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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
15 stories where might appears.
ʻAlí-Muḥammad Varqá, a poet and devoted teacher of the Faith, was imprisoned in Ṭihrán with his twelve-year-old son Rúḥu'lláh and a company of believers. When the murder of the Sháh was used as a pretext to crush them, father and son were threatened, tormented, and at last killed — the boy bearing witness with a serenity and courage before overwhelming power that astonished even his executioners.
During the long siege of Zanján, a young village woman named Zaynab could not bear to stand idle while her companions fell. She put on a man's garments, took up sword and gun, and begged the leader of the defenders for leave to fight. For days she stood in the front of the battle with a courage that astonished the army arrayed against her — a single peasant girl defying both an empire and the expectations of her age.
In the city of ʻIshqábád, a respected Bahá'í named Ḥájí Muḥammad-Riḍá was set upon in broad daylight by assassins sent to terrorize the believers into silence. The murder was meant to make the community cower. Instead it produced something never seen before: a public trial under the Russian authorities in which the Bahá'ís were, for the first time in their history, openly distinguished from their persecutors and their innocence proclaimed before the world.
Mullá ʻAlí-Akbar of Shahmírzád — known as Ḥájí Ákhúnd, and later named a Hand of the Cause — taught the Faith so openly in Ṭihrán that he was the first to be seized whenever trouble broke out. Again and again he was chained, jailed, and threatened with the sword; a famous photograph shows him sitting in his fetters utterly composed. 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered him in a single unforgettable line: openly at odds with his oppressors, he defied them, and he was never vanquished.
Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl of Gulpáygán was among the most learned men in Persia — head of a religious college before he ever heard the name of Bahá'u'lláh. Won to the Faith by the proofs he had once tried to refute, he was imprisoned three times for it and stripped of his worldly standing. He gave the rest of his life to defending the Cause with his pen and his voice across three continents, the very power of his learning laid at the feet of the Faith he had embraced.
From His prison in 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh addressed a Tablet to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia. A seventeen-year-old believer named Badíʻ asked for the honour of carrying it. Alone and on foot he crossed an empire, stood in plain sight before the royal camp, and delivered it — then bore three days of torture with a serenity his executioners could not break.
The Báb sent His disciple Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí into the great centres of Islamic learning with words that named his fate before he set out: "You are the first to leave the House of God and to suffer for His sake." Dragged before an unprecedented joint tribunal of the foremost divines, he would not deny what he had found — and became the first believer to give his life for the Faith.
Mírzá Qurbán-ʻAlí, a revered dervish with thousands of devoted admirers, was arrested as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. The all-powerful Grand Vizier, besieged by pleas for the holy man's life, all but offered him a way out. The dervish refused it — declaring that he had weighed the Báb with the scales of justice, and would seal that judgement with his blood.
When a commission of the Ottoman government arrived in 'Akká empowered to recommend His exile or execution, 'Abdu'l-Bahá met the threat without a trace of fear. He declared His readiness to submit to any sentence they chose, refused a consul's offer of escape, and went on planting trees and presiding at a wedding feast — until the empire that menaced Him collapsed and He was set free.
Mullá Ṣádiq — known in Persia as "the saintly," and remembered as Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq — was one of the most honoured divines of his day. When he began to teach the new Faith openly in Shíráz, his enemies hung a halter on him and led him through the streets and bázárs to shame him into silence. 'Abdu'l-Bahá recorded what happened: composed and smiling, he kept on speaking, and was not silenced.
A few hundred students, merchants, and craftsmen — most of whom had never held a weapon — were besieged in a makeshift fort in the forests of Mázindarán by the trained regiments and artillery of an empire. For eleven months they held, not by numbers or arms, but by a power their enemies could not understand and could not break.
The Báb was moved to the remote fortress of Chihríq, "the Mountain of Severity," chosen for its harshness and the supposed hostility of its Kurdish inhabitants, so that He might be cut off from all who loved Him. Instead the warden, the people, and the very town fell under the spell of His presence — and the verses that streamed from His pen could not be stopped by any wall.
When Bahá'u'lláh returned to Baghdád from the mountains of Kurdistan, He found the exiled Bábí community in ruins — leaderless, demoralized, fallen into disrepute, its very name a byword for lawlessness. Within a few years, by no worldly means whatever, He had transformed that broken remnant into a community renowned for its dignity, its purity, and its love.
Through the years of the Great War, with a naval blockade strangling the coast and famine stalking the Holy Land, 'Abdu'l-Bahá — Himself again a prisoner — fed the hungry of every religion in 'Akká and Haifa. The grain He had quietly stored against the crisis kept a whole region alive; for it, a victorious empire offered Him a knighthood, which He accepted and quietly laid aside.
'Abdu'l-Bahá spent forty years a prisoner in the fortress-city of 'Akká — exiled as a child, freed only as an old Man when the empire that held Him at last fell. Asked in London how He had borne it, He answered that He had been happy the whole time; that prison had been freedom to Him; and that there is no prison anywhere but the prison of the self.