One Prisoner Summons the Kings: The Súriy-i-Mulúk

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which describes the Súriy-i-Mulúk and its place among the Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.

To feel the grandeur of the Súriy-i-Mulúk — the "Súrih of the Kings" — one must first picture the smallness of the place from which it came. The year was around 1867. Bahá'u'lláh was living in Adrianople, an Ottoman provincial town in the European corner of the empire, far from anywhere that the powers of the world regarded as important. He had been driven there by stages: expelled from His native Persia, exiled to Baghdád, summoned to the imperial capital at Constantinople, and then banished again, in the depth of a bitter winter, to this remote and frozen town. He held no office. He commanded no soldiers. He possessed no wealth; what little His family had was repeatedly stripped away by the journeys and the schemes of His enemies. By every measure the world uses to reckon greatness, He was a man at the bottom of fortune's wheel — an exile in a borrowed house, watched by officials, his movements constrained, his very survival uncertain.

And it was from that house, in those circumstances, that He took up His pen and addressed Himself to the whole company of the kings of the earth.

Shoghi Effendi, in God Passes By, devotes the central chapters of his history to the proclamation Bahá'u'lláh made to the world's rulers during these years — a proclamation he describes as without parallel in the religious annals of humankind. Never before, he observes, had the Founder of a revealed religion addressed Himself, openly and by name, to the sovereigns and ecclesiastics of His age, calling them collectively to recognize the Day of God. Other Prophets had counseled individual kings; none had stood up before the entire institutional order of monarchy and summoned it, as a single body, to the bar of divine justice. That is precisely what Bahá'u'lláh did, and the Súriy-i-Mulúk is the Tablet in which He did it.

The word mulúk means "kings." Where the great Tablets that would follow were addressed each to one ruler — to Napoleon III of France, to Queen Victoria of Britain, to the Czar of Russia, to the Pope in Rome, to the Sháh of Persia — the Súriy-i-Mulúk was addressed to them all at once: to the entire concourse of the world's monarchs, and beyond them to their ministers, their ambassadors, their divines, and the peoples in their keeping. It is a collective summons. It does not whisper to one throne; it lifts its voice over every throne on earth.

What does such a summons say? Shoghi Effendi's history makes the burden of it plain. Bahá'u'lláh calls the kings to fear God and to deal justly with those over whom they rule. He bids them lay aside the pride and the love of dominion that had made them deaf. He counsels them to compose their differences, to reduce the crushing burden of their armaments, and to spend on the welfare of their subjects what they squandered on war. He reminds them that the poor are a trust in their hands, and that they will answer for the way they have discharged that trust. And He announces to them, with sovereign clarity, that the Promised One of all ages has appeared, that the Day so long foretold has dawned, and that the One addressing them speaks not for Himself but for God.

There is, in the whole of it, not a trace of the supplicant. This is the detail that staggers the imagination. A prisoner ordinarily writes to a king to beg — to plead for release, for mercy, for the restoration of what has been taken from him. Bahá'u'lláh, who had been robbed of homeland and freedom by the very governments He was addressing, asked nothing for Himself. He did not petition the Sulṭán who held Him captive to set Him free. He did not ask the kings to ease His exile. He summoned them — to justice, to humility, to the recognition of their Lord. The voice of the Súriy-i-Mulúk is the voice of One who speaks from a station immeasurably above the thrones He is addressing, and who calls their occupants down from their pride as a sovereign calls his vassals to account.

Within the Tablet, Shoghi Effendi notes, Bahá'u'lláh turned in particular toward the Sulṭán of Turkey — the very monarch whose decree had banished Him — and toward that ruler's ministers, the men whose intrigues had driven Him from city to city. He laid bare the injustice of His exile. He exposed the conduct of those who, clothed in office and surrounded by the trappings of power, had set themselves against the Cause of God while neglecting the cry of the oppressed at their own gates. He addressed the ministers and the wise men of the city, the ambassadors of foreign courts resident in the capital, and the people of Constantinople, that none might afterward say they had not been warned.

Consider the audacity of the act, measured against the circumstances. The Ottoman Empire still spanned three continents. The Russian Empire stretched across half the northern world. The French and the British were at the zenith of their reach, their fleets and their flags upon every sea. The Papacy, for all the erosion of its temporal lands, still commanded the spiritual allegiance of millions. These were the colossal powers of the nineteenth century, and to their courtiers the idea that an exiled Persian prisoner in a provincial town might have anything to say to them — let alone summon them to judgment — would have seemed the very definition of absurdity. Yet that is what He did, and He did it not with the nervous boldness of a man overreaching, but with the calm, settled authority of One who knew exactly Whose word He spoke.

The grandeur of the Súriy-i-Mulúk, then, is not borrowed from any circumstance of its author. It is the inherent grandeur of the Word of God, which is sovereign in itself and needs no throne beneath it and no army behind it. The kings derived their majesty from their crowns; take away the crown and the man remains, no greater than any other. Bahá'u'lláh's majesty owed nothing to a crown, for He had none. It was the majesty of the One who could address all crowns at once because He stood above them all.

Shoghi Effendi's history then records what the kings did with the summons, and what history did in turn with the kings. In the main, the rulers did not heed. Some never troubled to receive what was sent; one, by tradition, cast the Tablet aside. And the warnings Bahá'u'lláh had uttered began, within a single generation, to work themselves out across the world He had addressed. The French emperor who would not listen lost his throne and his empire in a catastrophic war and died an exile. The Sulṭán's empire, the Czar's autocracy, the old order of European monarchy — convulsion by convulsion, war by war, the thrones to whom the summons had been addressed were swept from their places, until the map of crowned heads that had seemed so permanent in the 1860s lay in ruins. The temporal grandeur that had looked eternal proved to be the most perishable thing on earth.

And the Tablet? The Word that one exiled Prisoner had set down in a borrowed house in a forgotten town? It endures. The Cause He proclaimed from behind the walls of His captivity has spread to every land the kings once ruled and to many they never reached. The Súriy-i-Mulúk is read today, with reverence, in languages those monarchs never spoke, on continents their ambassadors never named.

This is why the Tablet of the Kings belongs so fittingly to a Feast of 'Aẓamat — Grandeur. It draws, in a single stroke, the whole contrast the Feast exists to teach. On one side stands the world's idea of greatness: the throne, the crown, the army, the treasury, the empire that seems too vast ever to fall. On the other stands the greatness God confers: the Word that issues from a prison and summons every empire to account, that owns nothing the world can seize and therefore loses nothing when the world's grandeur crumbles. One exile, with no homeland, no soldiers, and no coin to His name, addressed the entire company of the kings of the earth — and summoned them, not to His aid, but to justice. The crowns are gone. The summons remains.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/