s showed their capacity, in 1955 and
1962, when the Community was successful in securing United Nations'
intervention on behalf of the believers suffering persecution in Iran and
Morocco, respectively.

* * * * *

In 1980, the patient external affairs activities of the National Spiritual
Assemblies and the Community's United Nations Office were suddenly
propelled into a new stage of their development. The catalyst was the
attempt by the _Sh_i'ih clergy of Iran to exterminate the Cause in the
land of its birth. The consequences were as little anticipated by the
Faith's persecutors as they were by its defenders.

Throughout the long decades in which the believers in the cradle of the
Faith suffered intermittent persecution for their beliefs, the mullas, who
instigated and led these attacks, acted in concert with the country's
succession of monarchs. The latter, ostensibly absolute in their
authority, were in fact constrained by political calculations that
rendered them vulnerable to outside pressures, particularly from Western
governments. So it was that the outrage voiced by Russian, British and
other diplomatic missions had compelled Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, against his
will, to bring to an end the orgy of violence that took so many believers'
lives in the early 1850s and threatened that of Baha'u'llah Himself.
During the twentieth century, his Qajar successors had been similarly
concerned to placate the opinion of foreign governments. The pattern was
repeated in 1955 when the second of the Pahlavi shahs, who had been
induced by the mullas to approve a wave of anti-Baha'i violence, was
forced by United Nations' protest and by objections on the part of the
American government to abruptly halt the campaign--both interventions
harbingers of things to come.

Such checks on the clergy's behaviour seemed to have been swept away by
the Islamic revolution of 1979. Suddenly, the mullas were themselves in
power, appointing their own nominees to the highest positions in the new
republic, and eventually taking over these posts directly. "Revolutionary
courts" were set up, answering only to the senior clergy. An army of
"revolutionary guards", far more effective than the shah's secret police,
and quite as brutal, took over control of every aspect of public life.

While the attention of the new ruling caste was focused chiefly on what it
believed were threats from foreign governments, influential eleme