The Captive Who Fed a Country: 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Famine

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family and of those close to 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

When the Great War broke over the world in 1914, it found 'Abdu'l-Bahá where so much of His life had been spent: under the power of an empire that regarded Him as an enemy. With the war, the partial freedom of His later years vanished. He became once more, in effect, a prisoner of the Ottoman state, watched and threatened, cut off by the fighting and the blockade from the believers of the wider world. The Turkish commander in the region was openly hostile, and there was a season, the accounts preserve, in which the Master's very life hung by a thread, when it was rumoured that the retreating authorities meant to crucify Him on Mount Carmel before they withdrew.

That was the danger to Himself. Around Him lay a danger to everyone: hunger.

The British navy's blockade had sealed the coast. The men of working age had been swept into the armies. Refugees were streaming into Haifa and 'Akká from the fighting in Syria and Palestine. Prices soared; food vanished from the markets; famine settled over the land. In such a time the strong look first to themselves, and the powerful hoard. 'Abdu'l-Bahá did the opposite, and He had prepared to do it long before.

For He had seen the storm coming. In the years before the war, with a foresight those around Him only understood afterward, the Master had directed that grain be cultivated in the country districts east of the Jordan and stored against a day of need. Now that day had come. The wheat He had laid up was brought down, under His own direction, and made the foundation of a relief that reached far beyond the believers. To the poor of the city — Muslim, Christian, Jew, and Bahá'í alike, for He made no distinction whatever among the hungry — bread and grain went out day after day. Where there was no bread He gave what else there was. To the destitute He gave money from a purse that was itself nearly empty. He fed not a household, not a congregation, but the poor of a whole region, and through the worst of the war years He kept famine from their doors.

He was, let it be remembered, a Captive while He did this. He held no public office. He commanded no soldiers and controlled no granary of the state. He had spent the better part of His life in exile and imprisonment. By every worldly measure He was among the least powerful men in the land. And yet, when the strong were helpless and the empires could feed no one, it was this Prisoner who fed the multitude. The power that sustained a starving country in those years did not come from any throne. It came from a heart that had made the care of the poor its own lifelong work, and from a wisdom that had quietly provided, in time of plenty, for the time of want.

When the war ended and the British took the Holy Land, the new authorities looked about them and understood what this one Man had done. To honour it, they conferred upon Him a knighthood of the British Empire, and a formal ceremony was held in the garden in Haifa at which the title was bestowed. 'Abdu'l-Bahá accepted it with perfect courtesy. And then He set it aside. He did not use it; He did not prize it; it changed nothing in Him at all. The relief of the hungry, not the ribbon of an empire, had been the whole purpose, and the purpose was already fulfilled. A Prisoner who had no army, no treasury, and no power that any state recognized had kept a whole region from starving — and the mightiest empire of the age could think of no higher response than to kneel, as it were, and offer Him a title He did not need.

This is the power the Feast of Qudrat sets before us. It is not the power that besieges cities or commands fleets; those belonged to the warring nations, and in the face of famine they could feed no one. It is the quieter and far greater power that foresees, provides, and sustains — that takes a Captive the world had locked away and makes Him, in the hour of universal need, the keeper of a whole people's life. The empires made the war. The Captive kept the children fed.

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.