The nucleus of this community had been formed by the Bab, soon after the night of the Declaration of His Mission to Mulla Husayn in Shiraz. A clamor in which the Shah, his government, his people and the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy of his country unanimously joined had greeted its birth. Captivity, swift and cruel, in the mountains of Adhirbayjan, had been the lot of its youthful Founder, almost immediately after His return from His pilgrimage to Mecca. Amidst the solitude of Mah- Ku and Chihriq, He had instituted His Covenant, formulated His laws, and transmitted to posterity the overwhelming majority of His writings. A conference of His disciples, headed by Baha'u'llah, had, in the hamlet of Badasht, abrogated in dramatic circumstances the laws of the Islamic, and ushered in the new, Dispensation. In Tabriz He had, in the presence of the Heir to the Throne and the leading ecclesiastical dignitaries of Adhirbayjan, publicly and unreservedly voiced His claim to be none other than the promised, the long- awaited Qa'im. Tempests of devastating violence in Mazindaran, Nayriz, Zanjan and Tihran had decimated the ranks of His followers and robbed Him of the noblest and most valuable of His supporters. He Himself had to witness the virtual annihilation of His Faith and the loss of most of the Letters of the Living, and, after experiencing, in His own person, a series of bitter humiliations, He had been executed by a firing squad in the barrack- square of Tabriz. A blood bath of unusual ferocity had engulfed the greatest heroine of His Faith, had further denuded it of its adherents, had extinguished the life of His trusted amanuensis and repository of His last wishes, and swept Baha'u'llah into the depths of the foulest dungeon of Tihran. (403:1)

In the pestilential atmosphere of the Siyah- Chal, nine years after that historic Declaration, the Message proclaimed by the Bab had yielded its fruit, His promise had been redeemed, and the most glorious, the most momentous period of the Heroic Age of the Baha'i era had dawned. A momentary eclipse of the newly risen Sun of Truth, the world's greatest Luminary, had ensued, as a result of Baha'u'llah's precipitate banishment to Iraq by order of Nasiri'd- Din Shah, of His sudden withdrawal to the mountains of Kurdistan, and of the degradation and confusion that afflicted the remnant of the persecuted community of His fellow- disciples in Baghdad. A reversal in the fortunes of a fast declining community, following His return from His two- year retirement, had set in, bringing in its wake the recreation of that community, the reformation of its morals, the enhancement of its prestige, the enrichment of its doctrine, and culminating in the Declaration of His Mission in the garden of Najibiyyih to His immediate companions on the eve of His banishment to Constantinople. Another crisis-- the severest a struggling Faith was destined to experience in the course of its history-- precipitated by the rebellion of the Bab's nominee and the iniquities perpetrated by him and by the evil genius that had seduced him, had, in Adrianople, well nigh disrupted the newly consolidated forces of the Faith and all but destroyed in a baptism of fire the community of the Most Great Name which Baha'u'llah had called into being. Cleansed of the pollution of this "Most Great Idol," undeterred by the convulsion that had seized it, an indestructible Faith had, in the strength of the Covenant instituted by the Bab, now surmounted the most formidable obstacles it was ever to meet; and in this very hour it reached its meridian glory through the proclamation of the Mission of Baha'u'llah to the kings, the rulers and ecclesiastical leaders of the world in both the East and the West. Close on the heels of this unprecedented victory had followed the climax of His sufferings, a banishment to the penal colony of Akka, decreed by Sultan Abdu'l- 'Aziz. This had been hailed by vigilant enemies as the signal for the final extermination of a much feared and hated adversary, and it had heaped upon that Faith in this fortress- town, designated by Baha'u'llah as His "Most Great Prison," calamities from both within and without, such as it had never before experienced. The formulation of the laws and ordinances of a new- born Dispensation and the enunciation and reaffirmation of its fundamental principles-- the warp and woof of a future Administrative Order-- had, however, enabled a slowly maturing Revelation, in spite of this tide of tribulations, to advance a stage further and yield its fairest fruit. (403:2)

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