finished.
From within the prison-city of 'Akká — held under a sentence of perpetual confinement — Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book: the charter of a future world civilization, set down by a Prisoner whom the powers of the earth had meant to silence forever.
In 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Súrih of the Temple — the Súriy-i-Haykal — and gathered into its body the mighty messages He had already sent to the Pope, the Emperor of France, the Sháh, the Czar, the Queen, and the rulers of the earth, fashioning of His proclamation a living "Temple" of the Word.
On the night the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz, He took up His pen and began, with astonishing speed, to reveal the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá' — the first Book of His Dispensation. Shoghi Effendi ranks it among the greatest and mightiest of all the works the Báb left behind.
In 1953 the golden dome of the Shrine of the Báb was at last raised over Mount Carmel, completing the monument Shoghi Effendi loved to call the "Queen of Carmel" — a structure of surpassing majesty over the remains of a Prophet whom His own land had martyred in obscurity.
On Naw-Rúz 1909, after the sacred remains of the Báb had been hidden and moved for sixty years, 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid them with His own hands in the Shrine He had built on Mount Carmel — and, overcome, wept so that all who were present wept with Him. The greatest victory, He called it, of a long-deferred hope.