Three Kinds of Persecution: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Account of His Imprisonment

In Issue 5 of Volume 4 of the *Star of the West,* dated the fifth of June, 1913, the editors printed a short account of words 'Abdu'l-Bahá had spoken about His own decades of imprisonment. The talk was preserved by one of the pilgrims who had attended Him during those years and recorded the substance for the readers in America.

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The Master made a careful distinction. There had been, He said, *three kinds of persecution* He had endured in the long years from His childhood in Tihrán, through the exiles to Baghdád, Constantinople, Adrianople, and finally 'Akká.

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The first kind was physical: actual chains, the rough confinement of the prison-city, the small accumulated discomforts of decades under guard. These He spoke of without bitterness. They were what they were; they had been borne; they had ended.

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The second kind was governmental: the repeated restriction of His movement, the surveillance, the suspicion of officials who imagined that His every gathering was a plot. This too He described without complaint. The work had gone forward in spite of it. The decrees of the Sultans had not, in the end, prevented the message of Bahá'u'lláh from going out into the world.

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But there was a third kind, and it had been the worst. The *bitter words and criticisms of the friends* — the cruelty, sometimes unintended, of the believers themselves toward one another and toward Him — had wounded more deeply than the chains. The blow that came from outside the family of the Faith could be endured. The blow that came from inside the family of the Faith struck a place no military prison could reach.

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> Bitter words and criticisms of the friends were the most > difficult.

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The teaching that lay underneath was one He had pressed often. The Bahá'ís were not finally to be measured by their willingness to withstand external persecution — although that was real and would remain real. They were to be measured by the love they bore one another. Where that love failed, no triumph over enemies abroad could replace it. Where that love held, no enemy abroad could finally prevail.

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The *Star of the West* printed the talk so that the American friends — who in 1913 had not yet been called upon to bear any external persecution at all — might ponder the *internal* persecution they were already, by tongue and by silence, capable of inflicting on each other.

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