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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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Bahai Story Library
“Be thou as a flame of fire to My enemies and a river of life eternal to My loved ones — words first sent to a single discouraged man on the road.”
Among the tablets revealed by Bahá’u’lláh during the Adrianople years was the small Arabic Tablet that has become known to the worldwide Bahá’í community simply as the Tablet of Aḥmad. Mr. Furutan, in *Stories of Bahá’u’lláh,* sets out the historical circumstance under which it was revealed.
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A Persian believer named Aḥmad of Yazd had, at Bahá’u’lláh’s direction, been in the long process of returning to Persia from Adrianople in the late 1860s. The journey had been hard. He had travelled on foot for many weeks. He had been ill. He had run into difficulties of language and of money. By the time he reached Constantinople he had grown discouraged in spirit. The purpose of his mission seemed less clear than it had at the moment of his departure.
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Word of his condition reached Adrianople. Bahá’u’lláh, the recollection preserves, called for the small Tablet that He addressed to him by name. The Tablet was sent on by trusted messenger. It reached Aḥmad on the road.
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He read it. The words turned, in his hand, into the consolation he had needed and not known how to ask for. The Tablet praised the loyal heart, named the testing he was undergoing, called him to fortitude in the path of God, and promised the unfailing succour of the divine assistance to those who continued. It closed with the now-famous Arabic verses naming the Greatest Name of God and assuring the believer that *if a man recite this Tablet with the utmost sincerity, God will dispel his sadness, solve his difficulties, and remove his afflictions.*
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Aḥmad continued his journey. The Tablet continued to be his companion. He shared it, on his way through Persia, with believer after believer. The text was copied; copies travelled. By the end of the nineteenth century the Tablet of Aḥmad had become one of the most widely-recited of the small revealed prayers of Bahá’u’lláh.
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Furutan observes, in his short chapter, that the Tablet has since accompanied countless Bahá’ís in seasons of test of their own. Bahá’u’lláh had revealed it for the consolation of a single discouraged man on a single road. It has consoled, in the years since, the discouragements of generations.
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*Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh (Ali-Akbar Furutan, George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.*
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Source
by Ali-Akbar Furutan · 1986 · George Ronald