A Letter to the Peacemakers: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet to The Hague

*A retelling based on the Tablet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá to the Central Organization for a Durable Peace at The Hague, as preserved in **Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá**. The passages in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own words, as rendered in the authorized English translation.*

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When the guns of the First World War fell silent at the end of 1918, the world was exhausted and grieving, and many sincere people turned their minds to a single question: how might such a catastrophe be prevented from ever happening again?

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Among those who had been labouring at that question even before the war's end was an organization in the Dutch city of The Hague — the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, a body of earnest people gathering ideas and proposals for building a peace that would last. In December of 1919 they sent an invitation and their proposals to a figure in the Holy Land whose whole life had been a witness to the cause of unity: 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

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He answered them. And the answer He sent — written from Haifa, only a year or two after His release from a lifetime under the confinement of the Ottoman state — is one of the great Tablets of His ministry, a revealed Word addressed not to a single soul but to the assembled peacemakers of the world.

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## The setting of the letter

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It is worth pausing on who was writing, and from where. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been a prisoner and an exile, with His Father and then alone, for the greater part of His life. He had been freed only when the old Ottoman order collapsed at the end of the war. He had, through the famine years, fed the poor of a whole district and been honoured by the British for it.

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He was, by 1919, an old Man who had carried the weight of the Cause through decades of suffering. And it was this Man — not a statesman with armies, not a diplomat with treaties, but a former prisoner with nothing in His hands but the Word — to whom a European peace society turned for guidance.

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That, in itself, is part of the meaning of the Feast of Words. The peacemakers had power and organization and goodwill of their own. What they sought from 'Abdu'l-Bahá was something their committees could not generate: the authoritative Word on what peace truly requires.

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## What He told the peacemakers

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'Abdu'l-Bahá did not flatter them, and He did not discourage them. He honoured their effort and then told them, plainly, that their goal could not be reached on the foundation they were standing on. Goodwill and clever arrangements, He indicated, were not enough; a durable peace must rest on a *spiritual* foundation, on the recognition of the oneness of humankind and on the teachings that could actually transform the hearts from which war proceeds.

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He set before them the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh as the basis of that foundation. The first and greatest of them, He wrote, is the oneness of the world of humanity.

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From it follow the others He laid out for them in the Tablet: the independent investigation of truth, freed from the blind imitation of inherited prejudice; the agreement of true religion with reason and science; the conviction that religion must be a cause of unity and love, and that if it becomes a source of hatred and division it would be better to have no religion at all; the abandonment of the religious, racial, national, and political prejudices that, He warned, are "the destroyers of human foundations"; the recognition of the equality of men and women; and the establishment of universal education and of a standard of justice in the economic life of the world.

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Running through the whole letter is a single insistence: that the disease of war has spiritual roots, and that no merely external remedy can cure it. Treaties written by self-interested powers, He warned, would not hold. The prejudices that set the peoples of the earth against one another do not yield to argument alone; they yield to the transforming power of a Word that can change the heart. The peace the world longs for, He taught, will come not chiefly from the conference table but from the renewal of the human spirit.

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He pressed the point home in a way the peace-workers were perhaps not expecting. Universal peace, He explained, would be brought about by two forces working together. There was the labour of the well-meaning — the conferences, the societies, the patient diplomacy by which thoughtful people sought to bind the nations into agreement. That labour was good and necessary, and He commended it.

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But it would be confirmed and made enduring only by the second force: the quickening power of the Word of God, breathed into the world by Bahá'u'lláh, which alone could reach beneath the surface of human affairs and remake the hearts from which both war and peace finally proceed. The committees might draw the boundaries of peace; only the Word could give it life.

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## The certainty of peace

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And yet — and this is the note on which the Tablet rests its hope — 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not present the Most Great Peace as a fond wish that might or might not be fulfilled. He presented it as a certainty. The path is hard, He acknowledged, and to the worldly eye even impossible; but it will come.

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He wrote, of the supreme peace that Bahá'u'lláh had proclaimed: "Although the realization of this is most difficult, nay impossible, yet the Most Great Peace will come." It will come, because it is the will of God for this age, and because the very Word He had brought is at work, beneath the surface of events, knitting the human race into one.

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He told the peace-workers, in effect, that they were labouring in the current of the age itself — that the unity they sought was not a private dream but the direction in which the whole world was being drawn. Their work mattered. But it would bear its fruit only as it aligned itself with the spiritual reality that Bahá'u'lláh had revealed: that humanity is one family, and that the prejudices which divide it must be laid down before any treaty can hold.

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## A Word sent to the world

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The Tablet to The Hague was carried back to Europe and read by those to whom it was addressed; and like the other great Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, it did not stay in the hands of its first readers. It was copied, translated, and gathered into the Selections from His Writings, where it stands to this day as a compact statement of the Bahá'í teachings on peace — studied by believers and by seekers of unity around the world.

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Consider once more the shape of the thing. A secular peace society, at the close of the most terrible war the world had then known, reached out for wisdom.

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And the wisdom that reached them came from a former prisoner in the Holy Land, in the form of a letter — a revealed Word that named the true causes of war and the true foundations of peace, and that promised, against every appearance, that the day of unity would surely dawn. The peacemakers had asked how the world might be kept from tearing itself apart. 'Abdu'l-Bahá answered them with the Word that alone can make humanity one.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the Tablet to The Hague in **Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá**.*

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