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To all administrative regulations which the civil authorities have issued from time to time, or will issue in the future in that land, as in all other countries, the Baha'i community, faithful to its sacred obligations towards its government, and conscious of its civic duties, has yielded, and will continue to yield implicit obedience. Its immediate closing of its schools in Persia is a proof of this. To such orders, however, as are tantamount to a recantation of their faith by its members, or constitute an act of disloyalty to its spiritual, its basic and God- given principles and precepts, it will stubbornly refuse to bow, preferring imprisonment, deportation and all manner of persecution, including death-- as already suffered by the twenty thousand martyrs that have laid down their lives in the path of its Founders-- rather than follow the dictates of a temporal authority requiring it to renounce its allegiance to its cause. (372:1) "If you cut us in pieces, men, women and children alike, in the entire district of Abadih," was the memorable message sent by the fearless descendants of some of those martyrs in that turbulent center to the Governor of Fars, who had intended to coerce them into declaring themselves as Muslims, "we will never submit to your wishes"-- a message which, as soon as it was delivered to that defiant governor, induced him to desist from pressing the matter any further. (372:2) In the United States of America, the Baha'i community, having already set an inspiring example, by erecting and perfecting the machinery of its Administrative Order, was alive to the far- reaching implications of the sentence passed by the Muslim court in Egypt, and to the significance of the reaction it had produced in the Holy Land, and was stimulated by the courageous persistence demonstrated by its sister- community in Persia. It determined to supplement its notable achievements with further acts designed to throw into sharper relief the status achieved by the Faith of Baha'u'llah in the North American continent. It was numerically smaller than the community of the Persian believers. Owing to the multiplicity of laws governing the states within the Union, it was faced, in matters affecting the personal status of its members, with a situation radically different from that confronting the believers in the East, and much more complex. But conscious of its responsibility to lend, once again, a powerful impetus to the unfoldment of a divinely appointed Order, it boldly undertook to initiate such measures as would accentuate the independent character of a Revelation it had already so nobly championed.
(372:3)
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