The Homage of an Empire: The World's Tribute at the Master's Passing

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Rabbání, which draws on the contemporary record of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing gathered in Haifa in those days. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

There is a particular irony that runs through the whole life of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and it reaches its sharpest point at the very end. For the greater part of His years He had been a captive of the state. He was a child of eight when soldiers seized His Father and the family was stripped of all it owned and driven into exile. He grew to manhood in one banishment after another, and He spent the prime of His life behind the walls of the prison-city of 'Akká, under a sentence of perpetual confinement passed by the Ottoman authorities, who regarded Him as a dangerous prisoner to be watched, walled in, and forgotten. Empires had done their best to make Him small.

And then He passed — in the early hours of the twenty-eighth of November, 1921, quietly, in His own house in Haifa — and those same powers of the earth could think of nothing to do but hasten to honour Him.

The change had begun a little before the end. After the Great War, when the British administration took over the Holy Land and learned how this one Man had fed the starving population of the whole region through the famine years, they had offered Him a knighthood, which He accepted with perfect courtesy and quietly set aside. He never used the title. The relief of the hungry, not the ribbon of an empire, had been the point. But the recognition was a sign of how the wind had turned: the Prisoner of the old empire had become, in the eyes of the new authorities, a figure of the highest moral standing in the land.

When word of His passing went out by cable, the tributes that came back were not the small change of protocol. They came from the very summit of the governing power. From London, Winston Churchill — then His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies — telegraphed at once to the High Commissioner for Palestine, asking him, in the words preserved in the record, "to convey to the Bahá'í community, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, their sympathy and condolence on the death of Sir 'Abdu'l-Bahá 'Abbás, K.B.E." Think of what those words contained. The government of the British Empire, by the hand of one of its foremost statesmen, was offering its official sympathy at the death of a Man who had spent decades as a prisoner of the empire that had preceded it on that very soil.

From Egypt came another. Viscount Allenby — the field-marshal whose armies had swept the Ottomans from Palestine, and who had once been wired from London to extend every protection to 'Abdu'l-Bahá when the British marched on Haifa — now sent his condolence as High Commissioner for Egypt. His message, dated the twenty-ninth of November, asked that there be conveyed "to the relatives of the late Sir 'Abdu'l-Bahá 'Abbás Effendi and to the Bahá'í community my sincere sympathy in the loss of their revered leader." From far-off Baghdad came word that the head of the government of 'Iráq desired to extend his sympathy to the family of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in their bereavement. Messages arrived from officials and notables of community after community, of faith after faith, across the region. The honour was not confined to one nation or one creed; it rose from many at once, as though the whole governing apparatus of a divided land had felt the same loss in the same hour.

The homage was not only on paper. On the day of the funeral, the highest representatives of the state came in person and walked up the mountain. Sir Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner of Palestine, attended; so did the Governor of Jerusalem and the Governor of Phoenicia, the chief officials of the administration, and the consuls of the various nations. They came not to preside over a ceremony of their own arranging — for the funeral was arranged by no committee of state — but simply to take their place among some ten thousand mourners of every class and creed who had gathered on no formal summons at all.

What the officials said, once they had seen that gathering, is as telling as the fact that they came. Sir Herbert Samuel afterward set down that a great throng had assembled, "sorrowing for His death, but rejoicing also for His life." It is a remarkable sentence to fall from the pen of a high commissioner of an empire — not the dry formula of condolence, but a true reading of the day: that this was grief shot through with gratitude. The Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, who had known the great occasions of state, confessed something even more striking. He said that he had "never known a more united expression of regret and respect than was called forth by the utter simplicity of the ceremony." A more united expression — from a land whose divisions were a byword; and called forth not by splendour, but by simplicity.

Here is the deep reversal that the day made plain. The empires of the earth deal in titles, ribbons, ranks, and ceremonies; they confer honour and they withdraw it; they had once measured 'Abdu'l-Bahá and judged Him a prisoner to be confined. Now the statesmen of those same powers stood bareheaded at His grave and reached for words large enough to name what had passed among them. They had nothing in their gift that He had sought. He had refused to be made small by their walls, and He was equally unmoved by their wreaths. The honours that came at the end fell upon One who had long ago become wholly indifferent to honour — and that indifference is precisely why the honours, when they came, meant so much. A man who craves the world's praise and finally wins it has merely been paid. A Servant who never wanted it, and to whom it came pouring in unbidden from the very powers that had wronged Him, has been vindicated.

The Priceless Pearl, recording these tributes, lets them stand for what they are: the testimony of an age, given in spite of itself. The governments did not understand the Cause that 'Abdu'l-Bahá embodied; their condolences name Him as a "revered leader" and a knight of their own order, not as the Centre of Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant, which is what He truly was. But they understood, dimly and truly, that a greatness had passed among them which their categories could not contain — and they bowed to it as best they knew how.

On the anniversary of His ascension, it is worth holding these two pictures together. There is the young Captive of the eighteen-sixties, exiled and walled in by the might of an empire that meant to extinguish His Father's Cause. And there is the same Figure, sixty years on, mourned by Churchill and Allenby and the High Commissioner, carried up Mount Carmel by ten thousand of every faith, the powers of the earth confessing they had never seen such unity of grief. The walls had not made Him small. The empire that had once locked Him behind the walls of 'Akká now bowed its head at His grave. He had outlived the captivity, outlived the power that imposed it, and drawn from the world a homage that no captor could have imagined and no decree could ever have commanded.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúhíyyih Rabbání.

Rabbání, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/khanum_priceless_pearl