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
|