In embarking on a mission for which history supplied him with no precedent, Shoghi Effendi could look nowhere but to the Writings of the Founders of the Faith and the example of the Master for the guidance his work required. No body of advisors could help him determine the meaning of the Texts he was called on to interpret for a Bahá’í community that had placed its whole trust in him. Although he read widely the published works of historians, economists and political thinkers, such research could do no more than supply raw materials that his inspired vision of the Cause must then organize. The confidence and courage required in mobilizing a heterogeneous community of believers to undertake tasks that were, by any objective criteria, far beyond their capacities, could be found only in the spiritual resources of his own heart. No dispassionate observer of the twentieth century, however sceptical about the claims of religion he or she may be, can fail to acknowledge that the integrity with which a young man in his early twenties accepted so awesome a responsibility—and the magnitude of the victory he won—are evidences of an immense spiritual power inherent in the Cause he championed.
To acknowledge all this is to recognize that the capacities with which the Covenant had endowed the Guardianship were not a form of magic. Their successful exercise entailed, as Rúḥíyyih Khánum has movingly described, a never-ending process of testing, evaluation, and refinement. One is awed by the precision with which Shoghi Effendi analyzed political and social processes in the early stages of their development, and the mastery with which his mind encompassed a kaleidoscope of events, both current and historical, relating their implications to the unfolding Will of Providence. That this work of the intellect was carried out on a level far above the one on which the human mind customarily operates did not make the effort any the less real or stressful. Rather, given the insight into human nature and human motivation that was an inseparable feature of the institution Shoghi Effendi represented, the opposite was the case.[107]
In the perspective of the more than forty years since Shoghi Effendi’s passing, the long-term significance of his work in the evolution of the Administrative Order has begun to emerge with brilliant clarity. Had circumstances been different, the Master’s Will and Testament had provided for the possibility that one or more successors might have followed in the institution Shoghi Effendi embodied. We obviously cannot penetrate the mind of God. What is clear and undeniable, however, is that, through his interpretive authority, the structure of the Administrative Order, as well as the course that its future development will pursue, have been permanently fixed by Shoghi Effendi’s fulfilment—in every least respect and to the fullest extent imaginable—of the mandate laid on him by the Master. Equally clear and undeniable is the fact that both structure and course represent the Will of God.
VIII
As Shoghi Effendi had prophetically warned, forces undermining inherited systems and convictions of every kind were continuing to advance in tandem with the integrating processes at work in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that the euphoria induced by the restoration of peace in both Europe and the Orient proved to be of the briefest duration. Hardly had hostilities ended than the ideological divisions between Marxism and liberal democracy burst out into attempts to secure dominance between the respective blocs of nations they inspired. The phenomenon of “Cold War”, in which the struggle for advantage stopped just short of military conflict, emerged as the prevailing political paradigm of the next several decades.
The threat posed by a new crisis in the international order was heightened by breakthroughs in nuclear technology and the success of both blocs of nations in equipping themselves with an ever-growing array of weapons of mass destruction. The horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had awakened humanity to the appalling possibility that a series of relatively minor mishaps, as uncalculated as the process set in motion by the 1914 incident in Sarajevo, might this time lead to the annihilation of a considerable portion of the world’s population and leave large areas of the globe uninhabitable. For Bahá’ís, the prospect could only bring vividly to mind the sombre warning uttered by Bahá’u’lláh decades earlier: “Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would prove lethal.”[108]
By far the greatest tragedy resulting from this latest contest for world domination was the blight that it cast over the hopes with which formerly subject peoples had welcomed the opportunity they believed they had been given to build a new life of their own devising. The obstinate determination of some of the surviving colonial powers to suppress such hopes, though doomed to failure in the eyes of any objective observer, had left the urge for liberation in many countries with no recourse but to assume the character of revolutionary struggle. By 1960, such movements, which had already been a feature of the political landscape during the earlier decades of the century, were coming to represent the principal form of indigenous political activity in most subject nations.
Since the driving force of colonialism itself was economic exploitation, it was perhaps inevitable that most movements of liberation assumed a broadly socialistic ideological cast. Within only a few short years, these circumstances had created a fertile ground for exploitation by the world’s superpowers. For the Soviet Union, the situation seemed to offer an opportunity to induce a shift in the existing alignment of nations by gaining a preponderating influence in what was by now beginning to be called the “Third World”. The response of the West—wherever development aid failed to retain the loyalties of recipient populations—was to resort to the encouragement and arming of a wide variety of authoritarian regimes.