Bahá'í International Community

“ Dismayed by the deepening moral and social chaos that marked its course, the generality of the world’s peoples are eager to leave behind them the memories of the suffering that these decades brought with them. No matter how frail the foundations of confidence in the future may seem, no matter how great the dangers looming on the horizon, humanity appears desperate to believe that, through some fortuitous conjunction of circumstances, it will nevertheless be possible to bend the conditions of human life into conformity with prevailing human desires. ”

“ Out of the darkest days of the war had come poignant stories, such as the impulse that had briefly moved British and German soldiers to leave the slaughterhouse of the trenches to commemorate together the birth of Christ, providing a flickering glimpse of the oneness of the human race which the Master had tirelessly proclaimed in His journeys across that same continent. Most important of all, an extraordinary effort of imagination had brought the unification of humanity one immense step forward. ”

“ The horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had awakened humanity to the appalling possibility that a series of relatively minor mishaps, as uncalculated as the process set in motion by the 1914 incident in Sarajevo, might this time lead to the annihilation of a considerable portion of the world’s population and leave large areas of the globe uninhabitable. For Bahá’ís, the prospect could only bring vividly to mind the sombre warning uttered by Bahá’u’lláh decades earlier: “Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the understanding of men. ”

“ With the successful establishment in 1963 of the Universal House of Justice, the Bahá’ís of the world set out on the first stage of a mission of long duration: the spiritual empowerment of the whole body of humankind as the protagonists of their own advancement. By the time the century ended, this immense effort had brought into existence a community representative of the diversity of the entire human race, unified in its beliefs and allegiance, and committed to building a global society that will reflect on earth the spiritual and moral vision of its Founder. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And finally, it was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá who made certain that the Divine Order conceived by Bahá’u’lláh for the unification of the human race and the institution of justice in humanity’s collective life would be provided with the means required to realize its Founder’s purpose. For unity to exist among human beings—at even the simplest level—two fundamental conditions must pertain. Those involved must first of all be in some agreement about the nature of reality as it affects their relationships with one another and with the phenomenal world. ”

“ The vindictive peace treaty, imposed by the Allied powers on their defeated enemies, succeeded only, as both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi have pointed out, in planting the seeds of another, far more terrible conflict. The ruinous reparations demanded of the vanquished —and the injustice that required them to accept the full guilt for a war for which all parties had been, to one degree or another, responsible—were among the factors that would prepare demoralized peoples in Europe to embrace totalitarian promises of relief which they might not otherwise have contemplated. ”

“ The spirit that today sustains Persian pioneers in every part of the world and that plays so creative a role in the building of Bahá’í community life runs like a straight line through family after family back to those heroic days. In retrospect, it is apparent that the phenomenon we today know as the twin processes of expansion and consolidation itself had its origin in those marvellous years. ”

“ The deaths of millions of young men who would have been urgently needed to meet the challenges of the coming decades was a loss that could never be recovered. Indeed, Europe itself—which only four brief years earlier had represented the apparent summit of civilization and world influence—lost at one stroke this pre-eminence, and began the inexorable slide during the following decades toward the status of an auxiliary to a rising new centre of power in North America. ”

“ Realization of the uniqueness of what Bahá’u’lláh has brought into being opens the imagination to the contribution that the Cause can make to the unification of humankind and the building of a global society. The immediate responsibility of establishing world government rests on the shoulders of the nation-states. What the Bahá’í community is called on to do, at this stage in humanity’s social and political evolution, is to contribute by every means in its power to the creation of conditions that will encourage and facilitate this enormously demanding undertaking. ”

“ With the end of hostilities, it gradually became apparent that a fundamental shift in consciousness was under way throughout the world and that inherited assumptions, institutions and priorities that had been progressively undermined by forces at work during the first half of the century were now crumbling. If the change could not yet be described as an emerging conviction about the oneness of humankind, no objective observer could mistake the fact that barriers blocking such a realization, which had survived all the assaults against them earlier in the century, were at last giving way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We solemnly reaffirm, on this historic occasion, that the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development. ”

“ On the slopes of Mount Carmel He erected with enormous pain and difficulty the Shrine housing the mortal remains of the martyred Báb, the focal point of the processes by which the life of our planet will gradually be organized. Through it all, in every least occasion of a life filled with cares and demands of every sort—a life exposed at all times to examination by enemy and friend alike—He ensured that posterity will possess that treasure of which poets, philosophers and mystics have dreamed all down the ages, a demonstration of unshadowed human perfection. ”

“ A concept that showed itself strongly in the Guardian’s writings was the organic metaphor in which Bahá’u’lláh, and subsequently ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, had captured the millennia-long process that has carried humanity to this culminating point in its collective history. That image was the analogy that can be drawn between, on the one hand, the stages by which human society has been gradually organized and integrated, and, on the other, the process by which each human being slowly develops out of the limitations of infantile existence into the powers of maturity. ”

“ The ever-widening gulf between the one fifth of the world’s population living in the highest income countries and the one fifth living in the lowest income countries tells a grim story. According to the 1999 Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Programme, this gap represented, in 1990, a ratio of sixty to one. That is to say, one segment of humankind was enjoying access to sixty percent of the world’s wealth, while another, equally large, population struggled merely to survive on barely one percent of that wealth. ”

“ To have seen in someone like Benito Mussolini the figure of a “Man of Destiny”, to have felt obliged to understand the racial theories of Adolf Hitler as anything other than the self-evident products of a diseased mind, to have seriously entertained the reinterpretation of human experience through dogmas that had given birth to the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin—so wilful an abandonment of reason on the part of a considerable segment of the intellectual leadership of society demands an accounting to posterity. ”

“ In sum, at precisely the moment in human history when an unprecedented outbreak of violence had undermined the inherited bulwarks of civilized behaviour, the political leadership of the Western world had emasculated the one alternative system of international order to which experience of this catastrophe had given birth and which alone could have alleviated the far greater suffering that lay ahead. ”

“ In the light of the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh such hopes are not merely illusory, but miss entirely the nature and meaning of the great turning point through which our world has passed in these crucial hundred years. Only as humanity comes to understand the implications of what occurred during this period of history will it be able to meet the challenges that lie ahead. The value of the contribution we as Bahá’ís can make to the process demands that we ourselves grasp the significance of the historic transformation wrought by the twentieth century. ”

“ The fourth candle is unity in religion which is the corner-stone of the foundation itself, and which, by the power of God, will be revealed in all its splendor. The fifth candle is the unity of nations—a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland. The sixth candle is unity of races, making of all that dwell on earth peoples and kindreds of one race. ”

“ Fathered by nineteenth century European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality—including human reality and the process by which it evolves—is essentially material in nature. ”

“ Whatever view of the situation political theorists may currently hold, no one can be surprised that such deliberate violence to the roots of human motivation led inexorably to the economic and political ruin of those societies luckless enough to fall under Soviet sway. Its longer-term spiritual effect, tragically, was to pervert to the service of its own amoral agenda the legitimate yearnings for freedom and justice of subject peoples throughout the world. ”

“ The result was the emergence of a culture, however localized, that was unlike anything humanity had ever known. Our century, with all its upheavals and its grandiloquent claims to create a new order, has no comparable example of the systematic application of the powers of a single Mind to the building of a distinctive and successful community that saw its ultimate sphere of work as the globe itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The overthrow of the twentieth century’s totalitarian systems has not meant the end of ideology. On the contrary. There has not been a society in the history of the world, no matter how pragmatic, experimentalist and multi-form it may have been, that did not derive its thrust from some foundational interpretation of reality. Such a system of thought reigns today virtually unchallenged across the planet, under the nominal designation “Western civilization”. ”

“ Inspired by ideologies ranging from an almost incoherent anarchism at one extreme to sharply honed racist and nationalist obsessions at the other, these underground forces shared one naïve conviction: if the particular part of the prevailing order that had become their target could somehow be brought down, the inherent nobility of the segment of humankind that supported their aims—or the assumed nobility of humankind in general—would by itself ensure a new era of freedom and justice. ”