The immediate effect of the winning of the Ten Year Crusade and the
establishment of the Universal House of Justice was to give a powerful
impetus to the advance of the Cause. This time the progress--which affected
virtually every aspect of Baha'i life--took the form of long-range
developments that are best appreciated when the entire period since 1963
is viewed as a whole. During these crucial thirty-seven years the work
proceeded rapidly forward along two parallel tracks: the expansion and
consolidation of the Baha'i community itself and, along with it, a
dramatic rise in the influence the Faith came to exercise in the life of
society. While the range of Baha'i activities greatly diversified, most
such efforts tended to contribute directly to one or other of the two main
developments.
A decision taken by the House of Justice at an early point in the period
proved crucial to all aspects of both teaching and administrative
development. Realization that there was no successor to Shoghi Effendi
brought with it recognition that neither would the appointment of new
Hands of the Cause be any longer possible. How essential the functions of
this institution are to the progress of the Faith had been demonstrated
with unforgettable force during the anxious six years between 1957 and
1963. Accordingly, in pursuance of the mandate authorizing it to bring
into existence new Baha'i institutions,(119) as the needs of the Cause
require, the House of Justice created, in June 1968, the Continental
Boards of Counsellors. Empowered to extend into the future the functions
of the Hands of the Cause for the protection and propagation of the Faith,
the new institution assumed responsibility for guiding the work of the
already existing Auxiliary Boards and joined National Assemblies in
shouldering responsibilities for the advancement of the Faith. The great
victories celebrated at the end of the Nine Year Plan in 1973, splendid in
themselves, reflected the extraordinary ease with which the new
administrative agency had taken up its duties and the eagerness with which
it had been welcomed by believers and Assemblies alike. The moment was
marked by another major development of the Administrative Order, the
creation of the International Teaching Centre, the Body that would carry
into the future certain of the responsibilities performed by the group of
"Hands of the Cause Residing in the Holy Land", and from this point on
coordinate the work of the Boards of Counsellors around the world.
Envisioning the course that the growth of the Cause would follow, Shoghi
Effendi had written of "the launching of worldwide enterprises destined to
be embarked upon, in future epochs of that same [Formative] Age, by the
Universal House of Justice, that will symbolize the unity and coordinate
and unify the activities of ... National Assemblies."(120) These global
undertakings began in 1964 with the Nine Year Plan, to be followed by a
Five Year Plan (1974), a Seven Year Plan (1979), a Six Year Plan (1986), a
Three Year Plan (1993), a Four Year Plan (1996), and a Twelve Month Plan
that ended the century. The shifts in emphasis that distinguished these
successive endeavours from one another provide a useful index to the
growth that the Cause was experiencing in these decades and the new
opportunities and challenges that this growth produced. Far more important
than the differences amongst them, however, is the fact that the
activities called for in each Plan were extensions of initiatives which
had been set in motion by Shoghi Effendi, who in turn had seized up and
elaborated strands woven by the Faith's Founders--the training of Spiritual
Assemblies; the translation, production and distribution of literature;
the encouragement of universal participation by the friends; attention to
the spiritual enrichment of Baha'i life; efforts toward the involvement of
the Baha'i community in the life of society; the strengthening of Baha'i
family life; and the education of children and youth. While these various
processes will continue indefinitely to unfold new possibilities, the fact
that each originated in the creative impulse of the Revelation itself
lends to everything the Baha'i community does a unifying force that is
both the secret and the guarantee of its ultimate success.
The first two decades of the process were one of the most enriching
periods that the Baha'i community has experienced. Within a remarkably
short period of time, the number of Local Spiritual Assemblies multiplied
and the ethnic and cultural diversity of the membership became an ever
more distinctive feature of Baha'i life. Although the breakdown of society
was creating problems for Baha'i administrative institutions, a related
effect was to generate a greatly increased interest in the message of the
Cause. At the outset, the community was introduced to the challenge of
"teaching the masses". By 1967, it was being called on "to launch, on a
global scale and to every stratum of human society, an enduring and
intensive proclamation of the healing message that the Promised One has
come...."(121)
As believers from urban centres set out on sustained campaigns to reach
the mass of the world's peoples living in villages and rural areas, they
encountered a receptivity to Baha'u'llah's message far beyond anything
they had imagined possible. While the response usually took forms very
different from the ones with which the teachers had been familiar, the new
declarants were eagerly welcomed. Tens of thousands of new Baha'is poured
into the Cause throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America, often
representing the greater part of whole rural villages. The 1960s and 1970s
were heady days for a Baha'i community most of whose growth outside of
Iran had been slow and measured. To the friends in the Pacific went the
great distinction of attracting into the Cause the first Head of State,
His Highness Malietoa Tanumafili II of Samoa, a distinction for which only
future events will provide an adequate frame.
At the heart of the development, as has been the case in the life of the
Cause from the outset, was the commitment made by the individual believer.
Already, during the ministry of Shoghi Effendi, far-sighted persons had
taken the initiative to reach indigenous populations in such countries as
Uganda, Bolivia and Indonesia. During the Nine Year Plan, ever larger
numbers of such teachers were drawn into the work, particularly in India,
several countries in Africa, and most regions of Latin America, as well as
in islands of the Pacific, Alaska and among the native peoples of Canada
and the rural black population of the southern United States. Pioneering
brought vital support to the work, encouraging the emergence of groups of
teachers among the indigenous believers themselves.
Even so, it soon became apparent that individual initiative alone, however
inspired and energetic, could not respond adequately to the opportunities
opening up. The result was to launch Baha'i communities on a wide range of
collective teaching and proclamation projects recalling the heroic days of
the dawn-breakers. Teams of ardent teachers found that it was now possible
to introduce the message of the Faith not merely to a succession of
inquirers, but to entire groups and even whole communities. The tens of
thousands became hundreds of thousands. The Faith's growth meant that
members of Spiritual Assemblies, whose experience had been limited to
confirming the understanding of the Faith of individual applicants raised
in cultures of doubt or religious fanaticism, had to adjust to expressions
of belief on the part of whole groups of people to whom religious
awareness and response were normal features of daily life.
No segment of the community made a more energetic or significant
contribution to this dramatic process of growth than did Baha'i youth. In
their exploits during these crucial decades--as, indeed, throughout the
entire history of the past one hundred and fifty years--one is reminded
again and again that the great majority of the band of heroes who launched
the Cause on its course in the middle years of the nineteenth century were
all of them young people. The Bab Himself declared His mission when He was
twenty-five years old, and Anis, who attained the imperishable glory of
dying with his Lord, was only a youth. Quddus responded to the Revelation
at the age of twenty-two. Zaynab, whose age was never recorded, was a very
young woman. _Sh_ay_kh_ 'Ali, so greatly cherished by both Quddus and
Mulla Husayn, was martyred at the age of twenty, while
Muhammad-i-Baqir-Naq_sh_ laid down his life when he was only fourteen.
Tahirih was in her twenties when she embraced the Bab's Cause.
Following in the path that these extraordinary figures had opened,
thousands of young Baha'is arose in subsequent years to proclaim the
message of the Faith throughout all five continents and the scattered
islands of the globe. As an international youth culture began to emerge in
society during the late nineteen sixties and seventies, believers with
talent in music, drama and the arts demonstrated something of what Shoghi
Effendi had meant when he pointed out: "That day will the Cause spread
like wildfire when its spirit and teachings are presented on the stage or
in art and literature...."(122) The spirit of zeal and enthusiasm
characteristic of youth has also provided an ongoing challenge to the
general body of the community to explore ever more audaciously the
revolutionary social implications of Baha'u'llah's teachings.
The burst of enrolments brought with it, however, equally great problems.
At the immediate level, the resources of Baha'i communities engaged in the
work were soon overwhelmed by the task of providing the sustained
deepening the masses of new believers needed and the consolidation of the
resulting communities and Spiritual Assemblies. Beyond that, cultural
challenges like those encountered by the early Persian believers who had
first sought to introduce the Faith in Western lands now replicated
themselves throughout the world. Theological and administrative principles
that might be of consuming interest to pioneers and teachers were seldom
those that were central to the concern of new declarants from very
different social and cultural backgrounds. Often, differences of view
about even such elementary matters as the use of time or simple social
conventions created gaps of understanding that made communication
extremely difficult.
Initially, such problems proved stimulating as both Baha'i institutions
and individual believers struggled to find new ways of looking at
situations--new ways, indeed, of understanding important passages in the
Baha'i Writings themselves. Determined efforts were made to respond to the
guidance of the World Centre that expansion and consolidation are twin
processes that must go hand in hand. Where hoped for results did not
readily materialize, however, a measure of discouragement frequently set
in. The initial rapid rise in enrolment rates slowed markedly in many
countries, tempting some Baha'i institutions and communities to turn back
to more familiar activities and more accessible publics.
The principal effect of the setbacks, however, was that they brought home
to communities that the high expectations of the early years were in some
respects quite unrealistic. Although the easy successes of the initial
teaching activities were encouraging, they did not, by themselves, build a
Baha'i community life that could meet the needs of its new members and be
self-generating. Rather, pioneers and new believers alike faced questions
for which Baha'i experience in Western lands--or even Iran--offered few
answers. How were Local Spiritual Assemblies to be established--and once
established, how were they to function--in areas where large numbers of new
believers had joined the Cause overnight, simply on the strength of their
spiritual apprehension of its truth? How, in societies dominated by men
since the dawn of time, were women to be accorded an equal voice? How was
the education of large numbers of children to be systematically addressed
in cultural situations where poverty and illiteracy prevailed? What
priorities should guide Baha'i moral teaching, and how could these
objectives best be related to prevailing indigenous conventions? How could
a vibrant community life be cultivated that would stimulate the spiritual
growth of its members? What priorities, too, should be set with respect to
the production of Baha'i literature, particularly given the sudden
explosion that had taken place in the number of languages represented in
the community? How could the integrity of the Baha'i institution of the
Nineteen Day Feast be maintained, while opening this vital activity to the
enriching influence of diverse cultures? And, in all areas of concern, how
were the necessary resources to be recruited, funded, and coordinated?
The pressure of these urgent and interlocking challenges launched the
Baha'i world on a learning process that has proved to be as important as
the expansion itself. It is safe to say that during these years there was
virtually no type of teaching activity, no combination of expansion,
consolidation and proclamation, no administrative option, no effort at
cultural adaptation that was not being energetically tried in some part of
the Baha'i world. The net result of the experience was an intensive
education of a great part of the Baha'i community in the implications of
the mass teaching work, an education that could have occurred in no other
way. By its very nature, the process was largely local and regional in
focus, qualitative rather than quantitative in its gains, and incremental
rather than large-scale in the progress achieved. Had it not been for the
painstaking, always difficult and often frustrating consolidation work
pursued during these years, however, the subsequent strategy of
systematizing the promotion of entry by troops would have had very little
with which to work.
The fact that the Baha'i message was now penetrating the lives not merely
of small groups of individuals but of whole communities also had the
effect of reviving a vital feature of an earlier stage in the advancement
of the Cause. For the first time in decades, the Faith found itself once
more in a situation where teaching and consolidation were inseparably
bound up with social and economic development. In the early years of the
century, under the guidance of the Master and the Guardian, the Iranian
believers--denied the opportunity to participate equally in whatever
limited benefits the society of the day offered--had arisen to
painstakingly construct a comprehensive community life of a kind beyond
either the need or the reach of the relatively isolated Baha'i groups
across North America and Western Europe. In Iran, spiritual and moral
advancement, teaching activities, the creation of schools and clinics, the
building of administrative institutions, and the encouragement of
initiatives aimed at economic self-sufficiency and prosperity--all had been
from an early stage inseparable features of one organically unified
process of development. Now--in Africa, in Latin America, and parts of Asia
--the same challenges and opportunities had re-emerged.
While social and economic development activities had long been under way,
particularly in Latin America and Asia, these had been isolated projects
carried out by groups of believers under the guidance of individual
National Assemblies, and unrelated to any plan. In October 1983, however,
Baha'i communities throughout the world were called on to begin
incorporating such efforts into their regular programmes of work. An
Office of Social and Economic Development was created at the World Centre
to coordinate learning and help seek financial support.
The decade that followed saw wide experimentation in a field of work for
which most Baha'i institutions had little preparation. While striving to
benefit from the models being tried by the many development agencies
operating around the world, Baha'i communities faced the challenge of
relating what they found in various areas of concern--education, health,
literacy, agriculture and communications technology--to their understanding
of Baha'i principles. The temptation was great, given the magnitude of the
resources being invested by governments and foundations, and the
confidence with which this effort was pursued, merely to borrow methods
current at the moment or to adapt Baha'i efforts to prevailing theories.
As the work evolved, however, Baha'i institutions began turning their
attention to the goal of devising development paradigms that could
assimilate what they were observing in the larger society to the Faith's
unique conception of human potentialities.
Nowhere was the strategy of the successive Plans so impressively
vindicated as was the case in India. The community there has today become
a giant of the Cause, numbering well over a million souls. Its work
stretches across the expanse of a vast sub-continent, home to an immense
diversity of cultures, languages, ethnic groups and religious traditions.
In many respects, the experience of this greatly blessed body of believers
encapsulates the Baha'i world's struggles, experiments, setbacks and
victories throughout these critical three decades. The dramatic rise in
enrolments had brought with it all of the problems being encountered
elsewhere in the world, but on a massive scale. The long road leading the
Indian Baha'i community to its present-day eminence was beset with the
most painful difficulties, some of which threatened at times to overwhelm
the administrative resources available. The victories won, however,
provide a foretaste of the confirmations that will in time bless the
efforts of Baha'i communities struggling with the same challenges on other
continents. By 1985, the growth of the Faith in India had reached the
point where the needs and opportunities of so many diverse regions called
for more sharply focused attention than the National Spiritual Assembly
alone could provide. Thus was born the new institution of the Regional
Baha'i Council, setting in motion the process of administrative
decentralization that has since proven so effective in many other lands.
In 1986, the expansion and consolidation taking place in India were
befittingly crowned with the inauguration of the beautiful "Lotus Temple".
Although the project had raised optimistic expectations as to the impact
its completion would have on public recognition of the Faith, the reality
has infinitely surpassed the brightest of such hopes. Today, India's House
of Worship has become the foremost visitors' attraction on the
subcontinent, welcoming an average of over ten thousand visitors every
day, and featuring prominently in publications, films and television
productions. The interest aroused in a Faith that could inspire and embody
itself in so magnificent a creation has given new meaning to the
description by 'Abdu'l-Baha of Baha'i Temples as "silent teachers" of the
Faith.
The progress of the Indian Baha'i community, both in its internal
development and its relationship with the larger society, was illustrated
by a pioneering initiative undertaken in November 2000 in the field of
social and economic development. Taking advantage of the reputation it had
deservedly won among progressive circles in the country, the National
Spiritual Assembly hosted, in collaboration with the Baha'i International
Community's newly created Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity,(123)
a symposium on the subject of "Science, Religion and Development". The
project engaged the participation of over one hundred of the most
influential development organizations in the country and inspired national
media coverage. Marking out a distinctive Baha'i contribution to the
promotion of social advancement, the event set the stage for symposia of
the same kind in Africa, Latin America and other regions, where creative
Baha'i communities can help shape what may well become one of the Faith's
major success stories.
During these same years, the Asian continent also saw the sudden emergence
of the Malaysian Baha'i community as an engine of the expansion work,
winning its own goals with stunning speed and dispatching pioneers and
travelling teachers to neighbouring lands. A development that made this
dramatic advance possible was the bonds of spiritual partnership that had
been woven between believers of Chinese and Indian backgrounds. Visitors
to Malaysia spoke, with something approaching awe, of the way in which the
Malaysian community, although working under many constraints and
disabilities, seemed to be the very embodiment of the military metaphors
with which Shoghi Effendi's writings seek to capture the spirit of Baha'i
teaching efforts.
Neither the world-wide growth of the Baha'i community nor the process of
learning it was experiencing, however, tell the whole story of these
tumultuous and creative decades. When the history of the period is
eventually written, one of its most brilliant chapters will recount the
spiritual victories won by Baha'i communities, in Africa particularly, who
survived war, terror, political oppression and extreme privations, and who
emerged from these tests with their faith intact, determined to resume the
interrupted work of building a viable Baha'i collective life. The
community in Ethiopia, homeland of one of the world's oldest and richest
cultural traditions, succeeded in maintaining both the morale of its
members and the coherence of its administrative structures under
relentless pressure from a brutal dictatorship. Of the friends in other
countries on the continent, it may be truly said that their path of
faithfulness to the Cause led through a hell of suffering seldom equalled
in modern history. The annals of the Faith possess few more moving
testimonies to the sheer power of the spirit than the stories of courage
and purity of heart emerging from the inferno that engulfed the friends in
what was then Zaire, stories that will inspire generations to come and
represent priceless contributions to the creation of a global Baha'i
culture. Such countries as Uganda and Rwanda added unforgettable
achievements of their own to this record of heroic struggle.
Inspiring, too, was the demonstration of the capacity for renewal that is
inherent in the Cause and which emerged in Cambodian refugee camps along
the Thailand border. Through the heroic efforts of a handful of teachers,
Local Spiritual Assemblies were established among people who had survived
a campaign of genocide almost beyond the capacity of the human heart to
contemplate, who had lost countless loved ones as well as everything they
possessed in the way of material security, but in whom still burned the
longing of the human soul for spiritual truth. An extraordinary
achievement of a related kind was that of the Liberian Baha'i community.
Driven from their homes into exile in neighbouring lands, many of these
intrepid believers transported with them their whole community life,
setting up Local Spiritual Assemblies, carrying on teaching work,
continuing the education of their children, using their time to learn new
skills, and finding in music, dance and drama powers of the spirit that
helped keep hope alive until they could return to their country.
As the process of education in methods of mass teaching was taking place,
the Faith's membership was being transformed. In 1992, the Baha'i world
celebrated its second Holy Year, this one marking the centenary of the
ascension of Baha'u'llah and the promulgation of His Covenant. More
eloquently than words could have done, the ethnic, cultural and national
diversity of the 27,000 believers who gathered at the Javits Convention
Center in New York City--together with the thousands present at nine
auxiliary conferences in Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Nairobi, New
Delhi, Panama City, Singapore, Sydney and Western Samoa--provided
compelling evidence of the success of Baha'i teaching work around the
world. An affecting moment occurred when the network of satellite
broadcasts linked the gathering in Moscow with the one taking place in New
York City, and Baha'is everywhere thrilled to greetings in Russian--the
common language of some 280 million people from at least fifteen
countries--that proclaimed a new phase in humanity's response to
Baha'u'llah.
In the Moscow and Bucharest conferences could be glimpsed the rebirth of
Baha'i communities that had been nearly extinguished under the oppression
of the Soviet regime and its collaborators. One of the last three
surviving Hands of the Cause, 'Ali-Akbar Furutan, who had lived in Russia,
had the great joy of returning to Moscow, at the age of eighty-six, for
the inaugural election of the National Assembly of that country. Local
Spiritual Assemblies sprang up in all of the newly opened lands, and six
new National Spiritual Assemblies were elected. In a brief space of time,
pioneering and teaching activities in countries along the southern rim of
the former Soviet empire--where the Faith had been similarly
proscribed--soon brought into existence still more Local Assemblies and
eight additional National Spiritual Assemblies. Baha'i literature was
translated into a range of new languages, energetic steps were taken to
secure civil recognition of Baha'i institutions, and representatives from
Eastern Europe and the countries of the now vanished Soviet bloc began
participating with their fellow believers in the external affairs work of
the Faith at the international level.
Gradually, too, the message of the Faith began to find a welcome in many
parts of China and among Chinese populations abroad. Baha'i literature was
translated into Mandarin, university audiences in many Chinese cities
extended invitations to Baha'i scholars, a Centre for Baha'i Studies was
established at the prestigious Institute of World Religions in
Beijing,(124) which operates within the Academy of Social Sciences, and
many Chinese dignitaries have been generous in their appreciation of the
principles they discover in the Writings. In light of the high praise of
the Master for Chinese civilization and its role in humanity's future, one
begins to anticipate the creative contribution that believers from this
background will make to the intellectual and moral life of the Cause in
the years ahead.(125)
The significance of these three decades of struggle, learning and
sacrifice became apparent when the moment arrived to devise a global Plan
that would capitalize on the insights gained and the resources that had
been developed. The Baha'i community that set out on the Four Year Plan in
1996 was a very different one from the eager, but new and still
inexperienced body of believers who, in 1964, had ventured out on the
first of such undertakings that were no longer sustained by the guiding
hand of Shoghi Effendi. By 1996, it had become possible to see all of the
distinct strands of the enterprise as integral parts of one coherent
whole.
With this education had also come a much needed perspective on what had
been accomplished. The expansion of the Cause over the preceding three
decades had represented the response of several million human beings who
had been affected by their encounter with the message of Baha'u'llah to
the point that they were moved to identify themselves in varying degrees
with the Cause of God. They were aware that a new Messenger of the Divine
had appeared, had caught something of the spirit of faith, and had been
strongly affected by the Baha'i teaching of the oneness of humankind. A
small minority among them were able to go beyond this point. For the most
part, however, these friends were essentially recipients of teaching
programmes conducted by teachers and pioneers from outside. One of the
great strengths of the masses of humankind from among whom the newly
enrolled believers came lies in an openness of heart that has the
potentiality to generate lasting social transformation. The greatest
handicap of these same populations has so far been a passivity learned
through generations of exposure to outside influences which, no matter how
great their material advantages, have pursued agendas that were often
related only tangentially--if at all--to the realities of the needs and
daily lives of indigenous peoples.
The Four Year Plan, which was a major advance on those that immediately
preceded it, was designed to take advantage of the opportunities and
insights thus offered. The goal of advancing the process of entry by
troops became the single-minded aim of the enterprise. The lessons that
had been learned during earlier Plans now placed the emphasis on
developing the capacities of believers--wherever they might be--so that all
could arise as confident protagonists of the Faith's mission. The
instrument to accomplish this objective had been undergoing steady
refinement during the earlier Plans and had demonstrated its efficacy.
As with most of the other methods and activities by which the Faith was
advancing, this instrument had likewise been conceived decades earlier by
the Master, who calls in the Tablets of the Divine Plan for deepened
believers to "gather together the youths of the love of God in schools of
instruction and teach them all the divine proofs and irrefragable
arguments, explain and elucidate the history of the Cause, and interpret
also the prophecies and proofs which are recorded and are extant in the
divine books and epistles regarding the manifestation of the Promised
One...."(126) Pioneering work and organized training of this nature had
already been done in Iran, during the early years of the century, by the
much-loved Sadru's-Sudur.(127) As the years passed, winter and summer
schools had multiplied, and successive Plans also encouraged
experimentation in the development of Baha'i institutes.
By far the most significant advance in this latter respect occurred over a
period of more than two decades, beginning in the 1970s in Colombia, where
a systematic and sustained programme of education in the Writings was
devised and soon adopted in neighbouring countries. Influenced by the
Colombian community's parallel efforts in the field of social and economic
development, the breakthrough was all the more impressive in the fact that
it was achieved against a background of violence and lawlessness that was
deranging the life of the surrounding society.
The Colombian achievement proved a source of great inspiration and example
to Baha'i communities elsewhere in the world. By the time the Four Year
Plan ended, over one hundred thousand believers were involved world-wide
in the programmes of the more than three hundred permanent training
institutes. In accomplishing this goal, a majority of regional institutes
had carried the process a stage further by creating networks of "study
circles" which utilize the talents of believers to replicate the work of
the institute at a local level. It is already apparent that the success of
the institute work has significantly reinforced the long-term process by
which a universal system of Baha'i education will take shape.(128)
Although the struggles of these decades were relatively modest--at least
when set against the standard of the Heroic Age--they provide the present
generation of Baha'is with a window on what Shoghi Effendi describes as
the cyclical nature of the Faith's history: "a series of internal and
external crises, of varying severity, devastating in their immediate
effects, but each mysteriously releasing a corresponding measure of divine
power, lending thereby a fresh impulse to its unfoldment."(129) These
words put into perspective the succession of efforts, experiments,
heartbreaks and victories that characterized the beginning of large-scale
teaching, and prepared the Baha'i community for the much greater
challenges ahead.
Throughout history, the masses of humanity have been, at best, spectators
at the advance of civilization. Their role has been to serve the designs
of whatever elite had temporarily assumed control of the process. Even the
successive Revelations of the Divine, whose objective was the liberation
of the human spirit, were, in time, taken captive by "the insistent self",
were frozen into man-made dogma, ritual, clerical privilege and sectarian
quarrels, and reached their end with their ultimate purpose frustrated.
Baha'u'llah has come to free humanity from this long bondage, and the
closing decades of the twentieth century were devoted by the community of
His followers to creative experimentation with the means by which His
objective can be realized. The prosecution of the Divine Plan entails no
less than the involvement of the entire body of humankind in the work of
its own spiritual, social and intellectual development. The trials
encountered by the Baha'i community in the decades since 1963 are those
necessary ones that refine endeavour and purify motivation so as to render
those who would take part worthy of so great a trust. Such tests are the
surest evidences of that process of maturation which 'Abdu'l-Baha so
confidently described:
Some movements appear, manifest a brief period of activity, then
discontinue. Others show forth a greater measure of growth and strength,
but before attaining mature development, weaken, disintegrate and are lost
in oblivion.... There is still another kind of movement or cause which
from a very small, inconspicuous beginning goes forward with sure and
steady progress, gradually broadening and widening until it has assumed
universal dimensions. The Baha'i Movement is of this nature.(130)
X
Baha'u'llah's mission is not limited to the building of the Baha'i
community. The Revelation of God has come for the whole of humanity, and
it will win the support of the institutions of society to the extent that
they find in its example encouragement and inspiration for their efforts
to lay the foundations of a just society. To appreciate the importance of
this parallel concern, one has only to recall the time and care that
Baha'u'llah Himself devoted to cultivating relationships with government
officials, leaders of thought, prominent figures in various minority
groups, and the diplomatic representatives of foreign governments assigned
to service in the Ottoman empire. The spiritual effect of this effort is
apparent in the tributes paid to His character and principles by even such
bitter enemies as 'Ali Pa_sh_a and the Persian ambassador to
Constantinople, Mirza Husayn _Kh_an. The former, who condemned his
Prisoner to banishment in the penal colony at 'Akka, was nevertheless
moved to describe Him as "a man of great distinction, exemplary conduct,
great moderation, and a most dignified figure", whose teachings were, in
the minister's opinion "worthy of high esteem".(131) The latter, whose
machinations had been principally responsible for poisoning the minds of
'Ali Pa_sh_a and his colleagues, frankly admitted, in later years, the
great contrast between the moral and intellectual stature of his Enemy and
the harm done to Persian-Turkish relations by the reputation for greed and
dishonesty that characterized most of his other countrymen resident in
Constantinople.
From the beginning, 'Abdu'l-Baha took keen interest in efforts to bring
into existence a new international order. It is significant, for example,
that His early public references in North America to the purpose of His
visit there placed particular emphasis on the invitation of the organizing
committee of the Lake Mohonk Peace Conference for Him to address this
international gathering. He had also been generous in His encouragement of
the Central Organization for a Durable Peace at The Hague. He was,
however, entirely candid in the counsel He provided. Letters which the
Executive Committee of The Hague organization had written to Him during
the course of the war provided the opportunity for a response that drew
the organizers' attention to Baha'u'llah's enunciation of spiritual truths
which alone can provide a foundation for the realization of their aims:
O ye esteemed ones who are pioneers among the well-wishers of the world of
humanity!... At present Universal Peace is a matter of great importance,
but unity of conscience is essential, so that the foundation of this
matter may become secure, its establishment firm and its edifice
strong.... Today nothing but the power of the Word of God which
encompasses the realities of things can bring the thoughts, the minds, the
hearts and the spirits under the shade of one Tree. He is the potent in
all things, the vivifier of souls, the preserver and the controller of the
world of mankind.(132)
Beyond this, the list of influential persons with whom the Master spent
patient hours in both North America and Europe--particularly individuals
struggling to promote the goal of world peace and humanitarianism--reflects
His awareness of the responsibility the Cause has to humanity at large. As
the extraordinary response evoked by His passing testifies, He pursued
this course to the end of His life.
Shoghi Effendi took up this legacy almost immediately upon beginning his
ministry. As early as 1925, he encouraged the interest of an American
believer, Jean Stannard, to establish an "International Baha'i Bureau",
directing her to Geneva, seat of the League of Nations. While the Bureau
exercised no administrative authority, it acted, in the Guardian's words,
"as intermediary between Haifa and other Baha'i centers" and served as an
information "distributing center" in the heart of Europe, its role being
formally recognized when the League's publishing house solicited and
published an account of the Bureau's activities.(133)
As has so often been the case in the history of the Cause, an unexpected
crisis served to greatly advance Baha'i involvement with the larger
society at the international level. In 1928, Shoghi Effendi encouraged the
Spiritual Assembly of Baghdad to appeal to the League's Permanent Mandates
Commission against the seizure, by _Sh_i'ih opponents, of Baha'u'llah's
House in that city. Recognizing the wrong that had been done, the Council
of the League unanimously called on the British mandate authority, in
March 1929, to press the Iraqi government "with a view to the immediate
redress of the injustice suffered by the Petitioners". Repeated evasions
by the Iraqi government, including the violation of a solemn pledge on the
part of the monarch himself, resulted in the case dragging on for years
through successive sessions of the Mandates Commission, leaving the House
in the hands of those who had seized it, a situation that remains to this
day uncorrected.(134) Undeterred by this failure, Shoghi Effendi focused
the attention of the Baha'i community on the historic benefit that the
campaign had won for the Cause. As had earlier been the case with the
Sunni Muslim court's rejection of the appeal of an Egyptian Baha'i
community regarding marriage, the Guardian pointed out:
Suffice it to say that, despite these interminable delays, protests and
evasions ... the publicity achieved for the Faith by this memorable
litigation, and the defence of its cause--the cause of truth and justice--by
the world's highest tribunal, have been such as to excite the wonder of
its friends and to fill with consternation its enemies.(135)
The birth of the United Nations opened to the Faith a far broader and more
effective forum for its efforts toward exerting a spiritual influence on
the life of society. As early as 1947, a special "Palestine Committee" of
the United Nations solicited the views of the Guardian on the future of
that mandated territory. His response to the inquiry provided an
opportunity for him to forward an authoritative exposition of the history
and teachings of the Cause itself. That same year, with Shoghi Effendi's
encouragement, the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and
Canada submitted to the international organization a document entitled "A
Baha'i Declaration on Human Obligations and Rights", which was to inspire
the work of Baha'i writers and spokespersons over the decades that
followed.(136) A year later the eight National Spiritual Assemblies then
in existence secured from the responsible United Nations body
accreditation for "The Baha'i International Community" as an international
non-governmental organization.
It was not only the Faith's slowly emerging relationship with the new
international order that elicited support of this kind from the Guardian.
The pages of _God Passes By_ and Amatu'l-Baha's memoirs of the Guardian
are filled with references to responses that influential individuals and
organizations made to initiatives taken by Shoghi Effendi and to the
events around the world in which Baha'i representatives were invited to
participate. In the perspective of history, one is struck by the vast
disparity between many of these relatively inconsequential occasions and
the attention given them by a figure whose work was not only of enormous
importance to humanity's future, but who understood fully the relative
significance of events unfolding around him. What the Baha'i community has
been given in this careful record is a guide to the way that it must take
up the growing opportunities born out of modest beginnings.
From the moment of its accreditation, the Baha'i International Community
began to play an energetic role in United Nations' affairs. An activity
that won it much appreciation was a programme carried out, through the
expanding network of Baha'i Assemblies, to provide the public with
information about the United Nations itself, and which gave generous
support to struggling United Nations associations throughout the world. By
1970, the Community had secured consultative status with the United
Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This was followed in 1974 by
the granting of formal association with the United Nations Environmental
Programme (UNEP) and in 1976 by the acquisition of consultative status
with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). The influence and
expertise developed during these years showed their capacity, in 1955 and
1962, when the Community was successful in securing United Nations'
intervention on behalf of the believers suffering persecution in Iran and
Morocco, respectively.
* * * * *
In 1980, the patient external affairs activities of the National Spiritual
Assemblies and the Community's United Nations Office were suddenly
propelled into a new stage of their development. The catalyst was the
attempt by the _Sh_i'ih clergy of Iran to exterminate the Cause in the
land of its birth. The consequences were as little anticipated by the
Faith's persecutors as they were by its defenders.
Throughout the long decades in which the believers in the cradle of the
Faith suffered intermittent persecution for their beliefs, the mullas, who
instigated and led these attacks, acted in concert with the country's
succession of monarchs. The latter, ostensibly absolute in their
authority, were in fact constrained by political calculations that
rendered them vulnerable to outside pressures, particularly from Western
governments. So it was that the outrage voiced by Russian, British and
other diplomatic missions had compelled Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, against his
will, to bring to an end the orgy of violence that took so many believers'
lives in the early 1850s and threatened that of Baha'u'llah Himself.
During the twentieth century, his Qajar successors had been similarly
concerned to placate the opinion of foreign governments. The pattern was
repeated in 1955 when the second of the Pahlavi shahs, who had been
induced by the mullas to approve a wave of anti-Baha'i violence, was
forced by United Nations' protest and by objections on the part of the
American government to abruptly halt the campaign--both interventions
harbingers of things to come.
Such checks on the clergy's behaviour seemed to have been swept away by
the Islamic revolution of 1979. Suddenly, the mullas were themselves in
power, appointing their own nominees to the highest positions in the new
republic, and eventually taking over these posts directly. "Revolutionary
courts" were set up, answering only to the senior clergy. An army of
"revolutionary guards", far more effective than the shah's secret police,
and quite as brutal, took over control of every aspect of public life.
While the attention of the new ruling caste was focused chiefly on what it
believed were threats from foreign governments, influential elements
within it saw an opportunity at last to destroy the Iranian Baha'i
community.(137) The harrowing details of the campaign that followed need
no review here. Their significance lies, rather, in the response made to
these attacks by thousands of individual Baha'is--men, women and
children--throughout the country. Their refusal to compromise their faith,
even at the cost of their lives, inspired in their fellow believers
throughout the world a heightened dedication to the Cause for which these
sacrifices were being made. It was not, however, only the members of the
Faith who were affected by these events. Decades earlier, in 1889, a
distinguished Western commentator on the heroism of the dawn-breakers of
the Faith had prophetically written of the sufferings of the early
believers:
It is the lives and deaths of these, their hope which knows no despair,
their love which knows no cooling, their steadfastness which knows no
wavering, which stamp this wonderful movement with a character entirely
its own.... It is not a small or easy thing to endure what these have
endured, and surely what they deemed worth life itself is worth trying to
understand. I say nothing of the mighty influence which, as I believe, the
Babi [sic] faith will exert in the future, nor of the new life it may
perchance breathe into a dead people; for, whether it succeed or fail, the
splendid heroism of the Babi martyrs is a thing eternal and
indestructible.... But what I cannot hope to have conveyed to you is the
terrible earnestness of these men, and the indescribable influence which
this earnestness, combined with other qualities, exerts on any one who has
actually been brought in contact with them.(138)
These words prefigured the rise of a similar sentiment among non-Baha'i
observers during the Islamic revolutionary years; and this was to become
one of the most powerful forces propelling the emergence of the Cause from
obscurity. Captured in those early words, too, was the fundamentally
spiritual nature of what has always been at stake in the cradle of the
Faith. Beyond a revulsion at the senseless brutality of the persecution, a
growing body of foreign opinion has been profoundly moved by the response
of the Iranian Baha'is.
The twentieth century has, alas, been overwhelmed by the suffering of
countless victims of oppression. What made the Baha'i situation unique was
the attitude adopted by those who endured the suffering. The Iranian
believers refused to accept the all too familiar role of victims. Like the
Founders of the Faith before them, they took moral charge of the great
issue between them and their adversaries. It was they, not revolutionary
courts or revolutionary guards, who quickly set the terms of the
encounter, and this extraordinary achievement affected not only the hearts
but the minds of those who observed the situation from outside the Baha'i
Faith. The persecuted community neither attacked its oppressors, nor
sought political advantage from the crisis. Nor did its Baha'i defenders
in other lands call for the dismantling of the Iranian constitution, much
less for revenge. All demanded only justice --the recognition of the rights
guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by the
community of nations, ratified by the Iranian government, and many of them
embodied even in clauses of the Islamic constitution.
The crisis roused the Baha'i world to extraordinary feats of achievement.
National Spiritual Assemblies who had little or no experience in
developing a working relationship with officials of their countries'
governments were called on to solicit government support for resolutions
at various levels of the international human rights system, and did so
with outstanding success. Year after year, for twenty uninterrupted years,
the case of the Iranian Baha'is proceeded through the international human
rights system, gathering support in successive resolutions, ensuring
attention to Baha'i grievances in the missions of rapporteurs appointed by
the United Nations Human Rights Commission and consolidating these gains
through decisions of the Third Committee of the United Nations General
Assembly. Every attempt by the Iranian regime to escape international
condemnation of its treatment of its Baha'i citizens failed to shake the
support the Baha'i issue attracted from a persistent majority of
sympathetic nations represented on the Commission. The achievement was all
the more remarkable in the context of the Commission's constantly changing
membership and a demanding agenda that included human rights abuses in
other countries that affected millions of victims.
At the same time as direct pressure was being exerted on the Iranian
government, the case was attracting unprecedented publicity around the
world in newspapers, magazines and the broadcast media. Newspapers such as
_The_ _New York Times_, _Le Monde _and _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_,
enjoying international readership, gave wide coverage to the persecution,
and television networks in Australia, Canada, the United States and a
number of European countries produced in-depth, magazine-format
presentations. The abuses were denounced in often strong editorial
comment. Apart from the support thus lent to the efforts to secure
effective intervention at the Human Rights Commission, such publicity had
the effect of introducing, usually for the first time and to an audience
of tens of millions of people, accurate and appreciative information about
Baha'i teachings and belief. Both the publicity and the campaign being
carried on through the United Nations' system provided influential
officials around the world with a sustained opportunity to judge for
themselves both the teachings of the Cause and the character of the Baha'i
community.
A problem arising out of the persecution was that faced by several
thousand Iranian Baha'is who found themselves either stranded without
valid passports in countries where they were serving as pioneers, or
forced to flee from Iran because they or their families had been singled
out as targets of the pogrom. In 1983, an International Baha'i Refugee
Office was established in Canada,(139) where the government had been
particularly responsive to the representations made by the National
Spiritual Assembly of that country. Over the next few years, with the
assistance of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, a series of
other countries likewise opened their doors to more than ten thousand
Iranian Baha'is, many of whom filled pioneer goals in their new places of
residence.
* * * * *
Not only the Baha'i community but the United Nations' human rights system
itself benefited from this long struggle. Initially, after the Islamic
revolution, the community of believers in Iran had faced a threat to its
very survival. In time, the United Nations Human Rights Commission,
however slow and relatively cumbersome its operations may appear to some
outside observers, succeeded in compelling the Iranian regime to bring the
worst of the persecution to a halt. In this way, the "case of Iran's
Baha'is" marked a significant victory for the Commission and the Baha'i
Faith alike. It served as a startling demonstration of the power of the
community of nations, acting through the machinery created for the
purpose, to bring under control patterns of oppression that had darkened
the pages of recorded history throughout the ages.
This circumstance highlights the relevance of the Faith's activities to
the life of the larger society in which these efforts are taking place.
Together with world peace, the need for the international community to
take effective steps to realize the ideals in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and its related covenants is an urgent challenge facing
humanity at the present moment in its history. There are relatively few
places in the world where minority populations, because of religious,
ethnic or national prejudices, are not still denied basic human needs of
some kind. No body of people on the planet understands better this issue
than does the Baha'i community. It has endured--continues to endure in some
lands--mistreatment for which there is no conceivable justification,
whether legal or moral; it has given its martyrs and shed its tears, while
remaining faithful to its conviction that hatred and retaliation are
corrosive to the soul; and it has learned, as few communities have done,
how to use the United Nations' human rights system in the manner intended
by that system's creators, without having recourse to involvement in
political partisanship of any kind, much less violence. Drawing on this
experience, it is today embarked on a programme to encourage governments
in a score of countries to institute public education programmes on the
subject of human rights, providing whatever practical assistance of its
own is possible.(140) Throughout the world, it is particularly active in
promoting the rights of women and children. Most important of all, it
provides a living example of brotherhood, from which countless people
outside its embrace derive courage and hope.
* * * * *
As the Iranian crisis was unfolding, an initiative taken by the Universal
House of Justice suddenly moved the external affairs work of the Baha'i
community to an entirely new level. In 1985, the statement _The Promise of
World Peace_, addressed to the generality of humankind, was released
through National Spiritual Assemblies. In it, the House of Justice
asserted, in unprovocative but uncompromising terms, Baha'i confidence in
the advent of international peace as the next stage in the evolution of
society. Set out, as well, were elements of the form that this
long-awaited development must take, many of which went far beyond the
political terms in which the subject is commonly discussed. It concluded:
The experience of the Baha'i community may be seen as an example of this
enlarging unity [of humankind].... If the Baha'i experience can contribute
in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we
are happy to offer it as a model for study.
While the immediate purpose of the release was to provide Baha'i
institutions and individual believers with a coherent line of discussion
for their interactions with government authorities, organizations of civil
society, the media and influential personalities, a collateral effect was
to set in motion an intensive and ongoing education of the Baha'i
community itself in several important Baha'i teachings. The influence of
the ideas and perspectives in the document was soon making itself widely
felt in conventions, publications, summer and winter schools, and the
general discourse of believers everywhere.
In many respects, _The Promise of World Peace _may be said to have set the
agenda for Baha'i interaction with the United Nations and its attendant
organizations in the years since 1985. Building on the reputation it had
already won, the Baha'i International Community became, in only a few
short years, one of the most influential of the non-governmental
organizations. Because it is, and is seen to be, entirely non-partisan, it
has increasingly been trusted as a mediating voice in complex, and often
stressful, discussions in international circles on major issues of social
progress. This reputation has been strengthened by appreciation of the
fact that the Community refrains, on principle, from taking advantage of
such trust to press partisan agendas of its own. By 1968, a Baha'i
representative had been elected to membership on the Executive Committee
of Non-Governmental Organizations affiliated with the Office of Public
Information, subsequently holding the positions of chairman and
vice-chairman. From this point on, representatives of the Community found
themselves increasingly asked to function as convenors or chairpersons of
a wide range of bodies: committees, task forces, working groups and
advisory boards. During the past four years, the Community has served as
executive secretary of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations,
the central coordinating body of non-governmental groups affiliated with
the United Nations.
The structure of the Baha'i International Community reflects the
principles guiding its work. It has escaped labelling as merely another
special interest lobby group. While making full use of the expertise and
executive resources of its United Nations Office and Office of Public
Information, the Community has come to be recognized by its fellow
non-governmental organizations as essentially an "association" of
democratically elected national "councils", representative of a
cross-section of humankind. Baha'i delegations to international events
commonly include members appointed by various National Spiritual
Assemblies who are experienced in the subject matters under discussion and
who can provide regional perspectives.
This feature of the Faith's involvement in the life of society--in which
motivating principle and operating method represent two dimensions of a
unified approach to issues--demonstrated its power at the series of world
summits and related conferences organized by the United Nations held
between 1990 and 1996. In that period of nearly six years, the political
leaders of the world came together repeatedly under the aegis of the
Secretary-General of the United Nations to discuss the major challenges
facing humankind as the twentieth century drew to a close. No Baha'i can
review the themes of these historic gatherings without being struck by how
closely the agenda mirrored major teachings of Baha'u'llah. It seemed
befitting that the centenary of His ascension should occur at the midway
point in the process, endowing the meetings, for Baha'is, with spiritual
meaning beyond merely their stated goals.
Among those gatherings, the World Conference on Education for All in
Thailand (1990), the World Summit for Children in New York (1990), the
United Nations Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro (1992), an
anguished and chaotic World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (1993),
the International Conference on Population in Cairo (1994), the World
Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen (1995), and the particularly
vibrant Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995),(141) stand out
as highlights of this process of global discourse on the problems
afflicting the world's peoples. At the concurrent non-governmental
conferences, Baha'i delegations, made up of members from a wide range of
countries, had the opportunity to place issues in a spiritual as well as
social perspective. Evidence of the trust the Community enjoys among
hundreds of its fellow non-governmental organizations was the fact that
Baha'i delegations were repeatedly selected by their peers for inclusion
among the handful of member groups to be accorded the much prized
opportunity to address the conferences from the podium, rather than merely
distributing printed copies of presentations.
* * * * *
During the century's concluding years, many National Spiritual Assemblies
won impressive victories of their own in the field of external affairs.
Two outstanding examples suggest the character and importance of these
advances. The first was achieved by the National Spiritual Assembly of
Germany, where the nature of Baha'i elected bodies had been challenged by
local authorities as being technically incompatible with the requirements
of German civil law. In upholding the appeal of the Local Spiritual
Assembly of the Baha'is of Tuebingen against this ruling, Germany's
constitutional High Court concluded that the Baha'i Administrative Order
is an integral feature of the Faith and as such is inseparable from Baha'i
belief. The High Court justified its taking jurisdiction in the case by
adducing evidence that the Baha'i Faith itself is a religion, a judgement
with far-reaching implications in a society where church opponents have
long sought to misrepresent the Cause as a "cult" or "sect". The
definitive language of the judgement merits repetition:
...the character of the Baha'i Faith as a religion and of the Baha'i
Community as a religious community is evident, in actual every day life,
in cultural tradition, and in the understanding of the general public as
well as of the science of comparative religion.(142)
It was left to the Brazilian Baha'i community to win a victory in the
field of external affairs that is so far unique in Baha'i history. On 28
May 1992, its country's highest legislative body, the Chamber of Deputies,
held a special session to pay tribute to Baha'u'llah on the centenary of
His ascension. The Speaker read a message from the Universal House of
Justice and representatives of all of the parties rose, one by one, to
acknowledge the contribution to human betterment of the Faith and its
Founder. A moving address by one prominent deputy described the Baha'i
teachings as "the most colossal religious work ever written by the pen of
a single Man".(143)
Such appreciations of the nature of the Cause and of the work it is trying
to accomplish--coming as they did from the highest judicial and legislative
levels, respectively, of two of the world's major nations--were victories
of the spirit as important in their way as those won in the teaching
field. They help to open those doors through which Baha'u'llah's healing
influence begins to touch the life of society itself.