The Cause of God must be protected from the enemies of the Faith, and from
those who sow seeds of doubt in the hearts of the believers, and the
greatest of all protections is knowledge: there is no doubt that the
silliest of all charges ever made is that the “Will and Testament” of the
Master is a forgery! It is all in His own hand, sealed in more than one
place with His own seal, and was opened after His death by some members of
His own family, who took it from His own safe, in this house, and from
that day it has been kept in the safe under lock and key. The charges of
Mrs. White were the result of an unbalanced mind. No other enemy, even
those who were shrewd and clever, made this foolish accusation! The case
of Aḥmad Sohrab is, for one who has had any experience of orientals and of
psychology, easily understandable. He was, for some years the secretary of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá and enjoyed, as a result of this and the fact that he
accompanied Him to America, (to be sure with a number of other Persians),
a great deal of attention from the Bahá’ís who looked up to him and
admired him. However, since the Master’s Will was read, and the
administrative order, under the Guardianship, began to be developed, he
became cognizant of the fact that his personal ambition for leadership
would have to be subordinated to some degree of supervision; that he would
have to obey the National and local assemblies—just like every other
Bahá’í, and could not be free to teach wholly independent of any advice or
supervision. This was the beginning of the defection which in the end took
him outside the pale of the Faith: he refused not to be handled always as
an exception, a privileged exception. In fact, if we keenly analyse it, it
is almost invariably the soaring ambition and deep self-love of people
that has led them to leave the Faith. Towards the end Sohrab used, in the
course of his lectures, to incorporate quotation after quotation of
Bahá’u’lláh’s words in his lectures, without once stating they were
Bahá’u’lláh’s, and when the believers remonstrated with him over this
plagiarism, it had no effect. After he had, of his own accord, left the
organized body of the Faith and refused to be reconciled with it, he began
to attack the administrators of it, first the American N.S.A., then the
entire administrative order, and in the end the Guardian. What he teaches
at present is so far divorced from our beloved Faith, and so tinged with
the doctrines of many “cults” which we see thriving at present, as to be
almost unrecognizable. Sohrab’s influence and activities in America have
waned greatly, and he seems to now feel his only chance of causing
mischief is to be active with his “caravan” movement abroad. The books and
articles he published attacking the Guardian and, in fact, everything
established in the Master’s Will, had no effect, and far from succeeding
in causing any breach in the Faith in America, some of the very few who
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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