ucceed His religion, that no law will abrogate His law,
that the Qur'an is the last of the Books of God and His last Revelation to
His Prophets and His Messengers ... he shall be accepted and shall be
entitled to renew his marriage contract..."

This declaration of portentous significance, which was supported by
incontrovertible proofs adduced by the avowed enemies of the Faith of
Baha'u'llah themselves, which was made in a country that aspires to the
headship of Islam through the restoration of the Caliphate, and which has
received the sanction of the highest ecclesiastical authorities in that
country, this official testimony which the leaders of _Sh_i'ah Islam, in
both Persia and 'Iraq, have, through a century, sedulously avoided
voicing, and which, once and for all, silences those detractors, including
Christian ecclesiastics in the West, who have in the past stigmatized that
Faith as a cult, as a Babi sect and as an offshoot of Islam or represented
it as a synthesis of religions--such a declaration was acclaimed by all
Baha'i communities in the East and in the West as the first Charter of the
emancipation of the Cause of Baha'u'llah from the fetters of Islamic
orthodoxy, the first historic step taken, not by its adherents as might
have been expected, but by its adversaries on the road leading to its
ultimate and world-wide recognition.

Such a verdict, fraught with incalculable possibilities, was immediately
recognized as a powerful challenge which the builders of the
Administrative Order of the Faith of Baha'u'llah were not slow to face and
accept. It imposed upon them a sacred obligation which they felt ready to
discharge. Designed by its authors to deprive their adversaries of access
to Muslim courts, and thereby place them in a perplexing and embarrassing
situation, it became a lever which the Egyptian Baha'i community, followed
later by its sister-communities, readily utilized for the purpose of
asserting the independence of its Faith and of seeking for it the
recognition of its government. Translated into several languages,
circulated among Baha'i communities in East and West, it gradually paved
the way for the initiation of negotiations between the elected
representatives of these communities and the civil authorities in Egypt,
in the Holy Land, in Persia and even in the United States of America, for
the purpose of securing the official recognition by these authorities of
the Faith as an independent religion.