Honour Behind Prison Walls: The Exiles of 'Akká

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are preserved from that history.

When the Ottoman government decided what to do with Bahá'u'lláh, it chose a punishment designed not merely to confine Him but to dishonour Him. He and His family and a band of His companions — some seventy souls in all — were issued the sentence of perpetual banishment and imprisonment, and the place selected was 'Akká: a walled penal colony on the coast of the Holy Land that served the empire as a dumping-ground for murderers, thieves, and political prisoners. The decree ordered the strictest confinement. The exiles were to be cut off from the world, forbidden to mingle with anyone, sealed behind the walls. The intention, Shoghi Effendi makes plain in God Passes By, was that the Cause should wither and die in that pestilential spot, its Author forgotten, its followers crushed. This was to be the deepest degradation the State could devise.

The arrival matched the intention. The townspeople of 'Akká had been told that a company of dangerous infidels, enemies of God and the State, was being sent among them. They came out to meet the exiles with curses and contempt. The newcomers were marched through a hostile crowd and shut into the barracks of the citadel — a damp, filthy, evil-smelling place. Shoghi Effendi does not soften the conditions. The exiles were crowded together; the air was foul; the water was bad; the food was worse. Almost at once, sickness swept through them. "All of them," the Guardian records, fell ill of malaria and dysentery, except, he notes, two. Three of the company died. There was, in those first days, a cruelty heaped upon cruelty: when the dead were to be buried, the guards demanded payment for the very shrouds and the digging, and the exiles, stripped of their resources, had to sell what little they had to lay their own companions in the ground.

By every outward measure, the empire had succeeded. Here were the followers of a new Faith reduced to the lowest condition a human being can occupy: imprisoned, diseased, bereaved, penniless, despised by a whole town, cut off from the world. If honour were a matter of circumstance — of comfort, freedom, reputation, and standing — then honour had been wholly taken from them. The walls of 'Akká were meant to be the tomb of their dignity.

And here the account turns, and turns on a single hinge: the bearing of the exiles themselves. For honour, it transpires, was never in the empire's gift to take. The prisoners met their degradation not with despair, not with rage, not with the broken servility their jailers expected, but with a serenity that nothing in the situation could explain. They went on. They prayed. They cared for one another in the sickness. They kept the rhythms of their devotion. Bahá'u'lláh continued, behind those walls, to reveal the verses of His Revelation — it was in 'Akká, in the very heart of His captivity, that some of His weightiest Writings were sent down, including the Most Holy Book of His Dispensation. The State had locked the doors; it could not lock the spirit. The Cause it had buried went on breathing, composing, teaching, from inside the tomb prepared for it.

'Abdu'l-Bahá, in those years, became the shield and the steward of the whole company. Though Himself a prisoner, He took upon His own shoulders the dealings with the authorities, the care of the sick, the management of the exiles' meagre affairs, the protection of His Father. The dignity of the Holy Family in the barracks was, in large part, His doing: He carried the burdens so that the others might keep their peace. The bearing that so impressed those who later wrote of those years — the unbroken courtesy, the absence of complaint, the refusal to return the town's hatred — flowed from the example set at the centre of that household.

Then came the slow miracle that dignified conduct so often works. The people of 'Akká had begun by cursing the exiles; they could not help, over time, observing them. They watched how these prisoners lived — how they bore their afflictions without bitterness, how they dealt honestly, how the eldest Son of the Captive went among the poor and the sick of the very town that had reviled His family. Hatred cannot easily survive that kind of sustained contradiction. The contempt of the citizens began, person by person, to give way — first to curiosity, then to respect, and at length to a reverence that would have seemed unthinkable on the day the exiles arrived. The prison-city that had been chosen as the instrument of their disgrace became, by the way they endured it, the scene of their honouring. Shoghi Effendi traces the long arc of it: the gates that were sealed against them would in time open; the family confined as criminals would in time be sought out by seekers from across the world; the most degraded address in the empire would become one of the most honoured spots on the face of the earth, its very dust the goal of pilgrimage.

This is the paradox the Feast of Sharaf sets before us. The world believes that honour is conferred by circumstances — that to be free, comfortable, respected, and well-placed is to be honoured, and to be imprisoned, sick, poor, and despised is to be disgraced. The exiles of 'Akká proved the belief false from both directions. An empire at the height of its power, holding every advantage of force and authority, could not confer real dishonour upon them; and a band of penniless prisoners, holding no advantage at all, kept a dignity that the empire could neither grant nor remove. Their honour was not in their circumstances but in their bearing — in the serenity, the faithfulness, the uncomplaining steadfastness with which they carried a fate meant to crush them.

The walls still stand at 'Akká. The empire that built the sentence is dust. And the names of those who were shut behind those walls to be forgotten are now spoken with reverence wherever the Cause is known. They were sent there to lose their honour. They found, instead, the kind that no prison can hold and no power can take — the honour of souls who would not let their degradation degrade them.

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/