The Wilmette Institute is continuing to add to its Deepen! Web Videos. An important addition is an interview with Dr. Jena Khadem Khodadad about her father the Hand of the Cause of God Zikrullah Khadem. It is being released two week in advance of Dr. Khodadad’s Web Talk on “Zikrullah Khadem, The Itinerant Hand of the Cause of God” on May 14.
Video about the Hand of the Cause of God Zikrullah Khadem. The first addition to the Deepen! collection comes from four parts of a telephone interview with Dr. Jena Khadem Khodadad, a daughter of the Hand of the Cause of God Zikrullah Khadem. Some month ago Niki Daniels, the Marketing Coordinator and Course Creation Assistant for the Wilmette Institute, had the good fortune to spend some forty minutes interviewing Dr. Khodadad on the telephone about Khadem family stories about her father and her own memories of him.
Niki turned the first two parts of the interview into a video in which the text of the interview is complemented with many photographs of the Khadem family, some from archival sources and some from Mrs. Khodadad herself. This video, called “O God, Increase My Astonishment at Thee” (a phrase found in Bahá’u’lláh’s Seven Valleys, p. 34, and a phrase that Mr. Khadem often used). In the video Mrs. Khodadad discusses her father’s early life and influences on him, his pilgrimage to see Shoghi Effendi, his passion for the Bahá’í Faith, his marriage, his disbelief on his appointment in the second contingent of Hands of the Cause of God, and his travels for Shoghi Effendi, which led to the Guardian’s giving him the title of “the itinerant Hand of The Cause of God.”
SoundCloud Audio Recordings about the Hand of the Cause of God Zikrullah Khadem. If you want to listen only to the audio portion of the interview, you are in luck, for it is available in four parts on SoundCloud. In Part One (6:33), Jena Khadem Khodadad discusses Zikrullah Khadem’s early life and his passion for serving the Bahá’í Faith. In Part Two (10:22), she moves on to his pilgrimage to see Shoghi Effendi, his marriage, and his life as a Hand of the Cause of God.
In the third part of the interview (9:02), Dr. Khodadad talks about her coming to the United States to pursue higher education, her impressions of her new country, her deciding to study molecular and cell biology as the DNA era revolutionized science, her studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and her teaching at Rush Medical College in Chicago. In the fourth part of her interview (9:11), Dr. Khodadad discusses influences on her new book The Dynamics of Growth: Scientific Principles at Work in the Worldwide Advancement of the Bahá’í Faith 2017). These include the Bahá’í Faith, her father, and science. Throughout these two SoundCloud sections of the interview, Dr. Khodadad continues to make references to her father, her remembrances of him, and his influence on him.
You can access the Deepen! Web Video and the SoundCloud audio recordings with the links in the paragraph above. To sign up for the May 14 Web Talk on the Hand of the Cause of God Zikrullah Khadem, click here.
