On November 4, 1957, Shoghi Effendi passed away suddenly at the age of 60 from the Asian flu in London where he was
shopping for furniture and ornaments for the International Archives building. He died having violated Bahá'u'lláh's command in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas that
"Unto everyone hath been enjoined the writing of a will."
Having no children of his own and having declared every living male
descendant of Bahá'u'lláh a Covenant-breaker, Shoghi Effendi left no
eligible candidates for the office of Guardian, posing a serious problem
given his assertion that
"In
this Dispensation, divine guidance flows on to us in this world after
the Prophet’s ascension, through first the Master, and then the
Guardians." He had
furthermore stated in The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh that
Divorced from the institution of the Guardianship the World Order of
Bahá’u’lláh would be mutilated and permanently deprived of that
hereditary principle which, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written, has been
invariably upheld by the Law of God. “In all the Divine Dispensations,”
He states, in a Tablet addressed to a follower of the Faith in Persia,
“the eldest son hath been given extraordinary distinctions. Even the
station of prophethood hath been his birthright.” Without such an
institution the integrity of the Faith would be imperiled, and the
stability of the entire fabric would be gravely endangered. Its prestige
would suffer, the means required to enable it to take a long, an
uninterrupted view over a series of generations would be completely
lacking, and the necessary guidance to define the sphere of the
legislative action of its elected representatives would be totally
withdrawn.
It is worth reading and reflecting on how
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.
It should be noted, that because Bahá'í law forbids the
"transport the body of the deceased a greater distance than one hour’s journey from the city",
Shoghi Effendi was buried at the New Southgate Cemetery in London, far
from the Bahá'í holy shrines in Israel. Not far from his grave in
Southgate, however, rests Shoghi Effendi's niece
Maliheh Afnan, the artist daughter of
Ruhangiz Afnan,
who Shoghi Effendi had declared a Covenant-breaker for marrying the son
of Siyyid Ali Afnan, who 'Abdu'l-Bahá had declared a Covenant-breaker.
