Century of Light

ve a powerful impetus to the advance of the Cause. This time the progress-which affected virtually every aspect of Bahá'í lif

Bahá'í community itself and, along with it, a dramatic rise in the influence the Faith came to exercise in the life of society. While the r

into existence new Bahá'í institutions,119 as the needs of the Cause require, the House of Justice created, in June 1968, the Continental Boards of Counsellors. Empowered to extend into the future the functions of the Hands of the Cause for the protection and propagation of the Faith, the new institution assumed responsibility for guiding the work of the already existing Auxiliary Boards and joined National Assemblies in shouldering responsibilities for the advancement of the Faith. The great victories celebrated at the end of the Nine Year Plan in 1973, splendi

century. The shifts in emphasis that distinguished these successive endeavours from one another provide a useful index to the growth that the Cause was experiencing in these decades and the new opportunities and challenges that this growth produced. Far more important than the differences amongst them, however, is the fact that the activities called for in each Plan were extensions of initiatives which had been set in motion by Shoghi Effendi, who in turn had seized up and elaborated strands woven by the Faith's Founders-the training of Spiritual Assemblies; the translation, production and

ip became an ever more distinctive feature of Bahá'í life. Although the breakdown of society was creating problems for Bahá'í administrative institutions, a related effect was to generate a greatly increased interest in the message of the Cause. At the outset, the c

he ones with which the teachers had been familiar, the new declarants were eagerly welcomed. Tens of thousands of new Bahá'ís poured into the Cause throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America, often representing the greater part of whole rural villages. The 1960s and 1970s were heady days for a Bahá'í co

populations in such countries as Uganda, Bolivia and Indonesia. During the Nine Year Plan, ever larger numbers of such teachers were drawn into the work, particularly in India, several countries in Africa, and most regions of Latin America, as well as in island

reakers. Teams of ardent teachers found that it was now possible to introduce the message of the Faith not merely to a succession of inquirers, but to entire groups and even whole communities. The tens of thousands became hundreds of thousands. The Faith's growth meant that members of Spiritual Assemblies, w

e band of heroes who launched the Cause on its course in the middle years of the nineteenth century were all of them young people. The Báb Himself declared His mission when He was twenty-five years old, and Anís, who attained the imperishable glory of dying with his Lord, was only a youth. Quddús responded to the Revelation

in society during the late nineteen sixties and seventies, believers with talent in music, drama and the arts demonstrated something of what Shoghi Effendi had meant when he pointed out: "That day will the Cause spread like wildfire when its spirit and teachings are presented

Spiritual Assemblies. Beyond that, cultural challenges like those encountered by the early Persian believers who had first sought to introduce the Faith in Western lands now replicated themselves throughout the world. Theological and administrative principles that might be of consuming interest to pioneers and t

lves. Determined efforts were made to respond to the guidance of the World Centre that expansion and consolidation are twin processes that must go hand in hand. Where hoped for results did not readily materialize, however, a measure

ce established, how were they to function-in areas where large numbers of new believers had joined the Cause overnight, simply on the strength of their spiritual apprehension of its truth? How, in societies dominated by men since the dawn of time, were women to be accorded an equal voice? How was the education of large numbers of children to be systematically addressed in cultural situations where poverty and illiteracy prevailed? What priorities should guide Bahá'í moral teaching, and how could these objectives best be related to prevailing indigenous conventions? How could

l adaptation that was not being energetically tried in some part of the Bahá'í world. The net result of the experience was an intensive education of a great part of the Bahá'í community in the implications of the mass teaching work, an education that could have occurred in no other way. By its very nature, the process was largely local and regional in focus, qua

years of the century, under the guidance of the Master and the Guardian, the Iranian believers-denied the opportunity to participate equally in whatever limited benefits the society of the day offered-had arisen to painstakingly construct a comprehensive community life of a kind beyond either the need or the reach of the relatively isolated Bahá'í groups across North America and Western Europe. In Iran, spiritual and

nder the guidance of individual National Assemblies, and unrelated to any plan. In October 1983, however, Bahá'í communities throughout the world were called on to begin incorporating

eas of concern-education, health, literacy, agriculture and communications technology-to their understanding of Bahá'í principles. The temptation was great, given the magnitude of the resources being invested by governments and foundations, and the confidence with which this effort was pursued, merely to borrow methods cu

victories throughout these critical three decades. The dramatic rise in enrolments had brought with it all of the problems being encountered elsewhere in the world, but on a massive scale. The long road leading the Indian Bahá'í community to its present-day eminence was beset with the most painful difficulties, some of which threatened at times to overwhelm the administrative resources available. The victories won, however, provide a foretaste of the confirmations that will in time bless the

n of the Faith, the reality has infinitely surpassed the brightest of such hopes. Today, India's House of Worship has become the foremost visitors' attraction on the subcontinent, welcoming an average of over ten thousand visitors every day, and featuring promin

the National Spiritual Assembly hosted, in collaboration with the Bahá'í International Community's newly created Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity,123 a symposium on the subject of "Science, Religion and Development". The project engaged the participation of over one hundred of the most influential development organizations in the

uring lands. A development that made this dramatic advance possible was the bonds of spiritual partnership that had been woven between believers of Chinese and Indian backgrounds. Visitors to Malaysia spoke, with something approaching awe, of the

to resume the interrupted work of building a viable Bahá'í collective life. The community in Ethiopia, homeland of one of the world's oldest and richest cultural traditions, succeeded in maintaining both the morale of its members and the coherence of its administrative structures under relentless pressure from a brutal dictatorship. Of the friends in other countries on the continent, it may be truly said that their path of faithfulness to the Cause led through a hell of suffering seldo

an heart to contemplate, who had lost countless loved ones as well as everything they possessed in the way of material security, but in whom still burned the longing of the human soul for spiritual truth. An extraordinary achievement of a related kind was that of the Liberian Bahá'í community. Driven from their homes into exile in neighbouring lands, ma

ional diversity of the 27,000 believers who gathered at the Javits Convention Center in New York City-together with the thousands present at nine auxiliary conferences in Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Panama City, Singapore, Sydney and Western Samoa-provided compelling evidence of the success of Bahá'í teaching work around the

ional Assembly of that country. Local Spiritual Assemblies sprang up in all of the newly opened lands, and six new National Spiritual Assemblies were elected. In a brief space of time, pioneering and teaching activities in countries along the southern rim of the former Soviet empire-where the Faith had been similarly proscribed-soon brought into existence still more Local Assemblies and eig

or Bahá'í Studies was established at the prestigious Institute of World Religions in Beijing,124 which operates within the Academy of Social Sciences, and many Chinese dignitaries have been generous in their appreciation of the principles they discover in the Writings.

en developed. The Bahá'í community that set out on the Four Year Plan in 1996 was a very different one from the eager, but new and still inexperienced body of believers who, in 1964, had ventured out on the first o

appeared, had caught something of the spirit of faith, and had been strongly affected by the Bahá'í teaching of the oneness of humankind. A small minority among them were able to go beyond this point. For the most part, however, these friends were essentially recipients of teaching programmes conducted by teachers and pioneers from outside. One of the great strengths of the masses of humankind from among whom the newly enrolled believe

y troops became the single-minded aim of the enterprise. The lessons that had been learned during earlier Plans now placed the emphasis on developing the capacities of believers-wherever they might be-so that

n and teach them all the divine proofs and irrefragable arguments, explain and elucidate the history of the Cause, and interpret also the prophecies and proofs which are recorded and are extant in the divine books and epistles regarding the manifestation of the Promised One...."126 Pioneering work

of education in the Writings was devised and soon adopted in neighbouring countries. Influenced by the Colombian community's parallel efforts in the field of social and economic develop

f the more than three hundred permanent training institutes. In accomplishing this goal, a majority of regional institutes had carried the process a stage further by creating networks of "study circles" which utilize the talents of believe

the Faith's history: "a series of internal and external crises, of varying severity, devastating in their immediate effects, but each mysteriously releasing a corresponding measure of divine power, lending thereby a fresh impulse to its unf

mporarily 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 capti

rosecution of the Divine Plan entails no less than the involvement of the entire body of humankind in the work of its own spiritual, social and intellectual development. The trials encountered by the Bahá'í community in the decades since 1963 are

re development, weaken, disintegrate and are lost in oblivion.... There is still another kind of movement or cause which from a very small, inconspicuous beginning