Shoghi Effendi launched the Baha’i World on the Ten-Year World Crusade in 1953. Pioneers would bring the Baha’i Faith across the world.
Since 1937, Shoghi Effendi had been using the term ‘conqueror’ with the Iranian Baha’is, which echoed a concept from the early period of Islam when a new area was opened to Islamic rule but, with American Baha’is, he used the term ‘pioneer’ because this term had more meaning in the context of the American experience.
The Iranian Baha’i community had already been preparing, in a sense, for this world crusade. As early as 1938, Shoghi Effendi called for Baha’is to migrate within Iran to establish Baha’i groups and in 1941, over one hundred and forty-five Baha’i families pioneered to Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Baluchistan (Pakistan), and Bahrain. A.Q. Faizi was one of the pioneers who was able to settle in Bahrain.
Iran had already carried out a forty-five-month plan for Persia from October of 1946 to July of 1950. Its general objectives were to strengthen the Baha’i community of Iran and send out pioneers. Some of the more specific goals included establish local assemblies in Kabul, Mecca, and Bahrain, to form four new groups in the Arabian peninsula, to send pioneers to India and to Iraq for the Women’s Four-Year Plan, and to hold literacy classes for girls and adult women.
This plan was followed by a two-year ‘Africa Campaign’ (1951-1953) coordinated with the British Baha’is and carried by the Baha’is in the U.K., Iran, the U.S., Egypt, and India, with the objective of opening up three African countries to the Baha’i Faith. The most fruitful teaching was in Uganda to which Musa Banani pioneered. He was later named a Hand of the Cause.