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The banishment, lasting no less than twenty- four years, to which two Oriental despots had, in their implacable enmity and shortsightedness, combined to condemn Baha'u'llah, will go down in history as a period which witnessed a miraculous and truly revolutionizing change in the circumstances attending the life and activities of the Exile Himself, will be chiefly remembered for the widespread recrudescence of persecution, intermittent but singularly cruel, throughout His native country and the simultaneous increase in the number of His followers, and, lastly, for an enormous extension in the range and volume of His writings. (185:1) His arrival at the penal colony of Akka, far from proving the end of His afflictions, was but the beginning of a major crisis, characterized by bitter suffering, severe restrictions, and intense turmoil, which, in its gravity, surpassed even the agonies of the Siyah- Chal of Tihran, and to which no other event, in the history of the entire century can compare, except the internal convulsion that rocked the Faith in Adrianople. "Know thou," Baha'u'llah, wishing to emphasize the criticalness of the first nine years of His banishment to that prison- city, has written, "that upon Our arrival at this Spot, We chose to designate it as the `Most Great Prison.' Though previously subjected in another land (Tihran) to chains and fetters, We yet refused to call it by that name. Say: Ponder thereon, O ye endued with understanding!" (185:2) The ordeal He endured, as a direct consequence of the attempt on the life of Nasiri'd- Din Shah, was one which had been inflicted upon Him solely by the external enemies of the Faith. The travail in Adrianople, the effects of which all but sundered the community of the Bab's followers, was, on the other hand, purely internal in character. This fresh crisis which, during almost a decade, agitated Him and His companions, was, however, marked throughout not only by the assaults of His adversaries from without, but by the machinations of enemies from within, as well as by the grievous misdeeds of those who, though bearing His name, perpetrated what made His heart and His pen alike to lament. (185:3) Akka, the ancient Ptolemais, the St. Jean d'Acre of the Crusaders, that had successfully defied the siege of Napoleon, had sunk, under the Turks, to the level of a penal colony to which murderers, highway robbers and political agitators were consigned from all parts of the Turkish empire. It was girt about by a double system of ramparts; was inhabited by a people whom Baha'u'llah stigmatized as "the generation of vipers"; was devoid of any source of water within its gates; was flea- infested, damp and honey- combed with gloomy, filthy and tortuous lanes. "According to what they say," the Supreme Pen has recorded in the Lawh- i- Sultan, "it is the most desolate of the cities of the world, the most unsightly of them in appearance, the most detestable in climate, and the foulest in water. It is as though it were the metropolis of the owl." So putrid was its air that, according to a proverb, a bird when flying over it would drop dead.
(185:4)
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