The Cause of God must be protected from the enemies of the
Faith, and from those who sow seeds of doubt in the hearts of the believers,
and the greatest of all protections is knowledge: there is no doubt that the
silliest of all charges ever made is that the “Will and Testament” of the
Master is a forgery! It is all in His own hand, sealed in more than one place
with His own seal, and was opened after His death by some members of His own
family, who took it from His own safe, in this house, and from that day it has
been kept in the safe under lock and key. The charges of Mrs. White were the
result of an unbalanced mind. No other enemy, even those who were shrewd and
clever, made this foolish accusation! The case of Aḥmad Sohrab is, for one who
has had any experience of orientals and of psychology, easily understandable.
He was, for some years the secretary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and enjoyed, as a result
of this and the fact that he accompanied Him to America, (to be sure with a
number of other Persians), a great deal of attention from the Bahá’ís who
looked up to him and admired him. However, since the Master’s Will was read,
and the administrative order, under the Guardianship, began to be developed, he
became cognizant of the fact that his personal ambition for leadership would
have to be subordinated to some degree of supervision; that he would have to
obey the National and local assemblies—just like every other Bahá’í, and could
not be free to teach wholly independent of any advice or supervision. This was
the beginning of the defection which in the end took him outside the pale of
the Faith: he refused not to be handled always as an exception, a privileged
exception. In fact, if we keenly analyse it, it is almost invariably the
soaring ambition and deep self-love of people that has led them to leave the
Faith. Towards the end Sohrab used, in the course of his lectures, to
incorporate quotation after quotation of Bahá’u’lláh’s words in his lectures,
without once stating they were Bahá’u’lláh’s, and when the believers
remonstrated with him over this plagiarism, it had no effect. After he had, of
his own accord, left the organized body of the Faith and refused to be
reconciled with it, he began to attack the administrators of it, first the
American N.S.A., then the entire administrative order, and in the end the
Guardian. What he teaches at present is so far divorced from our beloved Faith,
and so tinged with the doctrines of many “cults” which we see thriving at
present, as to be almost unrecognizable. Sohrab’s influence and activities in
America have waned greatly, and he seems to now feel his only chance of causing
mischief is to be active with his “caravan” movement abroad. The books and
articles he published attacking the Guardian and, in fact, everything
established in the Master’s Will, had no effect, and far from succeeding in
causing any breach in the Faith in America, some of the very few who followed
him out of the Cause, gave him up, and returned to serve the Cause with
redoubled enthusiasm!
