's
major success stories.

During these same years, the Asian continent also saw the sudden emergence
of the Malaysian Baha'i community as an engine of the expansion work,
winning its own goals with stunning speed and dispatching pioneers and
travelling teachers to neighbouring lands. A development that made this
dramatic advance possible was the bonds of spiritual partnership that had
been woven between believers of Chinese and Indian backgrounds. Visitors
to Malaysia spoke, with something approaching awe, of the way in which the
Malaysian community, although working under many constraints and
disabilities, seemed to be the very embodiment of the military metaphors
with which Shoghi Effendi's writings seek to capture the spirit of Baha'i
teaching efforts.

Neither the world-wide growth of the Baha'i community nor the process of
learning it was experiencing, however, tell the whole story of these
tumultuous and creative decades. When the history of the period is
eventually written, one of its most brilliant chapters will recount the
spiritual victories won by Baha'i communities, in Africa particularly, who
survived war, terror, political oppression and extreme privations, and who
emerged from these tests with their faith intact, determined to resume the
interrupted work of building a viable Baha'i collective life. The
community in Ethiopia, homeland of one of the world's oldest and richest
cultural traditions, succeeded in maintaining both the morale of its
members and the coherence of its administrative structures under
relentless pressure from a brutal dictatorship. Of the friends in other
countries on the continent, it may be truly said that their path of
faithfulness to the Cause led through a hell of suffering seldom equalled
in modern history. The annals of the Faith possess few more moving
testimonies to the sheer power of the spirit than the stories of courage
and purity of heart emerging from the inferno that engulfed the friends in
what was then Zaire, stories that will inspire generations to come and
represent priceless contributions to the creation of a global Baha'i
culture. Such countries as Uganda and Rwanda added unforgettable
achievements of their own to this record of heroic struggle.

Inspiring, too, was the demonstration of the capacity for renewal that is
inherent in the Cause and which emerged in Cambodian refugee camps along
the Thailand border. Through the heroic efforts of a handful of teacher