To enumerate a few of the outstanding features of this moving drama will suffice to evoke in the reader of these pages, already familiar with the history of the Faith, the memory of those vicissitudes which it has experienced, and which the world has until now viewed with such frigid indifference.
- The forced and sudden retirement of Bahá’u’lláh to the mountains of Sulaymáníyyih, and the distressing consequences that flowed from His two years’ complete withdrawal;
- the incessant intrigues indulged in by the exponents of Shí’ih Islám in Najaf and Karbilá, working in close and constant association with their confederates in Persia;
- the intensification of the repressive measures decreed by Sultán ‘Abdu’l-‘Azíz which brought to a head the defection of certain prominent members of the exiled community;
- the enforcement of yet another banishment by order of that same Sultán, this time to that far off and most desolate of cities, causing such despair as to lead two of the exiles to attempt suicide;
- the unrelaxing surveillance to which they were subjected upon their arrival in Akká, by hostile officials, and the insufferable imprisonment for two years in the barracks of that town;
- the interrogatory to which the Turkish páshá subsequently subjected his Prisoner at the headquarters of the government;
- His confinement for no less than eight years in a humble dwelling surrounded by the befouled air of that city, His sole recreation being confined to pacing the narrow space of His room—
these, as well as other tribulations, proclaim, on the one hand, the nature of the ordeal and the indignities He suffered, and point, on the other, the finger of accusation at those mighty ones of the earth who had either so sorely maltreated Him, or deliberately withheld from Him their succor.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘The Promised Day Is Come’)