Born [‘Abdu’l-Baha] in the very year that witnessed the
inception of the Bábí Revelation; baptized with the initial fires of
persecution that raged around that nascent Cause; an eyewitness, when a boy of
eight, of the violent upheavals that rocked the Faith which His Father had
espoused; sharing with Him, the ignominy, the perils, and rigors consequent
upon the successive banishments from His native-land to countries far beyond
its confines; arrested and forced to support, in a dark cell, the indignity of
imprisonment soon after His arrival in Akká; the object of repeated
investigations and the target of continual assaults and insults under the
despotic rule of Sultán ‘Abdu’l-Hamíd, and later under the ruthless military
dictatorship of the suspicious and merciless Jamál Páshá—He, too, the Center
and Pivot of Bahá’u’lláh’s peerless Covenant and the perfect Exemplar of His
teachings, was made to taste, at the hands of potentates, ecclesiastics,
governments and peoples, the cup of woe which the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, as well
as so many of their followers, had drained.
- Shoghi Effendi (From a letter
dated March 28, 1941, published as: ‘The Promised One Is Come’)
