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Features of This Moving Drama |
To enumerate a few of the outstanding features of this moving drama
will suffice to evoke in the reader of these pages, already familiar with
the history of the Faith, the memory of those vicissitudes which it has
experienced, and which the world has until now viewed with such frigid
indifference. The forced and sudden retirement of Bahá’u’lláh to the
mountains of Sulaymáníyyih, and the distressing consequences that
flowed from His two years’ complete withdrawal; the incessant intrigues
indulged in by the exponents of Shí’ih Islám in Najaf and Karbilá,
working in close and constant association with their confederates in
Persia; the intensification of the repressive measures decreed by Sulṭán
Abdu’l-’Aziz which brought to a head the defection of certain prominent
members of the exiled community; the enforcement of yet another
banishment by order of that same Sulṭán, this time to that far off and
most desolate of cities, causing such despair as to lead two of the exiles to
attempt suicide; the unrelaxing surveillance to which they were subjected
upon their arrival in ‘Akká, by hostile officials, and the insufferable
imprisonment for two years in the barracks of that town; the
interrogatory to which the Turkish páshá subsequently subjected his
Prisoner at the headquarters of the government; His confinement for no
less than eight years in a humble dwelling surrounded by the befouled
air of that city, His sole recreation being confined to pacing the narrow
space of His room—these, as well as other tribulations, proclaim, on the
one hand, the nature of the ordeal and the indignities He suffered, and
point, on the other, the finger of accusation at those mighty ones of the
earth who had either so sorely maltreated Him, or deliberately withheld
from Him their succor.
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No wonder that from the Pen of Him Who bore this anguish with
such sublime patience these words should have been revealed: “He Who
is the Lord of the seen and unseen is now manifest unto all men. His
blessed Self hath been afflicted with such harm that if all the seas, visible
and invisible, were turned into ink, and all that dwell in the kingdom
into pens, and all that are in the heavens and all that are on earth into
scribes, they would, of a certainty, be powerless to record it.” And again:
“I have been, most of the days of My life, even as a slave, sitting under a
sword hanging on a thread, knowing not whether it would fall soon or
late upon him.” “All this generation,” He affirms, “could offer Us were
wounds from its darts, and the only cup it proffered to Our lips was the
cup of its venom. On Our neck We still bear the scar of chains, and upon
Our body are imprinted the evidences of an unyielding cruelty.” “Twenty
years have passed, O kings!” He, addressing the kings of Christendom, at
the height of His mission, has written, “during which We have, each
day, tasted the agony of a fresh tribulation. No one of them that were
before Us hath endured the things We have endured. Would that ye could
perceive it! They that rose up against Us have put Us to death, have shed
Our blood, have plundered Our property, and violated Our honor.
Though aware of most of Our afflictions, ye, nevertheless, have failed to
stay the hand of the aggressor. For is it not your clear duty to restrain the
tyranny of the oppressor, and to deal equitably with your subjects, that
your high sense of justice may be fully demonstrated to all mankind?”
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Who is the ruler, may it not be confidently asked, whether of the East
or of the West, who, at any time since the dawn of so transcendent a
Revelation, has been prompted to raise his voice either in its praise or
against those who persecuted it? Which people has, in the course of so
long a captivity, felt urged to arise and stem the tide of such tribulations?
Who is the sovereign, excepting a single woman, shining in solitary
glory, who has, in however small a measure, felt impelled to respond to
the poignant call of Bahá’u’lláh? Who amongst the great ones of the
earth was inclined to extend this infant Faith of God the benefit of his
recognition or support? Which one of the multitudes of creeds, sects,
races, parties and classes and of the highly diversified schools of human
thought, considered it necessary to direct its gaze towards the rising light
of the Faith, to contemplate its unfolding system, to ponder its hidden
processes, to appraise its weighty message, to acknowledge its regenerative
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power, to embrace its salutary truth, or to proclaim its eternal
verities? Who among the worldly wise and the so-called men of insight
and wisdom can justly claim, after the lapse of nearly a century, to have
disinterestedly approached its theme, to have considered impartially its
claims, to have taken sufficient pains to delve into its literature, to have
assiduously striven to separate facts from fiction, or to have accorded its
cause the treatment it merits? Where are the preeminent exponents,
whether of the arts or sciences, with the exception of a few isolated cases,
who have lifted a finger, or whispered a word of commendation, in
either the defense or the praise of a Faith that has conferred upon the
world so priceless a benefit, that has suffered so long and so grievously,
and which enshrines within its shell so enthralling a promise for a world
so woefully battered, so manifestly bankrupt?
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To the mounting tide of trials which laid low the Báb, to the
long-drawn-out calamities which rained on Bahá’u’lláh, to the warnings
sounded by both the Herald and the Author of the Bahá’í Revelation,
must be added the sufferings which, for no less than seventy years, were
endured by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as well as His pleas, and entreaties, uttered in
the evening of His life, in connection with the dangers that increasingly
threatened the whole of mankind. Born in the very year that witnessed
the inception of the Bábí Revelation; baptized with the initial fires of
persecution that raged around that nascent Cause; an eyewitness, when
a boy of eight, of the violent upheavals that rocked the Faith which His
Father had espoused; sharing with Him, the ignominy, the perils, and
rigors consequent upon the successive banishments from His native-land
to countries far beyond its confines; arrested and forced to support,
in a dark cell, the indignity of imprisonment soon after His arrival in
‘Akká; the object of repeated investigations and the target of continual
assaults and insults under the despotic rule of Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-Ḥamíd,
and later under the ruthless military dictatorship of the suspicious and
merciless Jamál Páshá—He, too, the Center and Pivot of Bahá’u’lláh’s
peerless Covenant and the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, was made
to taste, at the hands of potentates, ecclesiastics, governments and
peoples, the cup of woe which the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, as well as so
many of their followers, had drained.
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With the warnings which both His pen and voice have given in
countless Tablets and discourses, during an almost lifelong incarceration
and in the course of His extended travels in both the European and
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American continents, they who labor for the spread of His Father’s
Faith in the Western world are sufficiently acquainted. How often and
how passionately did He appeal to those in authority and to the public at
large to examine dispassionately the precepts enunciated by His Father?
With what precision and emphasis He unfolded the system of the Faith
He was expounding, elucidated its fundamental verities, stressed its
distinguishing features, and proclaimed the redemptive character of its
principles? How insistently did He foreshadow the impending chaos,
the approaching upheavals, the universal conflagration which, in the
concluding years of His life, had only begun to reveal the measure of
its force and the significance of its impact on human society?
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A co-sharer in the woeful trials and momentary frustrations afflicting
the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh; reaping a harvest in His lifetime wholly
incommensurate to the sublime, the incessant and strenuous efforts He
had exerted; experiencing the initial perturbations of the world-shaking
catastrophe in store for an unbelieving humanity; bent with age, and
with eyes dimmed by the gathering storm which the reception accorded
by a faithless generation to His Father’s Cause was raising, and with a
heart bleeding over the immediate destiny of God’s wayward children—He, at last, sank beneath a weight of troubles for which they
who had imposed them upon Him, and upon those gone before
Him, were soon to be summoned to a dire reckoning.
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“Hasten, O my God!” He cried, at a time when adversity had sore
beset Him, “the days of my ascension unto Thee, and of my coming
before Thee, and of my entry into Thy presence, that I may be delivered
from the darkness of the cruelty inflicted by them upon me, and may enter
the luminous atmosphere of Thy nearness, O my Lord, the All-Glorious,
and may rest under the shadow of Thy most great mercy.” “Yá Bahá’u’l-Abhá
[O Thou the Glory of Glories]!” He wrote in a Tablet revealed
during the last week of His life, “I have renounced the world
and the people thereof, and am heartbroken and sorely afflicted because
of the unfaithful. In the cage of this world I flutter even as a
frightened bird, and yearn every day to take my flight unto Thy Kingdom.
Yá Bahá’u’l-Abhá! Make me to drink of the cup of sacrifice, and
set me free. Relieve me from these woes and trials, from these afflictions
and troubles.”
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Dear friends! Alas, a thousand times alas, that a Revelation so
incomparably great, so infinitely precious, so mightily potent, so manifestly
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innocent, should have received, at the hands of a generation so
blind and so perverse, so infamous a treatment! “O My servants!”
Bahá’u’lláh Himself testifies, “The one true God is My witness! This
most great, this fathomless and surging ocean is near, astonishingly
near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein! Swift as the
twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this
imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this
most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.”
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