A cataclysmic process, one of the most remarkable in modern history, was
set in motion ever since Baha'u'llah, while a prisoner in Constantinople,
delivered to a Turkish official His Tablet, addressed to Sultan
'Abdu'l-'Aziz and his ministers, to be transmitted to 'Ali Pa_sh_a, the
Grand Vizir. It was this Tablet which, as attested by that officer and
affirmed by Nabil in his chronicle, affected the Vizir so profoundly that
he paled while reading it. This process received fresh impetus after the
Lawh-i-Ra'is was revealed on the morrow of its Author's final banishment
from Adrianople to Akka. Relentless, devastating, and with ever-increasing
momentum, it ominously unfolded, damaging the prestige of the Empire,
dismembering its territory, dethroning its sultans, sweeping away their
dynasty, degrading and deposing its Caliph, disestablishing its religion,
and extinguishing its glory. The "sick man" of Europe, whose condition had
been unerringly diagnosed by the Divine Physician, and whose doom was
pronounced inevitable, fell a prey, during the reign of five successive
sultans, all degenerate, all deposed, to a series of convulsions which, in
the end, proved fatal to his life. Imperial Turkey that had, under
'Abdu'l-Majid, been admitted into the European Concert, and had emerged
victorious from the Crimean War, entered, under his successor,
'Abdu'l-'Aziz, upon a period of swift decline, culminating, soon after
'Abdu'l-Baha's passing, in the doom which the judgment of God had
pronounced against it.
Risings in Crete and the Balkans marked the reign of this, the 32nd sultan
of his dynasty, a despot whose mind was vacuous, whose recklessness was
extreme, whose extravagance knew no bounds. The Eastern Question entered
upon an acute phase. His gross misrule gave rise to movements which were
to exercise far-reaching effects upon his realm, while his continual and
enormous borrowings, leading to a state of semibankruptcy, introduced the
principle of foreign control over the finances of his empire. A
conspiracy, leading to a palace revolution, finally deposed him. A fatva
of the mufti denounced his incapacity and extravagance. Four days later he
was assassinated, and was succeeded by his nephew, Murad V, whose mind had
been reduced to a nullity by intemperance and by a long seclusion in the
Cage. Declared to be imbecile, he, after a reign of three months, was
deposed and was succeeded by the subtle, the resourceful, the suspicious,
the tyrannical 'Abdu'l-Hamid II who "proved to be the most mean, cunning,
untrustworthy and cruel intriguer of the long dynasty of U_th_man." "No
one knew," it was written of him, "from day to day who was the person on
whose advice the sultan overruled his ostensible ministers, whether a
favorite lady of his harem, or a eunuch, or some fanatical dervish, or an
astrologer, or a spy." The Bulgarian atrocities heralded the black reign
of this "Great Assassin," which thrilled Europe with horror, and were
characterized by Gladstone as "the basest and blackest outrages upon
record in that [XIX] century." The War of 1877-78 accelerated the process
of the empire's dismemberment. No less than eleven million people were
emancipated from Turkish yoke. The Russian troops occupied Adrianople.
Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania proclaimed their independence. Bulgaria
became a self-governing state, tributary to the sultan. Cyprus and Egypt
were occupied. The French assumed a protectorate over Tunis. Eastern
Rumelia was ceded to Bulgaria. The wholesale massacres of Armenians,
involving directly and indirectly a hundred thousand souls, were but a
foretaste of the still more extensive bloodbaths to come in a later reign.
Bosnia and Herzegovina were lost to Austria. Bulgaria obtained her
independence. Universal contempt and hatred of an infamous sovereign,
shared alike by his Christian and Muslim subjects, finally culminated in a
revolution, swift and sweeping. The Committee of Young Turks secured from
the _Sh_ay_kh_u'l-Islam the condemnation of the sultan. Deserted and
friendless, execrated by his subjects, and despised by his fellow-rulers,
he was forced to abdicate, and was made a prisoner of state, thus ending a
reign "more disastrous in its immediate losses of territory and in the
certainty of others to follow, and more conspicuous for the deterioration
of the condition of his subjects, than that of any other of his
twenty-three degenerate predecessors since the death of Soliman the
Magnificent."
The end of so shameful a reign was but the beginning of a new era which,
however auspiciously hailed at first, was destined to witness the collapse
of the Ottoman ramshackle and worm-eaten state. Muhammad V, a brother of
'Abdu'l-Hamid II, an absolute nonentity, failed to improve the status of
his subjects. The follies of his government ultimately sealed the doom of
the empire. The War of 1914-18 provided the occasion. Military reverses
brought to a head the forces that were sapping its foundations. While the
war was still being fought the defection of the Sherif of Mecca and the
revolt of the Arabian provinces portended the convulsion which was to
seize the Turkish throne. The precipitate flight and complete destruction
of the army of Jamal Pa_sh_a, the commander-in-chief in Syria--he who had
sworn to raze to the ground, after his triumphant return from Egypt, the
Tomb of Baha'u'llah, and to publicly crucify the Center of His Covenant in
a public square of Constantinople--was the signal for the nemesis that was
to overtake an empire in distress. Nine-tenths of the large Turkish armies
had melted away. A fourth of the whole population had perished from war,
disease, famine and massacre.
A new ruler, Muhammad VI, the last of the twenty-five successive
degenerate sultans, had meanwhile succeeded his wretched brother. The
edifice of the empire was now quaking and tottering to its fall. Mustafa
Kamal dealt it the final blows. Turkey, that had already shrunk to a small
Asiatic state, became a republic. The sultan was deposed, the Ottoman
Sultanate was ended, a rulership that had remained unbroken for six and a
half centuries was extinguished. An empire which had stretched from the
center of Hungary to the Persian Gulf and the Sudan, and from the Caspian
Sea to Oran in Africa, had now dwindled to a small Asiatic republic.
Constantinople itself, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been
honored as the splendid metropolis of the Roman Empire, and had been made
the capital of the Ottoman government, was abandoned by its conquerors,
and stripped of its pomp and glory--a mute reminder of the base tyranny
that had for so long stained its throne.
Such, in their bare outline, were the awful evidences of that retributive
justice which so tragically afflicted 'Abdu'l-'Aziz, his successors, his
throne and his dynasty. What of Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah, the other partner in
that imperial conspiracy which sought to extirpate, root and branch, the
budding Faith of God? His reaction to the Divine Message borne to him by
the fearless Badi, the "Pride of Martyrs," who had spontaneously dedicated
himself to this purpose, was characteristic of that implacable hatred
which, throughout his reign, glowed so fiercely in his breast.