I shall seek to represent and correlate, in however cursory
a manner, those momentous happenings which have insensibly, relentlessly, and
under the very eyes of successive generations, perverse, indifferent or hostile,
transformed a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of the Shaykhí school
of the Ithná-‘Asharíyyih sect of Shi‘ah Islám into a world religion whose
unnumbered followers are organically and indissolubly united; whose light has
overspread the earth as far as Iceland in the North and Magellanes in the
South; whose ramifications have spread to no less than sixty countries of the
world; whose literature has been translated and disseminated in no less than
forty languages; whose endowments in the five continents of the globe, whether
local, national or international, already run into several million dollars;
whose incorporated elective bodies have secured the official recognition of a
number of governments in East and West; whose adherents are recruited from the
diversified races and chief religions of mankind; whose representatives are to
be found in hundreds of cities in both Persia and the United States of America;
to whose verities royalty has publicly and repeatedly testified; whose
independent status its enemies, from the ranks of its parent religion and in
the leading center of both the Arab and Muslim worlds, have proclaimed and
demonstrated; and whose claims have been virtually recognized, entitling it to
rank as the fourth religion of a Land in which its world spiritual center has
been established, and which is at once the heart of Christendom, the holiest
shrine of the Jewish people, and, save Mecca alone, the most sacred spot in
Islám.
- Shoghi Effendi (Preface to ‘God Passes By’)