Sulaymániyyih, as it was in 1844

Sulaymániyyih, 1930s

Today Sulaymániyyih is a very pleasant small town, at a distance of about 200 miles from Baghdad, built amidst three hills and surrounded by trees and verdure. But it must have been otherwise in Bahá’u’lláh’s time, for Commander James F. Jones of the Indian Navy, who accompanied Sir Henry Rawlinson on a tour of Kurdistan in 1844, writes thus of Sulaymániyyih as he found it:

Sulimaniyeh, the capital of the Pachalic, is a collection of small and ruinous houses, bearing a more mean appearance than, I believe, the most wretched hamlet in England. This is, however, not attributable to the poverty of the Kurds alone, but to the nomad habits of its occupants, who, in the spring, summer, and autumn, abandon the town, and spread themselves over the country . . . After its second foundation by Ibrahim Pacha [sixty-two years previously], it gradually improved, and in Rich's time boasted of about a thousand houses. I believe, at the present time, it scarcely contains half that number of tenable dwellings, and is, moreover, considered unhealthily situated when compared with the more salubrious and less confined region of the adjoining plain. Built on the skirt of a low and barren range, which rises up immediately behind it, it is either entirely shut out from the cooler breezes that sweep the plain, or is visited by constant hot winds which blow from the E, and NE. over the heated ridge during the summer months. 

- Hasan Balyuzi (‘Bahá’u’lláh King of Glory’)

The “initial and impassioned outpourings of a Soul struggling to unburden itself, in the solitude of a self-imposed exile”

In the odes He revealed, whilst wrapped in His devotions during those days of utter seclusion, and in the prayers and soliloquies which, in verse and prose, both in Arabic and Persian, poured from His sorrow-laden soul, many of which He was wont to chant aloud to Himself, at dawn and during the watches of the night, He

• lauded the names and attributes of His Creator,
• extolled the glories and mysteries of His own Revelation,
• sang the praises of that Maiden that personified the Spirit of God within Him,
• dwelt on His loneliness and His past and future tribulations,
• expatiated upon the blindness of His generation, the perfidy of His friends and the perversity of His enemies,
• affirmed His determination to arise and, if needs be, offer up His life for the vindication of His Cause,
• stressed those essential pre-requisites which every seeker after Truth must possess, and
• recalled, in anticipation of the lot that was to be His,
• the tragedy of the Imám Husayn in Karbilá,
• the plight of Muhammad in Mecca,
• the sufferings of Jesus at the hands of the Jews,
• the trials of Moses inflicted by Pharaoh and his people and
• the ordeal of Joseph as He languished in a pit by reason of the treachery of His brothers.

These initial and impassioned outpourings of a Soul struggling to unburden itself, in the solitude of a self-imposed exile (many of them, alas lost to posterity) are, with the Tablet of Kullu’t-Ta‘ám and the poem entitled Rashh-i-‘Amá, revealed in Tihrán, the first fruits of His Divine Pen. They are the forerunners of those immortal works—the Kitáb-i-Íqán, the Hidden Words and the Seven Valleys—which in the years preceding His Declaration in Baghdád, were to enrich so vastly the steadily swelling volume of His writings, and which paved the way for a further flowering of His prophetic genius in His epoch-making Proclamation to the world, couched in the form of mighty Epistles to the kings and rulers of mankind, and finally for the last fruition of His Mission in the Laws and Ordinances of His Dispensation formulated during His confinement in the Most Great Prison of ‘Akká. 

- Shoghi Effendi (‘God Passes By’)

The unbelievable sufferings of Bahá’u’lláh

... By the righteousness of God! I have borne what neither the oceans, nor the waves, nor the fruits, nor any created thing, whether of the past or of the future, hath borne or will be capable of bearing. 

- Bahá’u’lláh (From a Tablet; provisional translation by Hand of the Cause Hassan Balyuzi)