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contained a foreword by the distinguished Cambridge University Orientalist, Edward Granville Browne, at the time the only Western scholar to have investigated the Bahá’í Faith. The author, Myron Phelps, was a New York lawyer who had made an extended visit to the ancient city of ‘Akká in Palestine to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The thick volume sympathetically focused upon the obscure religious sage from Iran, attracting Western readers as another exotic tale straight out of the Arabian Nights folktales. In the Muslim world, however, the book was deemed dangerous contraband by religious and government authorities, for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was a prisoner of conscience. To illustrate, a few years earlier government officials in Beirut, Lebanon, (then part of the Ottoman Empire) had confiscated the copy of Phelps’s book owned by William Jennings Bryan, an important American politician, Democratic Party Presidential Nominee, and future Secretary of State, while he was travelling through the Levant. Bryan had visited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at His home shortly before his copy was seized. He asked the U.S. Consulate officials to intervene with Ottoman authorities to get it back, protesting all the while against Turkish censorship of religious literature.15

The book had a cumbersome twenty-nine-word title: Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi: A Study of the Religion of the Babis, or Beha’is Founded by the Persian Bab and by His Successors, Beha Ullah and Abbas Effendi;16 despite this, it sold well enough to have a second edition. Even though it focused upon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá rather than upon His Father, Bahá’u’lláh, the Faith’s founder, it provided English readers with an adequate, but not entirely accurate, summary of the Bahá’í Faith.

As Horace moved from Browne’s intriguing introduction with its first-hand account of meeting with early believers, including Bahá’u’lláh Himself, and on to the main body of the book, he encountered an arresting prediction at the opening of Phelps’s introduction: that the Bahá’í Faith would be important to the world in the near future.

To the student of the development of human thought, there is probably not in the world to-day another place so interesting as the small city of Akka in northern Palestine; for there may be investigated, still in its youth and under the fostering care of one of its founders, a religious Faith which gives promise of becoming, at no very distant time, one of the recognized great religions of the world.17

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