The Prisoner Pleads Before the King: The Tablet to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh

A retelling drawn from Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, the last great Tablet revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, in which He Himself quotes at length from His earlier Tablet to the Sháh of Persia. The passages in quotation marks are Bahá'u'lláh's own words as preserved in that book.

Of all the Tablets that Bahá'u'lláh addressed to the kings of the earth, the longest revealed for any single sovereign was the one He sent to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia — the very monarch in whose realm the blood of the Báb and of thousands of believers had been shed. Bahá'u'lláh was at the time a prisoner in the fortress of 'Akká, the place chosen by two empires to extinguish His Cause. Yet out of that confinement He composed an appeal of extraordinary power, addressed to the man who held supreme worldly authority over the land of its birth.

Years later, in the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahá'u'lláh quoted long passages from that Tablet, so that its substance is preserved in His own hand. What is most striking in it is what the Prisoner did not ask for. He did not ask to be released. He did not ask for His confiscated wealth, His lost station, or revenge upon His persecutors. From the king who could have granted Him anything, He sought nothing at all for Himself.

He spoke, instead, of what He had borne — and He spoke of it not in complaint but in witness:

O King! I have seen in the way of God what no eye hath seen and no ear hath heard.

He described the calamities that had descended and would yet descend, the friends who had disclaimed Him, the ways that had been straitened. And then He turned the king's gaze away from Himself entirely. His sorrow, He said, was not for His own sufferings. It was for the souls who had been wronged, for the oppressed believers slaughtered without trial, for a people led astray while their rulers supposed themselves secure. The whole weight of the Tablet was thrown not behind a prisoner's grievance but behind a plea for justice for others.

And then came the offer that no impostor would dare to make. Bahá'u'lláh asked the Sháh to summon the divines of the realm — the very clergy who had pronounced against Him — and to bring Him face to face with them in the king's own presence, that the truth of His Cause might be examined and decided openly, before the throne itself. Let the proofs be weighed, He in effect said; let the matter be put to the test in the light of day, with the sovereign as witness. He counselled the king to act with justice toward the servants of God, and warned him, with the tenderness of one who sought the king's own good, of the account that every ruler must one day render.

The request was never granted. The king did not convene the meeting. The Tablet was carried into Persia, at the cost of his life, by the youth Badíʻ, who was seized and tortured to death rather than betray a single name. The throne met the appeal with cruelty and turned away.

But consider what the Tablet itself reveals about two kinds of sovereignty. Here was a king who commanded armies, treasuries, prisons, and the lives of a whole nation — and who used that power, in the end, to silence a question he was afraid to face. And here was a Prisoner who commanded nothing, who would not be set free, who asked for no relief — and who, from within His chains, addressed the king as a shepherd addresses a wayward charge, pleaded only for the wronged, and offered to stake everything on an open trial of the truth. The one clung to his throne and feared the light; the Other, possessing the sovereignty of the Word of God, feared nothing and sought only justice.

The Feast of Sovereignty holds this scene up for our reflection. It asks us where true dominion lies — in the power that can imprison a body and yet trembles before a single honest question, or in the detachment that, having let go of everything the world can give or take, can stand before any throne on earth and plead the cause of God without fear. The Tablet to the Sháh is the answer written in Bahá'u'lláh's own hand.

This is a retelling. For Bahá'u'lláh's own words, see the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1891). *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/epistle-son-wolf/