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This declaration of portentous significance, which was supported by incontrovertible proofs adduced by the avowed enemies of the Faith of Baha'u'llah themselves, which was made in a country that aspires to the headship of Islam through the restoration of the Caliphate, and which has received the sanction of the highest ecclesiastical authorities in that country, this official testimony which the leaders of Shi'ah Islam, in both Persia and Iraq, have, through a century, sedulously avoided voicing, and which, once and for all, silences those detractors, including Christian ecclesiastics in the West, who have in the past stigmatized that Faith as a cult, as a Babi sect and as an offshoot of Islam or represented it as a synthesis of religions-- such a declaration was acclaimed by all Baha'i communities in the East and in the West as the first Charter of the emancipation of the Cause of Baha'u'llah from the fetters of Islamic orthodoxy, the first historic step taken, not by its adherents as might have been expected, but by its adversaries on the road leading to its ultimate and world- wide recognition.
(366:1)
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