The Temple of God: The Súriy-i-Haykal

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 3, by Adib Taherzadeh, which devotes a chapter to the Súriy-i-Haykal. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that study and in the authoritative histories of the Faith.

By the time Bahá'u'lláh was settled in the prison-city of 'Akká, He had already done a thing without parallel in the annals of the world's prophets. From exile and captivity He had addressed, one after another, the most powerful men alive: the Pope in Rome, Napoleon III the Emperor of the French, the Sháh of Persia, the Czar of Russia, Queen Victoria, the Sulṭán of Turkey. To each He had announced that the Promised One of all ages had appeared, and had summoned each to justice, to peace, and to the recognition of the Day of God. He had told them to compose their differences, to lay down the instruments of war, and to care for the peoples entrusted to them. He had warned them, with sober clarity, of what would follow if they refused.

In 'Akká, Adib Taherzadeh recounts, Bahá'u'lláh revealed a Tablet that drew these separate proclamations together into a single, deliberate whole: the Súriy-i-Haykal, the "Súrih of the Temple." Its central image gives the Tablet its name. Bahá'u'lláh speaks of a "Temple" — a Haykal — the living temple of the Cause of God, the very Person and Word of the Manifestation, raised up in the midst of creation. And into the body of that Temple He set, as one sets stones into a sacred building, the messages He had sent to the rulers of the earth. The addresses to the kings became, in this way, not scattered letters but the fabric of one majestic edifice of the Word.

Read with the eyes of the world, the situation is almost incomprehensible. Here was a Man whom two empires had condemned, who had been driven from His homeland, stripped of His possessions, and shut up under guard in a fortress town — and He was not petitioning the kings. He was summoning them. There is in the Súriy-i-Haykal no trace of the supplicant. There is the voice of One who speaks from a station above all earthly thrones, calling the occupants of those thrones to account, and bidding them turn to the One Whom God had made manifest. The greatness on display is not the greatness of power as the world counts power. It is the greatness of the Word of God, which needs no army to enforce it and no treasury to sustain it, and which speaks to emperors as easily from a cell as from a palace.

Taherzadeh draws attention to what history then did with these warnings. The sovereigns the Tablets had addressed did not, in the main, heed them. And within a single generation the thrones began to fall. Napoleon III, who is said to have cast aside the Tablet sent to him, lost his empire in a catastrophic war and died in exile. The Sháh's dynasty and the Sulṭán's empire and the Czar's autocracy were swept away in turn. The convulsions Bahá'u'lláh had foretold rolled across the world He had addressed. The Temple of His Word, meanwhile, stood; and stands.

That is why the Súriy-i-Haykal belongs so naturally to a Feast of Grandeur. The crowns and empires that seemed, in the 1860s and 1870s, to be the very definition of grandeur are gone — their palaces emptied, their dynasties closed. The Prisoner who addressed them from behind the walls of 'Akká, with nothing the world recognizes as might, has seen His Cause spread to every land on earth. Bahá'u'lláh had fashioned of His proclamation a Temple and bidden the rulers of the world give ear. The form He chose was not accidental: a temple is what endures, what is built for worship and for ages, while the thrones around it rise and crumble.

To stand, in imagination, before that Temple of the Word — a structure raised in a prison and addressed to the whole earth — is to glimpse the majesty the Cause of God carries within it, wholly independent of the circumstances of the One Who proclaimed it. The walls of 'Akká were meant to make Him small. They became the quiet foundation of something the kings of the earth could not match.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 3, by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1983). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 3 — 'Akká, The Early Years 1868-77)*. George Ronald.