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A PERIOD of Historic Significance- The historic significance of this period cannot indeed be overestimated. For it was a hundred years ago that a Faith, which had already been oppressed by a staggering weight of untold tribulations; which had sustained shattering blows in Mazindaran, Nayriz, Tihran and Zanjan, and indeed throughout every province in the land of its birth; which had lost its greatest exponents through the tragic martyrdom of most of the Letters of the Living, and particularly of the valiant Mulla Husayn and of the erudite Vahid and which had been afflicted with the supreme calamity of losing its Divine Founder; was being subjected to still more painful ordeals - ordeals which robbed it of both the heroic Hujjat and of the far-famed Tahirih; which caused it to pass through a reign of terror, and to experience a blood-bath of unprecedented severity, which inflicted on it one of the greatest humiliations it has ever suffered through the attempted assassination of the sovereign himself, and which unloosed a veritable deluge of barbarous atrocities in Tihran, Mazindaran, Nayriz and Shiraz before which paled the horrors of the siege of Zanjan, and which swept no less a figure than Baha'u'llah Himself - the last remaining pillar of a Faith that had been so rudely shaken, so ruthlessly denuded of its chief buttresses - into the subterranean dungeon of Tihran, an imprisonment that was soon followed by His cruel banishment, in the depths of an exceptionally severe winter, from His native land to "Iraq. To these tribulations He Himself has referred as "afflictions" that "rained" upon Him, whilst the blood shed by His companions and lovers He characterized as the blood which "impregnated" the earth with the "wondrous revelation" of God's "might." (100:1) Nor should the momentous character of the unique event, that may be regarded as the climax and consummation of this tragic period, be overlooked or underestimated, inasmuch as its centenary synchronizes with the termination of the sixteen-month interval separating the American Baha'i Community from the conclusion of its present Plan. This unique event, the centenary of which is to be befittingly celebrated, not only in the American continent but throughout the Baha'i world, and is destined to be regarded as the culmination of the Second Seven Year Plan, is none other than the "Year Nine," anticipated 2,000 years ago as the "third woe" by St. John the Divine, alluded to by both Shaykh Ahmad and Siyyid Kazim - the twin luminaries that heralded the advent of the Faith of the Bab - specifically mentioned and extolled by the Herald of the Baha'i Dispensation in His Writings, and eulogized by both the Founder of our Faith and the Center of His Covenant. In that year, the year "after Hin" (68), mentioned by Shaykh Ahmad, the year that witnessed the birth of the Mission of the Promised "Qayyum," specifically referred to by Siyyid Kazim, the "requisite number" in the words of Baha'u'llah, "of pure, of wholly consecrated and sanctified souls" had been "most secretly consummated." In that year, as testified by the pen of the Bab, the "realities of the created things" were "made manifest," "a new creation was born" and the seed of His Faith revealed its "ultimate perfection." In that year, as borne witness by 'Abdu'l-Baha, a hitherto "embryonic Faith" was born. In that year, while the Blessed Beauty lay in chains and fetters, in that dark and Pestilential pit, "the breezes of the All-Glorious," as He Himself described it, "were wafted" over Him. There, whilst His neck was weighted down by the Qara-Guhar, His feet in stocks, breathing the fetid air of the Siyah-Chal, He dreamed His dream and heard, "on every side," "exalted words," and His "tongue recited" words that "no man could bear to hear."
(100:2)
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