The Home of Laughter: 'Abdu'l-Bahá Reconciles Two Feuding Arabs

In Issue 3 of Volume 9 of the Star of the West, in April 1918, Dr. Zia Bagdadi translated and the editors printed extracts from talks 'Abdu'l-Bahá had given in the Holy Land in January and February of 1914. Among them was a small story the Master told to His pilgrims about a recent reconciliation in 'Akká.

Two prominent Arab men of the city had been at odds for years. The matter had grown out of a property dispute that had escalated, in the Eastern way of long-running grievances, into mutual avoidance, public coldness, and the involvement of the extended families of both sides. By 1913 they were no longer on speaking terms. The whole quarter knew it. Mutual friends had tried mediation and failed.

'Abdu'l-Bahá, who had through the years of His residence in 'Akká become quietly trusted by the leading Arab notables of the city, undertook the matter Himself. He invited both men to the household, separately at first, then together. He sat them down in the same reception room. He began the conversation not with the dispute but with His own habit: a stream of small stories, observations on the weather, gentle teasings of each of His guests in turn, the kind of light hospitality that no quarrel can resist long.

The friends in the household, watching from the next room, heard within a short time the unfamiliar sound of the two men laughing together. Within an hour they had embraced. Within the afternoon the dispute had been settled by a quiet compromise that the Master suggested in a sentence and that both men accepted at once, half-amused at how small the matter now looked.

Reflecting on the visit, the Master remarked to the pilgrims:

My home is the home of laughter and exultation.

The sentence is more programmatic than it sounds. The household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá had over the years acquired, by deliberate cultivation, a particular atmosphere. Visitors of every faith and every social position remarked on it. The Master was a serious man whose ministry had been forged in suffering. But the rooms of His household were warm, His laughter was easy, His hospitality was unforced. He had, by His own choice, made the inner life of His home the opposite of the prison-city in which that home was located.

The teaching for the friends was unspoken but clear. The reform of communities is not, finally, accomplished by long-faced solemnity and serious memoranda. It is accomplished, in many of its hardest cases, by the cultivation of the kind of warmth in which old grievances cannot easily survive. The Master had turned a long Arab quarrel into a settled embrace by an afternoon's hospitality and a steady gentle laughter.

The Star of the West printed the story so that the American friends — many of whom were beginning, in 1918, to face their own small communal frictions — might consider what kind of home they were running, and whether laughter had any place in it.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 9, Issue 3 (April 1918), translation of talks of 'Abdu'l-Bahá by Dr. Zia Bagdadi. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1918). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1