Memorials of the Faithful
Proem
This is a book about people who were trying to get into prison rather than to escape from it, because they were prisoners of a great love. Their love was for
Bahá’u’lláh, Whom the nineteenth century world bound with chains and tried to silence by shutting Him, ultimately, in the Crusaders’ stronghold at
‘Akká. Like the eye of the storm, He is the center of these accounts, but hardly appears in them—remaining, as the
Guardian has described Him, “transcendental in His majesty, serene, awe-inspiring, unapproachably glorious.”
The reader will probably find himself in these pages, whether he is the jeweler from
Baghdád, one of the dishwashers, or the professor who could not endure the arrogance of his compeers. Mystic, feminist, cleric, artisan, merchant prince are here. Even modern Western youth will be found here, for example in the chapter on dervishes. For this is more than the brief annals of early Bahá’í disciples; it is, somehow, a book of prototypes; and it is a kind of testament of values endorsed and willed to us by the
Bahá’í Exemplar, values now derided, but—if the planet is to be made safe for humanity—indispensable. These are short and simple accounts, but they constitute a manual of how to live, and how to die.
The task of putting these biographies into English was given me by the Guardian many years ago, when I was on a pilgrimage to the
Bahá’í world center in
Haifa. Shortly afterward the Guardian sent me to
Ṭihrán, the text from which this translation was made. According to its Persian title page, this was the first Bahá’í book to be printed in Haifa under the Guardianship.
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