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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."
373 stories where steadfastness appears.
A young Bahá 'i lady pioneered to Bolivia in the 1930 s to open it to the Faith. Having no success in teaching anyone, she began to write to the Guardian expressing feelings of failure. With each passing month she wrote and he replied…
Bahá’í poets and people of letters in Persia used to write poems in praise and glorification of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. But the resident Bahá’ís in Akká were very careful not to breathe a word about His glorious station. They knew He had often…
He is the All-Glorious. The world’s great Light, once resplendent upon all mankind, has set to shine everlastingly from the Abhá horizon, His Kingdom of fadeless glory, shedding splendor upon His loved ones from on high, and breathing into…
As to the seven qualifications (of the divinely enlightened soul) of which thou hast asked an explanation, it is as…
O ye beloved of God, know that steadfastness and firmness in this new and wonderful Covenant is indeed the spirit that quickeneth the hearts which are overflowing with the love of the Glorious Lord; verily, it is the power which…
O ye friends of…
The blessed letter indicating the election of the Spiritual Meeting was received and proved a source of joy. Thank God, the beloved of that city, in perfect unity, love and oneness, held the new election and were confirmed and…
Praise be to God! that ye are gathered in one assembly like unto the stars of the Pleiades, are illumined with the light of the knowledge of God and through the outpouring of the cloud of the love of God, ye are the fresh flowers of the…
Aqa Mirza Muhammad-Taqi Abhari (Ibn-i-Abhar) received many tablets from Baha'u'llah. For example, Ibn-i-Abhar had posed the question of the well-being and prosperity of the Baha'is of Persia. In a Tablet revealed in 1889 Baha'u'llah in…
He was a blessed person; he was like a cup filled with the red wine of faith. At the time when he was first made captive by the tender Loved One, he was in the flower of his youth. **…
He spent his days in friendly association with the other believers. Then for a while he went to Ghawr, near Tiberias, where he farmed, both tilling the soil and devoting much of his time to supplicating and communing with God. **…
Later, following a journey to distant countries, he went to the Holy Land, and there in utter submission and lowliness bowed his head before the Sacred Threshold and was honored with entering the presence of Bahá’u’lláh, where he drank in…
He wished neither rank nor office, and had no worldly aims at all. His one supreme desire was to serve Bahá’u’lláh, and for this reason he was never separated from his Brother’s presence. ** His Eminence Kalím (Mírzá…
He shouted aloud, was frenzied, was drunk with the music of the new message. He escaped from his debits and credits, set out to meet the Lord of his heart, and entered the presence of Bahá’u’lláh. ** Husayn Effendi…
When young, he joined the circle of the late Siyyid Kázim and became one of his disciples. He was known in Persia for his purity of life, winning fame as Mullá Ṣádiq the saintly. ** Ismu’lláhu’l-Asdaq (Mullá ****Ṣ****ádiq…
During the years when Bahá’u’lláh resided in Iraq, Jináb-i-Muníb left Káshán and hastened to His presence. He went to live in a small and humble house, barely managed to subsist, and set about committing to writing the words of God…
This honored man was successful in converting a multitude. For the sake of God he cast all caution aside, as he hastened along the ways of love. **Mu****lla`Ali-Akbar Shahmirzadi (Haji…
He was a universal man, in himself alone a convincing proof. When his eyes were opened to the light of Divine guidance, and he breathed in the fragrances of Heaven, he became a flame of God. **Nabíl-i-Akbar**** (****Áqá…
Shaykh Hasan recognized in the Báb all those attributes his master had predicted, and he became His devoted disciple, travelling far and wide to be close to the newest Manifestation of God on earth. When the ulama of Isfahan issued the…
In May 1878, his travel teaching took Siyyid Mustafa Rumi to Myanmar (Burma). There he would, not yet knowing the local language, together with Jamal Effendi and Haji Siyyid Mihdi, lay the foundation for the Burmese Bahá’í community.…
Táhirih asked to borrow the writings and take them home. Mullá Javád violently objected, telling her: “Your father is an enemy of the Twin Luminous Lights, Shaykh Ahmad and Siyyid Kázim. **…
Although the young merchant's given name was Siyyid 'Ali-Muhammad, He took the name "Báb"…
"‘Abdu’l-Bahá recognized Chase as "the first American believer," and Shoghi Effendi later described him as "indeed the first to embrace the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh in the Western world." ** Thornton Chase, Disciple of…
“Nothing is left me on this pathway. I have lost everything, including my bride. I have been able to give Him all I possessed.” ** Ustád…
44 I greatly value your sympathy in my cruel, my irreparable loss. My only comfort is the assurance of her devoted lovers to remain firm and steadfast in the Cause and to strive to follow in her footsteps. The example of her life is…
122 O leaf that has been stirred by the breeze of God! O victim of oppression in the path of the Abhá Beauty!—may my soul and the souls of the handmaids of God be offered up as a sacrifice for the dust of His Holy…
123 All praise be to the Abhá Beauty, the Best-Beloved, the Desire of the world, for having enabled His well-assured leaves to remain firm in the Cause of God and steadfast in His love, even as immovable mountains, particularly the…
90 The Guardian’s anguish, because of this tragic occurrence, is such that it can neither be plumbed nor described in words. That sublime and gloried Leaf, that precious jewel of the Kingdom, was the one great solace of his life; she…
50 O well-loved friend, The emotions that have possessed my grieving heart are such that they cannot be put into words, and tongue and pen are helpless to describe them. The one consolation of this servant is the steadfastness and the…
57 Moved by an unalterable devotion to the memory of the Greatest Holy Leaf, I feel prompted to share with you, and through you with the concourse of her steadfast lovers throughout the West, these significant passages58 which I have…
138 We thank you most sincerely for your kind letters of sympathy, and we appreciate your loving Messages, which are as comforting balm to our wounded…
140 In this day, those holy souls are divinely confirmed who stand firm in the most sacred Cause of the Abhá Beauty, those who are steadfast, and loyal to the Covenant and Testament of…
142 This dire calamity, this great affliction, the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, may our lives be sacrificed for His meekness, has shaken us to the very depths. Our lives lie in ruins. In our hearts, the stars of happiness have set, the…
144 O faithful servant of the Best-Beloved, the Most Glorious! O steadfast friend, flourishing in the garden of His luminous Beauty! The brief but informative letter you had written to Shoghi Effendi, the Chosen Branch, the Guardian of…
145 O God, my…
162 The good news that the Word of God is being raised up, and His Cause glorified, and that His friends, on fire with love for Him, are arising to spread His sweet savours abroad—is coming in steadily from every quarter of the…
163 All the virtues of humankind are summed up in the one word ‘steadfastness’, if we but act according to its laws. It draws to us as by a magnet the blessings and bestowals of Heaven, if we but rise up according to the obligations it…
164 It is clear how that most dire of calamities, that most great disaster which was the ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, may our souls be sacrificed for His meekness, has set our hearts on fire and dissolved our very limbs and members in…
168 The good news has come that the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, may our lives be sacrificed for His meekness, has been read at the meetings of the friends, and we here are rejoiced to learn of their unity and their…
170 The purport of your letter is highly indicative of your steadfastness in His Cause, of your unswerving constancy in the Covenant, of having set your face toward Shoghi Effendi, the authorized Point to whom all must turn, the Centre…
172 At this hour while yet the heart burns with the anguish of sorrow, and the gloom of bereavement still hangs low, my thoughts turn in loving remembrance to my sincere beloved sisters and brothers in the…
173 O steadfast ones, gathered beneath the Abhá Beauty’s standard of oneness, O faithful lovers of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá! Sad news has come to us out of Iran in recent days, and it has intensely grieved the entire Bahá’í world: they have, in…
177 We were delighted to receive your excellent letter ... and read it with joy. It gladdens our hearts to witness from its contents the evidences of loyalty and sincerity and perfect steadfastness in the Cause of God, and unshakeable…
180 The letter that you wrote in your burning grief, on the passing of the world’s Beloved, the Orb of the Covenant—wrote with weeping eyes and a heart afire, has come. Once again, it brings back the full force of this calamity, and…
190 Your letter has come, and I myself and the Holy Family were infinitely grieved to learn of the sufferings you have undergone, being made as you were the targets of such injustice, malevolence and…
193 All praise be unto the Court of Holiness, that God has drawn certain blessed souls, entities delicate and pure, unto a realm where they have no desire save the good-pleasure of the Beloved; where, in the pathway of the Ancient…
115 May my life be sacrificed for those leaves who are steadfast in the Covenant of God—they whom the slander of the slanderer hinders not from holding fast to His divine…
205 The Pen of the divine Ordainer has so decreed that this house of sorrows should be encompassed by unending calamity and pain. Even before the dark clouds of one disaster are scattered, the lowering storm of yet a new grief takes…
206 ‘O God, My God! Thou hast lighted the lamp of Thy Cause with the oil of wisdom; protect it from contrary winds. The lamp is Thine and the glass is Thine, and all things in the heavens and on earth are in the grasp of Thy power.’207…
116 From this hallowed and snow-white Spot, this blessed, heavenly Garden, wherefrom the fragrance of God is diffused to all regions, I hail you with salutations, most tender, most wondrous, and most glorious, and impart to you the…
The hostility aroused by the claim of Bábhood was redoubled when the young reformer proceeded to declare that He was Himself the Mihdí (Mahdi) Whose coming Muḥammad had foretold. The Shí’ihs identified this Mihdí with the 12th Imám9…
Esslemont's *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era* records the early growth of the Bahá'í Faith in Egypt — the publication of Bahá'í pamphlets in Cairo from the 1890s, the establishment of small communities in Cairo and Alexandria, and the difficulties when the Egyptian religious authorities ruled, in the 1920s, that Bahá'ís were no longer to be considered Muslims.
In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont preserves Bahá'u'lláh's own brief description of the Síyáh-Chál — the underground prison in Tihrán in which He was held in chains for four months in 1852. The dungeon was *foul beyond comparison*, dark, and crowded with nearly one hundred and fifty fellow-prisoners.
It has been the general characteristic of religion that organization marks the interruption of the true spiritual influence and serves to prevent the original impulse from being carried into the world. The organization has invariably…
Aqa Mirza Ja'jar was an erudite divine of Islam. In his youth, he taught at a theological school... He left the school altogether when he embraced the Cause and became a very steadfast believer.
Some thirty years ago when 'Abdu'l-Baha was surrounded by His bitter enemies; when they were instigating the Turkish Government to illtreat Him; when in His confined place of 'Akka He had a very…
Isfandiyar was a gem from Africa, pure and untarnished, and yet firm and steadfast as a diamond under all pressures and persecutions.
May Bolles Maxwell was one of the first group of pilgrims from the West who, in 1898-99, visited ‘Abdu’l-Baha while He was still a prisoner in ‘Akka.
Jináb-i-Mírzá Músá was the true brother of Bahá’u’lláh, and from earliest childhood he was reared in the sheltering embrace of the Most Great Name.
In about 1848, four years after recognizing the Báb and becoming His first believer, and receiving the title of Bábu’l-Báb (the Gate of the Gate), Mulla Husayn left the city of Mashhad, in the…
A short paraphrase from the Baha'i Stories Blog about a letter Shoghi Effendi sent in the late 1930s to the small Bahá'í community of Germany, then under increasing harassment from the National Socialist regime — a brief message of love, encouragement to steadfastness, and assurance that the prayers of the world's believers were with them.
In Badasht there was a field with a stream running through it and gardens to either side. Quddús remained concealed in one of the gardens, and Táhirih resided in the other.
Táhirih was a woman of rare accomplishment. Most Persian women were not educated, but Táhirih's father had recognized early on that his young daughter was gifted with an especially keen mind. He loved her dearly and educated her the same…
We were awakened one night, ere break of day, by Mírzá ‘Abdu’l-Vahháb-i-Shírází, who was bound with Us to the same chains.
Hand of the Cause Mr Furutan 1953 Early in 1941, during the Second World War, means were miraculously provided for me and my family to go on pilgrimage.
In the whole range of Bahá'u'lláh's Writings, the Kitáb-i-Íqán (The Book of Certitude) has most importance, with the exception of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (The Most Holy Book).
Resting place of Ásíyih Khánum and son Mirza Mihdi Many people loved Bahá'u'lláh when He was alive. Pilgrims traveled far distances just to look at His face.
On a July morning in 1850, the Báb was brought to a barracks square in Tabríz to be shot. What happened when the smoke of the first volley cleared astonished the thousands who watched. A retelling from Lady Blomfield's The Chosen Highway.
In the bitter winter of 1852, Bahá'u'lláh lay chained in an underground dungeon in Tihrán. Each night His wife slipped through the dangerous streets to learn whether He still lived — while at home a little girl held her frightened baby brother and waited. A retelling from Lady Blomfield's The Chosen Highway.
For two years the family of Bahá'u'lláh did not know where He was. His young daughter, the future Greatest Holy Leaf, lived those years in poverty and longing — until a rumor of a holy dervish in the mountains brought Him home. A retelling from Lady Blomfield's The Chosen Highway.
Released from the Black Pit but broken by it, Bahá'u'lláh was exiled in the dead of winter. His wife sold her last jewels to fund the journey and washed clothes with her own chapped hands — and once, trying to make Him a sweet cake, reached for sugar and found salt. A retelling from Lady Blomfield's The Chosen Highway.
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.
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the autumn of 1852, after the attempt on the life of Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh by two distraught Bábís acting without authorisation, Bahá'u'lláh was arrested at Níyávarán and confined in the underground dungeon of Ṭihrán known as the Black Pit. There, in chains, He received the intimations of the Mission that would shape the next forty years.
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the spring and summer of 1850, the city of Zanján was the scene of one of the most prolonged Bábí defenses of the early years. Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání, surnamed Ḥujjat, took refuge with his followers in the fortress of 'Alí-Mardán Khán; he and they held against the assembled forces of the Sháh's army for nine months.
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 records the death of Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í, first of the Letters of the Living, in the closing months of the siege of the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí in Mázindarán. He led the final sortie at dawn on February 2, 1849, and fell with a musket-ball to the chest in the same charge that broke the Imperial line.
On a winter dawn at Fort Ṭabarsí, the first man ever to believe in the Báb put on his Master's turban, mounted his horse, and rode out against an army. A retelling from Nabíl's Dawn-Breakers.
After the betrayal of the Bábís at Fort Ṭabarsí in the spring of 1849, Quddús was led back into Bárfurúsh. He was eighteen of the Báb's Letters of the Living and the only one besides Bahá'u'lláh who would be honoured by the Báb with a written commentary. He was killed in the open square of the town. His last words were of the splendour of his nuptials.
Summoned to Tabríz to be examined and humiliated before the assembled clergy and the Crown Prince of Persia, the Báb walked in, took the seat reserved for the prince, and declared His station in words that fell on the room like thunder. A retelling from Nabíl's Dawn-Breakers.
Fourteen believers were arrested in Tihrán and told to deny their faith and go free. Seven did. The other seven — a merchant, a dervish, a scholar, and more — chose to give their lives instead. A retelling from Nabíl's Dawn-Breakers.
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the early summer of 1850, Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known as Vaḥíd — withdrew with his followers from the city of Nayríz to the small fort at Khájih in the surrounding hills, where for several months he held off the forces of the governor of Fárs before being deceived, surrendered, and put to death.
A seventeen-year-old boy asked for one thing: to carry a letter from Bahá'u'lláh to the king of Persia. He walked for months to deliver it — and gave his life with a smile that no one who saw it could forget.
After the destruction of the defenders of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Bahá'u'lláh — who had set out to join them — was arrested in the town of Ámul, beaten in the local mosque until His feet bled, and stoned in the streets. Shoghi Effendi reads this episode as the moment Bahá'u'lláh stepped into the centre of the stage left vacant by the Báb.
Nine days after Bahá'u'lláh passed, His own sealed Will was opened and read aloud — and a grieving community learned exactly where to turn.
After His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh appointed 'Abdu'l-Bahá as the Centre of His Covenant. When friends in the East asked if a day might be observed in the Master's honor, He refused — His birthday already belonged to the Declaration of the Báb — and gave them, instead, the day of His own appointment as Centre of the Covenant. Here is a tablet from that period in which He calls the friends to be firm in that Covenant.
Nabíl's account, in *The Dawn-Breakers*, of the night of May 22–23, 1844, when Mullá Ḥusayn met the Báb at the gate of Shíráz, accepted His invitation home, and at two hours and eleven minutes after sunset became the first to recognise Him.
Nabíl's narrative of the morning of July 9, 1850, in the barrack square of Tabríz: the young follower Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alíy-i-Zunúzí, called Anís, who begged to die with the Báb; the first volley that severed the ropes; the Báb's interrupted conversation; and His final words to the regiment.
I wish to tell you the story of two martyrs; one was a Persian nobleman, a favorite at court, possessed of much wealth and known throughout all the country. When it was discovered that he was a follower of Bahá'o'llah, this glorious man…
In the early days of the Faith in Isfahan, when I began to study the Tablets and Writings of the Báb, and listen to the explanations of the friends, I found the proofs of His Revelation convincing and conclusive and the testimonies…
In those days when the friends in Persia were aflame with the fire of love, and at the same time, they were, with a spirit of forbearance, burning in that fire of envy and hatred, of calumny and slander created by the people of malice and…
Jinab-i-Haji Amin was a shining star who served the Cause as the Trustee of Huququ'lláh for forty-seven years with eagerness and zeal, showing magnanimity, courage and incredible steadfastness. During the Ministry of Bahá’u’lláh he was…
A young man named Muḥammad-Ibráhím was captured for loving Bahá'u'lláh — but he broke free and spent the rest of his life serving with all his heart.
A young merchant far from home heard wonderful news in a busy port city — and it changed everything he wanted to do with his life.
When angry crowds led him through the streets with a rope around his neck, Mullá Ṣádiq did not stop smiling — or stop speaking the truth he loved.
A young man named Mírzá Muhammad Báqir was one of the very first to find the Báb, and he stayed brave and faithful right to the end.
A clever man searched school after school looking for joy and never found it — until he found a faith worth being brave for, no matter who laughed at him.
One cold winter, a mother walked alone through dangerous streets each night to find out if her husband was safe — while at home a little girl held her baby brother and waited.
A little girl waited two long years, not knowing where her father had gone — until a story about a holy stranger in the mountains brought Him back to her door.
Brought before the most powerful judges in the land, the Báb was asked who He claimed to be — and He answered with three brave words that no one could forget.
On a frightening morning in a city square, the Báb showed a courage so steady that even the soldiers could not understand it.
Locked deep in the darkest prison in all of Persia, weighed down by heavy chains, Bahá'u'lláh heard a voice in the night promising that He would never be alone.
In a faraway city, a brave teacher named Ḥujjat and his friends stood together inside an old fortress for many long months, holding on to their faith no matter what.
A brave believer named Mullá Ḥusayn set out on a long, dangerous journey with a black flag flying before him, ready to give everything for what he loved most.
Mullá Ḥusayn, the first person ever to believe in the Báb, gathered his hungry, weary friends one last time and led them out into the cold dawn for the One he loved.
A brave young hero named Quddús kept his promise to God to the very end, and spoke of joy even on the hardest day of his life.
Brought into a great hall to be put on trial, the Báb walked straight to the seat of honor, sat down, and bravely told a room full of powerful men exactly who He was.
Fourteen friends were told to give up their faith and go free — and seven of them chose to be brave and stay true, even though it was the hardest choice of all.
A brave teacher named Vaḥíd led his friends to a tiny fort in the rocky hills and stayed true to what he believed, even when it cost him everything.
Bahá'u'lláh set out to help His friends in danger, and when the road was closed and He was hurt in a faraway town, He bore it all with quiet courage.
When the friends were sad and unsure what to do, a sealed letter was opened and read aloud — and at last they knew exactly where to turn.
When friends wanted a special day to honor 'Abdu'l-Bahá, He gave His own birthday away and chose, instead, the day He promised to keep everyone together.
A tired traveler had searched everywhere for one special person — and then, just outside the city gate, a smiling Youth in a green turban came out to meet him.
Mullá Ḥusayn was the very first person to believe in the Báb. Years later, surrounded by an army, he showed the world what it means to be truly brave.
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 young man stepped into a quiet London office, saw a message lying open on a desk, and read the hardest news of his life — all alone.
On a freezing journey into exile, a little girl watched her mother do everything she could to care for the family — including one small, loving mistake nobody ever forgot.
Also among the emigrants and near neighbors was Áqá ‘Alí Najaf-Ábádí. When this spiritual young man first listened to the call of God he set his lips to the holy cup and beheld the glory of the Speaker on the Mount. And when, by grace…
Fáṭimih Begum, widow of the King of Martyrs of Iṣfáhán, lost her father at Badasht in childhood, married a husband whose faith would cost him his life, was stripped of every possession by the government, and ended her years in 'Akká, where the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh proved more than her heart could bear.
In *Memorials of the Faithful* 'Abdu'l-Bahá portrays His own paternal uncle, Mírzá Músá — known as Áqáy-i-Kalím — the loyal full brother of Bahá'u'lláh, who shared in His every exile, sought without success to restrain the rebellion of their half-brother Mírzá Yaḥyá, and bore witness to the moment the fame of the Cause of God reached as far as Díyárbakr.
In the flower of tender youth, Muḥammad-‘Alí, the illumined, heard the cry of God, and lost his heart to heavenly grace. He entered the service of the Afnán, offshoot of the Holy Tree, and lived happy and content. This was how he came…
This man, noble and high-minded, was the son of the respected ‘Abdu’l-Faṭṭaḥ who was in the Akká prison. Learning that his father was a captive there, he came with all speed to the fortress so that he too might have a share of those…
One of the emigrants who died along the way to the Holy Land was Zaynu’l-Ábidín of Yazd. When, in Manshad, this devoted man first heard the cry of God, he was awakened to restless life. A holy passion stirred him, his soul was made…
My mother, my Aunt Khánum, my three sisters, and I lived in the bigger house at `Akká with our beloved Father; Bahá’u’lláh lived at Bahji. At this time the people of the place greatly respected and honoured Him and the Master, and we were…
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.
In a tender letter preserved among His Writings, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set the fading things of this world beside the one Beauty that never fades. Mortal charm passes, He wrote, roses give way to thorns, youth lives its day and is no more — but the Beauty of the True One endureth for ever. His counsel is the very lesson the month of the Fast was given to teach: where to fix the heart.
Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, was a small child when soldiers seized her Father and stripped her home. From that day she shared every exile and every imprisonment of the Holy Family, set aside the ordinary hopes of a woman of her time, and gave her whole long life to service. Lady Blomfield's *The Chosen Highway* preserves the memory of that quiet, unbroken renunciation.
Mírzá Asadu'lláh of Khúy stood high in the world — a learned man, master of several tongues, a trusted official of the Persian state. When he recognized the Báb, he laid all of it down. The Báb gave him a title that bound him to the future of the Faith — "the Third Letter to believe in Him Whom God shall make manifest" — and Dayyán kept that covenant to the end, journeying to recognize Bahá'u'lláh and dying for Him.
In the shrine-city of Karbilá, the Báb gave one of His devoted followers a promise that asked everything of him: that he would live to behold "Him Whom God shall make manifest," but must tell no one, and must wait. Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí let the years pass in patient detachment, holding fast to that word — until the day in Karbilá when he beheld Bahá'u'lláh and the promise came true.
Mishkín-Qalam was the most celebrated calligrapher of Persia, honoured at the royal court and famed across Asia — a man whose art alone could have brought him every comfort. He left all of it to follow Bahá'u'lláh, was imprisoned for years on the island of Cyprus, and remained, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words, "detached from the world," joyous and steadfast in the Covenant to the end.
At the end of the great funeral on Mount Carmel in 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was laid to rest not in a tomb of His own but in a chamber of the Shrine of the Báb — the very Shrine He had laboured for years to raise over the remains of His Lord's Forerunner. The Builder of that holy House became one of its treasures.
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.
Days before His passing, the believers of Springfield cabled 'Abdu'l-Bahá for His blessing on a second convention for unity between the races. His reply — "Approved; God confirms" — is believed to be His last word sanctioning a public service of the American Bahá'ís. The grief-stricken friends carried it out in His memory, and the Star of the West preserved it.
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 weeks before His passing, 'Abdu'l-Bahá told His family of two dreams. In one He stood in a great mosque and raised the call to prayer before a vast multitude; in the other Bahá'u'lláh came to Him and said, "Destroy this room." Only after His ascension did those around Him understand what the dreams had foretold.
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed in 1921, His grandson and appointed successor, Shoghi Effendi, was a grief-stricken young man not yet able to take up his burden. In that hour the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahíyyih Khánum — who had served the Cause since she was a child of six — steadied the whole community and held its affairs in her hands.
Years before His passing, in days of great danger, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set down in His own hand a Will and Testament. Opened after His ascension in 1921, it appointed Shoghi Effendi as Guardian, provided for the Universal House of Justice, and laid the foundations of the Administrative Order — His parting gift to a community He would not leave unguided.
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.
In Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembers Muḥammad-Muṣṭafá Baghdádí — famed in Iraq for his love of Bahá'u'lláh, who settled near the coast and made himself the host and helper of every pilgrim journeying to attain the presence of the Blessed Beauty. When the Sun of Bahá set, he stood unshaken, loyal to the Covenant, "a blazing light" to the end.
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.
Six days before His ascension in 1892, Bahá'u'lláh — already weakened by fever — summoned the entire company of believers and pilgrims gathered at the Mansion of Bahjí into His presence one last time. Leaning against one of His sons, He thanked them for their services, urged them to remain united, and gave them His final blessing.
In His final years at Bahjí, Bahá'u'lláh did what no Founder of a world religion had ever done before: He wrote out, in His own hand, a Will and Testament naming His successor. The Kitáb-i-'Ahd — the Book of the Covenant — turned every believing heart toward the Most Mighty Branch, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and made division impossible for anyone who chose to remain faithful.
Long before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh had begun to unveil the station of His eldest Son. In the Tablet of the Branch — the Súriy-i-Ghuṣn, revealed years earlier in Adrianople — He called 'Abdu'l-Bahá "the Limb of the Law of God" and "the Trust of God." When the Book of the Covenant was opened after His passing, it brought to fruition what this Tablet had quietly sown.
On the first night of His Revelation the Báb gave to the first soul who recognised Him a name that would shape the rest of his life — Bábu'l-Báb, the Gate of the Gate. From that hour Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í lived as the door through which others were meant to enter, until he laid down his life at the fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí.
Before the world knew her as Táhirih, the gifted poet-theologian of Qazvín was given one name by the teacher she never met in person — Qurratu'l-'Ayn, Solace of the Eyes — and another, years later, at the conference of Badasht, where the assembled believers proclaimed her Táhirih, the Pure One. Two names, conferred by two hands, for a woman who became the herald of a new Day.
Bahá'u'lláh's loyal full brother, Mírzá Músá, shared in His every exile and carried, in silence, the burdens no one else would bear. The title by which the believers knew him — Áqáy-i-Kalím, drawn from the ancient name of Moses, "He Who conversed with God" — honoured a man who sought no rank and shone, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words, like a bright lamp within the holy Household.
Bahá'u'lláh bestowed upon His eldest Son a constellation of titles unique in religious history — the Most Great Branch, the Master, and, most mysterious of all, Sirru'lláh, the Mystery of God. Shoghi Effendi unfolds what these names mean, and how the One on whom they were conferred chose, in the end, to be known by a single humble name of His own.
In His Will and Testament 'Abdu'l-Bahá named His grandson Shoghi Effendi the Guardian of the Cause of God — "the sign of God," "the chosen branch," "the priceless pearl that doth gleam from out the Twin Surging Seas." The young man who received this towering station asked only to be known by the simple name his Grandfather had used, and signed himself, in lifelong humility, the servant of the threshold.
In the first weeks of His Revelation, the Báb gave to the youngest of His chosen disciples, Mullá Muḥammad-'Alí of Bárfurúsh, a name that set him apart from all the rest — Quddús, the Most Holy — and chose him, alone among the Letters of the Living, to be His companion on the long pilgrimage to Mecca.
Already past sixty, a travelling salesman named Hyde Dunn and his wife Clara left America to carry the Bahá'í message to a continent where it had never been heard. Town by town across Australia they planted the Faith, and Shoghi Effendi gave them the names by which they are remembered — "Father" and "Mother" Dunn, and Australia's "spiritual conqueror."
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.
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.
When Bahá'u'lláh lay chained in the Black Pit of Ṭihrán, condemned without cause and surrounded by the executions of His fellow-prisoners, help came from an unlooked-for quarter: the Russian Minister at the Persian court, who took up His case, pressed for His release, and afterward offered Him the protection of his government. Nabíl records it as one of the signs that no power on earth could extinguish the Cause of God.
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.
For ten years in Baghdád Bahá'u'lláh had carried His station in silence. Then, in the spring of 1863, on the eve of a new banishment, He entered a rose-filled garden on the bank of the Tigris and, for twelve days, declared openly to His companions that He was the Promised One foretold by the Báb. Bahá'ís remember those days as the King of Festivals — the hour the long-hidden Glory of God was at last unveiled.
From within the prison-city of 'Akká — where the world's authorities had hoped His Cause would die — Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book. Out of the most desolate confinement came the charter of a future world civilization: its laws, its institutions, and its summons to the unity of humankind.
In the bitterest days of His imprisonment in 'Akká — His sons fallen, His companions scattered, the gates barred against Him — Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Lawḥ-i-Qad-Iḥtaraqa'l-Mukhliṣún, the Fire Tablet. Its verses move through a long lament over the world's wrongs and then break, at the end, into the certainty of the dawn: the glory of His Cause shining out from the very depth of His affliction.
The Power that had banished Bahá'u'lláh to the worst prison in its empire could not keep Him there. In His last years the walls of 'Akká opened, and the once reviled Prisoner lived out His days in a mansion at Bahjí, honoured by pilgrims and notables alike — having shown, His family recalled, how to glorify God in abasement and how to glorify Him again in honour.
The friends longed to keep 'Abdu'l-Bahá's birthday as a festival of His own. He refused — that day, the twenty-third of May, belonged wholly to the Declaration of the Báb — and turned their devotion instead toward the Covenant, giving them the fourth of Qawl as the day of His appointment as its Centre. Years later, Star of the West would carry word of a Convention of the Covenant in which that same redirection of love bore extraordinary fruit.
About a year before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh set down in His own hand the Kitáb-i-'Ahd — His Book of the Covenant, His Will and Testament. During His final illness He placed it in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's keeping, and nine days after His passing it was read aloud to the gathered believers. In it, in words beyond all dispute, Bahá'u'lláh bade His family and His kindred turn their faces toward the Most Mighty Branch.
When Bahá'u'lláh ascended, His Covenant was at once attacked from within. His younger son, Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alí, refused 'Abdu'l-Bahá's appointed authority and set himself against the Centre of the Covenant — even carrying false accusations to the Ottoman court that nearly cost the Master His life. In The Chosen Highway, the women of the household remember how, through years of danger, they stood utterly firm at His side.
During His 1912 journey across America, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gathered the friends in New York to speak to them of the Covenant of Bahá'u'lláh, and gave that city a name it has carried ever since — the City of the Covenant. The talks of that journey, collected in The Promulgation of Universal Peace, show the Centre of the Covenant pointing the new Western believers toward firmness, unity, and the great work of teaching the Cause to all the world.
Years before He named 'Abdu'l-Bahá the Centre of His Covenant, Bahá'u'lláh revealed in Adrianople the Súriy-i-Ghuṣn — the Tablet of the Branch — in which His eldest Son is extolled as the "Branch of Holiness," the "Limb of the Law of God," and the "Trust of God," a Tablet that foreshadowed the rank later to be conferred upon Him.
In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book, Bahá'u'lláh wrote a single luminous verse pointing the believers, after His passing, toward "Him Whom God hath purposed, Who hath branched from this Ancient Root." In His Book of the Covenant He made the meaning unmistakable: the object of that verse was none other than 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the Most Mighty Branch.
In the winter of 1898, a small band of American believers crossed the ocean to the prison-city of 'Akká — the first Bahá'ís of the West ever to reach the Centre of the Covenant. They came with little but their longing, and they returned having found in 'Abdu'l-Bahá the living heart toward which Bahá'u'lláh had bidden every soul to turn.
During a pilgrimage to 'Akká in 1905, a visitor wrote down 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own words about the Covenant of God — that it is a Lifeboat and an Ark of Salvation, that the believers are as fishes in its sea, and that Bahá'u'lláh wrote His Testament with His own Pen so that none who obeyed it could ever go astray.
The Báb's first eighteen disciples — the Letters of the Living — were not the most famous or powerful of their age, but souls whom God had prepared to recognise Him each by his own seeking. When their number was complete, the Báb gathered them, told them they were the bearers of His Name, and sent them out across Persia to herald the Day that had dawned.
Soon after declaring His mission in Shíráz, the Báb set out on the great pilgrimage to Mecca, arriving in December 1844. There, in the holiest place of Islam, He openly proclaimed His station — and on His return to Persia the news of His claim kindled both fervent love and bitter opposition, opening the long road of suffering that led at last to His martyrdom.
In the days after Mullá Ḥusayn recognised the Báb in Shíráz in 1844, a learned disciple of Siyyid Káẓim named Mullá ‘Alíy-i-Bastámí arrived in the city, withdrew alone to pray and fast, and on the third night was led by a vision to the threshold of the Báb. He became the second to believe — and, in the Báb's own words, the first to leave the House of God and the first to suffer for His sake.
Years before the Declaration, in the shrine-city of Karbilá, Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí was led by his teacher Siyyid Káẓim to the door of a young Pilgrim of radiant countenance, and watched Him weep in prayer at the shrine of the Imám Ḥusayn. When the Call rang out from Shíráz in 1844, the memory of that Youth flashed back to him — and he knew at once that the Báb and the Pilgrim of Karbilá were one and the same.
Before Mullá Ḥusayn ever met the Báb at the gate of Shíráz, he obeyed his teacher's dying charge: he scattered, purified his heart, and withdrew for forty days of prayer and fasting. Then an inner prompting drew him from Karbilá across Persia to Búshihr, and turned him northward to Shíráz — the preparation of soul that made the recognition of 1844 possible.
Before Bahá'u'lláh ever reached the Garden of Riḍván, He had to walk out of His house and through the streets of Baghdád — and the city wept. Men and women of every station crowded the route to the river, and a small child ran from the crowd and clung to His robe, begging Him not to go.
When Bahá'u'lláh entered the Garden of Riḍván on 22 April 1863, His family could not follow Him at once: the Tigris had risen in flood and made the crossing impassable. Only on the ninth day, when the waters fell, did the Holy Family cross the boat-bridge to join Him — which is why the ninth day of Riḍván is itself a holy day.
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 Bahá'u'lláh crossed the Tigris into the Garden of Riḍván on that April afternoon in 1863, His eldest Son crossed with Him — 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then a young Man of eighteen, who had already given the whole devotion of His life to His Father, and who in the Garden stood at the threshold of the Cause He would one day be appointed to lead.
He was the most favoured disciple of the foremost religious teacher of his day, the one student raised to the rank of mujtahid, "a universal man, in himself alone a convincing proof." Then Áqá Muḥammad-i-Qá'iní met Bahá'u'lláh — and the scholar who had mastered theology, philosophy, and mysticism found a knowledge before which all his learning bowed.
ʻAlí-Muḥammad Varqá, a poet and devoted teacher of the Faith, was imprisoned in Ṭihrán with his twelve-year-old son Rúḥu'lláh and a company of believers. When the murder of the Sháh was used as a pretext to crush them, father and son were threatened, tormented, and at last killed — the boy bearing witness with a serenity and courage before overwhelming power that astonished even his executioners.
During the long siege of Zanján, a young village woman named Zaynab could not bear to stand idle while her companions fell. She put on a man's garments, took up sword and gun, and begged the leader of the defenders for leave to fight. For days she stood in the front of the battle with a courage that astonished the army arrayed against her — a single peasant girl defying both an empire and the expectations of her age.
In the city of ʻIshqábád, a respected Bahá'í named Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá was set upon in broad daylight by assassins sent to terrorize the believers into silence. The murder was meant to make the community cower. Instead it produced something never seen before: a public trial under the Russian authorities in which the Bahá'ís were, for the first time in their history, openly distinguished from their persecutors and their innocence proclaimed before the world.
Mullá ʻAlí-Akbar of Shahmírzád — known as Ḥájí Ákhúnd, and later named a Hand of the Cause — taught the Faith so openly in Ṭihrán that he was the first to be seized whenever trouble broke out. Again and again he was chained, jailed, and threatened with the sword; a famous photograph shows him sitting in his fetters utterly composed. 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered him in a single unforgettable line: openly at odds with his oppressors, he defied them, and he was never vanquished.
Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl of Gulpáygán was among the most learned men in Persia — head of a religious college before he ever heard the name of Bahá'u'lláh. Won to the Faith by the proofs he had once tried to refute, he was imprisoned three times for it and stripped of his worldly standing. He gave the rest of his life to defending the Cause with his pen and his voice across three continents, the very power of his learning laid at the feet of the Faith he had embraced.
From His prison in 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh addressed a Tablet to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia. A seventeen-year-old believer named Badíʻ asked for the honour of carrying it. Alone and on foot he crossed an empire, stood in plain sight before the royal camp, and delivered it — then bore three days of torture with a serenity his executioners could not break.
The Báb sent His disciple Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí into the great centres of Islamic learning with words that named his fate before he set out: "You are the first to leave the House of God and to suffer for His sake." Dragged before an unprecedented joint tribunal of the foremost divines, he would not deny what he had found — and became the first believer to give his life for the Faith.
Mírzá Qurbán-ʻAlí, a revered dervish with thousands of devoted admirers, was arrested as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. The all-powerful Grand Vizier, besieged by pleas for the holy man's life, all but offered him a way out. The dervish refused it — declaring that he had weighed the Báb with the scales of justice, and would seal that judgement with his blood.
When a commission of the Ottoman government arrived in 'Akká empowered to recommend His exile or execution, 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the threat without a trace of fear. He declared His readiness to submit to any sentence they chose, refused a consul's offer of escape, and went on planting trees and presiding at a wedding feast — until the empire that menaced Him collapsed and He was set free.
Mullá Ṣádiq — known in Persia as "the saintly," and remembered as Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq — was one of the most honoured divines of his day. When he began to teach the new Faith openly in Shíráz, his enemies hung a halter on him and led him through the streets and bázárs to shame him into silence. 'Abdu'l-Bahá recorded what happened: composed and smiling, he kept on speaking, and was not silenced.
The first man on earth to recognize the Báb was also among the first to die for Him. Through the long winter siege of the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Mullá Ḥusayn held a starving, outnumbered band against an imperial army — and at last, having prayed through the night, mounted his horse at dawn and led the charge in which he fell, sealing with his blood the discipleship he had begun on a May night in Shíráz four years before.
Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí, called Vaḥíd, was one of the most learned men of his age — sent by the Sháh himself to refute the Báb, he came away His devoted disciple. In 1850 his teaching set the city of Nayríz aflame with faith, and when the army came he withdrew with a small band to a hilltop fort and held it for months. He was deceived by an oath sworn on the Qur'án, and went out to a death he had foreseen, steadfast to the last.
In 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own early history of the Faith, the upheaval at Zanján stands among the great trials of the believers. Led by the fearless scholar Mullá Muḥammad-'Alí — surnamed Ḥujjat, "the Proof" — the Bábís of the city, attacked and besieged at the decree of the clergy, held out through battle after battle until they were at last lured into surrender by oaths sworn upon the Qur'án, and put to the sword.
In Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembers Mullá Ṣádiq — famed across Persia for his saintliness and known to history as Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq, "the Most Truthful Name of God." Hung with a halter and led through the bazaars of Shíráz, he kept on teaching the Faith; starved for eighteen days at Fort Ṭabarsí, he kept his courage; through a whole lifetime of persecution he never once slackened or fell silent.
The recollections of the Holy Family, preserved in The Chosen Highway, tell of Mírzá Mihdí — the gentle younger brother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, known as the Purest Branch — who fell through a skylight while pacing the prison roof of 'Akká wrapped in prayer. Mortally hurt and offered by his Father whatever he might wish, he asked not to be healed but that his death be accepted as a ransom, so that the pilgrims barred from Bahá'u'lláh's presence might one day attain it.
In the terrible summer of 1852, a nobleman of Ṭihrán was offered his life and great wealth if he would only deny his Faith. He refused. Led through the streets to his execution with lighted candles set burning in his own flesh, Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán went to his death not weeping but rejoicing — chanting verses, distributing coins to the poor, and turning a public spectacle of cruelty into one of the most luminous acts of courage in Bahá'í history.
In Iṣfahán in 1879, two brothers — merchants famed throughout the city for their honesty and their boundless generosity to the poor — were stripped of their wealth, falsely accused, and put to death at the instigation of two powerful clergymen. Bahá'u'lláh, who had named them the King of Martyrs and the Beloved of Martyrs, mourned them as among the most precious souls to give their lives for His Cause.
Ṭáhirih — poet, scholar, and the only woman among the Báb's first eighteen disciples — spent her final hours in serene readiness, adorned as for a wedding rather than an execution. Led into a garden outside Ṭihrán in 1852 to be put to death, she met her end with a calm that astonished her captors, and left behind a prophecy about the freedom of women that history has been fulfilling ever since.
When the young believer Siyyid Ashraf of Zanján was captured and sentenced to death, his persecutors devised what they thought would surely break him: they brought his own mother before him to beg him to deny his Faith and live. She did the opposite. Rather than plead for his life, she charged him to remain steadfast — and warned him never to disgrace, by a moment's weakness, the Cause for which so many had already died.
Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ʻAlí was the merchant uncle who had reared the Báb from childhood and loved Him as his own son. When, as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán in 1850, he was offered his life and a ransom by influential friends if he would merely disavow his Nephew, he refused — choosing instead to be the first of the seven to lay down his life, that he might join the One he had raised.
From the Holy Land, during the dark years of the First World War, 'Abdu'l-Bahá wrote a series of Tablets to the Bahá'ís of North America summoning them to carry the Faith to the ends of the earth. Unveiled in New York in 1919, these Words transformed a small community into a teaching force that would belt the globe.
Quddús was the youngest and the last of the Báb's first eighteen disciples, the Letters of the Living — and the one He raised highest. A youth of luminous refinement, learning, courtesy, and serenity, Quddús was chosen as the Báb's sole companion on the pilgrimage to Mecca, poured out commentaries of astonishing depth even under arrest and siege, and bore himself through every ordeal with a perfection of character that his companions never forgot.
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."
Ustád Báqir and Ustád Aḥmad were two carpenter-brothers from Káshán who followed Bahá'u'lláh into exile and imprisonment. In the Most Great Prison of 'Akká they kept faithfully at their craft — tranquil, dignified, and joyful — and 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered them with a single luminous testimony: through all those long prison years they were "never neglectful of duty, never at fault."
Long before the barrack-square of Tabríz, a young man named Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zunúzí wept for one thing only — to look upon the face of his Lord. Kept from the Báb by his own stepfather, he poured out his soul in prayer, and in vision was promised the one gift he longed for above life: to share with the Báb the cup of martyrdom. On the 9th of July, 1850, that promise was kept.
In A Traveler's Narrative, written for the world beyond Persia, 'Abdu'l-Bahá sets down the martyrdom of the Báb with the calm precision of a witness to sacred history: the order of the Grand Vizier, the Christian regiment ranged in three files, the volleys that severed the ropes, and the deep truth He draws from it — that persecution, in matters of conscience, only strengthens what it means to destroy.
After the firing squad, the remains of the Báb began a journey unlike any other in religious history — wrapped in a cloak, hidden in a silk factory, carried to Ṭihrán, buried beneath shrine floors, walled into a mosque, smuggled at last across mountains and seas to the Holy Land. For nearly sixty years the faithful passed this Most Holy of trusts from hand to hand, guarding it through every danger until 'Abdu'l-Bahá could lay it to rest on Mount Carmel.
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.
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.
Forty days before He was led from His mountain prison to be martyred, the Báb quietly gathered up all that He possessed — His writings, His pen-case, His seals, and His rings — and placed them in trusted hands, with instructions that they be carried in secret to Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán. On the threshold of death, His last act of provision looked not backward in grief but forward to the One whose coming He had lived and would die to herald.
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.
It was the chief minister of Persia, Mírzá Taqí Khán the Amír-Niẓám, who decreed the Báb's death and pressed it through against the reluctance of others. Shoghi Effendi describes him as arbitrary, bloodthirsty, and reckless. Within little more than a year of the martyrdom he had ordered, the all-powerful minister was stripped of his office, banished, and secretly put to death — a downfall the Bahá'í histories read as no mere accident of court intrigue.
Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Khurásání was a famous, austere, and exacting divine — a man who had spent his life among the learned and was not easily moved. When word of the Báb reached Iṣfahán, he did not accept it on rumour, nor reject it from pride. He put it to the test. He set the young Quddús a hard examination of proofs — and when the answers came, the proud scholar was undone, and became one of the most steadfast heralds of the new Day.
Long before the Báb declared His mission, two remarkable teachers — Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í and his successor Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí — spent their lives preparing a generation to recognize the Promised One who was at hand. They did not tell their disciples whom to follow; they taught them to detach, to purify their hearts, and to go out and seek. When Siyyid Káẓim died, his last charge was simple: scatter, and find Him.
Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání was among the boldest and most independent-minded religious leaders of Persia — a man unafraid to break with the crowd of clerics when his own judgment told him otherwise. When word of the Báb reached Zanján, he did not rush to condemn or to follow. He sent a trusted messenger to investigate — and when the answer came back, he was ready to act on the truth whatever it cost him.
An Irish clergyman who rose to be Canon of St. Patrick's Cathedral and Archdeacon of Clonfert spent decades wrestling with a single question: was the long-promised Day of God already here? He had recognized the Bahá'í Faith as true as early as 1921, yet it took him until old age to follow that conviction all the way — resigning his orders and declaring openly what he had quietly believed.
Jamshíd-i-Gurjí, a valiant believer who came from Georgia and grew up in Káshán, was falsely denounced, chained, and dragged toward the Persian frontier to be handed over for execution. Thrown one night into a pit, he did not lament but proclaimed that the very depths into which his enemies had cast him were the heights of the Lord — and 'Abdu'l-Bahá records that he lived out his days tranquil and at peace, well-pleased with God and answering the call to return with a glad "Yea, verily!"
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.
Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, shared every exile, imprisonment, and bereavement that fell upon the Holy Family across nearly eighty years — the loss of her childhood home, the death of her little brother in the prison of 'Akká, the passing of her Father and then of her beloved Brother. Through all of it she remained, in the testimony of those who knew her, the very emblem of radiant submission to the will of God.
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.
In the winter of 1898, fifteen Western believers — gathered and largely financed by Phoebe Hearst, and travelling in small parties to avoid notice — made their way to the prison-city of 'Akká to attain the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Shoghi Effendi marks their visit as the opening of a new epoch in the rise of the Faith in the West.
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.
From the mountain prison of Chihríq, in the last spring of His earthly life, the Báb sent a beloved attendant on a long and perilous errand — bearing Tablets to the shrine of the Tabarsí martyrs and a message to Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán — with a single tender instruction: to hurry back in time to keep Naw-Rúz at His side, "that festival, the only one I probably shall ever see again."
When Bahá'u'lláh entered the Garden of Riḍván outside Baghdád in April 1863, His daughter Bahíyyih Khánum — the Greatest Holy Leaf, then a girl in her teens — remained behind with the household, kept on the far bank by the flooding Tigris. On the ninth day the waters fell and she crossed at last to rejoin her Father in the Garden of Paradise.
Why was the Holy Family's crossing to the Garden of Riḍván delayed until the ninth day? Drawing on Esslemont's Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, this retelling follows the swollen Tigris of the spring of 1863 — the river in flood, the bridge of boats made impassable — and the morning the waters fell at last and let the household cross into the Garden of Paradise.
When Bahá'u'lláh crossed the Tigris to enter the Garden of Riḍván in April 1863 and declared His mission, the eldest of the sons at His side was 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then a youth of eighteen. He had grown up in the shadow of His Father's exile and had already, as a child, recognized His station. The Ninth Day of Riḍván, when the rest of the family joined them in the Garden, gathers the whole household around that declaration.
The family that joined Bahá'u'lláh in the Garden of Riḍván on the Ninth Day was no ordinary household. They had shared His imprisonment in the Síyáh-Chál, the plundering of their home, banishment from Persia, and ten years of exile in Baghdád. Esslemont's account of those sufferings sets in relief the joy of their reunion in the Garden — and explains why the Faith keeps that reunion as a holy 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."
The Báb was sent to a bleak mountain prison on the frontier of Persia, chosen for its remoteness and the supposed hostility of its people, so that His influence might be extinguished. Instead the light could not be walled out: the hostile warden himself was transformed, the discipline relaxed, and the Kurdish villagers below began to climb the mountain each dawn for a single glimpse of His face.
In His own words, in the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahá'u'lláh recalls the four months He spent chained in the lightless underground dungeon of Ṭihrán — and how, in that very darkness, the first intimations of His Revelation broke upon Him like a dawn, a Voice calling from above His head and a sense that the whole creation had been set astir.
For nearly sixty years the remains of the martyred Báb were carried in secret from hiding place to hiding place, guarded through every danger. On the morning of Naw-Rúz 1909, after a labour of ten years to build the tomb, 'Abdu'l-Bahá with His own hands laid them to rest in the spot on Mount Carmel that Bahá'u'lláh Himself had chosen — and wept upon the sarcophagus.
Summoned from His mountain prison to be examined before the Crown Prince and the assembled clergy of Tabríz, the Báb was meant to be silenced and shamed. Instead, in that hostile hall, He openly affirmed the station He had come to proclaim — and the very tribunal convened to extinguish His Light became the stage on which it shone before the powers of the land.
When Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í and his companions reached the hostile town of Bárfurúsh, a mob rose to bar their way and cut them down. In that moment of utmost danger, the first to believe in the Báb answered not with the sword but with his voice — bidding the call to prayer be raised, and proclaiming the advent of the new Day before the very crowd that had come to kill him.
Hidden behind a curtain in Bahá'u'lláh's house in Ṭihrán, Táhirih listened as the celebrated divine Vahíd discoursed on the proofs of the new Day. Then she raised her voice and interrupted him with a few burning sentences that turned the whole meaning of speech inside out — calling not for more learned words, but for the deeds and the bold utterance that would promote the Word of God.
Besieged with a few hundred companions in the forest fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Quddús held the failing band together not chiefly with the sword but with his voice — composing a commentary whose verses made the hungry forget their hunger, and rising under the roar of the enemy's cannon to bid his companions fear neither the threats of the wicked nor the clamour of the ungodly.
On a Sunday evening in September 1911, after forty years of imprisonment and exile, 'Abdu'l-Bahá rose in the pulpit of the City Temple in London and gave the first public address of His life in the Western world — a few quiet sentences, proclaimed before a crowded congregation, that opened the teaching of the Cause in the West.
When the Sháh of Persia came to Paris in 1902, 'Abdu'l-Bahá charged the young American teacher Lua Getsinger to carry to him a message protesting the persecution of the Bahá'ís in his realm. She — a farmer's daughter with no rank and no standing — found her way to the monarch and delivered the Master's word, a single act of bold testimony that earned her the name of Banner-Bearer.
Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání was the foremost and most fearless divine of the city of Zanján. When the message of the Báb reached him and he recognised its truth, he did not keep his conviction to himself: he proclaimed the new Cause openly from his place of authority, won a great multitude of his townsmen, and bore imprisonment rather than be silenced.
Brought back a prisoner to His native Shíráz and slandered with claims He had never made, the Báb went up into the pulpit of the city's chief mosque on a Friday and addressed the assembled congregation directly — affirming His true mission and disowning the falsehoods spread in His name, before the very people who had been turned against Him.
In Ṭihrán in 1850, seven believers of utterly different stations — a great merchant, a beloved dervish, a learned theologian among them — were each offered their lives, and more than their lives, if they would deny the Báb. To the very last, with the sword before them, every one refused. A story of the power of God to make ordinary souls unbreakable.
An austere and revered cleric of Khurásán recognised the Báb and, with Quddús, became one of the first believers ever to be publicly tortured for the new Faith. Through the bastinado, repeated imprisonments, and a lifetime of banishment, a strange power sustained him — and 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who knew him, remembered him among the heroes of the dawn.
A few hundred students, merchants, and craftsmen — most of whom had never held a weapon — were besieged in a makeshift fort in the forests of Mázindarán by the trained regiments and artillery of an empire. For eleven months they held, not by numbers or arms, but by a power their enemies could not understand and could not break.
The Báb was moved to the remote fortress of Chihríq, "the Mountain of Severity," chosen for its harshness and the supposed hostility of its Kurdish inhabitants, so that He might be cut off from all who loved Him. Instead the warden, the people, and the very town fell under the spell of His presence — and the verses that streamed from His pen could not be stopped by any wall.
When Bahá'u'lláh returned to Baghdád from the mountains of Kurdistan, He found the exiled Bábí community in ruins — leaderless, demoralized, fallen into disrepute, its very name a byword for lawlessness. Within a few years, by no worldly means whatever, He had transformed that broken remnant into a community renowned for its dignity, its purity, and its love.
'Abdu'l-Bahá spent forty years a prisoner in the fortress-city of 'Akká — exiled as a child, freed only as an old Man when the empire that held Him at last fell. Asked in London how He had borne it, He answered that He had been happy the whole time; that prison had been freedom to Him; and that there is no prison anywhere but the prison of the self.
Mishkín-Qalam was the foremost calligrapher of Persia, welcomed in the courts of Ṭihrán and famed across Asia. He laid all of it down for the love of Bahá'u'lláh, was slandered as a dangerous agitator, and spent nine years a prisoner in the citadel of Famagusta — yet remained, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words, mild and submissive, peerless for sincerity and loyalty. His was an honour the world could neither give him nor take away.
In His own history of the Cause, 'Abdu'l-Bahá records a fact that astonished even the believers' enemies: through years of slaughter and plunder in Persia, with their numbers larger than ever, the followers of Bahá'u'lláh kept perfect order — none transgressed his bounds, none assailed anyone, all bore their afflictions patiently, looking unto God. It is one of history's quiet portraits of honour: dignity kept by the wronged who refused to become wrongdoers.
Bahá'u'lláh and His companions were banished to 'Akká as the worst of criminals, shut in a foul barracks where nearly all fell sick and several died. The empire meant to strip them of every dignity and let the Cause rot behind those walls. Instead, as Shoghi Effendi recounts in God Passes By, the exiles bore their degradation with such serenity that the prison itself became a place of honour, and the city that had cursed them came at last to revere them.
In an age when a Black man in America was offered little honour, Robert Turner — a butler in a wealthy household — became the first of his race in the West to embrace the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá rose to greet him, telling him that God had given him a black skin but a heart white as snow.
Robbed of his small stock of goods in exile, Ḥájí ʻAlí-ʻAskar-i-Tabrízí was pressed by a powerful consul to inflate the loss and share in the spoils. With prison and banishment threatened against him, the impoverished old believer would not speak a single false word — and Bahá'u'lláh said of him simply, "I am pleased with him."
Ustád Ismá'íl was a master builder of high standing in Ṭihrán, prosperous and well regarded by all. For the love of Bahá'u'lláh he lost his work, his wealth, and even his bride, and ended his days peddling trinkets from a cave outside Haifa — counting himself, in that poverty, more honoured than he had ever been in his prosperity.
Two empires shut Bahá'u'lláh inside the prison-city of 'Akká, meaning to bury His Cause behind stone. Yet within those very walls a sovereignty shone that no decree could touch: governors and generals came humbly to His door, pilgrims crossed the world to reach Him, and from His captivity He addressed the emperors who held Him as a King addresses His subjects. Esslemont's account shows that the Captive of 'Akká was, in reality, no prisoner at all, but a King of Kings.
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.
When the message of the Báb spread through Shíráz, its cruel governor, Ḥusayn Khán, set himself to crush the new Faith by force. He arrested its Herald, had Him struck, and bound Him with threats — yet every weapon of the state failed against a serene and majestic dignity, and the governor's own power was soon broken by a plague he could not command.
During the First World War the military governor of the region, Jamál Páshá, one of the most feared men in the Ottoman Empire, vowed to crucify 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Mount Carmel and raze the Bahá'í holy places. The Master met the threat with perfect calm — and before the general could carry it out, his army was routed and his power swept away.
When Bahá'u'lláh rode out of the Garden of Riḍván on the twelfth day, He did not step into freedom but onto a road — more than a thousand miles of mountain and plain, north and then west, to the Ottoman capital. With His family and twenty-six companions He set out on a march of more than three months, and at every stage along the way the people met Him not as a banished prisoner but as an honored guest.
Not everyone could follow Bahá'u'lláh onto the road of exile. When the convoy of the Beloved left Baghdád for Constantinople, believers remained behind in a city now empty of His presence and full of His enemies. In His memorial to Muḥammad-Muṣṭafá Baghdádí, 'Abdu'l-Bahá preserves what faithfulness looked like in those who stayed — loyal, staunch, and openly teaching the Faith after the great separation.
In the very days of the Riḍván festival, on the eve of His banishment from Baghdád, Bahá'u'lláh revealed one of the great Tablets of His early ministry — the Súriy-i-Ṣabr, the Tablet of Patience, also called the Tablet of Job. Sent in honor of a survivor of the Nayríz upheaval whom He named Ayyúb, it lifts up the steadfastness of those who suffered for the Báb and crowns the Festival of joy with a hymn to patient endurance.
The banishment that began on the twelfth day of Riḍván was meant to humble Bahá'u'lláh, yet the long road north became a procession of homage. Town after town received Him with reverence, recalling the love of the people of Baghdád; and as the caravan neared the Black Sea, He revealed the Tablet of the Howdah, in which the majesty of His Cause shone out over the very road of His exile.
At noon on the twelfth and last day in the Garden of Riḍván — May 3, 1863 — Bahá'u'lláh mounted a red roan stallion, the finest His lovers could buy for Him, and rode out toward the long exile to Constantinople. The crowds bowed to the dust at His horse's feet and pressed forward to embrace His stirrups; what the empire had decreed as banishment looked, to all who watched, like the riding-forth of a King.
On the twelfth day of Riḍván the long-prepared caravan finally moved. With members of His family and twenty-six of His disciples, Bahá'u'lláh set out from the Garden on a march that would last between three and four months, over a thousand miles to Constantinople. The Cause that had grown in the quiet of Baghdád was now openly upon the road of history.
The supreme festival of the Bahá'í year does not close on a day of arrival but on a day of departure. The Twelfth Day of Riḍván seals the twelve days Shoghi Effendi calls the holiest and most significant of all Bahá'í festivals — the Most Great Festival, the King of Festivals, the Festival of God — by sending the newly unveiled Glory of God out from the Garden and onto the road of His Cause.
One brief incident that made a lasting impression on Leroy illustrates this power of the Master. It occurred one evening when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke at the Masonic Temple [in Chicago]. More than a thousand people were present. The Ioas and…
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 young man at Oxford stepped into a London office one November day in 1921, glanced at an open telegram lying on a desk — and learned, alone and unprepared, that his grandfather had passed and his whole life had changed. A retelling from Rúhíyyih Rabbání's The Priceless Pearl.
Monday, November…
15 Rue Greuze, Paris, December…
Monday, October…
October 22nd ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said: It is a lovely day, the sun shines brightly upon the earth, giving light and warmth to all creatures. The Sun of Truth is also shining, giving light and warmth to the souls of men. The sun is the life-giver…
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.
Adib Taherzadeh, in *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh*, traces the mission of Mishkín-Qalam — Bahá'u'lláh's celebrated calligrapher — sent from Adrianople to Constantinople to teach by his art, then arrested through court intrigue and exiled to Cyprus, where he remained imprisoned for nine years.
In the beginning of the eleventh chapter of the Revelation of St. John it is…
Question.—What is the meaning of Christ’s resurrection after three…
You question about eternal life and the entrance into the Kingdom. The outer expression used for the Kingdom is heaven; but this is a comparison and similitude, not a reality or fact, for the Kingdom is not a material place; it is…
Thou art God, no God is there but…
Praise be to Thee, O Lord, my Best Beloved! Make me steadfast in Thy Cause and grant that I may be reckoned among those who have not violated Thy Covenant nor followed the gods of their own idle fancy. Enable me, then, to obtain a seat…
Praised and glorified art Thou, O God! Grant that the day of attaining Thy holy presence may be fast approaching. Cheer our hearts through the potency of Thy love and good-pleasure and bestow upon us steadfastness that we may willingly…
The Lord hath, in truth, inspired Me: Verily, verily, I am God, He besides Whom there is none other God, and I am indeed the Ancient of…
The Sunday school for the children in which the Tablets and Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh are read, and the Word of God is recited for the children is indeed a blessed thing. Thou must certainly continue this organized activity without…
O thou yearning flame, thou who art afire with the love of God! I have read thy letter, and its contents, well-expressed and eloquent, delighted my heart, showing as they did thy deep sincerity in the Cause of God, thy persevering steps…
O ye who are holding fast unto the Covenant and Testament! This day, from the realms of the All-Glorious, from the Kingdom of Holiness where hosannas of glorification and praise rise up, the Company on high direct their gaze upon you.…
O ye friends and maidservants of the Merciful! From the Spiritual Assembly of Los Angeles a letter hath been received. It was indicative of the fact that the blessed souls in California, like unto an immovable mountain, are withstanding…
Praise be to Him through Whose splendours the earth and the heavens are aglow, through Whose fragrant breathings the gardens of holiness that adorn the hearts of the chosen are trembling for joy, to Him Who hath shed His light and…
O thou who art steadfast in the Covenant! Thy letter of 9 September 1909 hath been received. Be thou neither grieved nor despondent over what hath come to pass. This trouble overtook thee as thou didst walk the path of God, wherefore it…
O thou servant of God! Do not grieve at the afflictions and calamities that have befallen thee. All calamities and afflictions have been created for man so that he may spurn this mortal world—a world to which he is much attached. When…
Praise be to Him Who hath rent the dark asunder, hath blotted out the night, hath drawn aside the coverings and torn away the veils; Whose light thereupon shone out, Whose signs and tokens were spread abroad, and His mysteries laid…
O ye who have turned your faces toward the Exalted Beauty! By night, by day, at morningtide and sunset, when darkness draweth on, and at early light I remember, and ever have remembered, in the realms of my mind and heart, the loved…
O ye sons and daughters of the Kingdom! Your letter, which was surely inspired of heaven, hath been received. Its contents were most pleasing, its sentiments arising out of luminous…
O ye who are steadfast in the Covenant! The pilgrim hath made mention of each one of you, and hath asked for a separate letter addressed to each, but this wanderer in the wilderness of God’s love is withheld from correspondence by a…
O ye concourse of the Kingdom of Abhá! Two calls to success and prosperity are being raised from the heights of the happiness of mankind, awakening the slumbering, granting sight to the blind, causing the heedless to become mindful,…
O respected personage! Thy second letter dated 19 December 1918 was received. It was the cause of great joy and gladness, for it showed thy firmness and steadfastness in the Covenant and Testament and thy yearning to raise the call of…
O ye faithful friends, O ye sincere servants of Bahá’u’lláh! Now, in the midwatches of the night, when eyes are closed in slumber and all have laid their heads upon the couch of rest and deep sleep, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is wakeful within the…
O thou who seekest the Kingdom of Heaven! Thy letter hath been received and its contents…
O thou who art steadfast in the Covenant, and staunch! The letter which thou didst write ... hath been shown to me, and the opinions expressed therein were most commendable. It is incumbent upon the Spiritual Consultative Assembly of…
O ye co-workers who are supported by armies from the realm of the All-Glorious! Blessed are ye, for ye have come together in the sheltering shade of the Word of God, and have found a refuge in the cave of His Covenant; ye have brought…
The world’s great Light, once resplendent upon all mankind, hath set, to shine everlastingly from the Abhá Horizon, His Kingdom of fadeless glory, shedding splendour upon His loved ones from on high and breathing into their hearts and…
O thou ignited candle! Thy letter was received. Its contents imparted spiritual gladness, for they were pervaded by spiritual sentiments and indicated the attraction of thy heart, attachment to the Kingdom of God and love for His divine…
O thou who art firm in the Covenant! The letter thou hadst written on 2 May 1919 was received. Praise thou God that in tests thou art firm and steadfast and art holding fast to the Abhá Kingdom. Thou art not shaken by any affliction or…
In Star of the West Volume 4, the editors printed a tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to Mrs. Harriet Cline of Los Angeles on the meaning of firmness in the Covenant. The Master compared it to a rope strong enough to hold the friends through the storm of differences and tests.
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 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 1913 the Star of the West printed words spoken by 'Abdu'l-Bahá about His own imprisonment. He distinguished three kinds of persecution He had endured — physical chains, governmental restriction, and the bitter words and criticisms of the believers themselves — and named the third as the hardest.
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.
178 Glory be unto Thee, O Thou whose mercy hath encompassed all things, whose gift is made perfect, whose power hath encircled the world, whose proof is demonstrated, whose signs have become manifest, whose words are promulgated, whose…
He is God! O ye heavenly…
“O Compassionate God! Thanks be to Thee for Thou hast awakened and made (me) conscious. Thou hast given me a seeing eye and favored me with a hearing ear; hast led me to Thy Kingdom and guided me to Thy Path. Thou hast shown me the…
O my spiritual friends!291…
O thou bird of the Rose-garden of the Love of…
O thou child of the Kingdom and firm in the…
O thou dear and…
O thou faithful maid-servant of…
O thou faithful servant of the True…
O thou Godlike person and spiritual…
O thou herald of the…
O thou kind maid-servant of…
O thou lamp of the Love of…
O thou lamp who art illuminated with the light of the Love of…
O thou loving torch, flaming by the fire of the Love of…
O thou maid-servant of God who art attracted unto…
O Thou Pure God!155…
O thou seeker after the Beauty of the True…
O thou seeker of…
O thou sincere servant of…
O thou slave of the Beauty of…
O thou spiritual…
O thou Thahbet (Firm) in the…
O thou who art advanced toward…
O thou who art advancing toward the Kingdom of…
O thou who art attracted by a Breath that passed upon thee from the Holy Garden, the Blessed Spot—the Paradise of…
O thou who art attracted to the Beauty of…
O thou who art attracted to the Bounty of…
O thou who art attracted to the Holy…
O thou who art attracted to the Spirit of…
O thou who art awakened to the Cause of…
O thou who art calling in the Name of God and heralding unto the Kingdom of…
O thou who art firm in the love of…
O thou who art gazing toward…
O thou who art quickened by the Divine…
O thou who art seeking fire from the Fire of the Love of…
O thou who art set aglow with the Fire of the Love of…
O thou who art set aglow with the Fire of the Love of…
O thou who art turning thy heart unto the Kingdom of…
O thou who hast gained illumination from the Light of…
O thou who hast humbled thyself before the Kingdom of…
O thou who in truth art attracted through the Breaths of the Holy…
O thou whose face is illumined with the Light of the Love of…
O ye206 beloved! O ye maid-servants of the…
O ye blessed maid-servant283 of the Beauty of…
O ye34 Cohorts of…
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O ye members of the shining assembly!222…
O ye209 my dear…
O ye servants of the Threshold of…
O ye273 servants of the True One and the maid-servants of the…
O ye shining Assembly!113…
***O ye118 shining faces and spiritual…
O ye148 sincere, O ye firm and steadfast in the Testament of…
O ye58 sincere ones and ye who are attracted and moved by the breeze of the favor of…
O ye177 sincere ones! O ye favored ones! O ye beseeching ones! O ye supplicating…
O ye200 sons of the…
O ye two220 maid-servants of…
O ye two merciful assemblies!287…
O ye two134 pilgrims of the Holy…
O ye78 who are attracted to the Heavenly Kingdom! O ye who are enlightened by the Light of Guidance! O ye lamps lighted by the Light of Love and…
O ye who are sincere! O ye who are firm! O ye who are…
O ye207 whom God hath chosen from among those who are called!—know that “many are called but few are chosen”!—upon whom He caused the evident Light to descend; whom He guided into the right Path, and to whom He gave the Glad-tidings of…
To the beloved of God in…
She said, “I regret indeed that I cannot speak your language. You also feel your need of Persian. Persian is most important in this Day as it is the language of the Word. We will understand each other perfectly in the spiritual world. A…
“Why are women so favored in this Revelation?” “Women in Persia were treated badly in former times by the Muhammadans. When speaking evil of a man, they would say, 'He is just like a woman.' When they wished to lower a man's pride, they…
The following account occurred in the Siyah-Chal prison in Teheran around the Fall/Winter of 1853. The prisoners were awaiting execution for their Faith: We were awakened one night, ere break of day, by Mirza ‘Abdu’l-Vahhab-i-Shirazi, who…
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes the morning of the Báb's martyrdom in the Tabríz barracks-square on the 9th of July, 1850 — the iron nail driven into the staircase, the two ropes by which He and His amanuensis were bound, the regiment that fired without harming Him, and the second regiment that did.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá recounts the Báb's confinement in the remote castle of Máh-Kú on the northwestern frontier of Persia — and describes how the warden 'Alí Khán's love for the family of the Prophet led him, despite official orders, to permit conversation between the prisoner and visiting believers.
Touching the individual known as the Báb and the true nature of this sect diverse tales are on the tongues and in the mouths of men, and various accounts are contained in the pages of Persian history and the leaves of European…
absolutism in [the conduct of] affairs: on his own decisive resolution, without seeking permission from the Royal Presence or taking counsel with prudent statesmen, he issued orders to persecute the Bábís, imagining that by overweening…
When he reached Hamadán his character became known, and, as he was of the clerical class, the doctors vehemently pursued him, handed him over to the government, and ordered chastisement to be inflicted. By chance there fell out from the…
swords be blunted, and their footsteps slip. I know not how long they shall ride the steed of desire and wander erringly in the desert of heedlessness and error. Of glory shall any glory endure, or of abasement any abasement? Or shall…
While the Master was in Boston, the Bahá’ís arranged a magnificent feast to commemorate the Declaration of the Báb as well as the birthday of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on May 23rd. They were in a state of utmost happiness and joy to have ‘Abdu’l-Bahá…