…the Bábí Revelation had been born in darkest Persia, in the
city of Shíráz. Despite the cruel captivity to which its Author had been
subjected, the stupendous claims He had voiced had been proclaimed by Him
before a distinguished assemblage in Tabríz, the capital of Ádhirbayján.
In the hamlet of Badasht the Dispensation which His Faith had ushered in
had been fearlessly inaugurated by the champions of His Cause. In the midst of the hopelessness and agony of the Síyáh-Chál of Tihrán,
nine years later, that Revelation had, swiftly and mysteriously been brought to
sudden fruition. The process of rapid deterioration in the fortunes of that
Faith, which had gradually set in, and was alarmingly accelerated during the
years of Bahá’u’lláh’s withdrawal to Kurdistán, had, in a masterly fashion
after His return from Sulaymáníyyih, been arrested and reversed. The ethical,
the moral and doctrinal foundations of a nascent community had been
subsequently, in the course of His sojourn in Baghdád, unassailably
established. And finally, in the Garden of Ridván, on the eve of His banishment
to Constantinople, the ten-year delay, ordained by an inscrutable Providence,
had been terminated through the Declaration of His Mission and the visible
emergence of what was to become the nucleus of a world-embracing Fellowship.
What now remained to be achieved was the proclamation, in the city of
Adrianople, of that same Mission to the world’s secular and ecclesiastical
leaders, to be followed, in successive decades, by a further unfoldment, in the
prison-fortress of Akká, of the principles and precepts constituting the
bedrock of that Faith, by the formulation of the laws and ordinances designed
to safeguard its integrity, by the establishment, immediately after His
ascension, of the Covenant designed to preserve its unity and perpetuate its
influence, by the prodigious and world-wide extension of its activities, under
the guidance of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Center of that Covenant, and lastly, by the
rise, in the Formative Age of that Faith, of its Administrative Order, the
harbinger of its Golden Age and future glory.
(Shoghi Effendi, ‘God Passes by’)
