aha'u'llah's withdrawal to Kurdistan,
had, in a masterly fashion after His return from Sulaymaniyyih, been
arrested and reversed. The ethical, the moral and doctrinal foundations of
a nascent community had been subsequently, in the course of His sojourn in
Ba_gh_dad, unassailably established. And finally, in the Garden of Ridvan,
on the eve of His banishment to Constantinople, the ten-year delay,
ordained by an inscrutable Providence, had been terminated through the
Declaration of His Mission and the visible emergence of what was to become
the nucleus of a world-embracing Fellowship. What now remained to be
achieved was the proclamation, in the city of Adrianople, of that same
Mission to the world's secular and ecclesiastical leaders, to be followed,
in successive decades, by a further unfoldment, in the prison-fortress of
Akka, of the principles and precepts constituting the bedrock of that
Faith, by the formulation of the laws and ordinances designed to safeguard
its integrity, by the establishment, immediately after His ascension, of
the Covenant designed to preserve its unity and perpetuate its influence,
by the prodigious and world-wide extension of its activities, under the
guidance of 'Abdu'l-Baha, the Center of that Covenant, and lastly, by the
rise, in the Formative Age of that Faith, of its Administrative Order, the
harbinger of its Golden Age and future glory.

This historic Proclamation was made at a time when the Faith was in the
throes of a crisis of extreme violence, and it was in the main addressed
to the kings of the earth, and to the Christian and Muslim ecclesiastical
leaders who, by virtue of their immense prestige, ascendancy and
authority, assumed an appalling and inescapable responsibility for the
immediate destinies of their subjects and followers.

The initial phase of that Proclamation may be said to have opened in
Constantinople with the communication (the text of which we, alas, do not
possess) addressed by Baha'u'llah to Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz himself, the
self-styled vicar of the Prophet of Islam and the absolute ruler of a
mighty empire. So potent, so august a personage was the first among the
sovereigns of the world to receive the Divine Summons, and the first among
Oriental monarchs to sustain the impact of God's retributive justice. The
occasion for this communication was provided by the infamous edict the
Sultan had promulgated, less than four months after the arrival of the
exiles in hi