The historic significance of this period cannot indeed be overestimated.
For it was a hundred years ago that a Faith, which had already been
oppressed by a staggering weight of untold tribulations; which had
sustained shattering blows in Mazindaran, Nayriz, Tihran and Zanjan, and
indeed throughout every province in the land of its birth; which had lost
its greatest exponents through the tragic martyrdom of most of the Letters
of the Living, and particularly of the valiant Mulla Husayn and of the
erudite Vahid and which had been afflicted with the supreme calamity of
losing its Divine Founder; was being subjected to still more painful
ordeals--ordeals which robbed it of both the heroic Hujjat and of the
far-famed Tahirih; which caused it to pass through a reign of terror, and
to experience a blood-bath of unprecedented severity, which inflicted on
it one of the greatest humiliations it has ever suffered through the
attempted assassination of the sovereign himself, and which unloosed a
veritable deluge of barbarous atrocities in Tihran, Mazindaran, Nayriz and
_Sh_iraz before which paled the horrors of the siege of Zanjan, and which
swept no less a figure than Baha'u'llah Himself--the last remaining pillar
of a Faith that had been so rudely shaken, so ruthlessly denuded of its
chief buttresses--into the subterranean dungeon of Tihran, an imprisonment
that was soon followed by His cruel banishment, in the depths of an
exceptionally severe winter, from His native land to 'Iraq. To these
tribulations He Himself has referred as "afflictions" that "rained" upon
Him, whilst the blood shed by His companions and lovers He characterized
as the blood which "impregnated" the earth with the "wondrous revelation"
of God's "might."
Nor should the momentous character of the unique event, that may be
regarded as the climax and consummation of this tragic period, be
overlooked or underestimated, inasmuch as its centenary synchronizes with
the termination of the sixteen-month interval separating the American
Baha'i Community from the conclusion of its present Plan. This unique
event, the centenary of which is to be befittingly celebrated, not only in
the American continent but throughout the Baha'i world, and is destined to
be regarded as the culmination of the Second Seven Year Plan, is none
other than the "Year Nine," anticipated 2,000 years ago as the "third woe"
by St. John the Divine, alluded to by both _Sh_ay_kh_ Ahmad and Siyyid
Kazim--the twin luminaries that heralded the advent of the Faith of the
Bab--specifically mentioned and extolled by the Herald of the Baha'i
Dispensation in His Writings, and eulogized by both the Founder of our
Faith and the Center of His Covenant. In that year, the year "after Hin"
(68), mentioned by _Sh_ay_kh_ Ahmad, the year that witnessed the birth of
the Mission of the promised "Qayyum," specifically referred to by Siyyid
Kazim, the "requisite number" in the words of Baha'u'llah "of pure, of
wholly consecrated and sanctified souls" had been "most secretly
consummated." In that year, as testified by the pen of the Bab, the
"realities of the created things" were "made manifest," "a new creation
was born" and the seed of His Faith revealed its "ultimate perfection." In
that year, as borne witness by 'Abdu'l-Baha, a hitherto "embryonic Faith"
was born. In that year, while the Blessed Beauty lay in chains and
fetters, in that dark and pestilential pit, "the breezes of the
All-Glorious," as He Himself described it, "were wafted" over Him. There,
whilst His neck was weighted down by the Qara-Guhar, His feet in stocks,
breathing the fetid air of the Siyah-_Ch_al, He dreamed His dream and
heard, "on every side," "exalted words," and His "tongue recited" words
that "no man could bear to hear."
There, as He Himself has recorded, under the impact of this dream, He
experienced the onrushing force of His newly revealed Mission, that
"flowed" even as "a mighty torrent" from His "head" to His "breast,"
whereupon "every limb" of His body "would be set afire." There, in a
vision, the "Most Great Spirit," as He Himself has again testified,
appeared to Him, in the guise of a "Maiden" "calling" with "a most
wondrous, a most sweet voice" above His Head, whilst "suspended in the
air" before Him and, "pointing with her finger" unto His head, imparted
"tidings which rejoiced" His "soul." There appeared above the horizon of
that dungeon in the city of Tihran, the rim of the Orb of His Faith, whose
dawning light had, nine years previously, broken upon the city of
_Sh_iraz--an Orb which, after suffering an eclipse of ten years, was
destined to burst forth, with its resplendent rays, upon the city of
Ba_gh_dad, to mount its zenith in Adrianople, and to set eventually in the
prison-fortress of Akka.
Such is the year we are steadily approaching. Such is the year with which
the fortunes of the Second Seven Year Plan have been linked. As the
tribulations, humiliations and trials inflicted on the Cause of God in
Persia, a century ago, moved inexorably towards a climax, so must the
present austerity period, inaugurated a hundred years later, in the
continent of America, to reflect the privations and sacrifices endured so
stoically by the dawn-breakers of the Heroic Age of the Faith witness, as
it approaches its culmination, a self-abnegation on the part of the
champion-builders of the World Order of Baha'u'llah, laboring in the
present Formative Age of His Faith, which, at its best, can be regarded as
but a faint reflection of the self-sacrifice so gloriously evinced by
their spiritual forbears.