Foreword

Before there were Bahá'í books, pamphlets, periodicals—before there were, properly speaking, Bahá'í administrative institutions; before ‘Abdu'l-Bahá made His historic voyage to America; before Shoghi Effendi transmitted to the English speakers of the world his own sensitive and authoritative translations of the Writings central to the Bahá'í Faith—there were Bahá'ís in America. On what spiritual food did they subsist? As soon as the announcement had been made at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, concerning the spiritual sanctity of Bahá‘u'lláh, Americans began to explore the new Revelation. Some Persian Bahá'ís came from the Holy Land about that time to give lessons in the Bahá'í Faith in New York and Chicago. The first pilgrimage to ‘Akká and Haifa, in 1898, was followed by a steady and ever increasing stream of Americans intent on hearing the Faith expounded by ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, Whom Bahá‘u'lláh had designated Center of the Covenant. The pilgrims, on their return to the United States and Canada, conveyed their ardor, enkindled at the feet of the Master, to their questing compatriots. They did it by word of mouth, by private letter, by widely circulated and continually copied and recopied letters, descriptions, journals, and accounts that went from hand to hand. Sometimes they published their little books and pamphlets; and, when the Bahá'í Publishing Society (predecessor of the present Bahá'í Publishing Trust) was established in 1902, these travelers' accounts constituted an important part of its output. But infinitely more important than such publications were the Tablets, or letters, that Abdu'l-Bahá sent to the North American pilgrims. He maintained a continuous correspondence with the early believers, who welcomed the Tablets and eagerly, reverently shared them with their friends—by the same means, informal and formal, by which their personal experiences as pilgrims had been shared. The Tablets were written in Persian and were translated into English either in the Holy Land or in America by Persian believers and teachers. One of the translators of these Tablets was the Master's grandson, Shoghi Effendi, destined by Abdu'l-Bahá's Will and Testament to become the Guardian of the Cause of God. There came to be, even before Shoghi Effendi's accession to the Guardianship, a strong sense of the difference between official, authoritative expressions of the thoughts of Bahá‘u'lláh and Abdu'l-Bahá, on the one hand, and the informal reminiscences of travelers, on the other—of travelers eager to capture the precious words uttered by the Master as He taught the pilgrims—for He always taught; at tea, at lunch, on walks, on expeditions of mercy to the poor, He taught by deeds as well as words. Every minute of the pilgrims' day was a lesson, sometimes concealed to all but the truly sensitive, sometimes apparent to the least gifted. Clearly, in the “pilgrims' notes” (as they came to be called) there was necessarily involved the fallibility of each pilgrim's memory and interpretive capacity. There was a danger that a sentence in a letter, dictated in response to a very particular question, might be generalized far beyond the case to which it was addressed or that an oral lesson, adapted and filtered by the needs of the hearer, become the basis of a doctrine that, emanating from Abdu'l-Bahá, would be seen as binding on all believers. Precisely this had happened in Islám: the Traditions, or Hadíth—that is, the sayings of Muhammad as reported by His disciples—had come to represent, for the majority of Muslims, an authority second only to that of the Qur'án itself. Bahá‘u'lláh Himself had made it clear that, as Shoghi Effendi put it in a letter written on his behalf, “only those things that have been revealed in the form of Tablets have a binding power over the friends. Hearsays may be matters of interest but can in no way claim authority” (Bahá'í News, no. 125 [May 1939], 6). Shoghi Effendi was particularly vigilant in such matters and repeatedly warned the friends against accepting hearsay as binding on anyone except him who had heard the Master with his own ears. However that may be, what can be more thrilling, short of the immediate experience, than hearing or reading the account in a pilgrim's own words of his reception in the loving arms of the Master? Who can tire of the description of those penetrating eyes, that warm and merry laughter, the wise brow, the wisps of hair escaping from the confining turban? Surely pilgrims' notes are not binding on us; they cannot be adduced as proof of anything; they cannot provide the basis of a serious, critical analysis of Bahá'í teachings—though the temptation to use them so is sometimes nearly irresistible!—but the sense of Abdu'l-Bahá's presence, His quintessential courtesy, His tenderness, His occasional severity, His powers of intellect and concentration—all these are infinitely precious to Bahá'ís, every one of whom is in love with the Master.

In spite of considerable effort of research, we know practically nothing about the life of Julia M. Grundy. There are records of John M. Grundy, her husband; O. Z. Whitehead, in his chapter on Mr. and Mrs. Howard MacNutt in * Some Early Bahá'ís of the West*, p. 36, mentions Mrs. Grundy as having been in their party of pilgrims in 1905—this is certainly the pilgrimage of which the present book (published in 1907) is a record. She was listed as a Bahá'í in Brooklyn, New York, as late as 1944. After that, no further trace. Some reader of this re-edition is bound to know more, and we shall be grateful for any more information that may be sent to us. This account of Julia Grundy's pilgrimage to ‘Akká tells us more about her than we would probably learn from external sources. Ten Days in the Light of ‘Akká gives us a glimpse into the life of the Holy Household and introduces us not only into the presence of the Center of the Covenant but also into that of some other persons of lesser degree—but more of that later. The central object of this account—which appears to be daily notes only slightly organized and barely rewritten for publication—is to enable the pilgrim to share with fellow believers the lessons she heard from the lips of the Master Himself. At this point we must sound once again the customary caveat: “Pilgrims' notes” convey, not the words of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, but the pilgrim's memory and understanding of those words. We must, however, be permitted to inquire as to the degree of reliability of these notes. Two indications appear that seem to confer on them a rather high degree of accuracy. The first has to do with the lack of evident discrimination in presenting the lessons, whether of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá or some of the Persians (or Mr. MacNutt, for that matter) who happened to be at ‘Akká. Mrs. Grundy makes very few observations of her own, contenting herself for the most part with a few statements of fact: “‘Abdu'l-Bahá sent for me. I found Him in a little room opening from the courtyard. He was sitting upon a raised chair, His beautiful face, majestic in repose and strength, turned toward the only window. He greeted me joyfully. Both the daughters were present. He said….” Yes, her admiration is expressed, but with sobriety and modesty. The sentences are short and direct, and except for the chapters “Visit to the Tomb” and “Visit to the Ridván” the text consists preponderantly of direct quotations. Although the attributes of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá—His beauty, kindness, and so on, are clearly marked, there is no comment or judgment made concerning His words or any other speaker's: the quotations stand on their own, without any attempt on the part of their self-effacing reporter to influence the reader. It would probably be evident to one quite unacquainted with the principles of the Bahá'í Faith, solely on the basis of the lessons given by the several teachers, that there is a sensible difference between ‘Abdu'l-Bahá and all the rest, as to spirituality, intelligence, reason, and sense of structure and rhetoric; and among the rest, there is a clear gradation, my perception of which I have no intention of imposing upon the reader. The fact that those differences leap to the eye is a testimony to the objectivity of the reporter. Another evidence of accuracy in reporting emerges from the substantively exact correspondence of Mrs. Grundy's version of the lessons of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá with the authorized Writings of the Master that have been published since her pilgrimage. Again, comparison with the other teachers serves to confirm the author's faithfulness to the text of the lessons spoken in her presence. However, there are several points of variance between Julia Grundy's pilgrims' notes and what we know, from authorized Writings, to be either the historical truth of certain events or the doctrine revealed by the principal Figures of the Bahá'í Faith. For example, the “Mother of the Household” tells (p. 85) the story of a dream that Bahá‘u'lláh is supposed to have had when He was six years old. His father, according to this version, consulted a dream interpreter who explained visions “for the Kings.” If we refer to The Dawn-Breakers, p. 119, however, we learn that it was Bahá‘u'lláh's father who had the dream—and there is no indication that the interpreter was attached to the royal court. A small but substantive discrepancy that shows the wisdom of Shoghi Effendi's warning against uncritical confidence in pilgrims' notes. As to more theoretical—even theological—interpretation, here again there are discrepancies between the discourses of the lesser teachers and those of the Master. Mírzá Asadu'lláh comes very close to implying that ‘Abdu'l-Bahá enjoys direct Revelation: “…His Knowledge has descended from the Invisible Source of Knowledge, and the Holy Spirit is speaking through Him” (p. 98). Yet ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, far from ever making such a claim, is quoted in this book as denying most emphatically that He is the returned Christ, in spite of the strong wish of many of His disciples to believe so (see pp. 36-37 in the chapter on “The Manifestation”). Another indication of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's appreciation both of His secondary status compared to that of a Manifestation of God and of the importance of that station as commanding the obedience of all who believe in the Covenant is clearly delineated in the chapter entitled “The Second Coming.” On page 62 He establishes a multiple analogy: Moses : Joshua :: Christ : Peter :: Bahá‘u'lláh : ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, adding that this last authorization of successorship was, unlike the previous one, written in the Manifestation's “own Hand.” One should remark that this is not the progressive revelation of the chain of Manifestations; the very different proportion John the Baptist : Christ :: the Báb : Bahá‘u'lláh is not in question here. That is the difference between the successorship of Mírzá Yahyá to the Báb, and the super-session of the Báb by Bahá‘u'lláh. Just as Joshua continues the Mosaic era, and Peter the Christian era, Subh-i-Azal was supposed to continue the Bábí Dispensation; and, just as Christ superseded Moses, and Muhammad, Christ, so Bahá‘u'lláh has superseded the Báb. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, by comparing Himself to Joshua and to Peter, and in denying His correspondence to Christ, clearly rules out for Himself the station of Manifestation of God. It is hard to read the lesson of Badí‘ulláh in the light of hindsight and to retain one's objectivity and thus judge Mrs. Grundy's. Our hindsight comes from having read Shoghi Effendi's God Passes By, where Mírzá Badí‘ulláh and his brother Mírzá Díya‘u'lláh are identified as Covenant-breakers of the party of the infamous Muhammad-‘Alí. The two brothers vacillated, returned to the Bahá'í fold several times, and ultimately chose to rebel against the Covenant. Obviously, Badí‘ulláh was undergoing one of his episodes of repentance, for he mentions Muhammad-‘Alí with evident disapproval (p. 82). It is impossible to read these words today without at least suspecting Badí‘ulláh of hypocrisy. The mention of Muhammad-‘Alí recalls to the reader that this pilgrimage took place in a time of great trouble for the Bahá'ís. The sadness that the nefarious activities of the Covenant-breakers occasioned the Master breaks through from time to time in this account (pp. 50, 51), but for the most part He clearly makes of cheerfulness in adversity a law of conduct. With what courage (and foresight!) He proclaims: “If all the world combined against Me, I would still possess this power, and all the world could not take it away from Me. I can fight with this weapon forever and will always be victorious. It is a sword which can never be dulled, a magazine that is always filled.” This from the gentle, modest Servant of Bahá shows His other side—His firmness in the calm knowledge of His invincible station and of the power that will always sustain Him. What do we learn about Julia Grundy? Here is the picture that emerges, for me at least, for I could be proven quite wrong by one who really knew her: She is modest, even fearful, but has the courage of faith. I have the distinct impression that ‘Abdu'l-Bahá tried to inspire her with confidence. He succeeded, at least to the extent that she could produce this book. She is earnest, perhaps lacking in humor; it is odd that she never mentions ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's love of laughter, a characteristic other pilgrims rarely fail to observe. That this preface threatens to become longer than the book indicates the power of these pilgrims' notes to stimulate curiosity, imagination, and thought, in spite of their modest mien. They constitute a personal, though not intimate, record and, at the same time, a document of considerable historical value. In them we hear the voice of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá through the mind and heart of a good and simple person and once again appreciate His ability to teach anyone right to the limit of his spiritual and intellectual capacity to learn.

Howard Garey

Source: Julia M. Grundy, Ten Days in the Light of Akka (1907). Available at bahai-library.com.

Grundy, J. M.. (1907). *Ten Days in the Light of Akka*. https://bahai-library.com/grundy_ten_days_akka