The Rise of Baha
6. Alleged Baha’s leading role in the Badasht Conference
6.3 Shoghi Effendi’s Version of the Account
According to Shoghi Effendi in god passes by, P.17, “The conference of Badasht proclaimed the annulment of the old order;” (PP. 32-33): “Baha, maintaining through continual correspondence close contact with the BÁB, and himself the directing force behind the manifold activities of his struggling fellow-disciples, unobtrusively yet effectually presided over that conference, and guided and controlled its proceedings ….
the primary purpose of that gathering was to implement the revelation of the Bayan by a sudden, a complete and dramatic break with the past, with its order, its ecclesiasticism, its traditions, and ceremonials …. the eighty-one disciples who had gathered from various provinces were his grants from the day of their arrival to the day they departed …. Agitated as had been the conference from first to last as was the secession of the few who refused to countenance the annulment of the fundamental statutes of the Islamic Faith, its purpose has been fully and gloriously accomplished.”
(ibid, P. 403) “A conference of his disciples, headed by Baha, in the hamlet of Badasht, abrogated in dramatic circumstances the laws of the Islamic, and ushered the new dispensation.”
Shoghi Effendi’s account of the Badasht conference is an embellished version of Nabil’s fiction, which is not corroborated by any other source. Baha’s alleged “maintaining trough continual correspondence close contact with the BÁB” is the product of Shoghi Effendi’s fertile imagination. No documentary evidence is produced to prove this alleged correspondence and Shoghi Effendi’s allegation of Baha’s correspondence with the Primal Point is belied by Sir Abbas Effendi in the Traveller’s Narrative, where he says that Baha had in his mind the intention of corresponding and entering into relations with the Primal Point after the death of Muhammad Shah on September 4, 1848, and the Badasht conference took place before the death of Muhammad Shah.
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