ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's journeys to the West
1910–1913 trips by the Baháʼí leader to Europe and North America / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's journeys to the West were a series of trips ʻAbdu'l-Bahá undertook starting at the age of 66, journeying continuously from Palestine to the West between 1910 and 1913. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá was the eldest son of Baháʼu'lláh, founder of the Baháʼí Faith, and suffered imprisonment with his father starting at the age of 8; he suffered various degrees of privation for almost 55 years, until the Young Turk Revolution[1] in 1908 freed religious prisoners of the Ottoman Empire. Upon the death of his father in 1892, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá had been appointed as the successor, authorized interpreter of Bahá'u'lláh's teachings, and Center of the Covenant of the Baháʼí Faith.
At the time of his release, the major centres of Baháʼí population and scholarly activity were mostly in Iran,[2] with other large communities in Baku, Azerbaijan,[3] Ashgabat, Turkmenistan,[4] and Tashkent, Uzbekistan.[5]
Meanwhile, in the Occident the religion had been introduced in the late 1890s in several locales, with the very first mention of Baha'u'llah occurring in a talk given by a Christian missionary during the First World Parliament of Religions held in conjunction with the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. However, by 1910 the religion's followers still numbered less than a few thousands across the entire West.[2] ʻAbdu'l-Bahá thus took steps to personally present the Baháʼí teachings to the West by traveling to Europe and North America. His first excursion outside of Palestine and Iran was to Egypt in 1910 where he stayed for around a year, followed by a near five-month trip to France and Great Britain in 1911. After returning to Egypt, he left on a trip to North America which lasted nearly eight months. During that trip he visited many cities across the United States, from major metropolitan areas on the eastern coast of the country, to cities in the midwest, and California on the west coast; he also visited Montreal in Canada. Following his trip in North America he visited various countries in Europe, including France, Britain and Germany for six months, followed by a six-month stay again in Egypt, before returning to Haifa.[1]
With his visits to the West, the small Western Baháʼí community was given a chance to consolidate and embrace a wider vision of the religion; the religion also attracted the attention of sympathetic attention from both religious, academic, and social leaders as well as in newspapers which provided significant coverage of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's visits.[6] During his travels ʻAbdu'l-Bahá would give talks at the homes of Baháʼís, at hotels, and at other public and religious sites, such as the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, the Bethel Literary and Historical Society, at the NAACP, at Howard and Stanford universities, and at various Theosophical Societies, among others. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá talks across the West also became an important addition to the body of Baháʼí literature.[1] In succeeding decades after his visit the American community substantially grew[7] and then spread across South America, Australasia, Subsaharan Africa and the Far East.[8]
During these journeys Bahíyyih Khánum, his sister, was given the position of acting head of the religion.[9]