The Master and the Poor of 'Akká

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family and of early Western pilgrims to 'Akká. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.

For decades, Bahá'u'lláh and His family were held as prisoners in 'Akká, a walled and unhealthy fortress town on the coast of the Holy Land to which the Ottoman authorities had banished them, intending that the Cause should wither behind its gates. It did not wither. And within those same gates, the eldest Son of Bahá'u'lláh — 'Abdu'l-Bahá, whom the believers and at length the whole city came to call simply "the Master" — quietly took upon Himself a work that had nothing to do with His own comfort or release: He made Himself the servant of the poor of 'Akká.

He was Himself a prisoner. He owned little. By the testimony of those who knew Him in those years, He kept for Himself a single coat and the plainest of food, so that there might be more to give away. And out of that smallness He gave continually.

There was, the accounts preserve, a custom of the Friday mornings. The poor of the city — the blind, the lame, the crippled, the aged, the widows with their children, the men whom no one would hire — would gather in their numbers near the place where the Master could come to them. They were the poorest people the town contained, in patched and ragged clothing, and many of them had no other sure meal in the week than the one this gathering brought. The Master would station Himself among them and pass along their ranks, and into each open, waiting hand He would press some small coin. To this one and that one He spoke a word — a greeting, a question, a blessing, an old man's name said back to him — so that not one of them received a coin as a beggar receives it, but as a friend receives a gift from a friend.

His mercy did not stop at the Friday coin. Each winter, when the cold came in off the sea and the damp of the prison-town settled into old bones, the Master saw to it that every one of the poor of 'Akká had a warm garment to put on. There were several hundreds of them. Upon the most infirm, the most bent and broken, He would place the garment Himself and settle it about their shoulders with His own hands, as a son might wrap a cloak about his father.

And there was the matter of the sick. The Master did not wait to be told twice. When word reached Him that someone in the town lay ill — and it mattered not at all to Him whether that person was a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Bahá'í, or of no faith at all — He went. He went, almost every morning, on His own feet through the narrow lanes of 'Akká, to the bedsides of the sick and the forgotten. Where there was need, He brought a physician; where there was no money for medicine, He paid for it; where there was no one to sit with the dying, He sat with them. The respectable poor — those who were ashamed to beg and would rather suffer in silence behind a closed door — He did not forget either; to these, the accounts say, bread was sent quietly, so that no one need know and no one need be shamed.

Years later, when the long imprisonment had ended and the terrible famine of the First World War fell upon the land, the same heart did the same work on a larger scale. The Master organized the growing of grain in the country districts and the storing of it against the hunger to come, and through those years He fed the poor of every religion in Haifa and 'Akká and kept famine from their doors. For this the British honoured Him, after the war, with a knighthood. He accepted the title without ceremony and set it aside; the feeding of the hungry, not the honour, had been the point.

What shines out of these years is not that a great Personage condescended now and then to charity. It is that the relief of the poor and the sick was, for the Master, not an interruption of His life but the very texture of it — something done daily, with His own feet and His own hands, in the city that held Him captive, for the people the world had overlooked. He had taught the believers that the poor are a sacred trust. In 'Akká He simply lived it.

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

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.