In June 1877, Baha'u'llah at last emerged from the strict confinement of
the prison-city of Akka, and moved with His family to "Mazra'ih", a small
estate a few miles north of the city.(106) As had been predicted in His
statement to the Turkish government, Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz had been
overthrown and assassinated in a palace coup, and gusts from the winds of
political change sweeping the world were beginning to invade even the
shuttered precincts of the Ottoman imperial system. After a brief two-year
stay at Mazra'ih, Baha'u'llah moved to "Bahji", a large mansion surrounded
by gardens, which His son 'Abdu'l-Baha had rented for Him and the members
of His extended family.(107) The remaining twelve years of His life were
devoted to His writings on a wide range of spiritual and social issues,
and to receiving a stream of Baha'i pilgrims who made their way, with
great difficulty, from Persia and other lands.
Throughout the Near and Middle East the nucleus of a community life was
beginning to take shape among those who had accepted His message. For its
guidance, Baha'u'llah had revealed a system of laws and institutions
designed to give practical effect to the principles in His writings.(108)
Authority was vested in councils democratically elected by the whole
community, provisions were made to exclude the possibility of a clerical
elite arising, and principles of consultation and group decision making
were established.
At the heart of this system was what Baha'u'llah termed a "new Covenant"
between God and humankind. The distinguishing feature of humanity's coming
of age is that, for the first time in its history, the entire human race
is consciously involved, however dimly, in the awareness of its own
oneness and of the earth as a single homeland. This awakening opens the
way to a new relationship between God and humankind. As the peoples of the
world embrace the spiritual authority inherent in the guidance of the
Revelation of God for this age, Baha'u'llah said, they will find in
themselves a moral empowerment which human effort alone has proven
incapable of generating. "A new race of men"(109) will emerge as the
result of this relationship, and the work of building a global
civilization will begin. The mission of the Baha'i community was to
demonstrate the efficacy of this Covenant in healing the ills that divide
the human race.
Baha'u'llah died at Bahji on May 29, 1892, in His 75th year. At the time
of His passing, the cause entrusted to Him forty years earlier in the
darkness of Teheran's Black Pit was poised to break free of the Islamic
lands where it had taken shape, and to establish itself first across
America and Europe and then throughout the world. In doing so, it would
itself become a vindication of the promise of the new Covenant between God
and humankind. For alone of all the world's independent religions, the
Baha'i Faith and its community of believers were to pass successfully
through the critical first century of their existence with their unity
firmly intact, undamaged by the age-old blight of schism and faction.
Their experience offers compelling evidence for Baha'u'llah's assurance
that the human race, in all its diversity, can learn to live and work as
one people, in a common global homeland.
Just two years before His death, Baha'u'llah received at Bahji one of the
few Westerners to meet Him, and the only one to leave a written account of
the experience. The visitor was Edward Granville Browne, a rising young
orientalist from Cambridge University, whose attention had originally been
attracted by the dramatic history of the Bab and His heroic band of
followers. Of his meeting with Baha'u'llah, Browne wrote:
Though I dimly suspected whither I was going and whom I was to behold (for
no distinct intimation had been given to me), a second or two elapsed ere,
with a throb of wonder and awe, I became definitely conscious that the
room was not untenanted. In the corner where the divan met the wall sat a
wondrous and venerable figure... The face of him on whom I gazed I can
never forget, though I cannot describe it. Those piercing eyes seemed to
read one's very soul; power and authority sat on that ample brow... No
need to ask in whose presence I stood, as I bowed myself before one who is
the object of a devotion and love which kings might envy and emperors sigh
for in vain! A mild dignified voice bade me be seated, and then
continued:--"Praise be to God that thou hast attained!...Thou hast come to
see a prisoner and an exile...We desire but the good of the world and the
happiness of the nations; yet they deem us a stirrer up of strife and
sedition worthy of bondage and banishment...That all nations should become
one in faith and all men as brothers; that the bonds of affection and
unity between the sons of men should be strengthened; that diversity of
religion should cease, and differences of race be annulled--what harm is
there in this?...Yet so it shall be; these fruitless strifes, these
ruinous wars shall pass away, and the 'Most great Peace' shall
come..."(110)