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Updated: May 4, 2025
A message of 3 June 1957 celebrated the action of the Israeli government in executing the final decision of the court of appeals of that country, by which the surviving band of Covenant-breakers were at last evicted from the Ḥaram-i-Aqdas surrounding the focal Centre of the Bahá’í world at Bahjí.
The Third reason why God will be avenged of those that are covenant-breakers, is: Because that a covenant is the greatest obligation and the most forcible claim that can be invented to tie us to obedience and service. God may justly challenge obedience without covenanting, by virtue of creation, preservation and redemption: He hath made us, and, when lost, He hath purchased us with His blood.
Which covenants once entered into, and being for the matter of them lawful, are most sacred, and therefore inviolably binding; and what cannot be broken or transgressed, without manifest guilt, and incurring the dreadful resentment of a holy and jealous God, who has severely threatened to punish covenant-breakers.
Treacherous Ruhi Afnan, not content with previous disobedience, correspondence with Ahmad Sohrab, contact with old Covenant-breakers, sale, in conjunction with other members of family, of sacred property purchased by Founder of Faith, and allowing his sister to marry son of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s enemy, is now openly lecturing on Bahá’í movement, claiming to be its exponent and is misrepresenting the teachings and deliberately causing confusion in minds of authorities and the local population.
Neither the irreparable loss sustained by the termination of the earthly life of a vigilant Master, nor the acute distress caused by the financial collapse which suddenly swept their country, nor the unprecedented tragedy of a world crisis that swept their land and its people into its vortex, nor the perils and uncertainties, the exhaustion and the disillusionment associated with its aftermath nor even the soul-shaking tests which periodically assailed them, through the defection and the attacks of Covenant-breakers, occupying, by virtue of their kinship to, or their long association with, the Founder of their community, exalted positions at the World Center of the Faith, or in the land from which it sprang, or in their own country—none of these have succeeded in vitiating the hidden spring of their spiritual life, in deflecting them from their chosen course, or in even retarding the forward march and fruition of their enterprises.
In the Holy Land itself, the Mansion of Bahá’u’lláh was falling into ruin as a result of neglect by the Covenant-breakers who occupied it, and the Shrine housing the precious remains of both the Báb and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had progressed no further than the simple stone structure raised by the Master.
Carmel; by the formation of the Palestine branches of the Bahá’í National Assemblies; by exhumation of the Brother and Mother of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and reburial in the neighborhood of the Báb’s resting place; by the evacuation by these same adversaries of the Mansion of Bahjí, after forty years’ occupancy; by the demise, in distressing circumstances, of the archbreaker of the Covenant himself; by the ignominious flight of his henchmen on the eve of the disturbances which rocked the Holy Land in recent years; by the deaths with dramatic swiftness of this same lieutenant, his kindred and closest associates; by the intervention of the Israeli government in denying the competence of the civil courts to adjudicate the case brought by the remnant of these same Covenant-breakers and the subsequent authorization issued by the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs to demolish the ruined building close to the vicinity of Bahá’u’lláh’s Tomb; finally, by the extinction of the life of the prime mover in the diabolical plans directed during the course of three decades against ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
Now does loyalty to Him require that the beloved should rise up in obedience to His instructions, and devote their efforts to teaching the Faith, and to passing around from one to the next this winecup tempered at the camphor fountain, and to protecting God’s Cause from the evil suggestions and the mischief of the adversary, and to guarding the structure of the holy Covenant from disruption at the hands of the Covenant-breakers.
O ye close and dear friends of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá! In the Orient scatter perfumes, And shed splendours on the West. Carry light unto the Bulgar, And the Slav with life invest. One year after the ascension of Bahá’u’lláh, there came this verse from the lips of the Centre of the Covenant. The Covenant-breakers found it strange indeed, and they treated it with scorn.
More grievous than any of the intermittent crises which have more or less acutely afflicted the Faith since the inception, over thirty years ago, of the Formative Age of the Bahá’í Dispensation, such as a seizure of the keys of the foremost Shrine of the Bahá’í world by the covenant-breakers residing in the Holy Land; the occupation of the House of Bahá’u’lláh by His traditional enemies in Baghdád; the expropriation of the first Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of the Bahá’í world in Turkistán and the virtual extinction of the Ishqábád Bahá’í Community; the disabilities suffered by the Egyptian Bahá’í Community as a result of the verdict of the Egyptian ecclesiastical court and the historic pronouncements of the highest dignitaries of Sunní Islám in Egypt; the defection of the members of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s family and the machinations and eventual deviation of various recognized yet highly ambitious leaders, teachers, as well as administrators, in Persia, Egypt, Germany and the United States—more grievous than any of these, this latest manifestation of the implacable hatred, and relentless opposition, of the as yet firmly entrenched, politically influential avowed adversaries of God’s infant Faith, threatens to become more uncontrollable with every passing day.
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