All the territories within the confines of the American, the European, the Asiatic and the African continents, assigned to ten Bahá’í National Assemblies, have, with the exception of Soviet-controlled territories, been opened. Of the seventy-two islands allocated to eleven Bahá’í National Assemblies no less than sixty-four have opened their doors to the vanguard of Bahá’í Crusaders, leaving Spitzbergen and Anticosti Island, situated respectively in the North Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, Nicobar Islands, Cocos Island and Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and Loyalty Islands, Sakhalin Island and Hainan Island in the Pacific Ocean—one of which is a native reserve, two of which are within the Soviet orbit, while four others are either privately owned or controlled by private companies—as yet unopened by the heroic band battling for the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh.
The northern limits of the Faith in Europe have been pushed beyond the Arctic Circle as far as 70 degrees latitude, through the settlement of a Bahá’í pioneer in Reals Kolen, Batsfjord, Finnmark, only three degrees below Arctic Bay, Franklin, the northernmost Bahá’í Center established, in the course of the opening year of the Ten-Year Plan, in the North American Continent. Valiant pioneers have, moreover, volunteered and are busily engaged in devising plans, or have actually embarked on the necessary preparations, to cross the mountain frontiers of Tibet, to enter the Ukraine, beyond the Iron Curtain, to gain admission to the few remaining, hitherto inaccessible islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and to penetrate deep into the Arctic Ocean as far as the icebound island of Spitzbergen.
NUMBER OF RACES, LANGUAGES, INCORPORATED ASSEMBLIES AUGMENTED
No less than forty races are now represented in the world-wide Bahá’í Community, which has been recently enriched through the enrollment of representatives of the Greek, the Berber, the Pigmy, the Somali and Guanche races. The number of localities where Bahá’ís now reside is well over thirty-two hundred, of which fourteen hundred are located in the Great Republic of the West, over six hundred in the Cradle of the Faith, more than three hundred in the African Continent, and over one hundred each in the Dominion of Canada, in Australasia, Latin America and in the Indian Sub-Continent. In the African Continent alone the number of members of the Negro race has, within the space of four years, increased to over thirteen hundred; the number of territories opened to the Faith has reached fifty-eight, the number of local Spiritual Assemblies already established and functioning is now fifty, the number of tribes represented within the swiftly expanding Bahá’í Community is now over ninety, whilst the number of African languages into which Bahá’í literature has been and is being translated exceeds fifty.
The total number of the European, the African, the Asiatic and American-Indian languages into which Bahá’í literature has been and is being translated is one hundred and sixty-seven, of which fifty-five are among those included in the provisions of the Ten-Year Plan, and twenty-four are supplementary languages into which the translation of Bahá’í literature has been spontaneously undertaken by the indefatigable band of pioneers and new converts in Africa, in South East Asia, in the South Pacific Islands and in the Antipodes.
The number of incorporated Bahá’í national and local Spiritual Assemblies has now reached one hundred and forty, seventy-five of which are located in the United States of America, the latest additions to this steadily mounting list in other continents being the Assemblies of London and Manchester in the British Isles; of Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic; of Kuching in Sarawak; of Jakarta in Indonesia; of Helsinki in Finland and of San Juan in Puerto Rico.