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by Mark Towfiq
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Citadel of Faith
Pages 100-102
 

A PERIOD OF HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE
 
1

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 Mazindarán, Nayríz, Tihrán and Zanján, 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 Mullá Husayn and of the erudite Vahíd 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 Táhirih; 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 Tihrán, Mazindarán, Nayríz and Shíráz before which paled the horrors of the siege of Zanján, and which swept no less a figure than Bahá'u'lláh 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 Tihrán, an imprisonment that was soon followed by His cruel banishment, in the depths of an exceptionally severe winter, from His native land to `Iráq. 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."

 
2

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 Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í 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 Shaykh Ahmad and Siyyid Kázim--the twin luminaries that heralded the advent of the Faith of the Báb--specifically mentioned and extolled by the Herald of the Bahá'í 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 Shaykh Ahmad, the year that witnessed the birth of the Mission of the promised "Qayyúm," specifically referred to by Siyyid Kázim, the "requisite number" in the words of Bahá'u'lláh "of pure, of wholly consecrated and sanctified souls" had been "most secretly consummated." In that year, as testified by the pen of the Báb, 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-Bahá, 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 Qará-Guhar, His feet in stocks, breathing the fetid air of the Síyáh-Chál, He dreamed His dream and heard, "on every side," "exalted words," and His "tongue recited" words that "no man could bear to hear."

 
3

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 Tihrán, the rim of the Orb of His Faith, whose dawning light had, nine years previously, broken upon the city of Shíráz--an Orb which, after suffering an eclipse of ten years, was destined to burst forth, with its resplendent rays, upon the city of Baghdád, to mount its zenith in Adrianople, and to set eventually in the prison-fortress of Akká.

 
4

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 Bahá'u'lláh, 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.