After the Prison Walls: The Mansion of Bahjí in His Final Years

*A retelling based on **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 4** by Adib Taherzadeh, which records the circumstances of Bahá'u'lláh's final years at the Mansion of Bahjí.*

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To understand the place where Bahá'u'lláh's earthly life came to its close, one must first remember the place where His captivity began. In the late summer of 1868 He had been driven, with His family and a band of His companions, into the prison-city of 'Akká — a walled penal colony on the Mediterranean coast, notorious throughout the Ottoman Empire as a destination for the worst of criminals.

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The exiles were confined within its barracks under conditions of such severity that several of them died. For years the gates were shut against them, the people of the town were warned away, and the sentence pronounced upon Bahá'u'lláh was perpetual imprisonment.

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And yet, Adib Taherzadeh recounts, the iron of that sentence slowly, almost imperceptibly, gave way. Year by year the rigour of the confinement relaxed. The hostility of the townspeople turned, in time, to reverence; officials who arrived hardened against Him departed softened. The barred gates that had been meant to seal Him away from the world could not, in the end, hold against the influence of His presence.

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First He was permitted to move from the barracks into a house within the city walls. And at last the unthinkable became possible: He who had been condemned never to leave 'Akká was able to pass out beyond its gates altogether, into the open countryside to the north.

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It was there, amid fields and orchards, that the Mansion of Bahjí stood.

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The house had not been built for Him. Taherzadeh relates that the upper portion of the Mansion had been raised, around 1870, by a prosperous merchant of 'Akká, 'Údí Khammár — the same man whose earlier house within the city had for a time sheltered the Holy Family.

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He had built Bahjí as a fine summer residence, a place of spacious rooms and high windows looking out over the plain toward the sea and toward the slopes of Mount Carmel beyond. But an epidemic swept the district, and the family fled the area, abandoning the Mansion. The way was opened for it to pass into other hands.

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Those hands were 'Abdu'l-Bahá's. Throughout the years of imprisonment it had been the Most Great Branch — Bahá'u'lláh's eldest Son — who shouldered the burden of the family's affairs, who negotiated with officials, who provided for the believers, who interposed Himself between His Father and every hardship He could turn aside. Now, with the same quiet competence, 'Abdu'l-Bahá arranged for the Mansion of Bahjí to be secured for Bahá'u'lláh's use. It was first rented and then, in time, purchased; and the Blessed Beauty took up His residence there in the closing chapter of His life.

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The contrast could hardly have been greater with all that had gone before. From the lightless pit beneath Ṭihrán, where His ministry had first dawned in chains; through the long banishments to Baghdád, to Constantinople, to Adrianople; into the squalor and confinement of the 'Akká barracks — the path of Bahá'u'lláh's earthly years had been one of mounting deprivation, each exile farther from home than the last.

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And now, at the end of that road, He dwelt in a gracious house set among gardens, His rooms filled with light, His door open to a steady procession of pilgrims who had crossed deserts and seas for the bounty of attaining His presence. The Power that had banished Him to its foulest prison could not prevent His earthly life from closing in a place of beauty and peace.

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There was, Taherzadeh notes, a prophecy folded into all of this. Long before — in the very years of His most rigorous confinement — Bahá'u'lláh had foretold that the day would come when He would pitch His tent upon the mountain of God, and that the choicest of His loved ones would be gathered to Him. To those who first heard such words, spoken by a prisoner behind locked gates, they must have seemed impossible.

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Yet the easing of the prison and the move to Bahjí were the unfolding of exactly that promise. The exiles lived to see the One who had been sentenced to a perpetual prison receive, instead, the homage of the very land of His exile.

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In these final years the rhythm of life at Bahjí settled into something settled and luminous. Bahá'u'lláh continued to reveal Tablets, to receive the believers, to send His counsels out across the world to kings and to friends alike. Pilgrims arriving footsore from Persia would be received, fed, and granted the audience for which they had risked everything. The Mansion became a centre from which the light of the Cause radiated outward — no longer a cell of confinement, but a seat of quiet sovereignty.

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It is in this house, then, that the events the Bahá'ís commemorate each year on the Day of the Ascension took place. When the fever came in early May of 1892, and when, in the small hours of the twenty-ninth of that month, Bahá'u'lláh passed from this world, it was within the walls of Bahjí — not within the prison of 'Akká. He was laid to rest in a room of the house adjoining the Mansion, and that spot became the holiest place on earth for His followers, the Qiblih toward which they turn in prayer.

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To stand at Bahjí today, amid the gardens and the stillness, is to stand at the end of a long arc that began in a dungeon. The story of the Mansion is the story of how the worst that the powers of the earth could do to Bahá'u'lláh was, in the end, undone — how the Prisoner of 'Akká came to rest, in honour and in beauty, in the very country where He had been sent to be forgotten.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 4** by Adib Taherzadeh.*

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