The Master, and the Centre of the Covenant

Abdu'l-Baha (1844-1921) was the eldest son of Baha'u'llah, born Abbas Effendi in Tehran on the very night, by the Baha'i reckoning, that the Bab declared his mission. He shared his father's forty years of imprisonment and exile from childhood, and after Baha'u'llah's death in 1892 he became, by his father's explicit written appointment, the head of the Baha'i Faith and the authorized interpreter of its scriptures.

He took for himself no title of grandeur but the name Abdu'l-Baha, the Servant of Baha, servant of the Glory, and Baha'is know him also as the Master. His designation is the linchpin of what Baha'is call the Covenant: the written chain of authority by which Baha'u'llah sought to preserve the unity of his community against the divisions that had followed earlier prophets. Abdu'l-Baha's authority to interpret was challenged by some of his own relatives, and Baha'is regard his vindication and the failure of those challenges as a demonstration of the Covenant's power to hold the faith together.

He remained a prisoner of the Ottoman state until the Young Turk revolution of 1908 freed all political and religious prisoners, so that only in his mid-sixties did he gain his liberty.