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January 3, 2015

While besieged within the fort of Shaykh Tabarsi Quddus completed a commentary about Baha’u’llah comprising five hundred thousand verses

Though distant in body, these heroic souls are engaged in daily communion with their Beloved, partake of the bounty of His utterance, and share the supreme privilege of His companionship. Otherwise how could Shaykh Ahmad and Siyyid Kazim have known of the Bab? How could they have perceived the significance of the secret which lay hidden in Him? How could the Báb Himself, how could Quddus, His beloved disciple, have written in such terms, had not the mystic bond of the spirit linked their souls together? Did not the Báb, in the earliest days of His Mission, allude, in the opening passages of the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá', His commentary on the Surih of Joseph, to the glory and significance of the Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh? Was it not His purpose, by dwelling upon the ingratitude and malice which characterised the treatment of Joseph by his brethren, to predict what Bahá'u'lláh was destined to suffer at the hands of His brother and kindred? Was not Quddus, although besieged within the fort of Shaykh Tabarsi by the battalions and fire of a relentless enemy, engaged, both in the daytime and in the night-season, in the completion of his eulogy of Bahá'u'lláh -- that immortal commentary on the Sad of Samad which had already assumed the dimensions of five hundred thousand verses? Every verse of the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá', every word of the aforementioned commentary of Quddus, will, if dispassionately examined, bear eloquent testimony to this truth. 
(Shoghi Effendi, ‘The Dawn-Breakers’)