We can discover a no less distinct gradation in the
character of the opposition it has had to encounter—an opposition, at first
kindled in the bosom of Shi‘ah Islám, which, at a later stage, gathered momentum
with the banishment of Bahá’u’lláh to the domains of the Turkish Sulṭán and the
consequent hostility of the more powerful Sunní hierarchy and its Caliph, the
head of the vast majority of the followers of Muhammad—an opposition which,
now, through the rise of a divinely appointed Order in the Christian West, and
its initial impact on civil and ecclesiastical institutions, bids fair to
include among its supporters established governments and systems associated
with the most ancient, the most deeply entrenched sacerdotal hierarchies in
Christendom. We can, at the same time, recognize, through the haze of an
ever-widening hostility, the progress, painful yet persistent, of certain
communities within its pale through the stages of obscurity, of proscription,
of emancipation, and of recognition—stages that must needs culminate in the
course of succeeding centuries, in the establishment of the Faith, and the
founding, in the plenitude of its power and authority, of the world-embracing
Bahá’í Commonwealth.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘Preface to God Passes By’)