The Cause the Thrones Could Not Quench

A retelling based on A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, His own account of the episode of the Báb and the rise of the Faith. The passages in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own words as preserved in that history.

The kings and ministers who set themselves to destroy the Faith in its earliest days were certain of one thing: that power, applied without mercy, extinguishes. It is the oldest assumption of worldly authority. A new movement appears; it is inconvenient, or threatening, or simply strange; and so the throne brings down upon it the whole apparatus of suppression — proclamation and prison, sword and scaffold — confident that enough force will end the matter. It is the way empires have always dealt with what they fear. And in the case of the Cause of God, it failed completely, and failed in a way so consistent that 'Abdu'l-Bahá, looking back, names it almost as a law.

A Traveler's Narrative is 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own telling of the episode of the Báb — the rise of the new Faith in Persia, the storm of persecution that broke over it, and the meaning hidden inside that storm. And one observation runs through His account like a thread: that the violence meant to crush the Cause was the very thing that spread it. The throne struck, and the Cause grew. The throne struck harder, and it grew faster. The blows did not weaken it; they fed it.

'Abdu'l-Bahá states the principle in words of crystalline clarity. "Quaking and affliction," He writes, "resulted in constancy and stability, and grievous pains and punishment caused acceptance and attraction." The very things calculated to make the believers waver made them firm; the very cruelties meant to frighten people away drew people in. He sets it down as a settled truth, confirmed by experience: "it hath been proved by experience in the world that in the case of such matters of conscience laceration causeth healing; censure produceth increased diligence; prohibition induceth eagerness; and intimidation createth avidity." Read the pairs slowly, for each is a small paradox that the powers of the age never solved. They cut, and the wound healed stronger. They condemned, and the condemned grew more diligent. They forbade, and the forbidding only sharpened desire. They threatened, and the threat only kindled longing. Every instrument of suppression, turned against a matter of conscience, produced the opposite of what its wielders intended.

'Abdu'l-Bahá draws out why. Force can compel an outward act; it has no power whatever over the conscience, over the inward allegiance of the soul. When a government persecutes a belief, it cannot reach the belief itself; it can only make the believer suffer — and suffering nobly borne is the most eloquent of all testimonies. The onlookers see it. They see men and women who will give up their property, their freedom, their very lives rather than deny what they have found, and they cannot help but ask what it is these people have found that is worth so much. As 'Abdu'l-Bahá observes, "interference in matters of conscience causes stability and firmness and attracts the attention of men's sight and souls." The persecutor, meaning to silence a question, only makes the whole world ask it.

So it was in Persia. The more fiercely the authorities moved against the Báb and His followers, the more the report of the Cause spread. 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes the sect as steadily multiplying under the blows: "this sect was daily on the increase, and the discussion and disputation was such that in meetings and assemblies in all parts of Persia there was no conversation but on this topic." The thing the authorities most wanted to suppress had become the one subject the whole country was talking about. And the contagion did not stay within Persia's borders. "The flame rose higher," He writes, "and the contagion became swifter: the affair waxed grave and the report thereof reached other climes." A Cause its enemies had tried to bury in a single province was beginning to be spoken of across the world.

Here is the deepest meaning of the episode for a Feast of Sulṭán — Sovereignty. The thrones of the age possessed every visible instrument of power, and they used them all. They had the armies; they had the prisons; they had the scaffolds; they had the decrees and the clergy and the machinery of an ancient state. The believers possessed none of these. They had no soldiers, no fortresses, no government, no weapons but their own steadfastness. By every measure the world uses, it was the most unequal of contests. And the believers, possessing nothing, prevailed; the thrones, possessing everything, could not extinguish a Cause held by the poor and the unarmed. This is sovereignty of an order the world cannot reckon — a dominion that owns nothing the sword can seize, and therefore cannot be defeated by the sword.

What 'Abdu'l-Bahá saw in retrospect, the persecutors could never see in the moment, because they mistook the nature of the thing they were fighting. They imagined they were facing a political movement, or a sect that could be stamped out like any other. They were in fact contending against the Cause of God, and a Cause founded upon truth obeys a different law from the causes of the world. The causes of the world are sustained by power and collapse when power is withdrawn or turned against them. The Cause of God is sustained by the Word, and the Word is nourished, not destroyed, by the sacrifices of those who suffer for it. The blood of the martyrs did not drain the Cause; it watered it. Every soul that stood firm under torment became a sermon more persuasive than any argument, and every fresh cruelty wrote that sermon larger.

And the long verdict of history confirmed 'Abdu'l-Bahá's observation to the letter. The dynasty that shed the blood of the Báb and His companions, that exiled Bahá'u'lláh from His native land, that strove with all its might to erase the Faith from the earth — that throne is gone, swept into the past with the other crowns that warred against the Cause. The Faith they tried to drown in blood spread from its persecuted beginnings in Persia to every corner of the globe. The Báb, Whom they martyred and Whose body they cast aside to be destroyed, is enshrined today in a sanctuary of surpassing beauty on the slope of Mount Carmel, a place of pilgrimage for a worldwide community — the very triumph the thrones spent themselves to prevent, and could not.

This is the lesson 'Abdu'l-Bahá's narrative presses upon us. The powers of the world believe that force is final, that what can be imprisoned and killed can be ended. The history of the Cause of God says otherwise. There is a sovereignty no throne can overthrow, because it rules in the realm of conscience, where no army can march; a dominion that grows under the blows meant to destroy it, and stands serene above the rise and fall of every earthly power. The thrones did their worst. The Cause they could not quench reigns still.

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 Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Báb*. Cambridge University Press. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19300