|Destruction of the House of the Báb|
The violent disturbances in Persia, coinciding with the gathering in of the bountiful harvest of the Five Year Plan, [1974-1979] have brought new and cruel hardships to our long-suffering brethren in the Cradle of our Faith and confronted the Bahá'í world community with critical challenges to its life and work. As the Bahá'í world stood poised on the brink of victory, eagerly anticipating the next stage in the unfoldment of the Master's Divine Plan, Bahá'u'lláh's heroic compatriots, the custodians of the Holy Places of our Faith in the land of its birth, were yet again called upon to endure the passions of brutal mobs, the looting and burning of their homes, the destruction of their means of livelihood, and physical violence and threats of death to force them to recant their faith. They, like their immortal forebears, the Dawn-Breakers, are standing steadfast in face of this new persecution and the ever-present threat of organized extermination.
- The Universal House of Justice (From a message dated Naw-Ruz 1979; ‘Messages from the Universal House of Justice 1963-1986’)