We can discover a no less distinct gradation in the
character of the opposition it has had to encounter—an opposition, at first
kindled in the bosom of Shi‘ah Islám, which, at a later stage, gathered
momentum with the banishment of Bahá’u’lláh to the domains of the Turkish Sulṭán
and the consequent hostility of the more powerful Sunní hierarchy and its
Caliph, the head of the vast majority of the followers of Muhammad—an
opposition which, now, through the rise of a divinely appointed Order in the
Christian West, and its initial impact on civil and ecclesiastical
institutions, bids fair to include among its supporters established governments
and systems associated with the most ancient, the most deeply entrenched
sacerdotal hierarchies in Christendom. We can, at the same time, recognize,
through the haze of an ever-widening hostility, the progress, painful yet
persistent, of certain communities within its pale through the stages of
obscurity, of proscription, of emancipation, and of recognition—stages that must
needs culminate in the course of succeeding centuries, in the establishment of
the Faith, and the founding, in the plenitude of its power and authority, of
the world-embracing Bahá’í Commonwealth.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘Preface to God
Passes By’)