One hundred years ago, [1873] in a room overlooking a dusty
square in the ancient seaport of 'Akká, was penned a Book that will come to be
recognized as the charter of world civilization. Its Author, Bahá'u'lláh, 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 'Akká.
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 (From Introduction to 'Synopsis and Codification of the Kitab-i-Aqdas')
