Announce to National Assemblies that Majdi’d-Dín, the most redoubtable adversary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, denounced by Him as the incarnation of Satan and who played a predominant part in kindling the hostility of ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd and Jamál Páshá, and who was the chief instigator of Covenant-breaking and archbreaker of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant, and who above sixty years labored with fiendish ingenuity and guile to undermine its foundations, miserably perished struck with paralysis affecting his limbs and tongue. Dispensation of Providence prolonged the span of his infamous life to a hundred years, enabling him to witness the extinction of his cherished hopes and the disintegration with dramatic rapidity of the infernal crew he unceasingly incited and zealously directed, and the triumphant progress and glorious termination of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s thirty-year ministry as well as evidences of the rise and establishment in all continents of the globe of the administrative order, child of the divinely-appointed Covenant and harbinger of the world-encircling order.
—Shoghi
[Cablegram, June 3, 1955]
World-Wide Reverberations
Mysterious dispensations of ever-watchful Providence, hastening, through turmoil and trial, the triumph of His undefeatable Faith, dictating at this critical hour the sudden deterioration of the situation confronting the largest community of the Bahá’í world, as evidenced by the violent recrudescence of the persecution afflicting intermittently, for over a century, its members residing in Bahá’u’lláh’s native land.
Following the seizure and the destruction of the dome of the community’s national administrative headquarters, the occupation of similar institutions in all provinces, the government declaration to the Majlis outlawing the Faith and a virulent press and radio campaign, distorting its history, calumniating its Founders, misrepresenting its tenets and obscuring its aims and purposes, a series of atrocities has been perpetrated in rapid succession throughout the length and breadth of the land against members of a sorely-tried community.
The House of the Báb, the foremost Shrine in Írán, has been twice desecrated and severely damaged; Bahá’u’lláh’s ancestral Home at Takur occupied; the house of the Báb’s uncle razed to the ground; shops, farms plundered; crops burned, livestock destroyed; bodies disinterred in the cemeteries and mutilated; private houses broken into, damaged and looted; adults execrated and beaten; young women abducted and forced to marry Muslims; children mocked, reviled, beaten and expelled from the schools; boycott by butchers and bakers imposed; fifteen-year-old girl raped; eleven-month-old baby trampled underfoot; and pressure brought to bear upon believers to recant their Faith.
More recently a family of seven, the oldest eighty, the youngest nineteen, residing in Hurmuzak of the Province of Yazd, were set upon by a mob two thousand strong, accompanied by music of drums and trumpets, which hacked them to pieces with spades and axes. Meanwhile an official circular has been issued by the Prime Minister, addressed to Government Departments ordering the expulsion of all Bahá’í employes refusing to recant.