Chapter 7

Well might the Sovereign Pontiff recall the reign of the most powerful among his predecessors, Innocent III who, during the eighteen years of his pontificate, raised and deposed the kings and the emperors, whose interdicts deprived nations of the exercise of Christian worship, at the feet of whose legate the King of England surrendered his crown, and at whose voice the fourth and the fifth crusades were both undertaken.

Might not the process, to which reference has already been made, manifest, in the course of its operation, during the tumultuous years in store for mankind, and in this same domain, a commotion still more devastating than it has yet produced?

The dramatic collapse of both the Third Empire and the Napoleonic dynasty, the virtual extinction of the temporal sovereignty of the Supreme Pontiff, in the lifetime of Baha'u'llah, were but the precursors of still greater catastrophes that may be said to have marked the ministry of 'Abdu'l-Baha. The forces unleashed by a conflict, the full significance of which still remains unfathomed, and which may be considered as a prelude to this, the most devastating of all wars, can well be regarded as the occasion of these dreadful catastrophes. The progress of the War of 1914-18 dethroned the House of Romanov, while its termination precipitated the downfall of both the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties.

THE RISE OF BOLSHEVISM

The rise of Bolshevism, born amidst the fires of that inconclusive struggle, shook the throne of the Czars and overthrew it. Alexander II Nicolaevich, whom Baha'u'llah had commanded in His Tablet to "arise ... and summon the nations unto God," who had been thrice warned: "beware lest thy desire deter thee from turning towards the face of thy Lord," "beware lest thou barter away this sublime station," "beware lest thy sovereignty withhold thee from Him Who is the Supreme Sovereign," was not indeed the last of the Czars to rule his country, but rather the inaugurator of a retrogressive policy which in the end proved fatal to both himself and his dynasty.

In the latter part of his reign he initiated a reactionary policy which, causing widespread disillusionment, gave rise to Nihilism, which, as it spread, ushered in a period of terrorism of unexampled violence, leading in its turn to several attempts on his life, and culminating in his assassination. Stern repression guided the policy of his successor, Alexander III, who "assumed an attitude of defiant hostility to innovators and liberals." The tradition of unqualified absolutism, of extreme religious orthodoxy was maintained by the still more severe Nicolas II, the last of the Czars, who, guided by the counsels of a man who was "the very incarnation of a narrow-minded, stiff-necked despotism," and aided by a corrupt bureaucracy, and humiliated by the disastrous effects of a foreign war, increased the general discontent of the masses, both intellectuals and peasants. Driven for a time into subterranean channels, and intensified by military reverses, it exploded at last in the midst of the Great War, in the form of a Revolution which, in the principles it challenged, the institutions it subverted, and the havoc it wrought, has scarcely a parallel in modern history.

A great trembling seized and rocked the foundations of that country. The light of religion was dimmed. Ecclesiastical institutions of every denomination were swept away. The state religion was disendowed, persecuted, and abolished. A far-flung empire was dismembered. A militant, triumphant proletariat exiled the intellectuals, and plundered and massacred the nobility. Civil war and disease decimated a population, already in the throes of agony and despair. And, finally, the Chief Magistrate of a mighty dominion, together with his consort, and his family, and his dynasty, were swept into the vortex of this great convulsion, and perished.

The very ordeal that heaped such dire misfortunes on the empire of the Czars brought about, in its concluding stages, the fall of the almighty German Kaiser as well as that of the inheritor of the once famed Holy Roman Empire. It shattered the whole fabric of Imperial Germany, which arose out of the disaster that engulfed the Napoleonic dynasty, and dealt the Dual Monarchy its death blow.

Almost half a century before, Baha'u'llah, Who had predicted, in clear and resounding terms, the ignominious fall of the successor of the great Napoleon, had, in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, addressed to Kaiser William I, the newly acclaimed victor, a no less significant warning, and prophesied, in His apostrophe to the banks of the Rhine, in words equally unambiguous, the mourning that would afflict the capital of the newly federated empire.

"Do thou remember," Baha'u'llah thus addressed him, "the one [Napoleon] whose power transcended thy power, and whose station excelled thy station.... Think deeply, O king, concerning him, and concerning them who, like unto thee, have conquered cities and ruled over men." And again: "O banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the swords of retribution were drawn against you; and you shall have another turn. And We hear the lamentations of Berlin, though she be today in conspicuous glory."

On him who, in his old age, sustained two attempts upon his life by the advocates of the rising tide of socialism; on his son Frederick III, whose three months' reign was overshadowed by mortal disease; and finally on his grandson, William II, the self-willed and overweening monarch and wrecker of his own empire--on these fell, in varying degrees, the full weight of the responsibilities consequent to these dire pronouncements.

William I, first German Emperor and seventh king of Prussia, whose entire lifetime had, up to the date of his accession, been spent in the army, was a militaristic, autocratic ruler, imbued with antiquated ideas, who initiated, with the aid of a statesman rightly regarded as "one of the geniuses of his century," a policy which may be said to have inaugurated a new era not only for Prussia but for the world. This policy was pursued with characteristic thoroughness and perfected through the repressive measures that were taken to safeguard and uphold it, through the wars that were waged for its realization, and the political combinations that were subsequently formed to exalt and consolidate it, combinations that were fraught with such dreadful consequences to the European continent.

William II, temperamentally dictatorial, politically inexperienced, militarily aggressive, religiously insincere, posed as the apostle of European peace, yet actually insisted on "the mailed fist" and "the shining armor." Irresponsible, indiscreet, inordinately ambitious, his first act was to dismiss that sagacious statesman, the true founder of his empire, to whose sagacity Baha'u'llah had paid tribute, and to the unwisdom of whose imperial and ungrateful master 'Abdu'l-Baha had testified. War indeed became a religion of his country, and by enlarging the scope of his multifarious activities, he proceeded to prepare the way for that final catastrophe that was to dethrone him and his dynasty. And when the war broke out, and the might of his armies seemed to have overpowered his adversaries, and the news of his triumphs was noised abroad, reverberating as far as Persia, voices were raised ridiculing those passages of the Kitab-i-Aqdas which so clearly foreshadowed the misfortunes that were to befall his capital. Suddenly, however, swift and unforeseen reverses fatally overtook him. Revolution broke out. William II, deserting his armies, fled ignominiously to Holland, followed by the Crown Prince. The princes of the German states abdicated. A period of chaos ensued. The communist flag was hoisted in the capital, which became a caldron of confusion and civil strife. The Kaiser signed his abdication. The Constitution of Weimar established the Republic, bringing the tremendous structure, so elaborately reared through a policy of blood and iron, crashing to the ground. All the efforts to that end, which through internal legislation and foreign wars had, ever since the accession of William I to the Prussian throne, been assiduously exerted, came to naught. "The lamentations of Berlin," tortured by the terms of a treaty monstrous in its severity, were raised, contrasting with the hilarious shouts of victory that rang, half a century before, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles.

The Hapsburg monarch, heir of centuries of glorious history, simultaneously toppled from his throne. It was Francis Joseph, whom Baha'u'llah chided in the Kitab-i-Aqdas for having failed in his duty to investigate His Cause, let alone to seek His presence, when so easily accessible to him in the course of his visit to the Holy Land. "Thou passed Him by," He thus reproves the pilgrim-emperor, "and inquired not about Him.... We have been with thee at all times, and found thee clinging unto the Branch and heedless of the Root.... Open thine eyes, that thou mayest behold this Glorious Vision and recognize Him Whom thou invokest in the daytime and in the night season, and gaze on the Light that shineth above this luminous Horizon."

The House of Hapsburg, in which the Imperial Title had remained practically hereditary for almost five centuries, was, ever since those words were uttered, being increasingly menaced by the forces of internal disintegration, and was sowing the seeds of an external conflict, to both of which it ultimately succumbed. Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, a reactionary ruler, reestablished old abuses, ignored the rights of nationalities, and restored that bureaucratic centralization that proved in the end so injurious to his empire. Repeated tragedies darkened his reign. His brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico. The Crown Prince Rudolph perished in a dishonorable affair. The Empress was assassinated in Geneva. Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were murdered in Sarajevo, kindling a war in the midst of which the Emperor himself died, closing a reign which is unsurpassed by any other reign in the disasters it brought to the nation.

END OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Belated efforts had been made to steady his tottering throne. The "ramshackle empire," a medley of states, races, and languages, was, however, relentlessly and rapidly disintegrating. The political and economic situation was desperate. The defeat of Austria and Hungary, in that same war, sounded its death knell and brought its dismemberment. Hungary sundered its connection. The conglomerate realm was carved up, and all that was left of the once formidable Holy Roman Empire was a shrunken republic that led a miserable existence until, in more recent times, it was, unlike its sister nation, completely extinguished and wiped off the political map of Europe.

Such was the fate of the Napoleonic, the Romanov, the Hohenzollern, and the Hapsburg empires, whose rulers, together with the sovereign occupant of the Papal throne, were individually addressed by the Pen of the Most High, and who were respectively chastised, forewarned, condemned, rebuked and admonished. What of the fate of those sovereigns who, exercising direct political jurisdiction over the Faith, its Founders, and followers, and within the radius of whose domains that Faith was born and first spread, were at liberty to crucify its Herald, banish its Founder, and mow down its adherents?

WHAT OF TURKEY AND PERSIA?

Already in the lifetime of Baha'u'llah, and later during the ministry of 'Abdu'l-Baha, the first blows of a slow yet steady and relentless retribution were falling alike upon the rulers of the Turkish House of U_th_man and of the Qajar dynasty in Persia--the archenemies of God's infant Faith. Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz fell from power, and was murdered soon after Baha'u'llah's banishment from Adrianople, while Nasiri'd-Din _Sh_ah succumbed to an assassin's pistol, during 'Abdu'l-Baha's incarceration in the fortress-town of Akka. It was reserved, however, for the Formative Period of the Faith of God--the Age of the birth and rise of its Administrative Order--which, as stated in a previous communication, is through its unfoldment casting such a turmoil in the world, to witness not only the extinction of both of these dynasties, but also the abolition of the twin institutions of the Sultanate and the Caliphate.

Of the two despots 'Abdu'l-'Aziz was the more powerful, the more exalted in rank, the more preeminent in guilt, and the more concerned with the tribulations and fortunes of the Founder of our Faith. He it was who, through his farmans, had thrice banished Baha'u'llah, and in whose dominions the Manifestation of God spent almost the whole of His forty years' captivity. It was during his reign and that of his nephew and successor, 'Abdu'l-Hamid II, that the Center of the Covenant of God had to endure, for no less than forty years, in the fortress-town of Akka, an incarceration fraught with so many perils, affronts and privations.

"Hearken, O king!" is the summons issued to Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz by Baha'u'llah, "to the speech of Him that speaketh the truth, Him that doth not ask thee to recompense Him with the things God hath chosen to bestow upon thee, Him Who unerringly treadeth the Straight Path.... Observe, O king, with thine inmost heart and with thy whole being, the precepts of God, and walk not in the paths of the oppressor.... Place not thy reliance on thy treasures. Put thy whole confidence in the grace of God, thy Lord.... Overstep not the bounds of moderation, and deal justly with them that serve thee.... Set before thine eyes God's unerring Balance, and, as one standing in His presence, weigh in that Balance thine actions, every day, every moment of thy life. Bring thyself to account ere thou art summoned to a reckoning, on the Day when no man shall have strength to stand for fear of God, the Day when the hearts of the heedless ones shall be made to tremble."

"The day is approaching," Baha'u'llah thus prophesies in the Lawh-i-Ra'is, "when the Land of Mystery [Adrianople], and what is beside it shall be changed, and shall pass out of the hands of the king, and commotions shall appear, and the voice of lamentation shall be raised, and the evidences of mischief shall be revealed on all sides, and confusion shall spread by reason of that which hath befallen these captives at the hands of the hosts of oppression. The course of things shall be altered, and conditions shall wax so grievous, that the very sands on the desolate hills will moan, and the trees on the mountain will weep, and blood will flow out of all things. Then wilt thou behold the people in sore distress."

"Soon," He, moreover has written, "will He seize you in His wrathful anger, and sedition will be stirred up in your midst, and your dominions will be disrupted. Then will ye bewail and lament, and will find none to help or succor you.... Several times calamities have overtaken you, and yet ye failed utterly to take heed. One of them was the conflagration which devoured most of the City [Constantinople] with the flames of justice, and concerning which many poems were written, stating that no such fire had ever been witnessed. And yet, ye waxed more heedless.... Plague, likewise, broke out, and ye still failed to give heed! Be expectant, however, for the wrath of God is ready to overtake you. Erelong will ye behold that which hath been sent down from the Pen of My command."

"By your deeds," He, in another Tablet, anticipating the fall of the Sultanate and the Caliphate, thus reproves the combined forces of Sunni and _Sh_i'ih Islam, "the exalted station of the people hath been abased, the standard of Islam hath been reversed, and its mighty throne hath fallen."

And finally, in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, revealed soon after Baha'u'llah's banishment to Akka, He thus apostrophizes the seat of Turkish imperial power: "O Spot that art situate on the shores of the two seas! The throne of tyranny hath, verily, been stablished upon thee, and the flame of hatred hath been kindled within thy bosom.... Thou art indeed filled with manifest pride. Hath thine outward splendor made thee vainglorious? By Him Who is the Lord of mankind! It shall soon perish, and thy daughters, and thy widows, and all the kindreds that dwell within thee shall lament. Thus informeth thee, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise."

Indeed, in a most remarkable passage in the Lawh-i-Fu'ad, wherein mention has been made of the death of Fu'ad Pa_sh_a, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, the fall of the Sultan himself is unmistakably foretold: "Soon will We dismiss the one who was like unto him, and will lay hold on their Chief who ruleth the land, and I, verily, am the Almighty, the All-Compelling."

The Sultan's reaction to these words, bearing upon his person, his empire, his throne, his capital, and his ministers, can be gathered from the recital of the sufferings he inflicted on Baha'u'llah, and already referred to in the beginning of these pages. The extinction of the "outward splendor" surrounding that proud seat of Imperial power is the theme I now proceed to expose.

THE DOOM OF IMPERIAL TURKEY

A cataclysmic process, one of the most remarkable in modern history, was set in motion ever since Baha'u'llah, while a prisoner in Constantinople, delivered to a Turkish official His Tablet, addressed to Sultan 'Abdu'l-'Aziz and his ministers, to be transmitted to 'Ali Pa_sh_a, the Grand Vizir. It was this Tablet which, as attested by that officer and affirmed by Nabil in his chronicle, affected the Vizir so profoundly that he paled while reading it. This process received fresh impetus after the Lawh-i-Ra'is was revealed on the morrow of its Author's final banishment from Adrianople to Akka. Relentless, devastating, and with ever-increasing momentum, it ominously unfolded, damaging the prestige of the Empire, dismembering its territory, dethroning its sultans, sweeping away their dynasty, degrading and deposing its Caliph, disestablishing its religion, and extinguishing its glory. The "sick man" of Europe, whose condition had been unerringly diagnosed by the Divine Physician, and whose doom was pronounced inevitable, fell a prey, during the reign of five successive sultans, all degenerate, all deposed, to a series of convulsions which, in the end, proved fatal to his life. Imperial Turkey that had, under 'Abdu'l-Majid, been admitted into the European Concert, and had emerged victorious from the Crimean War, entered, under his successor, 'Abdu'l-'Aziz, upon a period of swift decline, culminating, soon after 'Abdu'l-Baha's passing, in the doom which the judgment of God had pronounced against it.

Risings in Crete and the Balkans marked the reign of this, the 32nd sultan of his dynasty, a despot whose mind was vacuous, whose recklessness was extreme, whose extravagance knew no bounds. The Eastern Question entered upon an acute phase. His gross misrule gave rise to movements which were to exercise far-reaching effects upon his realm, while his continual and enormous borrowings, leading to a state of semibankruptcy, introduced the principle of foreign control over the finances of his empire. A conspiracy, leading to a palace revolution, finally deposed him. A fatva of the mufti denounced his incapacity and extravagance. Four days later he was assassinated, and was succeeded by his nephew, Murad V, whose mind had been reduced to a nullity by intemperance and by a long seclusion in the Cage. Declared to be imbecile, he, after a reign of three months, was deposed and was succeeded by the subtle, the resourceful, the suspicious, the tyrannical 'Abdu'l-Hamid II who "proved to be the most mean, cunning, untrustworthy and cruel intriguer of the long dynasty of U_th_man." "No one knew," it was written of him, "from day to day who was the person on whose advice the sultan overruled his ostensible ministers, whether a favorite lady of his harem, or a eunuch, or some fanatical dervish, or an astrologer, or a spy." The Bulgarian atrocities heralded the black reign of this "Great Assassin," which thrilled Europe with horror, and were characterized by Gladstone as "the basest and blackest outrages upon record in that [XIX] century." The War of 1877-78 accelerated the process of the empire's dismemberment. No less than eleven million people were emancipated from Turkish yoke. The Russian troops occupied Adrianople. Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania proclaimed their independence. Bulgaria became a self-governing state, tributary to the sultan. Cyprus and Egypt were occupied. The French assumed a protectorate over Tunis. Eastern Rumelia was ceded to Bulgaria. The wholesale massacres of Armenians, involving directly and indirectly a hundred thousand souls, were but a foretaste of the still more extensive bloodbaths to come in a later reign. Bosnia and Herzegovina were lost to Austria. Bulgaria obtained her independence. Universal contempt and hatred of an infamous sovereign, shared alike by his Christian and Muslim subjects, finally culminated in a revolution, swift and sweeping. The Committee of Young Turks secured from the _Sh_ay_kh_u'l-Islam the condemnation of the sultan. Deserted and friendless, execrated by his subjects, and despised by his fellow-rulers, he was forced to abdicate, and was made a prisoner of state, thus ending a reign "more disastrous in its immediate losses of territory and in the certainty of others to follow, and more conspicuous for the deterioration of the condition of his subjects, than that of any other of his twenty-three degenerate predecessors since the death of Soliman the Magnificent."

The end of so shameful a reign was but the beginning of a new era which, however auspiciously hailed at first, was destined to witness the collapse of the Ottoman ramshackle and worm-eaten state. Muhammad V, a brother of 'Abdu'l-Hamid II, an absolute nonentity, failed to improve the status of his subjects. The follies of his government ultimately sealed the doom of the empire. The War of 1914-18 provided the occasion. Military reverses brought to a head the forces that were sapping its foundations. While the war was still being fought the defection of the Sherif of Mecca and the revolt of the Arabian provinces portended the convulsion which was to seize the Turkish throne. The precipitate flight and complete destruction of the army of Jamal Pa_sh_a, the commander-in-chief in Syria--he who had sworn to raze to the ground, after his triumphant return from Egypt, the Tomb of Baha'u'llah, and to publicly crucify the Center of His Covenant in a public square of Constantinople--was the signal for the nemesis that was to overtake an empire in distress. Nine-tenths of the large Turkish armies had melted away. A fourth of the whole population had perished from war, disease, famine and massacre.

A new ruler, Muhammad VI, the last of the twenty-five successive degenerate sultans, had meanwhile succeeded his wretched brother. The edifice of the empire was now quaking and tottering to its fall. Mustafa Kamal dealt it the final blows. Turkey, that had already shrunk to a small Asiatic state, became a republic. The sultan was deposed, the Ottoman Sultanate was ended, a rulership that had remained unbroken for six and a half centuries was extinguished. An empire which had stretched from the center of Hungary to the Persian Gulf and the Sudan, and from the Caspian Sea to Oran in Africa, had now dwindled to a small Asiatic republic. Constantinople itself, which, after the fall of Byzantium, had been honored as the splendid metropolis of the Roman Empire, and had been made the capital of the Ottoman government, was abandoned by its conquerors, and stripped of its pomp and glory--a mute reminder of the base tyranny that had for so long stained its throne.