A Letter to the Czar: Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to Alexander II

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh, a historical study of Bahá'u'lláh's Tablets and ministry. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that work from Bahá'u'lláh's own Tablet.

From within the prison-city of 'Akká, where two empires had conspired to bury His Cause behind stone walls, Bahá'u'lláh did a thing that no captive is expected to do. He turned His attention outward — past the walls, past the guards, past the borders of the empire that held Him — and addressed the most powerful sovereigns on earth as One who stood above them all. To the Sháh of Persia, to the Emperor of the French, to the Queen of Britain, to the Roman Pontiff, He sent His summons. And among them, in the years around 1869, He addressed a Tablet to the Emperor of all the Russias, Czar Alexander II.

In The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Adib Taherzadeh recounts what set this Tablet apart from the others. Most of the Tablets to the Kings opened with warning or with summons. The Tablet to the Czar opened, in part, with the memory of a kindness.

Years before, in the autumn of 1852, Bahá'u'lláh had been dragged in chains into the most notorious dungeon of Ṭihrán — the Síyáh-Chál, the "Black Pit," a sunken pit of foul air and total darkness where He was held with a crushing weight of iron upon His neck, and where the Revelation that would remake the world first stirred within Him. In that lethal hour, when His life hung by a thread and many of the believers were being put to death above ground, help had come from an unexpected quarter. The Russian minister in Ṭihrán, learning of Bahá'u'lláh's plight and of His blameless character, had used his influence on His behalf and extended the protection of his government. It was, in part, through that intervention that Bahá'u'lláh had been spared and permitted to leave Persia for exile rather than death.

Bahá'u'lláh did not forget it. Now, a prisoner once more but bearing a Cause that no prison could contain, He recalled in His Tablet to the Czar the kindness that had been shown Him in His distress, and He invoked blessings upon the sovereign whose minister had acted with such humanity. The Cause of God, Taherzadeh observes, remembers every act of justice and mercy, however small, and lets none go unacknowledged.

Having recalled the past, the Tablet turned to the present and to the future. It proclaimed to the Czar that the Day long promised had dawned — that He Whom the Christ had foretold, the Father come in the glory of the Kingdom, now addressed him from the place of His exile. It called upon the Emperor to arise and serve that Cause, to set the immense power entrusted to him at the service of God rather than of self. As Taherzadeh records, the Tablet contained the summons:

Arise thou amongst men in the name of this all-compelling Cause, and summon, then, the nations unto God.

Here was the test laid before a king. He had been shown, at the height of his power, an opportunity that no measure of empire could buy: to be among the first of the world's rulers to recognise and champion the Manifestation of God in his own age. The Tablet did not flatter him and did not fear him. It honoured what was worthy of honour, summoned him to the one undertaking that would have given his reign eternal meaning, and left the choice in his hands.

The choice was not taken. The Czar, like the other monarchs to whom Bahá'u'lláh wrote, did not answer the call. Taherzadeh draws the long lesson that the chronicle of the following decades made plain. The thrones that turned away from that summons did not endure. Alexander II was killed by an assassin's bomb in the streets of his own capital in 1881; and within two generations the whole imperial house of Russia — the mightiest autocracy in Europe — was swept away entirely, its dynasty ended, its empire transformed beyond recognition.

The Feast of Sovereignty sets exactly this contrast before us. Worldly sovereignty is real, and for a season it can seem absolute; but it is a borrowed thing, held in trust, and it passes. The prisoner of 'Akká, who owned nothing and commanded no armies, addressed the emperors of the earth from a sovereignty of an altogether different kind — the sovereignty of the Word of God, which no dungeon could silence and no throne could outlast. The kings He summoned have left their thrones to the dust; the Cause He proclaimed from His prison has reached the ends of the earth. That is where true and lasting dominion was to be found, and where it remains.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1983). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 3 — 'Akká, the Early Years)*. George Ronald.