Portrait of Abdu’l-Baha leader of the Baha’i Faith
as Dr. Guy would have known him .
Dr. Guy became aware of the Baha’i Faith in 1899 according to a memoir written in the late 1920s. The Baha’i Faith is a universalist religion, or “new religion” that emerged from Shia Islam in mid-19th Century Persia.
The Baha’is believe that all religions worship the same God, that humanity is one family, and that all prophets are part of a progressive revelation of truth.
Baha’i beliefs include social precepts such as the abolition of prejudice, race unity, equality between the sexes, establishment of universal education, and the eventual organization of a world government based on theocracy.
These were very progressive ideals when Dr. Guy and his wife first encountered them at the beginning of the 20th Century.
Dr. Guy had a very close connection with Abdu’l-Baha, the leader of the Baha’is and son of the founder, Baha’u’llah. He first became aware of Abdu’l-Baha in 1899 while living in Boston. At this time, Dr. Guy was a member of the Theosophical Society or deeply immersed in their beliefs.
One of the ideas circulated in Theosophy was that there are Masters alive in physical form, or in an ascended state, who watch over mankind, and guide its spiritual evolution. Many seekers have devoted their lives to communicating with the Masters or finding out their earthly identities and locations. A number of Theosophists and esoteric explorers around the early Baha’is have suggested that Abdu’l-Baha was a living Master who could be identified as one of the Theosophical Masters such as Koot Hoomi or Morya. Other early Baha’is believed that Abdu’l-Baha was an incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Author and researcher K. Paul Johnson has explored the historical identities of the Masters and the intersection of the Theosophical Society and the Baha’is in two books.
Koot Hoomi
Master Morya
Young Abdu’l-Baha (Left)
Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921) fit the model of a Master from the Middle East. Like Koot Hoomi and Morya pictured above, he is not European or from the Far East. While visiting Europe and America in 1912, he addressed a number of Theosophical Society gatherings.
Most likely the first person who knew about the Baha’i Faith in Boston in 1899 was a woman named Kate Ives. The Baha’i scholar Robert Stockman places her there in that year. Ives had been introduced to the Baha’is in Chicago a few years before. In fact, she was on of the first half-dozen believers in the West. There were no books readily available about the Baha’is, and very little had been written about them in the newspapers at that time. She is the likely source of Dr. Guy’s introduction the Baha’is and their leader Abdu’l-Baha.
Abdu’l-Baha was known to his followers as The Master. The suggestion to Dr. Guy’s mind and to others was that Abdu’l-Baha was indeed the physical embodiment of a spiritually enlightened teacher or Master. In the winter of 1900-1901 Dr. Guy traveled to the city of Haifa in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire to meet Abdu’l-Baha. Of this meeting he wrote:
“During the eleven days I remained in Haifa on my first visit, I had ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s personality and spirit deeply engraved on my consciousness. All was not easy to understand; I had many questions; but shortly before I left him everything seemed to become very clear — my spiritual rapport with him was established. The moment of our parting was a most happy one, rather than distressing for me. I felt that I was carrying away with me something which would never be destroyed, a spiritual friendship which would grow eternally both here and in the realms beyond.”
This experience sealed his belief in the teachings of the Baha’is, also referred to in that time as the Persian Revelation.