“I was walking in the Land of Ṭá (
Ṭihrán)—the dayspring of the signs of thy Lord—when lo, I heard the lamentation of the pulpits and the voice of their supplication unto God, blessed and glorified be He. They cried out and said: `O God of the world and Lord of the nations! Thou beholdest our state and the things which have befallen us....”
We, the two billion people currently on the planet, are living at a time when not only the pulpits of all the religions, but all things must be condemning us, each in that voice which, according to the
Qur’án, God has given to all things: “God, Who giveth a voice to all things, hath given us a voice....” (
41:21). We who have killed some forty-five million human beings in the past thirty-five years, strangers whom we did not even know by name. We who have denied our qualitative difference from the animals and have tried to live in their world, an attempt which has proved as successful as would be the animal’s to turn into a tree or the tree’s to be a stone. We who spend our time devising elaborate excuses to justify our ways; who always blame someone else, who always want someone else to save us.
It is not surprising that
Bahá’u’lláh, the Persian nobleman Who declared His spiritual mission in 1863, should also say: “
... ye walk on My earth complacent