The Zoroastrian Priest Who Saw Beyond Prejudice: A Talk in Washington

In the home of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Parsons in Washington, D.C., on the evening of April 22, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told a story drawn from the long Persian past. The Muslim conquest of Persia had brought peoples together who had despised one another for centuries. The Persians, an old and proud civilization, regarded the Arabs as crude. The Arabs, the new sword of Islam, regarded the Persians as unbelievers.

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A Zoroastrian high priest, the Master recounted, was once arrested for drinking wine — an act forbidden under the new Islamic order. The priest had felt only contempt for his Arab judges. But as he moved among them in his captivity he was struck by something he had not expected: a quiet authority, a transformation of conduct, that ran counter to every prejudice he had carried into the room.

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Slowly the priest watched what *Muḥammad’s guidance* had done to men who, by the priest’s own reckoning, ought to have been ungovernable. The contempt fell away. He began to see that the quality of a people is not finally measured by their geography or the language they speak, but by the spirit they have received and the lives they live in obedience to it.

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The Master then drew the parallel to His own day. The same thing was happening, He said, between East and West — but on a far wider scale, and by a wholly different means.

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> Not through rod nor blow, whip nor sword; but the power of the > love of God.

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Bahá’u’lláh had united nations that had never met one another save in war. He had done it without armies, without wealth, without political authority. The proof of His teaching, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said to the friends in Washington that night, was that bond — the bond of hearts joined across continents, in a quiet that no court of the world had managed to produce.

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