I hail, with feelings of thankfulness and relief, the signature, on the
eve of 'Abdu'l-Baha's ascension, of a contract for the immediate
expropriation, by the Israeli Finance Minister, on the recommendation of
the Mayor of the City of Haifa, of a thirteen-hundred meter plot, owned by
the sister of Fareed, notorious enemy of the Center of Baha'u'llah's
Covenant. This historic act paves the way for the early transfer of the
title deed of this plot by the State of Israel to the Baha'i Community,
now engaged in establishing and consolidating its World Administrative
Center in the Holy Land.
The truculence, greed and obstinacy, of this breaker of the Covenant of
Baha'u'llah, demonstrated by her persistent refusal to sell and by the
exorbitant price subsequently demanded, raised, during more than thirty
years, an almost insurmountable obstacle to the acquisition of an area
which, however circumscribed, occupies a central position amidst the
extensive Baha'i domains in the heart of God's Holy Mountain, is situated
in the vicinity of the Bab's Sepulcher, overlooks the Tomb of the Greatest
Holy Leaf, and adjoins the resting-places of the Brother and the Mother of
'Abdu'l-Baha, and which, through deliberate neglect, has been allowed to
become an eyesore to all those who throng the embellished precincts of a
Mausoleum rightly regarded as the second holiest Shrine in the Baha'i
world.
The ownership of this plot will now enable us to locate the site, excavate
the foundations, and erect the structure, of the International Baha'i
Archives, designed by the Hand of the Cause, Mason Remey, President of the
International Baha'i Council, which will serve as the permanent and
befitting repository for the priceless and numerous relics associated with
the Twin Founders of the Faith, with the Perfect Exemplar of its teachings
and with its heroes, saints and martyrs, and the building of which
constitutes one of the foremost objectives of the Ten-Year Plan.
The raising of this Edifice will in turn herald the construction, in the
course of successive epochs of the Formative Age of the Faith, of several
other structures, which will serve as the administrative seats of such
divinely appointed institutions as the Guardianship, the Hands of the
Cause, and the Universal House of Justice. These Edifices will, in the
shape of a far-flung arc, and following a harmonizing style of
architecture, surround the resting-places of the Greatest Holy Leaf,
ranking as foremost among the members of her sex in the Baha'i
Dispensation, of her Brother, offered up as a ransom by Baha'u'llah for
the quickening of the world and its unification, and of their Mother,
proclaimed by Him to be His chosen "consort in all the worlds of God." The
ultimate completion of this stupendous undertaking will mark the
culmination of the development of a world-wide divinely-appointed
Administrative Order whose beginnings may be traced as far back as the
concluding years of the Heroic Age of the Faith.
This vast and irresistible process, unexampled in the spiritual history of
mankind, and which will synchronize with two no less significant
developments--the establishment of the Lesser Peace and the evolution of
Baha'i national and local institutions--the one outside and the other
within the Baha'i world--will attain its final consummation, in the Golden
Age of the Faith, through the raising of the standard of the Most Great
Peace, and the emergence, in the plenitude of its power and glory, of the
focal Center of the agencies constituting the World Order of Baha'u'llah.
The final establishment of this seat of the future Baha'i World
Commonwealth will signalize at once the proclamation of the sovereignty of
the Founder of our Faith and the advent of the Kingdom of the Father
repeatedly lauded and promised by Jesus Christ.
This World Order will, in turn, in the course of successive Dispensations
of the Baha'i Cycle, yield its fairest fruit through the birth and
flowering of a civilization, divinely inspired, unique in its features,
world-embracing in its scope, and fundamentally spiritual in its
character--a civilization destined as it unfolds to derive its initial
impulse from the spirit animating the very institutions which, in their
embryonic state, are now stirring in the womb of the present Formative Age
of the Faith.
Advise share this message with the Hands of the Cause and the members of
the National Spiritual Assemblies throughout the Baha'i world.
--Shoghi
[November 27, 1954]