The Guard Who Wept in the Corridor

Mr. Furutan, in Stories of Bahá’u’lláh, preserves several small narratives from the years of the imprisonment in ‘Akká. Among them is the recollection of a prison guard whose original duty had been to keep the Holy Family confined inside the stone walls of the citadel.

The guard had arrived, in the early months of the imprisonment, with the prejudices of the city against the Persian heretics who had been deposited at its gates by the Ottoman authorities. He was, by the family’s recollection, sour-tempered and rough in his speech. He turned away pilgrims who tried to send food into the prison. He shouted at the women of the household. He refused, for some time, to permit the children any of the small courtesies that the previous guard had grudgingly allowed.

Then, the Greatest Holy Leaf later told the friends, something began to change. The guard would walk the stone corridor outside the family’s cells. He would hear, through the door, Bahá’u’lláh chanting in the early mornings. He would hear the women's voices later in the day — singing as they prepared the small food they had been permitted, laughing with the children, asking each other the patient questions that the long confinement required. The voices, the recollection preserves, did not behave like the voices of prisoners. They behaved like the voices of a household at peace.

The guard began, after some weeks, to linger in the corridor. He listened. Furutan preserves the family observation that he was sometimes seen standing very still by the door, with tears running down his face, before composing himself and moving on.

The household began, after a time, to ask the new captain on duty whether the man might be permitted to bring small things into the cells — a piece of fruit, a clean cloth — without official authorization. The captain, half-knowing, looked the other way. The guard's small courtesies began.

The day came, the recollection records, when the guard contrived to pass into the cell of Bahá’u’lláh himself. He stood at the door, then crossed the floor, and fell at His feet. He asked nothing; he begged nothing; he simply set down, in the ordinary act of reverence, the change that had happened in him. Bahá’u’lláh raised him gently. The man returned to his post. He served, the recollection ends, as a friend of the household until his transfer.

The Bahá’ís of ‘Akká would meet such guards more than once across the long imprisonment. Furutan preserves the story because the household preserved it. The walls of a prison, he notes in his short chapter, are no defence against the quiet contagion of holiness lived inside them.

Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh (Ali-Akbar Furutan, George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.

Furutan, A.. (1986). *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh*. George Ronald.