As indicated in the survey recently conducted by the Orthodox Baha’i Faith throughout India about the beliefs held by the sans Guardian Baha’is, it was found that these Baha’is have been consistently mislead concerning the provisions of the divinely-conceived Baha’I Administrative Order by the ABMs, Counselors’ and secretaries of the National Spiritual Assembly of India under the instructions of the Sans-Guardian Universal House of Justice and by other Sans-Guardian Local Assembly office bearers and the tutors of the Ruhi Books.
I appeal to all the Indian Baha’i friends to undertake an independent investigation of the Truth by reexamining the Baha’i Administrative Order as clearly and immutably established in the Will and Testament of Abdul Baha, rather then listening only to those who have repudiated its sacred provisions by ignoring the continuity and infallibility of the Guardianship of the Baha’i Faith.
Provided below for your independent review, is a seminal article written by Joel Marangella, the current Guardian of the Baha’I Faith, titled “THE DIABOLICAL SUBVERSION OF THE BAHÁ’Í ADMINISTRATIVE ORDER,” which summarizes the purposeful perversion of the Baha’I Administrative Order faithlessly perpetrated following the passing in 1957 of Shoghi Effendi, the first Guardian of the Faith.
It is my hope that sincere and true Indian scholars of the Faith will embrace this article as an affirmation of the sacred Will and Testament of Abdul Baha, and will join with me and the other faithful friends in support of the Guardianship within the Orthodox Baha’I Community of India.
Allah-u-Abha,
Dr. A. Parikh
Hand of the Cause of God
Secretary, National Baha’i Council of India.
THE DIABOLICAL SUBVERSION OF THE BAHÁ’Í ADMINISTRATIVE ORDER
PERPETRATED FOLLOWING THE PASSING OF SHOGHI EFFENDI
During the concluding years of Shoghi Effendi’s thirty-six year ministry he appointed twenty-seven living Hands of the Cause of God, the first contingent of twelve being appointed on 24 December 1951 and the last contingent of eight being appointed in his last message to the Bahá’í world in October 1957, dispatched one month prior to his passing on the 4th of November 1957 during a visit to London, England.
Some two weeks following his passing these Hands convened a conclave in ‘Akká for the purpose of determining who had been named as his successor. After undertaking a fruitless search for a will and testament left by Shoghi Effendi which should have been foreseen, had they recalled that the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá clearly requires the Guardian to appoint his successor "in his own life-time," a provision that they should have realized barred him and all future Guardians from using a testamentary type document to appoint their successors. Had they realized this fact, they then would have inevitably concluded that Shoghi Effendi must have appointed and identified his successor during his life-time in some manner that they had failed to perceive. Ignoring this fact, as they then did, and failing to take any time to re-examine past acts or significant statements made by Shoghi Effendi, which they had perhaps overlooked at the time, because he had possibly made the appointment of his successor in an indirect way, the ten Persian Hands seconded the proposal that had been immediately made by one of their number, that the Guardianship be declared "Badah" (meaning that God had changed His Mind about the continuance of this Institution). This proposal was then surprisingly endorsed by Rúhíyyih Khánum, the widow of Shoghi Effendi, and ultimately by the remaining Hands of the Cause, with a single notable exception. For them to so hastily conclude on this basis that the Guardianship had ended a mere thirty-six years following the inception of an Administrative Order, that had been promised to endure for not less than a full thousand years, was not only a tragic and incredible loss of faith in the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh and in the immutability of every provision of the divinely-conceived Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the "Center of the Covenant," but constituted, as well, a shameful repudiation of all that Shoghi Effendi had written concerning the divine genesis of the Administrative Order and the undeniable essentiality and indispensability of the Guardianship to that Order that had been consistently and repeatedly stressed by him in his writings. They therefore undeniably failed the severe test of continued fidelity to the Covenant with which they had been faced as a result of the sudden and unexpected passing of Shoghi Effendi. While two of the Hands are known to have initially wavered in adhering to this decision taken by their fellow-Hands, one of them doing so for a considerable period of time, he finally fell into line, whereas it was only Mason Remey, who never wavered for a single moment in his unshakeable faith in the indestructibility of the Covenant of Bahá’u’lláh, although he temporarily supported his fellow-Hands in the interest of preserving unity and until such time as he was able to marshal the necessary arguments and facts to prove to his fellow-Hands that they were wrong in declaring the end of the Guardianship which, in due course, he fully did, in both verbal and magnificently written appeals that remain a matter of permanent record.
These now faithless Hands, who had gained by this time great prestige and were greatly revered by the believers, found it easy, as a result, to persuade the majority of their fellow-Bahá’ís to accept their hasty decision that the Guardianship had ended, supporting this fateful decision, as they did, with patently false interpretations and specious beliefs. Moreover, these Hands were able to ignominiously and incredibly induce most of their fellow-believers to accept a flagrantly-flawed and highly-corrupted sans-Guardian administrative organization of their own making which they had the temerity to foist upon them as a pitiful substitute for "the Administrative Order which the master-hand of its perfect Architect [‘Abdu’l-Bahá] has fashioned," and one founded, as Shoghi Effendi had declared, on the very "bedrock" of "God’s immutable Purpose for mankind in this day."
Numbered amongst these patently false beliefs and interpretations initially promulgated by the Hands of the Cause (with a single notable exception, as previously mentioned) and subsequently endorsed by the current Heterodox Bahá’í organization are the following:
- That the Guardianship was "Badah," as previously mentioned above, a term not found in the Bahá’í Writings but propounded by a Persian Hand of the Cause on the very first day of their consultations in their first conclave held in ‘Akká and ultimately embraced, as discussed above, by twenty-six of the twenty-seven Hands of the Cause, following their fruitless search for a will and testament left by Shoghi Effendi. Their inordinately hasty adoption of this belief, so foreign to the Writings of the Faith and completely contrary to the writings of Shoghi Effendi concerning the Administrative Order, in effect, reduced to naught Shoghi Effendi’s labors to erect "at long last" the supreme administrative institutions of the Faith, in complete fidelity to the provisions of the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. For the term, "Badah," that they now had the temerity to apply to the Institution of the Guardianship, meant, that they expected their fellow-believers to accept without question their incredulous conclusion, that God had changed His mind about the continuation of the Guardianship and that this Institution, which had been delineated, in the provisions of a divinely-conceived, sacred and immutable Will and Testament, and which, in effect, had been Co-authored, by both Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, had now become null and void and the Guardianship forever ended for the duration of the Dispensation of Bahá’u’lláh.
- That Shoghi Effendi had been unable to appoint a successor because only an Aghsán was eligible to be appointed as his successor and all of the Aghsán had become unfaithful to the Covenant.
- That the term Aghsán as found in the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, referred to all male descendants of Bahá’u’lláh.
- That when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in His Will and Testament, had provided the Guardian with the option of choosing "another branch" to be his successor in the event that his eldest son was not worthy, that the word "branch" in this clause referred to the Aghsán.
- That, in view of their appointment as Hands of the Cause by Shoghi Effendi, they were now to be considered, as announced in their "Unanimous Proclamation" on 25 November 1957, "the supreme body of the Bahá’í World Community."
- That the entire body of Hands of the Cause possessed approval authority over the Guardian’s appointment of a successor, notwithstanding the fact that the Will and Testament states that it is only the nine Hands elected from their number to serve at the World Center under the direction of the Guardian who must give their assent to the Guardian’s choice (obviously during his life-time and not afterwards) and that Shoghi Effendi had clearly explained that this "assent" did not denote that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had granted them veto authority over the Guardian’s divinely-guided choice of a successor and their further disregard for the fact that this body of nine Hands at the World Center, for which Shoghi Effendi obviously had found no need in the early stage of development of the Faith at the World Center, had never been brought into existence during his ministry.
- That the body of "nine Hands" whom they stated had been elected by their fellow-Hands, following the passing of Shoghi Effendi, (not elected as falsely alleged but appointed) and given the title: "the Custodians of the Bahá’í World Faith" was not only to be accepted by the believers as a legitimate body but actually was to be considered as the body of nine Hands that are elected to serve under the direction of the Guardian at the World Center, which they falsely claimed had taken place "in accordance with the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, although an obvious impossibility since they no longer accepted a living Guardian, under whose direction these Hands are required to serve. Moreover, incredulously the Hands announced in a "Resolution," under date of 25 November 1957, that the "Custodians shall be deemed to succeed the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith" and further preposterously stated in their "Unanimous Proclamation," on the same date, that these Custodians would exercise "all such functions, rights and powers in succession to the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith." (obviously conflicting with the belief voiced by other believers that Shoghi Effendi would, in some magical way, continue to exercise undefined and obviously limited functions, at best, from the next world).
- That the International Bahá’í Council, appointed by Shoghi Effendi on 9 January 1951, was only a provisional body, even though he had proclaimed it in this message to be "the first embryonic International Institution."
- That the functions of the International Bahá’í Council would continue to remain limited to matters within the Holy Land, as originally outlined by Shoghi Effendi even though he had stated in his Proclamation establishing the Council that: "to these will be added further functions" and, as a case in point, had specifically assigned this Council, referred to in his message of 23 November 1951 as "the Central Body," a future pre-eminent role in directing the "widely ramified operations" of National Spiritual Assemblies of the Bahá’í world in their achievement of the goals of the Ten Year Global Crusade, a role that was not only completely ignored by the Hands but a role flagrantly usurped by the body of the Custodian Hands.
- That Shoghi Effendi’s appointment of Mason Remey as the President of the International Bahá’í Council was nothing more than a temporary appointment and that he would be replaced through election, similarly to the other eight members, in the future stages of the Council’s evolution outlined by Shoghi Effendi.
- That the sans-Guardian Universal House of Justice, the election for which would be held, according to their plans, at Ridván 1963, would, notwithstanding the absence of the Guardian presiding as its "sacred head," be the same infallible Institution delineated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in his Will and Testament.
- That Shoghi Effendi’s plans had envisaged that the International Bahá’í Council would achieve the final efflorescent stage of its development with the election of a fully functioning Universal House of Justice at Ridván 1963, whereas this development brought about by decision of the Hands was excessively premature as Shoghi Effendi had only projected the Council’s development to its second stage as the International Bahá’í Court by the end of the Ten Year Global Crusade, at which time its irremovable appointed Head, Mason Remey, would automatically assume the role of Chief Judge.
- That the establishment of the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh did not depend upon the erection of the "twin pillars that support this mighty Administrative Structure–the institutions of the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice"–and that this World Order could be successfull
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