One hundred years ago,[as of April 1973] in a room
overlooking a dusty square in the ancient seaport of 'Akka, was penned a Book
that will come to be recognized as the charter of world civilization. Its
Author, Baha'u'llah, had for more than a quarter of a century endured
tribulation upon tribulation. His Forerunner had been martyred; His young Son,
the Purest Branch, and some twenty-thousand believers, men, women and children,
had given their lives that the new Revelation might live. He Himself had been
tortured, imprisoned, despoiled of His worldly goods, betrayed by His
half-brother, and had been subjected, with His family and a small band of
followers, to successive exiles and finally to incarceration in the
pestilential Turkish prison-city of 'Akka. His enemies, determined to
obliterate His Cause, had all unwittingly served to fulfil the ancient purpose
of God by bringing to the Holy Land the One Who was destined to establish the
Kingdom of God on earth. With His arrival the time for the revelation of the
Law of that Kingdom had come.
(The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1973)
