The Súriy-i-Mulúk: A General Address to the Kings

In *The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh,* Adib Taherzadeh devotes a chapter to the Súriy-i-Mulúk — the Súrih of the Kings — the first of the great addresses to the sovereigns of the earth. The Súrih was revealed in Adrianople in the year 1867, before any of the individual Tablets to particular monarchs.

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The Adrianople period had been Bahá’u’lláh’s second exile. He had been removed from Constantinople by the Ottoman government to the Thracian provincial city in late 1863. The household remained in Adrianople for nearly five years.

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It was during these years, Taherzadeh notes, that the character of the Bahá’í dispensation as a public and universal proclamation was first established. The Súriy-i-Mulúk is the Tablet by which that public proclamation was opened. It is addressed, in the title and in the opening verses, to the *kings of the earth* as a body — not to any one of them individually but to all of them collectively, as the trustees to whom the affairs of humankind had been entrusted.

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The Súrih is long. Taherzadeh devotes a substantial chapter to its contents. The principal lines of its argument may be summarised in three movements.

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First, the Súrih declares the appearance, in the world, of the Manifestation. It calls the kings to recognise Him. It warns them against the consequences, both spiritual and temporal, of failing to recognise Him.

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Second, the Súrih reviews the present condition of the peoples whom the kings govern. It notes the weight of the taxation imposed for military expenditures; the suffering of the peasantry; the corruption of the administrative classes. It calls the kings to remember that they are *trustees of God,* not its owners.

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Third, the Súrih advances a positive program for the kings to implement. They are to compose their differences. They are to reduce their standing armies. They are to enter into a system of collective security in which any state attacking another will be met by the combined opposition of all the rest. They are to use the resources thus freed for the welfare of their own peoples.

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> Compose your differences, and reduce your armaments, that the > burden of your expenditures may be lightened.

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The principle here articulated, Taherzadeh notes, would become the foundation of all the subsequent individual Tablets to the sovereigns. The Súrih is, in effect, the general address of which the Tablets to Napoleon, Victoria, the Czar, the Sháh, the Sulṭán, and the Pope are particular applications.

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The Súrih warns the kings, in its closing sections, of the consequences of refusal. The peoples will rise. The thrones will totter. The wars the kings have prepared will consume them.

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The chronicle of the half-century that followed, Taherzadeh observes, vindicated each warning. By the close of the First World War in 1918 nearly every throne the Súrih had addressed had fallen — the Romanovs deposed, the Habsburgs overthrown, the Ottomans shattered, the Hohenzollerns abdicated, the French imperial house long gone, the temporal rule of the papacy long surrendered. Only Britain remained, and Britain had been the recipient of the Tablet that opened with praise.

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The Súriy-i-Mulúk, in its first generation of readers, was read as a prophecy whose fulfilment was a generation off. By the second generation the prophecy had been fulfilled.

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*Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 2 — Adrianople 1863-68 (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1977); see original for full text.*

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