Sequential excerpts (including footnotes) from ‘The Dawn-Breakers’ by Nabil-i-‘Azam, translated and edited by Shoghi Effendi

April 15, 2019

One needs to have “some knowledge of the condition of church and state in Persia [at that time] and of the customs and mental outlook of the people and their masters”

…it is not easy to follow the narrative in its details, or to appreciate how stupendous was the task undertaken by Bahá’u’lláh and His Forerunner, without some knowledge of the condition of church and state in Persia and of the customs and mental outlook of the people and their masters Nabíl took this knowledge for granted. He had himself travelled little if at all beyond the boundary of the empires of the Sháh and the Sulṭán, and it did not occur to him to institute comparisons between his own and foreign civilisations. He was not addressing the Western reader. Though he was conscious that the material he had collected was of more than national or Islámic importance and that it would before long spread both eastward and westward until it encircled the globe, yet he was an Oriental writing in an Oriental language for those who used it, and the unique work which he so faithfully accomplished was in itself a great and laborious task. 
- Shoghi Effendi  (‘Introduction to ‘The Dawn-Breakers’)