Shoghi Effendi died childless and alone...
Shoghi Effendi describes in God Passes By the misfortunes, illnesses, and deaths of those individuals he had declared Covenant-breakers...
[Mohammad Ali Bahai's] brother, Mírzá Ḍíya’u’lláh, died prematurely;
Mírzá Áqá Ján, his dupe, followed that same brother, three years later,
to the grave; and Mírzá Badí’u’lláh, his chief accomplice, betrayed his
cause, published a signed denunciation of his evil acts, but rejoined
him again, only to be alienated from him in consequence of the
scandalous behavior of his own daughter. Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí’s
half-sister, Furúghíyyih, died of cancer, whilst her husband, Siyyid
‘Alí, passed away from a heart attack before his sons could reach him,
the eldest being subsequently stricken in the prime of life, by the same
malady. Muḥammad-Javád-i-Qazvíní, a notorious Covenant-breaker,
perished miserably. Shu‘á’u’lláh who, as witnessed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in
His Will, had counted on the murder of the Center of the Covenant, and
who had been despatched to the United States by his father to join
forces with Ibráhím Khayru’lláh, returned crestfallen and empty-handed
from his inglorious mission. Jamál-i-Burújirdí, Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí’s
ablest lieutenant in Persia, fell a prey to a fatal and loathsome
disease; Siyyid Mihdíy-i-Dahájí, who, betraying ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, joined the
Covenant-breakers, died in obscurity and poverty, followed by his wife
and his two sons; Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alíy-i-Jahrúmí, Mírzá
Ḥusayn-i-Shírázíy-i-Khurṭúmí and Ḥájí Muḥammad-Ḥusayn-i-Káshání, who
represented the arch-breaker of the Covenant in Persia, India and Egypt,
failed utterly in their missions; whilst the greedy and conceited
Ibráhím-i-Khayru’lláh, who had chosen to uphold the banner of his
rebellion in America for no less than twenty years, and who had the
temerity to denounce, in writing, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, His “false teachings,
His misrepresentations of Bahaism, His dissimulation,” and to stigmatize
His visit to America as “a death-blow” to the “Cause of God,” met his
death soon after he had uttered these denunciations, utterly abandoned
and despised by the entire body of the members of a community, whose
founders he himself had converted to the Faith, and in the very land
that bore witness to the multiplying evidences of the established
ascendancy of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Whose authority he had, in his later years,
vowed to uproot.
As to those who had openly espoused the cause of this arch-breaker of
Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant [Mohammad Ali Bahai], or who had secretly
sympathized with him, whilst outwardly supporting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, some
eventually repented and were forgiven; others became disillusioned and
lost their faith entirely; a few apostatized, whilst the rest dwindled
away, leaving him in the end, except for a handful of his relatives,
alone and unsupported. Surviving ‘Abdu’l-Bahá by almost twenty years, he
who had so audaciously affirmed to His face that he had no assurance he
might outlive Him, lived long enough to witness the utter bankruptcy of
his cause, leading meanwhile a wretched existence within the walls of a
Mansion that had once housed a crowd of his supporters; was denied by
the civil authorities, as a result of the crisis he had after
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing foolishly precipitated, the official custody of
his Father’s Tomb; was compelled, a few years later, to vacate that same
Mansion, which, through his flagrant neglect, had fallen into a
dilapidated condition; was stricken with paralysis which crippled half
his body; lay bedridden in pain for months before he died; and was
buried according to Muslim rites, in the immediate vicinity of a local
Muslim shrine, his grave remaining until the present day devoid of even a
tombstone—a pitiful reminder of the hollowness of the claims he had
advanced, of the depths of infamy to which he had sunk, and of the
severity of the retribution his acts had so richly merited.
Ironically, while his family members passed away surrounded with
their loved ones, Shoghi Effendi died childless and alone while shopping
for furniture in London, where he is buried, far from the Bahai holy
sites in Haifa.
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