A Letter to a Queen: Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to Victoria

In The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, Adib Taherzadeh devotes a chapter to the Tablet that Bahá’u’lláh, then a prisoner in the fortress of ‘Akká, addressed to Queen Victoria of Britain in the early 1870s. The Tablet was one of the great Tablets to the Kings — letters sent during the years 1868-1873 to the principal sovereigns of the world.

The address to Victoria was, Taherzadeh notes, distinct in tone from those sent to other rulers. Where the Tablet to Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh was a stern accusation, where the Tablet to Napoleon III was a prophecy of imminent fall, where the Tablet to Sulṭán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz of the Ottoman Empire warned of doom, the Tablet to Victoria opens with praise.

Two acts of the Queen’s government, the Tablet noted with approval, were of a kind God Himself looked upon with favour: the abolition of the slave trade — accomplished by the British Parliament in the years before her accession but vigorously continued under her reign — and the development of an elective parliamentary system in which the affairs of the realm were entrusted to the consultation of representatives of the people.

These two acts, the Tablet observed, were aligned with the spirit of the new dispensation. The first recognised the oneness of humankind by emancipating those who had been held in bondage; the second recognised the principle of consultation by entrusting deliberation to a body of equals.

Having praised what could be praised, the Tablet then turned to counsel. Bahá’u’lláh urged the Queen and her fellow sovereigns to convene a great assembly of the rulers of the world. They should consult together. They should agree on the limits of their armies. They should establish a system of collective security in which any state attacking another would be met by the combined opposition of all the rest.

Taherzadeh notes that the Tablet anticipated, by half a century, the institutional architecture eventually attempted in the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. The specific principle of collective security against aggression was first articulated, in the modern world, in the letter that the prisoner of ‘Akká addressed to the throne in London.

The Tablet closes with a summons to the rulers of the earth as a whole:

Lay not aside the fear of God, O kings of the earth, and beware that ye transgress not the bounds which the Almighty hath fixed.

The Tablet was sent, Taherzadeh records, by the customary means: entrusted to a believer, conveyed by hand to a port, forwarded by ship to England, and delivered through diplomatic channels to the royal household. There is no record that Victoria responded to it directly. The Tablet, in subsequent generations, would be read more carefully than its first recipient appears to have read it.

Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 3 — 'Akká, the Early Years (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1983); see original for full text.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1983). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 3 — 'Akká, the Early Years)*. George Ronald.