Chapter 1
Introduction
As the new millennium approaches, the crucial
need of the human race is to find a unifying vision of
the nature of man and society. For the past century
humanity's response to this impulse has driven a
succession of ideological upheavals that have convulsed
our world and that appear now to have exhausted
themselves. The passion invested in the struggle, despite
its disheartening results, testifies to the depth of the
need. For, without a common conviction about the course
and direction of human history, it is inconceivable that
foundations can be laid for a global society to which the
mass of humankind can commit themselves.
Such a vision
unfolds in the writings of Bahá'u'lláh, the
nineteenth century prophetic figure whose growing
influence is the most remarkable development of
contemporary religious history. Born in Persia, November 12, 1817,
Bahá'u'lláh1 began at
age 27 an undertaking that has gradually captured the
imagination and loyalty of several million people from
virtually every race, culture, class, and nation on
earth. The phenomenon is one that has no reference points
in the contemporary world, but is associated rather with
climactic changes of direction in the collective past of
the human race. For Bahá'u'lláh claimed to be
no less than the Messenger of God to the age of human
maturity, the Bearer of a Divine Revelation that fulfills
the promises made in earlier religions, and that will
generate the spiritual nerves and sinews for the
unification of the peoples of the world.
If they were
to do nothing else, the effects which
Bahá'u'lláh's life and writings have already
had should command the earnest attention of anyone who
believes that human nature is fundamentally spiritual and
that the coming organization of our planet must be
informed by this aspect of reality. The documentation
lies open to general scrutiny. For the first time in
history humanity has available a detailed and verifiable
record of the birth of an independent religious system
and of the life of its Founder. Equally accessible is the record of the response
that the new faith has evoked, through the emergence of a
global community which can already justly claim to
represent a microcosm of the human race.2
During the
earlier decades of this century, this development was
relatively obscure. Bahá'u'lláh's writings
forbid the aggressive proselytism through which many
religious messages have been widely promulgated. Further,
the priority which the Bahá'í community gave to
the establishment of groups at the local level throughout
the entire planet militated against the early emergence
of large concentrations of adherents in any one country
or the mobilization of resources required for large-scale
programs of public information. Arnold Toynbee, intrigued by phenomena that
might represent the emergence of a new universal
religion, noted in the 1950s that the Bahá'í Faith
was then about as familiar to the average educated
Westerner as Christianity had been to the corresponding
class in the Roman empire during the second century A.D.3
In more
recent years, as the Bahá'í community's numbers
have rapidly increased in many countries, the situation
has changed dramatically. There is now virtually no area
in the world where the pattern of life taught by
Bahá'u'lláh is not taking root. The respect
which the community's social and economic development
projects are beginning to win in governmental, academic,
and United Nations circles further reinforces the
argument for a detached and serious examination of the
impulse behind a process of social transformation that
is, in critical respects, unique in our world.
No
uncertainty surrounds the nature of the generating
impulse. Bahá'u'lláh's writings cover an
enormous range of subjects from social issues such as
racial integration, the equality of the sexes, and
disarmament, to those questions that affect the innermost
life of the human soul. The original texts, many of them
in His own hand, the others dictated and affirmed by
their author, have been meticulously preserved. For
several decades, a systematic program of translation and
publication has made selections from
Bahá'u'lláh's writings accessible to people
everywhere, in over eight hundred languages.
