The Healer of 'Akká: 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Sick

*A retelling drawing on **Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era** by J. E. Esslemont, the classic early introduction to the Faith, which records 'Abdu'l-Bahá's ministry to the people of 'Akká, together with the recollections of those who witnessed His life in the prison-city. The narrative is retold in our own words.*

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The town of 'Akká, into which Bahá'u'lláh and His family were driven as prisoners in 1868, was by every account one of the most wretched places in the Ottoman Empire. It was a penal colony — a walled and fetid city to which the empire sent its worst criminals — and its reputation for unhealthiness was so notorious that it was said a bird flying over it would drop dead from the foul air.

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Within those walls disease was a constant presence. Malaria, dysentery, and other illnesses bred in the damp and the squalor; and the poorest inhabitants, who had no money for a physician and no one to look after them, sickened and died in their hovels with no hand to help them.

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Into this city of the sick and the forgotten came 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the eldest Son of Bahá'u'lláh — Himself a prisoner, Himself subject to all the privations of the place — and over the long years of the confinement He made the relief of that suffering His own personal work.

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He did not approach it from a distance. He did not content Himself with sending alms through intermediaries, though He gave alms freely. The hallmark of His ministry, as those who saw it remembered, was that He went Himself, on His own feet, through the narrow and filthy lanes of the town, to the very bedsides of the afflicted. When He learned that someone lay ill, He came.

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And it made no difference to Him whatever — this is stressed by everyone who recorded it — whether the sick person was a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a follower of His Father, or of no faith at all. The suffering itself was His only summons. He went to the poorest and the most abandoned precisely because they were the ones whom no one else would tend.

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His care for the sick was practical and complete. Where a household could not afford a doctor, He saw to it that a physician came. Where there was no money for medicine, He paid for it Himself.

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Where there was illness that needed nursing and no one to give it, He arranged for the care; and where there was no one at all to sit with a dying man or woman in their last hours, He Himself would sit with them.

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He kept little for His own comfort — a single coat, the plainest of food — so that there might be more to spend on others; and a great part of what He had went to the medicines, the doctors, and the wants of the sick poor of 'Akká.

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He had been taught by His Father that the relief of suffering is among the highest forms of worship, and in the prison-city He simply lived that teaching, day after day, year after year.

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This ministry to the sick was woven into a wider fabric of care for the poor of the city, for illness and poverty were rarely far apart in 'Akká. The same heart that paid for a dying man's medicine looked also to the living who depended on him: the widow left behind, the children with no bread, the families whom the loss of a breadwinner would have pushed into destitution.

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Each winter, when the damp cold came in off the sea and settled into the bones of the old and the feeble, the Master saw to it that the poor of the city had warm clothing to put on; and there were several hundred such people. To the most infirm among them He would bring the garment Himself.

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And there was a custom of almsgiving by which the poorest inhabitants — the blind, the lame, the aged, the widows, the men no one would hire — would gather to receive from His hand some small provision, given always with a word of greeting that turned a coin of charity into a gift between friends.

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Healing the sick, clothing the cold, feeding the hungry, comforting the bereaved: in His ministry these were not separate programs but a single, continuous outpouring of mercy upon every kind of human need the prison-city could present.

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Nor did He neglect the spirits of the sick along with their bodies. To the bedside He brought not only the physician and the medicine but His own presence — a serenity and a tenderness that the patients felt as a healing of its own. He comforted the frightened, He cheered the despondent, He sat with the dying and eased their passing.

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For those who were ashamed to be seen in their poverty — the respectable poor who would rather suffer in silence than beg — He found ways to help that spared them all humiliation, sending what was needed quietly, so that no one's dignity was wounded. The mercy was as careful of people's pride as it was of their flesh.

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There is something almost paradoxical in the spectacle of it. Here was a Man whom the empire had condemned, banished, and locked away as a danger — a prisoner with no freedom, no security, and few possessions of His own — and He had made Himself the physician and the benefactor of the city that held Him captive. The poorest inhabitants of 'Akká, who had nothing and could give Him nothing, became the chief objects of His attention.

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The very town that had received Him with suspicion, as one more dangerous exile to be watched, found over time that it had been given a friend such as it had never known.

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And the town responded. This is one of the most telling fruits of His mercy: the transformation of 'Akká's regard for Him. The place that had been a byword for cruelty came, through the long ministry of this one compassionate Soul, to honor Him above any man within its walls.

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The officials who had been set to guard Him, the religious leaders who had been warned against Him, the ordinary people who had watched Him go each day to the houses of the sick — all of them, in time, came to revere Him. The prison rules, so harsh at the beginning, were relaxed as the authorities themselves fell under the influence of a prisoner who returned their severity with kindness.

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The despised captive of the empire became, by the simple accumulation of countless acts of mercy, the most beloved figure in the city. He had conquered 'Akká — not by force, which He never used, and not by argument, but by going, morning after morning, to the bedsides of people the world had thrown away.

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When at last the years of strict imprisonment ended, and later still when the famine of the Great War fell upon the whole region, the same heart did the same work on a larger scale, organizing the growing and storing of grain so that the poor of every religion in 'Akká and Haifa were kept from starvation.

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For this the authorities, after the war, offered Him a knighthood; He accepted the title without ceremony and quietly set it aside, for the feeding of the hungry, and not the honor, had always been the point.

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But the heart of His mercy is seen most clearly not in the great wartime relief, with its scale and its public recognition, but in the small, daily, unwitnessed errands of the prison years — the lone figure making His way through the foul lanes of a penal city to sit at the bed of a dying stranger, bringing a doctor, paying for the medicine, easing a death, and asking nothing, ever, in return.

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*This is a retelling. For an account of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's life and ministry, see **Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era** by J. E. Esslemont.*

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