Two pillars upon which Shoghi Effendi's Baha'i narratives were constructed.

The late nineteenth-century writings on Persia of British author George Nathaniel Curzon were especially chosen to aid this project. Gesturing to the Aryan-Persianism explored earlier in the century by John Malcolm, Henry Rawlinson, Arthur Gobineau, Ernest Renan, and latterly Edward Granville Browne, Curzon suited Shoghi Effendi’s preference for authors who stressed the self-evident irreversibility of Persia and Islam’s decline. To this he added a component that operated as a binary opposite: the huge assertion of an exclusive agency of redemption in the form of a unitary Babi-Bahai revelation. These were the two pillars upon which Shoghi Effendi’s Bahai narratives were constructed, and vital to them both was the input Western orientalists provided, some of whom had mentioned Bahaism as possibly replacing Islam as Persia’s established religion. Probably because they were considered “modern” these writers also inflated the number of Bahais there (e.g., Curzon 1892, vol. 1, p. 499), perhaps on the assumption that if they took over the country, they would be friendly to Britain. Not potentially rebellious as the Muslims of the Empire were thought to be, as a small quietist group in Palestine, and like other heterodox Muslim sects scattered through the Empire such as the Ismailis and Ahmadiyya, they not only posed no threat, but positively exuded declarations of loyalty.

(What Is Bahai Orientalism? by Geoffrey Nash)

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/2