st of an American
believer, Jean Stannard, to establish an "International Baha'i Bureau",
directing her to Geneva, seat of the League of Nations. While the Bureau
exercised no administrative authority, it acted, in the Guardian's words,
"as intermediary between Haifa and other Baha'i centers" and served as an
information "distributing center" in the heart of Europe, its role being
formally recognized when the League's publishing house solicited and
published an account of the Bureau's activities.(133)

As has so often been the case in the history of the Cause, an unexpected
crisis served to greatly advance Baha'i involvement with the larger
society at the international level. In 1928, Shoghi Effendi encouraged the
Spiritual Assembly of Baghdad to appeal to the League's Permanent Mandates
Commission against the seizure, by _Sh_i'ih opponents, of Baha'u'llah's
House in that city. Recognizing the wrong that had been done, the Council
of the League unanimously called on the British mandate authority, in
March 1929, to press the Iraqi government "with a view to the immediate
redress of the injustice suffered by the Petitioners". Repeated evasions
by the Iraqi government, including the violation of a solemn pledge on the
part of the monarch himself, resulted in the case dragging on for years
through successive sessions of the Mandates Commission, leaving the House
in the hands of those who had seized it, a situation that remains to this
day uncorrected.(134) Undeterred by this failure, Shoghi Effendi focused
the attention of the Baha'i community on the historic benefit that the
campaign had won for the Cause. As had earlier been the case with the
Sunni Muslim court's rejection of the appeal of an Egyptian Baha'i
community regarding marriage, the Guardian pointed out:

Suffice it to say that, despite these interminable delays, protests and
evasions ... the publicity achieved for the Faith by this memorable
litigation, and the defence of its cause--the cause of truth and justice--by
the world's highest tribunal, have been such as to excite the wonder of
its friends and to fill with consternation its enemies.(135)

The birth of the United Nations opened to the Faith a far broader and more
effective forum for its efforts toward exerting a spiritual influence on
the life of society. As early as 1947, a special "Palestine Committee" of
the United Nations solicited the views of the Guardian on the future of
that mandated territory.