The Threat on Mount Carmel: 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the General's Power

A retelling drawn from The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family and of those close to 'Abdu'l-Bahá, together with the account of these years in the standard histories of the Faith. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

When the First World War engulfed the Holy Land, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was advanced in years, having already spent the greater part of His life as a prisoner and an exile. He had at last been freed from the walls of 'Akká in 1908; He had carried His Father's message across Europe and North America; and He had returned to Haifa to face the hardest years of all. The Allied Powers had gone to war with the Ottoman Empire, and the Holy Land was sealed off, hungry, and ruled by the iron hand of the Turkish military.

Over that region presided one of the most powerful and most feared men in the whole Empire: Jamál Páshá, the commander of the Ottoman forces on the Egyptian front and the military governor whose word was law throughout Syria and Palestine. He held the power of life and death over an entire population, and he was known to use it without mercy. To such a man, the lingering whispers of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's old enemies found a ready ear. They had spent years pouring false accusations into the ears of officials; now they poured them into the ear of a general who could act on them at once.

And Jamál Páshá resolved to act. He conceived a bitter hatred of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and he made a vow that has been recorded ever since as a measure of the danger of those days: that once the war was won and his hold on the country secured, he would crucify 'Abdu'l-Bahá upon Mount Carmel and destroy the sacred Bahá'í buildings — the Shrine of the Báb upon the mountainside and the holy places at 'Akká. It was no idle boast. The man had the authority and the cruelty to carry it out, and there was no earthly power in the land that could have stopped him.

What is preserved of 'Abdu'l-Bahá through that time is not fear, and not flight, but an unbroken calm. Friends urged Him to withdraw to safety; He would not be moved from the path of His duty. Under the very shadow of the gallows the general had promised Him, the Master went on doing exactly what He had always done. He had foreseen the famine that the war would bring, and He had quietly seen to it that grain was grown and stored in the country districts during the years of plenty; now He distributed that wheat to the starving people of Haifa and the surrounding region — Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike — and kept hunger from their doors. He received those who could still reach Him. He cared for the poor. He left the threat to crucify Him where He had left every threat of His long life: in the hands of God.

And the threat came to nothing. Jamál Páshá's great campaign against Egypt failed. His army was defeated and thrown into retreat; the British advanced; and the general who had vowed to crucify 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Mount Carmel was forced to flee the country in haste, his power gone, his vow unfulfilled, never able to lift a hand against the Master or the holy places he had sworn to destroy. The man who had commanded armies passed from the scene like a shadow. 'Abdu'l-Bahá remained — and when the war ended and the British entered Haifa, it was He who was honoured by the new authorities for having saved a whole population from famine.

This is the heart of the matter for the Feast of Sovereignty. Jamál Páshá wielded about as much worldly power as a man can hold: armies, governorship, the unquestioned authority to put another to death. 'Abdu'l-Bahá wielded none of it. Yet between the two, it was the unarmed old Man, quietly distributing wheat to the poor, who stood serene and unshaken — and the all-powerful general whose threats dissolved into nothing and who was swept from power before he could act. Earthly sovereignty, for all its terror, proved to be a passing thing, here today and gone tomorrow. The sovereignty that 'Abdu'l-Bahá possessed — the calm of a soul that feared no one because it rested wholly in God, and that spent even its hours of mortal danger in the service of others — was of a kind that no army could touch and no defeat could take away.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/blomfield_chosen_highway