Bahá'í History: Shoghi Effendi
and the Guardianship

Dr. Moojan Momen

In his Will and Testament, `Abdu'l-Bahá appointed his eldest grandson Shoghi Effendi as leader of the Bahá'í community (the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith) and as the authorized interpreter of the Bahá'í scriptures.

During the early years of Shoghi Effendi's ministry there were several episodes of persecution of Bahá'í communities. In Iran in 1926-7, there were several outbursts in which Bahá'ís were killed, and again in 1934, wide-ranging official measures were taken against the Bahá'ís. From 1926 onwards, the Soviet authorities increasingly persecuted the Bahá'í communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In 1928, they expropriated the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár that the Bahá'ís had built in Ashkhabad. In 1922, the house that Bahá'u'lláh had occupied in Baghdad, which was a site of pilgrimage for Bahá'ís, was taken over. Despite winning their case before the League of Nations in 1928, the Bahá'ís were never able to regain possession of it. In 1928, some 53 Bahá'ís were arrested in Adana in Turkey.

Shoghi Effendi spent the first fifteen years of his ministry establishing and assuring the proper functioning of the Bahá'í administrative structure. He then began to use this administration in a series of plans to extend the geographical range of the Bahá'í Faith. In 1937, he gave the American Bahá'ís the task of taking the Bahá'í Faith to several countries in Central and Southern America. Over the next few years he gave plans to various national Bahá'í communities. He gave the Iranian and Egyptian Bahá'ís the task of spreading the Bahá'í Faith to the Arab countries, the Indian Bahá'ís to South-East Asia; the British Bahá'ís to Africa; and he gave the American Bahá'ís a further plan involving Latin America and Europe. The culmination of all this was a Ten-Year World Crusade (1953-1963) which was to open many of the remaining countries of the world to the Bahá'í Faith.

During the Ten-Year Crusade, a development occurred which was eventually to change the face of the Bahá'í Faith. In widely separate corners of the world such as Uganda, Bolivia, Indonesia and India, large numbers of poor, illiterate villagers and tribal peoples began to enrol in the Bahá'í community.

Shoghi Effendi passed away in 1957 during a stay in London. He is buried in north London. The Bahá'í world continued to be administered until the end of the Ten-Year World Crusade in 1963 by a group of individuals whom Shoghi Effendi had designated "Hands of the Cause of God" and whom he had called the "chief stewards of Bahá'u'lláh's embryonic World Commonwealth." In 1963, the Universal House of Justice, a body which was ordained in Bahá'u'lláh's writings, was established by election.