The Ambassador's Commendation

A retelling based on Epistle to the Son of the Wolf by Bahá'u'lláh, with passages from the Súriy-i-Mulúk in The Summons of the Lord of Hosts and the history given in God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in those texts.

At noon on 16 August 1863 a Turkish steamer brought Bahá'u'lláh and His fellow-exiles to Constantinople. Two carriages were waiting at the landing-stage, and they took Him and His family to the house of Shamsí Big, the official appointed by the government to entertain its guests.

Nearly thirty years later, in the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahá'u'lláh recalled those first days. On the day He arrived, the official whose duty it was to receive visitors met Him and escorted Him to His lodging. The next day Prince Shujá'u'd-Dawlih called, with Mírzá Ṣafá, as representatives of the Persian Minister at the Imperial Court. Others followed, among them several ministers of the Imperial Government and Kamál Páshá. "In truth," He wrote, "the Government showed these wronged ones the utmost kindness and consideration."

Government guests, however highly placed, were expected to call in person on the Shaykhu'l-Islám, the Grand Vizir and the Foreign Minister. Persian dignitaries who came to the city, Bahá'u'lláh wrote, "would exert themselves to the utmost soliciting at every door such allowances and gifts as they might obtain."

He made no such calls. He did not even return the visits several ministers had paid Him. "Wholly reliant on God," He wrote, "and without any reference to any need He might have had, or to any other matter, this Wronged One sojourned for a period of four months in that city."

Mírzá Ḥusayn Khán, the Mushíru'd-Dawlih, was the Persian Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. His government pressed him continually to turn the Turkish authorities against Bahá'u'lláh, and he resented that Bahá'u'lláh would not present Himself at the Persian Embassy or return the visit of its representative. Through his official influence, and through his private dealings with clerics, notables and officials, he succeeded, Shoghi Effendi writes, in representing Bahá'u'lláh as "a proud and arrogant person, Who regarded Himself as subject to no law."

Less than four months after the exiles had landed, the Sultán banished them, suddenly and in the depth of winter, to Adrianople. Shoghi Effendi calls that decision "in no small degree attributable to the persistent intrigues" of the ambassador. On a cold December morning they set out, some in wagons, some on pack animals, their belongings piled in carts drawn by oxen, on a twelve-day journey across bleak and windswept country.

In Adrianople Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Súriy-i-Mulúk, addressed to the kings and rulers of the earth, and in it He spoke at length to the ambassador. "Dost thou imagine, O Minister of the Sháh in the City, that I hold within My grasp the ultimate destiny of the Cause of God?"

Later in the same Tablet He wrote: "Pause for but a little while and reflect, O Minister, and be fair in thy judgement." The two of them had never met, He said, except "in thy father's house, in the days when the martyrdom of Imám Husayn was being commemorated," and on those occasions no one could have made his views known. He had frequented no other gathering where the ambassador could have learned His mind. "How, then, didst thou pronounce thy verdict against Me, when thou hadst not heard My testimony from Mine own lips?"

He went on: "Despite what thou hast done I entertain—and to this God is My witness—no ill will against thee, nor against anyone, though from thee and others We receive such hurt as no believer in the unity of God can sustain."

From Adrianople the exiles were sent on to 'Akká, the Most Great Prison.

About a year before His ascension, Bahá'u'lláh addressed an epistle to Shaykh Muḥammad-Taqí, a hostile cleric surnamed the Son of the Wolf. In it He spoke of the slanders still being spread about Him. As soon as anyone left Constantinople to visit 'Akká, He wrote, "they at once telegraph and proclaim that he hath stolen money and fled to Akká."

Then He wrote of the ambassador, who had since died: "His Excellency, the late Mírzá Ḥusayn Khán, Mushíru'd-Dawlih,—may God forgive him—hath known this Wronged One." The ambassador, He wrote, must have given the authorities a circumstantial account of His arrival at the Sublime Porte and of all He had said and done. What the ambassador had done had not been prompted by friendship toward Him, but by his own judgment and his desire to render a service to his government.

"I testify that he was so faithful in his service to his Government that dishonesty played no part, and was held in contempt, in the domain of his activities. It was he who was responsible for the arrival of these wronged ones in the Most Great Prison (Akká). As he was faithful, however, in the discharge of his duty, he deserveth Our commendation."

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Epistle to the Son of the Wolf by Bahá'u'lláh.

Bahá'u'lláh. *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*.