Sequential excerpts from the book ‘God Passes By’, written in 1944 by Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith

4/16/26

The house of Bahá’u’lláh in Baghdad became “the focal center of a great number of seekers, visitors and pilgrims, including Kurds, Persians, Arabs and Turks”

Within a few years after Bahá’u’lláh’s return from Sulaymáníyyih the situation had been completely reversed. The house of Sulaymán-i-Ghannám, on which the official designation of the Bayt-i-A‘am (the Most Great House) was later conferred, known, at that time, as the house of Mírzá Músá, the Bábí, an extremely modest residence, situated in the Karkh quarter, in the neighborhood of the western bank of the river, to which Bahá’u’lláh’s family had moved prior to His return from Kurdistán, had now become the focal center of a great number of seekers, visitors and pilgrims, including Kurds, Persians, Arabs and Turks, and derived from the Muslim, the Jewish and Christian Faiths. It had, moreover, become a veritable sanctuary to which the victims of the injustice of the official representative of the Persian government were wont to flee, in the hope of securing redress for the wrongs they had suffered. 

- Shoghi Effendi (‘God Passes By’, chapter 8)