... the worst human quality and the most great sin is backbiting; more especially when it emanates from the tongues of the
believers of God. If some means
were devised so that the doors of backbiting could be shut eternally and each one of the believers of God
unsealed his tongue in the praise
of the other, then the teachings of His Holiness Baha'u'llah would be spread,
the hearts illuminated, the spirits glorified and the human world would attain
to everlasting felicity.
I hope that the believers of God will shun completely backbiting, each one praising the other
cordially and believe that backbiting
is the cause of Divine wrath,
to such an extent that if a person backbites to the extent of one word, he may become
dishonored among all the people, because
the most hateful characteristic of man is fault-finding. One must expose the
praiseworthy qualities of the souls and not their evil attributes. The friends
must overlook their shortcomings and faults and speak only of their virtues and
not their defects.
It is related that His Holiness Christ - May my life be a sacrifice to Him! – one day, accompanied by His apostles, passed by the corpse of a dead animal. One of them said: 'How putrid has this become!' The other exclaimed: 'How it is deformed!' A third cried out: 'What a stench! How cadaverous looking!' But His Holiness Christ said: 'Look at its teeth! How white they are!' Consider, that He did not look at all at the defects of that animal; nay, rather, He searched well until He found the beautiful white teeth. He observed only the whiteness of the teeth and overlooked entirely the deformity of the body, the dissolution of its organs and the bad odor.
This is the attribute of the children of the Kingdom. This
is the conduct and the manner of the real Baha’is. I hope that all the
believers will attain to this lofty station. (‘Abdu’l-Baha, from a Tablet, Star
of the West, vol. 4, no. 11, September 27, 1913; ‘Lights of Guidance’)
