Why Not Praise Christ and Muḥammad: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at Temple Emanu-El

On Saturday, October 12, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá entered the Sutter Street sanctuary of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco — the largest Reform synagogue on the Pacific coast. The audience that afternoon, Mírzá Maḥmúd records, numbered approximately 2,000. The rabbis and elders of the city had invited Him as a guest of honour and a friend of the Jewish people. They had not, perhaps, expected the talk He would give.

The Master began by honouring Moses. The foundation of the religion of God laid by Moses, He said, was the cause of eternal honour for the children of Israel. Without that foundation, much of what Christianity and Islam later professed would not have been possible. The world owed Israel a debt that could not be repaid.

He then turned the question.

Why should not the children of Israel praise now Christ and Muḥammad?

It was a question respectful in its grammar and devastating in its content. He laid out the case as gently as the room allowed: that Christ had spread the name of Moses across continents, and Muḥammad had carried it across oceans, and that in honouring either Christ or Muḥammad the Jewish community would be honouring the very vindication of Moses’s long ministry.

He pressed the larger principle:

The foundation of the religion of God which was laid by Moses was the cause of eternal honor.

To stand by that foundation was to recognise its growth. The age, He said, was not the age of fanaticism; it was the age of science, in which every claim could be tested and every inheritance examined.

This century is the century of science... Does it behoove us to linger in our fanaticism?

The talk did not flatter and it did not insult. It treated the audience as scholars capable of considering its argument on its merits. Mahmúd’s Diary records that when the Master had finished, many in the audience pressed forward to thank Him. Some who had come hostile, the diary notes, departed thoughtful.

Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for October 12, 1912; see original for full text.

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání*. George Ronald.