The Dignity of the Wronged: A People Who Would Not Retaliate

A retelling based on A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, His own historical account of the early Cause. Short phrases in quotation marks are preserved from that history.

We usually look for honour in a single shining deed — a brave word, a noble sacrifice, a refusal that costs everything. But there is a form of honour that shows itself not in one moment but across years, and not in what a person does so much as in what a whole community refuses to do. The Feast of Sharaf, the Feast of Honour, has room for this slower, harder dignity: the uprightness of a people who are wronged again and again, and who will not let the wrong turn them into wrongdoers. 'Abdu'l-Bahá set down exactly such a portrait in His own history of the Cause, the work known as A Traveler's Narrative.

To feel the weight of what He records, one has to picture the situation. By the years 'Abdu'l-Bahá is describing, the followers of the Báb and then of Bahá'u'lláh had passed through a furnace. There had been the great sieges and the mass killings; there had been, after the attempt on the Sháh's life in 1852, a wave of slaughter in which, by the Cause's own reckoning, thousands of believers were put to death. Homes had been plundered. Families had been scattered. The Founder of the Faith Himself had been chained in a black pit and then driven from His homeland into exile. The community that survived all this was a community with every earthly reason for bitterness, for grievance, and for revenge.

And here is the astonishing thing 'Abdu'l-Bahá insists upon. Through all of it, that community kept its order and its honour. In the passage of His narrative that addresses the Sháh directly, He points to the conduct of the believers as the plain, checkable evidence of their innocence. After Bahá'u'lláh's arrival in 'Iráq, He writes, the Cause was not weakened but spread: "the multitude of this faction in Persia at that time was more than it had been before." A persecuted movement, larger than ever — exactly the situation, the world would assume, in which grievance boils over into violence. Yet 'Abdu'l-Bahá states the opposite, and states it as a matter of public record: "notwithstanding this, none transgressed his proper bounds nor assailed anyone." Larger in numbers, harder pressed than ever, the believers did not rise, did not riot, did not avenge their dead. They held their place. They kept the peace.

He goes further, marking the duration of it: "It is nigh on fifteen years that all continue tranquil, looking unto God and relying on Him, and bear patiently what hath come upon them, casting it on God." Read that slowly. Fifteen years — not an afternoon's noble restraint, but a decade and a half of sustained, disciplined forbearance, kept by an entire scattered people, under conditions that would have broken almost any community into reprisal. They bore what came. They cast their sorrows upon God. They did not transfer their suffering onto anyone else. That is not weakness; weakness lashes out. That is the strength of a people who have decided that their dignity will not be surrendered to their persecutors.

'Abdu'l-Bahá draws the moral plainly. The right way to have answered the charges against the believers, He tells the Sháh, would have been to "consider what has happened with just regard" — to look honestly at the actual conduct of these people rather than at the slanders told about them. For the conduct spoke for itself. Where, in fifteen years of provocation, was the sedition the enemies predicted? Where was the uprising they used to justify the killing? It had not come, because the believers had refused to give it. Their innocence was written, not in their protests, but in their behaviour. The witness of this Servant is His action, He says of Bahá'u'lláh's own course in restraining the friends from strife — and the same was true of the community He guided. Their honour was their testimony.

This is a teaching with a sharp edge, because it cuts against one of the deepest instincts of the human heart. When we are wronged, everything in us wants to answer the wrong in kind — to meet contempt with contempt, cruelty with cruelty, injustice with the rough justice of revenge. The world even calls this honour, and speaks of avenging one's honour as though dignity were a thing restored by striking back. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's history quietly overturns that whole idea. The honour of the believers was not in vengeance taken but in vengeance declined. They did not let the conduct of their enemies set the terms of their own conduct. They remained, through years of degradation, dignified, orderly, and at peace — and in so doing they kept something their persecutors could never touch.

For the persecutor can take a great deal. He can take property, liberty, even life. The believers of those years lost all three by the thousand. But there is one thing he cannot take, and can only be given: the moment a wronged soul descends to the level of the one who wrongs him, that soul has handed over the last thing the enemy could not seize. By refusing to retaliate, the believers kept it. They suffered the loss of everything else and held on to their integrity, and that integrity outlasted every empire that oppressed them. The dynasties that ordered the killings are gone. The Cause those believers carried, peaceably, through the fire is spread today across the whole earth — and it carries with it the memory of a people who proved, over fifteen unbroken years, that the highest honour is not to conquer one's enemy but to refuse to become him.

'Abdu'l-Bahá offered this record to a king as evidence. We may receive it as something more: a portrait of what honour actually looks like when it is tested not once but continually, and a quiet summons to the same dignity in our own smaller trials. To be wronged is not in our control. To answer a wrong with uprightness rather than with another wrong — that is always in our power, and it is the very substance of the honour this Feast was made to celebrate.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1886). *A Traveler's Narrative*. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19300/pg19300-images.html