`Abdu'l-Bahá

Born Abbas to an aristocratic family in Tehran in 1844, he was eight when his father Baháʼu'lláh was imprisoned during a crackdown on the Bábí Faith and the family lost everything. Exile followed: a decade in Baghdad, brief stops in Istanbul and Edirne, then the prison-city of Acre, where he remained captive under Ottoman rule. When the Young Turk Revolution freed him in 1908 at 64, he traveled west - Europe, North America - expanding the Baháʼí message beyond the Middle East until World War I pinned him in Haifa. His father's 1892 will named him successor and head of the Faith; his Tablets of the Divine Plan drove Baháʼís to new territories, and his Will and Testament built the scaffolding for the religion's administrative order. The British knighted him in 1920 for famine relief work. He died in Haifa the following year, the last of the Faith's three central figures.