Arrival in the Holy Land
Given the
earlier events in Baghdad, it seems surprising that the Ottoman authorities did not
anticipate what would result from the establishment of Bahá’u’lláh in another
major provincial capital. Within a year of His arrival in Adrianople, their prisoner had
attracted first the interest and then the fervent admiration of figures prominent in both
the intellectual and administrative life of the region. To the dismay of the Persian
consular representatives, two of the most devoted of these admirers were Khurshíd
Páshá, the Governor of the province, and the Shaykhu’l-Islám, the leading Sunni
religious dignitary. In the eyes of His hosts and the public generally, the
exile was a moral philosopher and saint the validity of whose teachings was reflected not
only in the example of His own life but in the changes they effected among the flood of
Persian pilgrims who flocked to this remote center of the Ottoman Empire in order to visit
Him.75
These unanticipated developments convinced the
Persian ambassador and his colleagues that it was only a matter of time before the
Bahá’í movement, which was continuing to spread in Persia, would have established
itself as a major influence in Persia's neighboring and rival empire. Throughout this
period of its history, the ramshackle Ottoman Empire was struggling against repeated
incursions by Tsarist Russia, uprisings among its subject peoples, and persis- tent
attempts by the ostensibly sympathetic British and Austrian governments to detach various
Turkish territories and incorporate them into their own empires. These unstable political
conditions in Turkey’s European provinces offered new and urgent arguments supporting
the ambassador's appeal that the exiles be sent to a distant colony where
Bahá’u’lláh would have no further contact with influential circles, whether
Turkish or Western.
When the Turkish foreign minister, Fu’ád
Páshá, returned from a visit to Adrianople, his astonished reports of the reputation
which Bahá’u’lláh had come to enjoy throughout the region appeared to lend
credibility to the Persian embassy's suggestions. In this climate of opinion, the
government abruptly decided to subject its guest to strict confinement. Without warning,
early one day, Bahá’u’lláh's house was surrounded by soldiers, and the exiles
were ordered to prepare for departure to an unknown destination.
The place chosen for this final banishment was
the grim fortress-town of ‘Akká (Acre) on the coast of the Holy Land. Notorious
throughout the empire for the foulness of its climate and the prevalence of many diseases,
‘Akká was a penal colony used by the Ottoman State for the incarceration of
dangerous criminals who could be expected not to survive too long their imprisonment
there. Arriving in August 1868, Bahá’u’lláh, the members of His family, and a
company of His followers who had been exiled with Him were to experience two years of
suffering and abuse within the fortress itself, and then be confined under house arrest to
a nearby building owned by a local merchant. For a long time the exiles were shunned by
the superstitious local populace who had been warned in public sermons against “the
God of the Persians,” who was depicted as an enemy of public order and the purveyor
of blasphemous and immoral ideas. Several members of the small group of
exiles died of the privations and other conditions to which they were subjected.76
It seems, in retrospect, the keenest irony
that the selection of the Holy Land as the place of Bahá’u’lláh's forced
confinement should have been the result of pressure from ecclesiastical and civil enemies
whose aim was to extinguish His religious influence. Palestine, revered by three of the
great monotheistic religions as the point where the worlds of God and of man intersect,
held then, as it had for thousands of years, a unique place in human expectation. Only a
few weeks before Bahá’u’lláh's arrival, the main leadership of the German
Protestant Templer movement sailed from Europe to establish at the foot of Mount Carmel a
colony that would welcome Christ, whose advent they believed to be imminent. Over
the lintels of several of the small houses they erected, facing across the bay to
Bahá’u’lláh's prison at ‘Akká, can still be seen such carved
inscriptions as “Der Herr ist nahe” (“The Lord is near”).77
In ‘Akká, Bahá’u’lláh
continued the dictation of a series of letters to individual rulers, which He had begun in
Adrianople. Several contained warnings of the judgment of God on their negligence and
misrule, warnings whose dramatic fulfillment aroused intense public discussion throughout
the Near East. Less than two months after the exiles arrived in the prison-city, for
example, Fu’ád Páshá, the Ottoman foreign minister, whose misrepresentations had
helped precipitate the banishment, was abruptly dismissed from his post and died in France
of a heart attack. The event was marked by a statement which predicted the
early dismissal of his colleague, Prime Minister ‘Alí Páshá, the overthrow and
death of the Sultan, and the loss of Turkish territories in Europe, a series of disasters
which followed on the heels of one another.78
A letter to Emperor
Napoleon III warned that, because of his insincerity and the misuse of his power:
“...thy kingdom shall be thrown into confusion, and thine empire
shall pass from thine hands, as a punishment for that which thou hast wrought.... Hath thy
pomp made thee proud? By My life! It shall not endure...”79 Of the
disastrous Franco-Prussian War and the resulting overthrow of Napoleon III, which occurred
less than a year after this statement, Alistair Horne, a modern scholar of nineteenth
century French political history has written:
History
knows of perhaps no more startling instance of what the Greeks called peripateia,
the terrible fall from prideful heights. Certainly no nation in modern times, so replete
with apparent grandeur and opulent in material achievement, has ever been subjected to a
worse humiliation in so short a time.80
Only a few months before the unexpected series
of events in Europe that led to the invasion of the Papal States and the annexation of
Rome by the forces of the new Kingdom of Italy, a statement addressing Pope Pius IX had
urged the Pontiff “Abandon thy kingdom unto
the kings, and emerge from thy habitation, with thy face set towards the Kingdom... Be as
thy Lord hath been.... Verily, the day of ingathering is come, and all things have been
separated from each other. He hath stored away that which He chose in the vessels of
justice, and cast into the fire that which befitteth it....”81
Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, whose armies had
won such a sweeping victory in the Franco-Prussian War, had been warned by
Bahá’u’lláh in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas to heed the example of the fall of
Napoleon III and of other rulers who had been victorious in war, and not to allow pride to
keep him back from recognizing this Revelation. That Bahá’u’lláh foresaw the
failure of the German Emperor to respond to this warning is shown by the ominous passage
which appears later in that same Book:
O banks of
the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the swords of retribution were
drawn against you; and you shall have another turn. And We hear the lamentations of
Berlin, though she be today in conspicuous glory.82
A strikingly different note
characterizes two of the major pronouncements, that addressed to Queen Victoria83 and another to
the “Rulers of America and the Presidents of the Republics therein.” The former
praises the pioneering achievement represented by the abolition of slavery throughout the
British Empire, and commends the principle of representative government. The latter, which
opens with the announcement of the Day of God, concludes with a summons, a virtual
mandate, that has no parallel in any of the other messages: “Bind ye the broken with the hands of justice, and crush the oppressor
who flourisheth with the rod of the commandments of your Lord, the Ordainer, the
All-Wise.”84
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Bahá'u'lláh forbids:
Bahá'u'lláh
