Century of Light

by Bahá'í International Community

The birth of the United Nations opened to the Faith a far broader and more effective forum for its efforts toward exerting a spiritual influence on the life of society. As early as 1947, a special “Palestine Committee” of the United Nations solicited the views of the Guardian on the future of that mandated territory. His response to the inquiry provided an opportunity for him to forward an authoritative exposition of the history and teachings of the Cause itself. That same year, with Shoghi Effendi’s encouragement, the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada submitted to the international organization a document entitled “A Bahá’í Declaration on Human Obligations and Rights”, which was to inspire the work of Bahá’í writers and spokespersons over the decades that followed.[136] A year later the eight National Spiritual Assemblies then in existence secured from the responsible United Nations body accreditation for “The Bahá’í International Community” as an international non-governmental organization.

It was not only the Faith’s slowly emerging relationship with the new international order that elicited support of this kind from the Guardian. The pages of God Passes By and Amatu’l-Bahá’s memoirs of the Guardian are filled with references to responses that influential individuals and organizations made to initiatives taken by Shoghi Effendi and to the events around the world in which Bahá’í representatives were invited to participate. In the perspective of history, one is struck by the vast disparity between many of these relatively inconsequential occasions and the attention given them by a figure whose work was not only of enormous importance to humanity’s future, but who understood fully the relative significance of events unfolding around him. What the Bahá’í community has been given in this careful record is a guide to the way that it must take up the growing opportunities born out of modest beginnings.

From the moment of its accreditation, the Bahá’í International Community began to play an energetic role in United Nations’ affairs. An activity that won it much appreciation was a programme carried out, through the expanding network of Bahá’í Assemblies, to provide the public with information about the United Nations itself, and which gave generous support to struggling United Nations associations throughout the world. By 1970, the Community had secured consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This was followed in 1974 by the granting of formal association with the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and in 1976 by the acquisition of consultative status with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The influence and expertise developed during these years showed their capacity, in 1955 and 1962, when the Community was successful in securing United Nations’ intervention on behalf of the believers suffering persecution in Iran and Morocco, respectively.

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In 1980, the patient external affairs activities of the National Spiritual Assemblies and the Community’s United Nations Office were suddenly propelled into a new stage of their development. The catalyst was the attempt by the Shí‘ih clergy of Iran to exterminate the Cause in the land of its birth. The consequences were as little anticipated by the Faith’s persecutors as they were by its defenders.

Throughout the long decades in which the believers in the cradle of the Faith suffered intermittent persecution for their beliefs, the mullás, who instigated and led these attacks, acted in concert with the country’s succession of monarchs. The latter, ostensibly absolute in their authority, were in fact constrained by political calculations that rendered them vulnerable to outside pressures, particularly from Western governments. So it was that the outrage voiced by Russian, British and other diplomatic missions had compelled Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, against his will, to bring to an end the orgy of violence that took so many believers’ lives in the early 1850s and threatened that of Bahá’u’lláh Himself. During the twentieth century, his Qájár successors had been similarly concerned to placate the opinion of foreign governments. The pattern was repeated in 1955 when the second of the Pahlaví shahs, who had been induced by the mullás to approve a wave of anti-Bahá’í violence, was forced by United Nations’ protest and by objections on the part of the American government to abruptly halt the campaign—both interventions harbingers of things to come.

Such checks on the clergy’s behaviour seemed to have been swept away by the Islamic revolution of 1979. Suddenly, the mullás were themselves in power, appointing their own nominees to the highest positions in the new republic, and eventually taking over these posts directly. “Revolutionary courts” were set up, answering only to the senior clergy. An army of “revolutionary guards”, far more effective than the shah’s secret police, and quite as brutal, took over control of every aspect of public life.

While the attention of the new ruling caste was focused chiefly on what it believed were threats from foreign governments, influential elements within it saw an opportunity at last to destroy the Iranian Bahá’í community.[137] The harrowing details of the campaign that followed need no review here. Their significance lies, rather, in the response made to these attacks by thousands of individual Bahá’ís—men, women and children—throughout the country. Their refusal to compromise their faith, even at the cost of their lives, inspired in their fellow believers throughout the world a heightened dedication to the Cause for which these sacrifices were being made. It was not, however, only the members of the Faith who were affected by these events. Decades earlier, in 1889, a distinguished Western commentator on the heroism of the dawn-breakers of the Faith had prophetically written of the sufferings of the early believers:

It is the lives and deaths of these, their hope which knows no despair, their love which knows no cooling, their steadfastness which knows no wavering, which stamp this wonderful movement with a character entirely its own.... It is not a small or easy thing to endure what these have endured, and surely what they deemed worth life itself is worth trying to understand. I say nothing of the mighty influence which, as I believe, the Bábí [sic] faith will exert in the future, nor of the new life it may perchance breathe into a dead people; for, whether it succeed or fail, the splendid heroism of the Bábí martyrs is a thing eternal and indestructible.... But what I cannot hope to have conveyed to you is the terrible earnestness of these men, and the indescribable influence which this earnestness, combined with other qualities, exerts on any one who has actually been brought in contact with them.[138]

These words prefigured the rise of a similar sentiment among non-Bahá’í observers during the Islamic revolutionary years; and this was to become one of the most powerful forces propelling the emergence of the Cause from obscurity. Captured in those early words, too, was the fundamentally spiritual nature of what has always been at stake in the cradle of the Faith. Beyond a revulsion at the senseless brutality of the persecution, a growing body of foreign opinion has been profoundly moved by the response of the Iranian Bahá’ís.