hout the empire
for the foulness of its climate and the prevalence of many diseases, Akka
was a penal colony used by the Ottoman State for the incarceration of
dangerous criminals who could be expected not to survive too long their
imprisonment there. Arriving in August 1868, Baha'u'llah, the members of
His family, and a company of His followers who had been exiled with Him
were to experience two years of suffering and abuse within the fortress
itself, and then be confined under house arrest to a nearby building owned
by a local merchant. For a long time the exiles were shunned by the
superstitious local populace who had been warned in public sermons against
"the God of the Persians," who was depicted as an enemy of public order
and the purveyor of blasphemous and immoral ideas. Several members of the
small group of exiles died of the privations and other conditions to which
they were subjected.(76)

It seems, in retrospect, the keenest irony that the selection of the Holy
Land as the place of Baha'u'llah's forced confinement should have been the
result of pressure from ecclesiastical and civil enemies whose aim was to
extinguish His religious influence. Palestine, revered by three of the
great monotheistic religions as the point where the worlds of God and of
man intersect, held then, as it had for thousands of years, a unique place
in human expectation. Only a few weeks before Baha'u'llah's arrival, the
main leadership of the German Protestant Templer movement sailed from
Europe to establish at the foot of Mount Carmel a colony that would
welcome Christ, whose advent they believed to be imminent. Over the
lintels of several of the small houses they erected, facing across the bay
to Baha'u'llah's prison at Akka, can still be seen such carved
inscriptions as "Der Herr ist nahe" ("The Lord is near").(77)

In Akka, Baha'u'llah continued the dictation of a series of letters to
individual rulers, which He had begun in Adrianople. Several contained
warnings of the judgment of God on their negligence and misrule, warnings
whose dramatic fulfillment aroused intense public discussion throughout
the Near East. Less than two months after the exiles arrived in the
prison-city, for example, Fu'ad Pa_sh_a, the Ottoman foreign minister,
whose misrepresentations had helped precipitate the banishment, was
abruptly dismissed from his post and died in France of a heart attack. The
event was marked by a statement which predicted the early