Its voice, alas, is now
silenced, its institutions dissolved, its literature banned, its archives
confiscated, and its meetings suspended.

In central Asia, in the city enjoying the unique distinction of having
been chosen by 'Abdu'l-Baha as the home of the first Ma_sh_riqu'l-A_dh_kar
of the Baha'i world, as well as in the towns and villages of the province
to which it belongs, the sore-pressed Faith of Baha'u'llah, as a result of
the extraordinary and unique vitality which, in the course of several
decades, it has consistently manifested, finds itself at the mercy of
forces which, alarmed at its rising power, are now bent on reducing it to
utter impotence. Its Temple, though still used for purposes of Baha'i
worship, has been expropriated, its Assemblies and committees disbanded,
its teaching activities crippled, its chief promoters deported, and not a
few of its most enthusiastic supporters, both men and women, imprisoned.

In the land of its birth, wherein reside the immense majority of its
followers--a country whose capital has been hailed by Baha'u'llah as the
"mother of the world" and the "dayspring of the joy of mankind"--a civil
authority, as yet undivorced officially from the paralyzing influences of
an antiquated, a fanatical, and outrageously corrupt clergy, pursues
relentlessly its campaign of repression against the adherents of a Faith
which it has for well-nigh a century striven unsuccessfully to suppress.
Indifferent to the truth that the members of this innocent and proscribed
community can justly claim to rank as among the most disinterested, the
most competent, and the most ardent lovers of their native land,
contemptuous of their high sense of world citizenship which the advocates
of an excessive and narrow nationalism can never hope to appreciate, such
an authority refuses to grant to a Faith which extends its spiritual
jurisdiction over well-nigh six hundred local communities, and which
numerically outnumbers the adherents of either the Christian, the Jewish,
or the Zoroastrian Faiths in that land, the necessary legal right to
enforce its laws, to administer its affairs, to conduct its schools, to
celebrate its festivals, to circulate its literature, to solemnize its
rites, to erect its edifices, and to safeguard its endowments.

And now recently in the Holy Land itself, the heart and nerve-center of a
world-embracing Faith, the fires of racial animosity, of fratricidal
strife, of unabashed terror