Ridván 2004: To the Bahá’ís of the World

Dearly loved Friends,

Three years of the Five Year Plan have passed. The processes set in motion in the Four Year Plan, strengthened through special attention to the Bahá’í education of children during the Twelve Month Plan, and followed up unflaggingly during these past years, are now fulfilling the high hopes with which they were launched. In every part of the world the three participants in the Plan—the individual, the community and the institutions—each playing a distinctive role, are reinforcing one another’s actions. The core activities of study circles, children’s classes and devotional meetings have become essential aspects and mutually enhancing achievements lending greater vigor and success to all the other elements of Bahá’í community life. Human resources are being augmented, and the Local Spiritual Assemblies are responding to the fresh demands of this rising vitality.

The capacity built for the Bahá’í education of children throughout the world is extraordinarily impressive. Initial efforts for the spiritual empowerment of junior youth are meeting with success. The movement of clusters from each level of activity to a higher one is well in hand and, as it proceeds, the kernel of avowed believers is being joined by a larger circle of people, still not Bahá’ís but enthusiastically involved in core activities of the Plan. Structures for administering intensive growth are already appearing in certain advanced clusters. National Assemblies, while attending to the needs of all the clusters in their countries, have learned the value of concentrating special attention on certain priority clusters that show high promise, encouraging and developing them until the human resources they have raised up through the training institutes enable them to become centers of rapid, sustained growth.

12 January 2004: To the Iranian believers living outside Iran

Dearly loved Friends,

You will by now have had an opportunity to read our general letter of 26 November 2003 addressed to the followers of Bahá’u’lláh residing in the Cradle of the Faith. The subject has profound implications for those of you who live elsewhere in the world, implications that call for your prayerful reflection.

Although abuses of various kinds continue to limit what the friends in Iran can accomplish and unpredictable dangers could still lie ahead, the organized campaign to destroy the Cause there has clearly failed. “The enemies of God”, Bahá’u’lláh asserts, “seek by oppression to extinguish the Light, heedless of the fact that the Hand of Divine power transmutes their oppression into oil that increases the brightness of the Lamp.” For the victory so far won, the Bahá’í world can thank the interaction of two moral forces. The first has been the heroism of the Iranian believers themselves and their steadfast refusal to compromise their faith in the face of the worst abuses their enemies could inflict on them. The second has been the determination of National Spiritual Assemblies throughout the world to mobilize international protest, attract the attention of influential media, and ensure that the crimes committed against their brothers and sisters in Iran became an established issue in the ongoing indictment by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights of Iran’s violation of universally accepted standards.

Parallel with the operation of these forces was an intensive programme implemented in the 1980s to rescue thousands of Iranian refugees who had either been in danger of being singled out for attack or had been stranded without valid passports in lands where they were serving as pioneers. Many of you were the beneficiaries of this highly successful undertaking, and many of you have repaid the national Bahá’í communities who welcomed you by throwing yourselves eagerly into the teaching work. In country after country, your achievements—and those of your sons and daughters—have been vital to the advancement of the Cause.

26 November 2003: To the Followers of Bahá’u’lláh in the Cradle of the Faith

Dearly loved Friends,

It is now a little over 125 years since ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá addressed His open letter to the people of your country. Because of His vital role in a religious community that had been made the object of intense prejudice, the Author necessarily refrained from attaching His name to the document. His message, however, could not have been more clear. Speaking out of a profound love for a native land that He had not seen during the long years of exile since His childhood, the Master appealed in passionate language for its people to call to mind those days when Iran “was as the heart of the world”, “the source and centre of sciences and arts, the wellspring of great inventions and discoveries, the rich mine of human virtues and perfections”. The time had come, He insisted, when the heirs of so great a civilization could—and must—arise and reclaim their heritage.

What the letter prophetically laid out was the challenge of modernity. Today, that challenge has become the inescapable preoccupation of populations throughout the planet, not least the peoples of the Islamic world. The meaning of modernity and the features of that rising flood of cultural revolution were explicitly identified in the Master’s message: constitutional and democratic government, the rule of law, universal education, the protection of human rights, economic development, religious tolerance, the promotion of useful sciences and technologies and programmes of public welfare. In praising the achievements of what He termed this “temporal and material apparatus of civilization”, the Master made it clear that He was not proposing simply a credulous imitation of the West. On the contrary. In uncompromising language, He portrayed European society as drowning “in the sea of passion and desire”, trapped in a materialistic perception of reality that could bring in its wake nothing but disillusionment:

Be just: can this nominal civilization, unsupported by a genuine civilization of character, bring about the peace and well-being of the people or win the good pleasure of God? Does it not, rather, connote the destruction of man’s estate and pull down the pillars of happiness and peace?

Readers were urged to look below surface phenomena. As a lengthy exposition of historical processes would have burdened what was intended as an urgent appeal for reflection and action, ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá confined Himself to a few salient examples of the points He was making. Their common theme was the transformative power that has been responsible for all of humanity’s development over the ages and that would later lend the published edition of the letter its familiar title The Secret of Divine Civilization. Whether in reviewing events of Persian history or touching on passages in the Holy Qur’án, the letter called on its readers to reflect deeply about the unique endowment that promotes the advancement of all human well-being:

Ridván 2003: To the Bahá’ís of the World

Dearly loved Friends,

As the Five Year Plan enters upon its third year, momentum is building: the record of achievement during the year just ended far outdistanced that of the previous twelve months. The thrust of this momentum owes as much to the increased coherence achieved in the Plan’s constituent elements as to the animating effect of the spirit of unrest pervading the planet.

The circumstances attending the opening of this new administrative year are at once critical, challenging and extraordinary in their significance. The entire course of the previous year was agitated by a succession of crises that culminated in the outbreak of war in the Middle East. The implications are no less significant for the progress of the community of the Most Great Name than for the evolution of an increasingly global society in the throes of a turbulent transition. Of necessity, the timing, scale and tendencies of this transition have not been predictable. How swift indeed has been the current change in the tide of world conditions! In the resultant conflict, involving so conspicuously the countries in which the earliest history of the Cause took shape, we see a fresh reminder of Bahá’u’lláh’s warning that the “world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order.” That the events of this crisis directly affect a territory with as rich a Bahá’í legacy as Iraq is particularly noteworthy.

The disruptions caused by this and other situations in the world have, in one instance, suggested the opening of a new chapter in the history of the highly prized but woefully oppressed Bahá’í community of a land in which the Manifestation of God for this Day resided for a whole decade. In another, they have dashed the preparations for the Ninth International Convention at the World Centre of our Faith. But, however disappointing, this calls for no dismay. When the Major Plan of God interferes with His Minor Plan, there should be no doubt that in due course a way will providentially be opened to an opportunity of stellar possibilities for advancing the interests of His glorious Cause.