…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’)
