Social historians of the future, with a perspective far more dispassionate and universal than is presently possible, and benefiting from unimpeded access to all of the primary documentation, will study minutely the transformation that the Master achieved in these early years. Day after day, month after month, from a distant exile where He was endlessly harried by the host of enemies surrounding Him, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was able not only to stimulate the expansion of the Persian Bahá’í community, but to shape its consciousness and collective life. The result was the emergence of a culture, however localized, that was unlike anything humanity had ever known. Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself.
Although suffering intermittent atrocities at the hands of the Muslim clergy and their supporters—without protection from a succession of indolent Qájár monarchs—the Persian Bahá’í community found a new lease on life. The number of believers multiplied in all regions of the country, persons prominent in the life of society were enrolled, including several influential members of the clergy, and the forerunners of administrative institutions emerged in the form of rudimentary consultative bodies. The importance of the latter development alone would be impossible to exaggerate. In a land and among a people accustomed for centuries to a patriarchal system that concentrated all decision-making authority in the hands of an absolute monarch or Shí‘ih mujtáhids, a community representing a cross section of that society had broken with the past, taking into its own hands the responsibility for deciding its collective affairs through consultative action.
In the society and culture the Master was developing, spiritual energies expressed themselves in the practical affairs of day-to-day life. The emphasis in the teachings on education provided the impulse for the establishment of Bahá’í schools—including the Tarbíyat school for girls,[11] which gained national renown—in the capital, as well as in provincial centres. With the assistance of American and European Bahá’í helpers, clinics and other medical facilities followed. As early as 1925, communities in a number of cities had instituted classes in Esperanto, in response to their awareness of the Bahá’í teaching that some form of auxiliary international language must be adopted. A network of couriers, reaching across the land, provided the struggling Bahá’í community with the rudiments of the postal service that the rest of the country so conspicuously lacked. The changes under way touched the homeliest circumstances of day-to-day life. In obedience to the laws of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, for example, Persian Bahá’ís abandoned the use of the filthy public baths, prolific in their spread of infection and disease, and began to rely on showers that used fresh water.
All of these advances, whether social, organizational or practical, owed their driving force to the moral transformation taking place among the believers, a transformation that was steadily distinguishing Bahá’ís—even in the eyes of those hostile to the Faith—as candidates for positions of trust. That such far-reaching changes could so quickly set one segment of the Persian population apart from the largely antagonistic majority around it was a demonstration of the powers released by Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant with His followers and by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s assumption of the leadership this Covenant invested uniquely in Him.
Throughout these years Persian political life was in almost constant turmoil. While Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh’s immediate successor, Muẓaffari’d-Dín Sháh, was induced to approve a constitution in 1906, his successor, Muḥammad-‘Alí Sháh, recklessly dissolved the first two parliaments—in one case attacking with cannon fire the building where the legislature was meeting. The so-called “Constitutional Movement” that overthrew him and compelled the last of the Qájár kings, Aḥmad Sháh, to summon a third parliament was itself riven by competing factions and shamelessly manipulated by the Shí‘ih clergy. Efforts by Bahá’ís to play a constructive role in this process of modernization were repeatedly frustrated by royalist and popular factions alike, both of which were inspired by the prevailing religious prejudice and saw in the Bahá’í community merely a convenient scapegoat. Here again, only a more politically mature age than our own will be able to appreciate the way in which the Master—setting an example for future challenges that the Bahá’í community must inevitably encounter—guided the beleaguered community in doing all it could to encourage political reform, and then in being willing to step aside when these efforts were cynically rebuffed.
It was not only through His Tablets that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá exercised this influence on the rapidly developing Bahá’í community in the cradle of the Faith. Unlike Westerners, Persian believers were not distinguished from other peoples of the Near East by dress and appearance, and so travellers from the cradle of the Faith did not arouse the suspicion of the Ottoman authorities. Consequently, a steady stream of Persian pilgrims provided ‘Abdu’l-Bahá with another powerful means of inspiring the friends, guiding their activities, and drawing them ever more deeply into an understanding of Bahá’u’lláh’s purpose. Some of the greatest names in Persian Bahá’í history were among those who journeyed to ‘Akká and returned to their homes prepared to give their lives if necessary for the achievement of the Master’s vision. The immortal Varqá and his son Rúḥu’lláh were among this privileged number, as were Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar ‘Alí, Mírzá Abu’l Faḍl, Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí Afnán and four distinguished Hands of the Cause, Ibn-i-Abhar, Ḥájí Mullá Alí Akbar, Adíbu’l-Ulamá and Ibn-i-Aṣdaq. The spirit that today sustains Persian pioneers in every part of the world and that plays so creative a role in the building of Bahá’í community life runs like a straight line through family after family back to those heroic days. In retrospect, it is apparent that the phenomenon we today know as the twin processes of expansion and consolidation itself had its origin in those marvellous years.
Inspired by the Master’s words and the accounts brought back from the Holy Land, Persian believers arose to undertake travel-teaching activities in the Far East. During the latter years of Bahá’u’lláh’s Ministry, communities had been established in India and Burma, and the Faith carried as far as China; and this work was now reinforced. A demonstration of the new powers released in the Cause was the erection in the Russian province of Turkestan, where a vigorous Bahá’í community life had also developed, of the first Bahá’í House of Worship in the world,[12] a project inspired by the Master and guided, from its inception, by His advice.
It was this broad range of activities, carried out by an increasingly confident body of believers and stretching from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, that built the base of support from which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was able to pursue the promising opportunities which, as the new century opened, had already begun to unfold in the West. Not the least important feature of this base was its embrace of representatives of the Orient’s great diversity of racial, religious and national backgrounds. This achievement provided ‘Abdu’l-Bahá with the examples on which He would repeatedly draw in His proclamation to Western audiences of the integrating forces that had been released through Bahá’u’lláh’s advent.
The greatest victory of these early years was the Master’s success in constructing on Mount Carmel, on the spot designated for it by Bahá’u’lláh and through immense effort, a mausoleum for the remains of the Báb, which had been brought at great risk and difficulty to the Holy Land. Shoghi Effendi has explained that whereas in past ages the blood of martyrs was the seed of personal faith, in this day it has constituted the seed of the administrative institutions of the Cause.[13] Such an insight lends special meaning to the way in which the Administrative Centre of Bahá’u’lláh’s World Order would take shape under the shadow of the Shrine of the Faith’s Martyr-Prophet. Shoghi Effendi sets the Master’s achievement in global and historical perspective:
For, just as in the realm of the spirit, the reality of the Báb has been hailed by the Author of the Bahá’í Revelation as “the Point round Whom the realities of the Prophets and Messengers revolve,” so, on this visible plane, His sacred remains constitute the heart and center of what may be regarded as nine concentric circles,[14] paralleling thereby, and adding further emphasis to the central position accorded by the Founder of our Faith to One “from Whom God hath caused to proceed the knowledge of all that was and shall be,” “the Primal Point from which have been generated all created things.”[15]