In India alone, over 150,000 new believers have joined the
Baha'i community… 
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| circa 1935: views of Bábíyyih |
It was at the request of this same prelate [the Imám-Jum‘ih
of Isfahán] that the Báb, one night, after supper, revealed His well-known
commentary on the súrih of Va’l-‘Asr. Writing with astonishing rapidity, He, in
a few hours, had devoted to the exposition of the significance of only the
first letter of that súrih—a letter which Shaykh Ahmad-i-Ahsá’í had stressed,
and which Bahá’u’lláh refers to in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas—verses that equalled in
number a third of the Qur’án, a feat that called forth such an outburst of
reverent astonishment from those who witnessed it that they arose and kissed
the hem of His robe.
O God! Thou pure Lord! Thanks be unto Thee, that the
mountains and deserts were traversed and the great Atlantic was crossed until
we reached this continent and in this country, we have mentioned Thy name and
fame with our tongue. Even in this church, like unto Elijah, we have proclaimed
Thy Kingdom.
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| Isfahan 1839 |
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| Portrait of Muhammad Shah and his Vizier Haj Mirza Aghasi |
With the Báb’s return to Shíráz the initial collision of
irreconcilable forces may be said to have commenced…The people of Shíráz were
by that time wild with excitement. A violent controversy was raging in the
masjids, the madrisihs, the bazaars, and other public places. Peace and
security were gravely imperiled. Fearful, envious, thoroughly angered, the
mullás were beginning to perceive the seriousness of their position.
With the Báb’s return to Shíráz the initial collision of
irreconcilable forces may be said to have commenced…Mullá Sádiq-i-Khurásání,
impelled by the injunction of the Báb in the Khasá’il-i-Sab‘ih to alter the
sacrosanct formula of the adhán, sounded it in its amended form before a scandalized
congregation in Shíráz, and was instantly arrested, reviled, stripped of his
garments, and scourged with a thousand lashes. The villainous Husayn Khán, the
Nizámu’d-Dawlih, the governor of Fárs, who had read the challenge thrown out in
the Qayyúmu’l-Asmá’, having ordered that Mullá Sádiq together with Quddús and
another believer be summarily and publicly punished, caused their beards to be
burned, their noses pierced, and threaded with halters; then, having been led
through the streets in this disgraceful condition, they were expelled from the
city.
With the Báb’s return to Shíráz the initial collision of
irreconcilable forces may be said to have commenced. Already the energetic and
audacious Mullá ‘Alíy-i-Basṭámí, one of the Letters of the Living, “the first
to leave the House of God (Shíráz) and the first to suffer for His sake,” who,
in the presence of one of the leading exponents of Shí‘ah Islám, the far-famed
Shaykh Muhammad Hasan, had audaciously asserted that from the pen of his
new-found Master within the space of forty-eight hours, verses had streamed
that equalled in number those of the Qur’án, which it took its Author
twenty-three years to reveal, had been excommunicated, chained, disgraced,
imprisoned, and, in all probability, done to death.
Already within the space of less than two years it had
kindled the passions of friend and foe alike. The outbreak of the conflagration
did not even await the return to His native city of the One Who had generated
it. The implications of a Revelation, thrust so dramatically upon a race so
degenerate, so inflammable in temper, could indeed have had no other
consequence than to excite within men’s bosoms the fiercest passions of fear,
of hate, of rage and envy. A Faith Whose Founder did not content Himself with
the claim to be the Gate of the Hidden Imám, Who assumed a rank that excelled
even that of the Sáhibu’z-Zamán, Who regarded Himself as the precursor of one
incomparably greater than Himself, Who peremptorily commanded not only the
subjects of the Sháh, but the monarch himself, and even the kings and princes
of the earth, to forsake their all and follow Him, Who claimed to be the
inheritor of the earth and all that is therein—a Faith Whose religious
doctrines, Whose ethical standards, social principles and religious laws
challenged the whole structure of the society in which it was born, soon
ranged, with startling unanimity, the mass of the people behind their priests,
and behind their chief magistrate, with his ministers and his government, and welded
them into an opposition sworn to destroy, root and branch, the movement
initiated by One Whom they regarded as an impious and presumptuous pretender.
The Báb’s return to His native land (Safar 1261)
(February–March, 1845) was the signal for a commotion that rocked the entire
country. The fire which the declaration of His mission had lit was being fanned
into flame through the dispersal and activities of His appointed disciples.
In India alone, over 150,000 new believers have joined the
Baha'i community…
…we can even bear witness to the marked improvement in the
conditions surrounding the pilgrimages performed by its devoted adherents to
its consecrated shrines at its world center—pilgrimages originally arduous,
perilous, tediously long, often made on foot, at times ending in
disappointment, and confined to a handful of harassed Oriental followers,
gradually attracting, under steadily improving circumstances of security and
comfort, an ever swelling number of new converts converging from the four
corners of the globe, and culminating in the widely publicized yet sadly
frustrated visit of a noble Queen, who, at the very threshold of the city of
her heart’s desire, was compelled, according to her own written testimony, to
divert her steps, and forego the privilege of so priceless a benefit.
We can likewise discern a no less appreciable advance in the
rise of its institutions, whether as administrative centers or places of
worship—institutions, clandestine and subterrene in their earliest beginnings,
emerging imperceptibly into the broad daylight of public recognition, legally
protected, enriched by pious endowments, ennobled at first by the erection of
the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of ‘Ishqábád, the first Bahá’í House of Worship, and more
recently immortalized, through the rise in the heart of the North American
continent of the Mother Temple of the West, the forerunner of a divine, a
slowly maturing civilization.
In reviewing the religious history of the Pacific during the
Baha'i Dispensation we recall that it was only a short time prior to the
Declaration of the Bab that the Teachings of Christ spread throughout these
islands; that the Teachings of Baha'u'llah were first proclaimed there when the
Hand of the Cause Agnes Alexander arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in December
1901; that at the beginning of the World Crusade in 1953 only a handful of
islands had had any contact with the Faith; and that at Ridvan 1959 when the
first regional National Spiritual Assembly of the South Pacific was established
in Suva there were in its area but twelve Local Spiritual Assemblies in nine
island groups. Witness now what has happened in the quarter century since 1959.