About five years before Shaykh Ahmad left his home in Bahrain Edward Gibbon completed his six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was the eve of the French revolution and the eve of a spiritual revolution that was to lead to a new Revelation. Some time in 1960 Arnold Toynbee put his pen down and his Reconsiderations to his Study of History were complete. Toynbee found Gibbon’s work a model and an inspiration. So, too, did Shoghi Effendi.

About two months before ‘Abdu’l-Baha died Shoghi Effendi was studying at Oxford. Arnold Toynbee while travelling on a train in September 1921 had the final inspiration that led to his Study of History. He wrote this tour de force during the years of the Guardianship. As far as we know, Shoghi Effendi never read Toynbee. It took Gibbon some sixteen years and Toynbee some thirty-two to complete his work. The former had a profound effect on the Guardian, on his translations and, arguably, on his conception of history and life. The latter began to effect the thoughts of a generation that came of age in the Ten Year Crusade and the first plans of the Universal House of Justice. Inevitably, only a small fraction of that generation was affected by Toynbee since his whole language was, like Gibbon’s, complex and difficult for the reader. As the decades moved insensibly toward the close of the twentieth century fewer and fewer students had the skills to read Toynbee but, since more and more were graduating in history and the social sciences, a coterie got exposed to Toynbee.

Toynbee saw the first world war as the opening stage of a period that was like the Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404 BC. In this period in Greek history democracy came to an end, war punctuated the life of the city states and peace eventually came at a heavy price. Three-quarters of a century later Alexander conquered the world in 323 BC. The pattern may repeat itself in a different form in the twenty-first century as the first stirrings of World Order lead the World Order of Baha’u’llah to a position of great strength, prestige and influence. That time is a long way off. The Baha’i community has just left the first century and a half of obscurity. Toynbee and Gibbon function as stimulating historians to a generation that has come of age in the first decades of the office of the Universal House of Justice, the trustees of the legacy of two prophets of God in the nineteenth century. Two universal historians, the first at the dawn of this new age as the French revolution was about to take place, and the second at the dawn of the period known to Baha’is as the Kingdom of God on Earth, the period after 1953.

As the Baha’i community moved through its international teaching plan, starting in 1937, Toynbee was there waiting in the wings, so to speak. Three volumes were out in 1934 and the tenth volume in 1954 as the great Crusade was getting warmed up. A universal history up-dated for a global community: 6,290 pages and over three million words. Toynbee’s master passion, his torment, his labour and his pleasure coincided with the global plans and global energies of an emerging world religion. That so few could and did enjoy his work was no more insignificant than the reaction of the masses to Shakespeare. In a world that was getting more education as the decades went by there was every reason to hope, especially if imbued with Baha’i philosophy, that Toynbee’s days of being appreciated were just beginning.

I have written before on Toynbee and I will likely write about him again. I had no idea when I bought those volumes in the McMaster University bookshop in probably 1964 that they would influence my thinking as much as they have in the last thirty-two years. The volumes are worn and much the worse for wear, but they have become old friends.


Ron Price
30 March 1996