Given the earlier events in Baghdad, it seems surprising that the Ottoman
authorities did not anticipate what would result from the establishment of
Baha'u'llah 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
_Kh_ur_sh_id Pa_sh_a, the Governor of the province, and the
_Sh_ay_kh_u'l-Islam, 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 Baha'i 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 persistent 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
Baha'u'llah would have no further contact with influential circles,
whether Turkish or Western.
When the Turkish foreign minister, Fu'ad Pa_sh_a, returned from a visit to
Adrianople, his astonished reports of the reputation which Baha'u'llah 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, Baha'u'llah'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
Akka (Acre) on the coast of the Holy Land. Notorious throughout the empire
for the foulness of its climate and the prevalence of many diseases, Akka
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, Baha'u'llah, 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 Baha'u'llah'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 Baha'u'llah'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 Baha'u'llah's prison at Akka, can still be seen such carved
inscriptions as "Der Herr ist nahe" ("The Lord is near").(77)
In Akka, Baha'u'llah 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'ad Pa_sh_a, 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 'Ali Pa_sh_a, 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 Baha'u'llah in the
Kitab-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 Baha'u'llah 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 Victoria(83) 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)