Shoghi Effendi

Shoghi Effendi Rabbani was born in Akka (Acre), in Ottoman Palestine, in 1897, the eldest grandson of Abdu'l-Baha and great-grandson of Baha'u'llah. He studied at the American University of Beirut and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was reading for a degree when Abdu'l-Baha died in November 1921. Returning immediately to Haifa, he learned that Abdu'l-Baha's will and testament named him Guardian of the Baha'i Faith and the sole authorized interpreter of its sacred writings, an office created for him alone and not repeated after his death.

His first and most lasting labor was translation. Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha had written in Persian and Arabic, much of it in a dense, allusive prose that earlier renderings had not carried into English successfully. Shoghi Effendi produced the English versions of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Kitab-i-Iqan and the compilation Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah that Baha'i communities still use, choosing a deliberately formal, scripture-register English he judged suited to the material. He also wrote God Passes By, a history of the faith's first century, and thousands of letters to individual believers and national communities that themselves became a body of interpretive literature guiding practice and belief.

He held the guardianship for thirty-six years, a period in which the Baha'i community grew from a following concentrated in Iran and the Middle East into a religion established on every continent, before his sudden death in London in 1957.

Abdu'l-Baha's will charged Shoghi Effendi with constructing the Baha'i administrative order that Baha'u'llah's writings had outlined only in principle: local and national Spiritual Assemblies elected by secret ballot without campaigning or nomination, rising eventually to an elected Universal House of Justice. Shoghi Effendi treated this structure as itself a religious teaching, not merely an organizational convenience, and spent much of his guardianship establishing assemblies, drafting their electoral procedures and writing the constitutional documents that defined their authority.

He also directed the faith's systematic geographic expansion. The Ten Year Crusade he launched in 1953 assigned named individuals, the Knights of Baha'u'llah, to open specific unopened territories and islands to the faith, a campaign that more than tripled the number of countries with an organized Baha'i presence by its close in 1963. He developed the Baha'i World Centre in Haifa and Akka, acquiring land and building around the shrines of Baha'u'llah and the Bab and laying the terraces later completed as a pilgrimage and administrative site.

Shoghi Effendi died in London in November 1957 without having named a successor guardian, having, according to Baha'i understanding, no living relative eligible under the will's own conditions. The Hands of the Cause of God, a body of appointed believers he had raised up for exactly this contingency, guided the community until the Universal House of Justice was first elected in 1963, the body Baha'u'llah's Aqdas and Abdu'l-Baha's will had always intended as the faith's permanent head.