Already within the space of less than two years it had
kindled the passions of friend and foe alike. The outbreak of the conflagration
did not even await the return to His native city of the One Who had generated
it. The implications of a Revelation, thrust so dramatically upon a race so
degenerate, so inflammable in temper, could indeed have had no other
consequence than to excite within men’s bosoms the fiercest passions of fear,
of hate, of rage and envy. A Faith Whose Founder did not content Himself with
the claim to be the Gate of the Hidden Imám, Who assumed a rank that excelled even
that of the Sáhibu’z-Zamán, Who regarded Himself as the precursor of one
incomparably greater than Himself, Who peremptorily commanded not only the
subjects of the Sháh, but the monarch himself, and even the kings and princes
of the earth, to forsake their all and follow Him, Who claimed to be the
inheritor of the earth and all that is therein—a Faith Whose religious
doctrines, Whose ethical standards, social principles and religious laws
challenged the whole structure of the society in which it was born, soon
ranged, with startling unanimity, the mass of the people behind their priests,
and behind their chief magistrate, with his ministers and his government, and
welded them into an opposition sworn to destroy, root and branch, the movement
initiated by One Whom they regarded as an impious and presumptuous pretender.
- Shoghi Effendi (Chapter 1, ‘God Passes By)