The Hour of Freedom: 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Opening of the Prison Gates

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. The narrative is summarized in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are preserved from that history.

'Abdu'l-Bahá had been a prisoner almost His whole life. He was a child of eight when the persecutions drove His Father from Ṭihrán; He had walked into exile, by stages, across an empire — Baghdád, Constantinople, Adrianople — and at last, in 1868, into the prison-city of 'Akká, which the Ottoman authorities had chosen as the place where the Cause was meant to die. There He remained. The decades passed. Bahá'u'lláh ascended in 1892, and the weight of the Covenant came to rest upon the shoulders of His appointed Successor; and still the prisoner's status held. By the early years of the twentieth century 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been, in one form or another, a captive of the state for some forty years.

The confinement was never a settled, predictable thing. It tightened and loosened with the moods of officials and the schemes of enemies. In the years around 1901 the restrictions were drawn cruelly close again, and the Master was once more shut up within the walls of 'Akká. Worse loomed. Those who hated the Cause poured their accusations into the ear of the Sultán, 'Abdu'l-Ḥamíd; and there came a time when a commission of inquiry was dispatched from the capital with sweeping powers, and the rumour ran that its purpose was to have 'Abdu'l-Bahá banished to the deserts of North Africa, to Fízán in the remote Sahara — or, it was whispered, cast into the sea.

What is recorded of Him in those days is not agitation but calm. The danger was real and He did not pretend otherwise; arrangements pressed upon Him by anxious friends for His escape He set aside. He went on with His work — receiving the pilgrims who could reach Him, dictating His Tablets, caring for the poor of the city, directing from within His prison the building of the first House of Worship in distant 'Ishqábád and the raising, on the slope of Mount Carmel, of the Shrine that was to receive the sacred remains of the Báb. The members of the hostile commission landed at 'Akká; they gathered their testimony; the shadow over Him deepened. And through it He maintained, in Shoghi Effendi's words, the bearing of one whose trust was wholly in God — neither courting the danger nor fleeing it, but leaving the matter where He had always left every matter, in the hands of his Lord.

Then the deliverance came, and it came from a quarter no human calculation could have arranged. In the summer of 1908 the long-simmering discontent within the Ottoman empire broke out in the revolution of the Young Turks. The Committee of Union and Progress compelled the Sultán to restore the constitution he had suspended; and among the consequences of that upheaval was a decree freeing the religious and political prisoners held throughout the empire's dominions. Under that general amnesty, the prisoner of 'Akká was at last set at liberty. The commission that had come to destroy Him had achieved nothing; the very government that had held Him for forty years now opened His prison door. As Shoghi Effendi observes, the One who had been a captive walked free in the same year that saw the humbling of the sovereign who had striven to crush Him.

And here is the heart of it for those who would learn submission to the will of God. The Master did not greet His freedom as a man greets the end of a long ordeal — with bitterness recalled, or with the restless haste of one making up for lost years. He greeted it as He had greeted the imprisonment itself: as a turn in the road appointed by God, to be accepted with the same composure with which He had accepted all the rest. The captivity had not embittered Him, and the liberty did not unsettle Him. Whether bound or free, He rested in the will of God; and the same calm that had carried Him through forty years of prison carried Him through the hour of His release.

What He then did with that freedom is itself a kind of testimony. He did not withdraw to rest. He soon moved to Haifa; He completed the entombment of the Báb's remains in the Shrine on Mount Carmel in 1909; and, though by now advanced in years and far from strong, He undertook the great journeys to Egypt, to Europe, and across North America to proclaim His Father's message in the cities of the West. The prison years had been accepted as God's will; the years of freedom were spent, just as fully, in God's service. The acceptance was the same in both.

There is a particular dignity in a soul not made by its circumstances — neither broken by long bondage nor intoxicated by sudden release, because its peace was never lodged in circumstances at all. 'Abdu'l-Bahá shows us what it is to say yes to the will of God in the dungeon and yes to the will of God at the open gate, and to mean exactly the same thing by both.

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/