Good for Evil: The Master and Those Who Wronged Him

*A retelling based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family and of those who knew 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.*

1 / 23

The hardest test of a person's character is not how they treat their friends. It is how they treat the people who have set out to harm them. Almost anyone can be gracious to those who love them. To return goodness to an enemy — steadily, year after year, without bitterness and without keeping score — is one of the rarest and most exacting forms of human excellence.

2 / 23

And it is precisely this excellence that those who lived beside 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the prison-city of 'Akká saw Him display, not once in a dramatic gesture, but as the constant temper of His life.

3 / 23

To understand what they witnessed, we have to remember that the Master's sufferings in 'Akká did not come only from the Ottoman authorities who held Him captive. They came, with peculiar cruelty, from within. After the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh, certain members of His own family turned against the Covenant He had left and against 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the One He had appointed as the Centre of that Covenant.

4 / 23

These were people who had once shared the same roof, the same exile, the same hardships. Now they became His most relentless adversaries. They spread slanders about Him. They wrote reports to the authorities designed to deepen His imprisonment and tighten the restrictions upon Him. There were times, the recollections tell us, when their intrigues were aimed at nothing less than His destruction, and when the threat to His very life was real.

5 / 23

The accounts gathered in *The Chosen Highway* speak plainly of the long anguish these violators of the Covenant caused Him.

6 / 23

Now, what does a soul of perfected character do, when wronged like this — not by a stranger, but by his own kin; not once, but continually; not in small matters, but in matters touching his freedom and his life? The world's answer is well known. One defends oneself. One exposes the slanderers. One withdraws one's goodwill from those who have proved themselves enemies; at the very least, one ceases to do them any kindness. That is the ordinary, understandable course, and no one would have blamed the Master for taking it.

7 / 23

He did the opposite.

8 / 23

What those around Him saw, and could scarcely believe, was that 'Abdu'l-Bahá went on treating the very people who sought His harm with unfailing courtesy and active kindness. He did not let their enmity decide His conduct. The slanders they poured out did not turn into hardness in Him.

9 / 23

When illness or want fell upon the households of those who had wronged Him, He did not turn away in cold satisfaction; He saw to their needs as He saw to the needs of any who suffered. He sent help quietly to their doors. He shielded them, where He could, from consequences they had brought upon themselves. The same hand that they were working to bind reached out, again and again, to relieve them.

10 / 23

In the testimony preserved of those years, the wonder of it is exactly this contrast: that the more they did to injure Him, the more steadily He returned good for their evil.

11 / 23

This was not weakness, and it was not blindness. The Master understood perfectly well who His enemies were and what they were attempting; He was under no illusion about their plots. His kindness was not the kindness of a man who fails to see the knife. It was the kindness of a man who has decided, at the root of His being, that another person's wrongdoing will not be permitted to dictate His own character.

12 / 23

They could control many things about His outward life — they could help keep Him a prisoner, they could blacken His name in distant offices, they could make His days heavier — but there was one thing entirely beyond their power. They could not make Him unkind. That sovereignty He kept.

13 / 23

And this same temper extended outward, beyond His own family, to the whole life of the city. 'Akká had received the exiles, in the beginning, as dangerous criminals; its officials and clergy had been warned against them and had treated them with suspicion and contempt. Yet over the years it was this very community — including many who had once despised Him — that came to revere 'Abdu'l-Bahá as their friend and protector.

14 / 23

He earned that reverence not by argument but by conduct: by caring for the poor among them, by tending their sick, by dealing justly and generously with all, by meeting hostility so consistently with goodness that the hostility, in time, had nothing to feed on and simply died away. People who had been taught to hate Him found themselves unable to keep it up in the face of so much patient kindness.

15 / 23

The Master overcame His enemies, in the end, not by defeating them but by refusing to become like them.

16 / 23

There is a teaching at the heart of all this, one that 'Abdu'l-Bahá lived before He ever needed to explain it. The Bahá'í Writings hold that the answer to cruelty is not more cruelty, that hatred cannot be healed by hatred, and that the truly strong soul is the one who can absorb an injury without passing it on. To retaliate is easy; it requires only that we let the other person set the terms.

17 / 23

To return kindness for malice is hard, because it requires that we keep the terms ourselves — that we go on being good when being good is no longer being repaid. This is not the morality of the weak who cannot strike back. It is the morality of the strong who choose not to, because they answer to a higher standard than the behaviour of their enemies.

18 / 23

That is the perfection the Feast of Kamál sets before us, and perhaps the most searching form it can take. We will all, at some time, be wronged — slighted, slandered, betrayed, perhaps by people we trusted or loved.

19 / 23

And in that moment we will feel the old pull: to repay in kind, to let the wrong done to us lower the standard of our own conduct, to tell ourselves that *they* started it and so we are released from our better self. 'Abdu'l-Bahá shows us another way. Through long years, surrounded by those who plotted against Him, He held fast to His own goodness as the one thing no enemy could take.

20 / 23

He returned courtesy for discourtesy, help for harm, and love for hatred — not because His enemies deserved it, but because that is who He was, and He would not let them change Him.

21 / 23

The perfection of a character is tested most where it is least rewarded. By that test, the conduct of the Master toward those who wronged Him in 'Akká stands as one of the purest examples ever given of what excellence of character can be: a goodness so rooted that no amount of evil aimed at it could turn it into anything but more good.

22 / 23

*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield.*

23 / 23