Social historians of the future, with a perspective far more
dispassionate and universal than is presently possible, and benefiting from
unimpeded access to all of the primary documentation, will study minutely the
transformation that the Master achieved in these early years.[of His Ministry]
Day after day, month after month, from a distant exile where He was endlessly
harried by the host of enemies surrounding Him, ‘Abdu’l Bahá was able not only
to stimulate the expansion of the Persian Bahá’í community, but to shape its
consciousness and collective life. The result was the emergence of a culture,
however localized, that was unlike anything humanity had ever known. Our
century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new
order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of
a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that
saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself.
(From ‘Century of Light’,
a document prepared under the supervision of the Universal House of Justice and
published in 2001)
