Pilgrims Beyond the Third Moat: An Esslemont Story of 'Akká

In Chapter 3 of Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era — Esslemont's classic 1923 introduction to the Faith — the Scottish physician recounts the years of strict confinement of Bahá'u'lláh in the prison-city of 'Akká. The Ottoman state had banished the family to the city in 1868. The orders to the local governor were that no Persian Bahá'í pilgrim should be permitted to enter.

The orders were enforced, often harshly, throughout the early years of the imprisonment. Yet the pilgrims kept arriving. They had walked from Persia — across the Zagros mountains, across Mesopotamia, across the Syrian desert — for one purpose only: to attain the presence of the Manifestation of God who was now held inside the citadel walls of 'Akká. To be turned away at the city gate was, for most of them, an impossible answer to a journey of months.

Esslemont preserves what they did then.

They were refused admittance within the city walls. They used to go to a place on the plain outside the third moat, from which they could see the windows of Bahá'u'lláh's quarters.

The medieval fortifications of 'Akká comprised a chain of moats and walls. The third moat — the outermost — was the limit at which the city's authority effectively expired. Beyond it lay the open plain. The pilgrims would walk to that plain, find a spot from which the upper windows of the apartments where Bahá'u'lláh was held could be seen, and stand there.

Some had walked for two months to reach that spot.

They could not speak with Him. They could not attain His presence. They could not even, by the standards of Persian pilgrim etiquette, be sure that He had seen them. What they could do was look. They stood, sometimes for hours, watching the windows. Some wept. Some prayed silently. After a while they turned, by ones and twos, and began the long walk home.

The Master, watching them from the upper rooms, would on occasion appear briefly at the window so that they might know they had been seen. The witnesses recorded that He sometimes wept also.

The detail Esslemont chose for his Western readers was small. He let it stand alone. The Bahá'ís of England and America in 1923, many of whom would have hesitated to cross the Atlantic for a single talk of the Master, were being given a quiet measure against which to weigh their own devotion: a Persian villager on a plain beyond the third moat, looking up at a window, having walked from Iṣfáhán to do so.

The standard the pilgrims set in those years has never been lowered. It has only grown easier to meet — and harder, perhaps, to remember.

Source: J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (George Allen & Unwin, 1923), Chapter 3. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19241.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241