No Prisoner, but a King of Kings: Sovereignty Behind the Walls of 'Akká

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont, a classic introduction to the Faith, which describes Bahá'u'lláh's years in the prison-city of 'Akká and the sovereignty manifested there. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.

There is a kind of power that announces itself with armies and walls and decrees, and there is a kind of power that needs none of these — that can be locked behind the thickest walls a hostile empire can raise and remain, somehow, sovereign. The Feast of Sulṭán is a Feast about the second kind. And nowhere in the history of the Faith is the difference between the two drawn more plainly than in the years Bahá'u'lláh spent inside the prison-city of 'Akká.

By the outward facts alone, it would have looked like total defeat. By the late 1860s two great empires had set themselves against Bahá'u'lláh. The Sháh of Persia had driven Him from His native land; the Sulṭán of Turkey, after exiling Him by stages to Baghdád, to Constantinople, and to Adrianople, at last banished Him to 'Akká, a walled penal colony on the Mediterranean coast notorious as one of the most desolate spots in the Ottoman dominions. The decree was explicit and pitiless: He was to be confined within the city, cut off from the believers, His influence extinguished, and there to remain, a prisoner, for the rest of His days. Two sovereigns commanding millions of subjects, vast treasuries, and standing armies had pronounced sentence on One Who owned nothing, commanded no soldier, and held not a foot of land. By every reckoning the world uses, the matter was settled.

And yet, Esslemont writes, it was not settled at all — for the One they had imprisoned carried within Himself a sovereignty their decrees could not reach.

Consider first the simple, astonishing fact of what the prison became. The plan had been to seal Bahá'u'lláh away from the world. Instead the world began, quietly and then steadily, to make its way to Him. Believers set out from Persia on foot, walking for months across deserts and mountains, enduring hardship and danger, for no other purpose than to reach the neighbourhood of His prison and, if they could, to catch a single glimpse of Him. The barracks and, later, the house where He dwelt became the secret magnet of a whole people's longing. The empires could forbid the believers to enter; they could not extinguish the love that drew them across a continent. The stream of pilgrims and seekers never stopped. A prison meant to isolate one Captive had become the spiritual centre toward which a growing host of hearts was turning.

Then consider the bearing of the Captive Himself. Esslemont's account, drawing on the testimony of those who were there, describes the atmosphere that gathered about Bahá'u'lláh even in confinement: the loving reverence of the friends, the consideration and respect shown by officials and notables, the steady inflow of pilgrims, the spirit of devotion and service manifest on every side, and what the account calls "the majestic and kingly countenance of the Blessed Perfection," together with the effectiveness of His command and the multitude of His devoted followers. All of these things, Esslemont writes, "bore witness to the fact that Bahá'u'lláh was in reality no prisoner, but a King of Kings." The sentence is worth pausing over. It does not say He bore His imprisonment nobly, true though that is. It says the imprisonment was, at the level of reality, an illusion — that the One the empires called their prisoner was in truth the Sovereign before Whom they themselves were no more than vassals.

This was no mere figure of speech, for it showed itself even in the conduct of the very officials charged with guarding Him. Esslemont records that in time the governors and magistrates of the region, the generals and the local authorities — the men who held, on paper, all the power, and who were under orders to keep Him confined — would humbly request the honour of attaining His presence. Picture the strangeness of it. The State had decreed that this Man was a dangerous prisoner to be shut away; and the State's own representatives came, hats in hand, asking to be admitted to Him, treating the Captive with the deference owed to a king. The outward chain of command and the inward reality had been quietly reversed. The jailers were drawn to bow before the One they were set to guard.

And from within that confinement, Bahá'u'lláh did the thing that, more than any other, reveals where He understood true sovereignty to lie. He took up His pen and addressed the monarchs of the earth — including the two who held Him captive — not as a prisoner pleading for relief, but as a King addressing His subjects. Esslemont states it directly: "Two despotic sovereigns were against Him, two powerful autocratic rulers, yet, even when confined in their own prisons, He addressed them in very austere terms, like a king addressing his subjects." Read that again with the scene in mind. The One writing held nothing the world counts as power; the men He addressed held everything. Yet the voice that went out from 'Akká was not the voice of the weak appealing to the strong. It was the voice of the One Who stood above every throne, summoning their occupants to justice and to the recognition of their Lord. He asked the kings nothing for Himself. He summoned them.

What gives the episode its force is the completeness of the inversion. The Sháh and the Sulṭán had used the whole apparatus of empire to reduce Bahá'u'lláh to helplessness — and had succeeded, in every outward particular, and failed utterly. They could fix where His body remained; they could not touch the sovereignty of the Word He bore. They could shut the gates of a city; they could not stop the hearts of a people from streaming toward Him, nor keep their own governors from seeking His door, nor silence the Tablets that issued from His captivity to shake the thrones of the world. The prison held a Man; it could not hold a King.

Bahá'u'lláh's own words about that prison seal the truth of it. The 'Akká into which He had been cast was reckoned among the foulest and most wretched cities on earth, chosen precisely for its grimness. And of that place Esslemont records Him saying, "Verily, verily, the most wretched prison has been converted into a Paradise of Eden." Here is sovereignty in its purest form: not the power to escape a prison, but the power to transform it — to carry into the darkest cell a light the cell cannot dim, so that the place meant to be a tomb becomes a garden. In later years, as the strict terms of the confinement relaxed, He would dwell at the mansion of Bahjí, outside the walls, in conditions Esslemont describes as those of a prince; but the deepest token of His station had been given already, in the worst days, when He called the foulest prison a Paradise.

This is why the years in 'Akká belong so fittingly to a Feast of Sulṭán — Sovereignty. They set the two kinds of dominion side by side and let us see which is real. On one side, two emperors with all the visible majesty of crowns and armies, who spent that majesty trying to extinguish one Captive and could not. On the other, a Prisoner with no crown and no army, before Whom their own officials bowed, toward Whom a continent's hearts turned, and from Whose cell went out a summons that addressed the kings of the earth as subjects. The thrones that opposed Him have long since fallen into the dust of history. The Captive they could not silence is honoured today across the world. The empires were sure they held a prisoner. They held a King of Kings.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241