Seeking No Favour: Bahá'u'lláh in the Capital of the Sultan

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. The narrative is summarized in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are preserved from that history.

In the late summer of 1863, after a journey of some four months from Baghdád, Bahá'u'lláh arrived as an exile in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire and the seat of its Sultan. It was one of the great cities of the world — the meeting place of East and West, crowded with embassies and ministries, alive with the constant traffic of those who came to seek something from the powerful.

For that was the way of the city. Constantinople was a place of patronage. Anyone who arrived there with a cause to advance, an injury to redress, or a fortune to mend understood the rules at once: one called upon the ministers; one cultivated the great; one pressed one's case in the antechambers of the powerful and sought the favour of those whose word could open or shut every door. Exiles and newcomers especially were expected to make the rounds, to flatter, to petition, to lay their grievances before the men who held authority and beg their intervention. It was simply how things were done by everyone who wanted anything from the Sublime Porte.

Bahá'u'lláh did none of it.

This, Shoghi Effendi records, was the thing that set Him apart and that the capital found difficult to comprehend. Though He had arrived as a banished man, stripped of His home and His possessions and entirely within the power of the state that had exiled Him, He sought no one's favour, asked for no audience, and made no plea to the ministers in whose hands the powerful believed their fate to lie. He did not present Himself at their gates. He did not solicit their goodwill or angle for their protection. He held Himself apart from the entire machinery of patronage on which the city ran.

This was not indifference, and it was not weakness, and it was certainly not ignorance of His own danger. It was a deliberate and majestic detachment. To go begging at the doors of ministers would have been to acknowledge that His welfare lay in their hands — and Bahá'u'lláh knew that it did not. His dignity, and the dignity of His Cause, rested upon God alone, not upon the shifting goodwill of any official or the patronage of any throne. He would not purchase safety or advantage by bowing to worldly power, because He recognised in that power nothing that He needed and nothing before which the Cause of God should stoop.

The conduct astonished those who observed it. In a city where everyone sought something from someone, here was an exile who sought nothing — who bore Himself, in His poverty and His banishment, with a sovereignty greater than that of the ministers whose favour the rest of the world courted. Some were drawn to Him by the very strangeness of it; the bearing of One who plainly answered to a higher authority than the Sultan's could not be hidden. His enemies, for their part, took His refusal to flatter them as an affront, and it deepened their resolve to move Him still farther away. Within a matter of months the order came for a new and harsher banishment, to Adrianople.

Yet the lesson of those Constantinople weeks outlasted the city's verdict. The whole episode is a portrait of what the Feast of Sovereignty means by detachment from worldly power. The powerful of the earth derive much of their power from precisely this: that others need them, court them, fear them, and arrange their lives around securing their favour. Bahá'u'lláh broke that spell completely. By needing nothing from the mighty, He stood entirely free of them — and showed, in the very capital of an empire, that the truest sovereignty belongs not to the one on the throne, but to the soul that has ceased to be governed by hope of the throne's reward or fear of its displeasure, and rests wholly in God.

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/