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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Tehran, Iran
18 stories took place here — most often featuring Bahá'u'lláh, the Báb and Mullá Ḥusayn.
Ṭihrán (today: Tehran, Iran)
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the autumn of 1852, after the attempt on the life of Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh by two distraught Bábís acting without authorisation, Bahá'u'lláh was arrested at Níyávarán and confined in the underground dungeon of Ṭihrán known as the Black Pit. There, in chains, He received the intimations of the Mission that would shape the next forty years.
Soon after the Declaration, the Báb sent Mullá Ḥusayn northward to Ṭihrán to deliver a sacred trust to one He did not name. Guided by a midnight conversation with a teacher's pupil, Mullá Ḥusayn entrusted a scroll of the Báb's Writings to be carried at dawn to Bahá'u'lláh — who, upon reading it, affirmed its truth at once. It was among the first recognitions of the new Revelation in the capital.
Mírzá Qurbán-ʻAlí, a revered dervish with thousands of devoted admirers, was arrested as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. The all-powerful Grand Vizier, besieged by pleas for the holy man's life, all but offered him a way out. The dervish refused it — declaring that he had weighed the Báb with the scales of justice, and would seal that judgement with his blood.
In the terrible summer of 1852, a nobleman of Ṭihrán was offered his life and great wealth if he would only deny his Faith. He refused. Led through the streets to his execution with lighted candles set burning in his own flesh, Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán went to his death not weeping but rejoicing — chanting verses, distributing coins to the poor, and turning a public spectacle of cruelty into one of the most luminous acts of courage in Bahá'í history.
Ṭáhirih — poet, scholar, and the only woman among the Báb's first eighteen disciples — spent her final hours in serene readiness, adorned as for a wedding rather than an execution. Led into a garden outside Ṭihrán in 1852 to be put to death, she met her end with a calm that astonished her captors, and left behind a prophecy about the freedom of women that history has been fulfilling ever since.
Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ʻAlí was the merchant uncle who had reared the Báb from childhood and loved Him as his own son. When, as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán in 1850, he was offered his life and a ransom by influential friends if he would merely disavow his Nephew, he refused — choosing instead to be the first of the seven to lay down his life, that he might join the One he had raised.
On the night the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz, He entrusted Mullá Ḥusayn with a sacred charge: to find in Ṭihrán a soul of a noble house and deliver into His hands a scroll of the newly revealed Word. The young schoolteacher who carried it never learned the meaning of his errand — but Bahá'u'lláh read the Words, and the first utterance of the new Revelation reached the One for Whom, unknown to all, it had been written.
Not long after the Báb declared His mission, He told His first disciple that a soul of surpassing greatness was yet to be reached, and sent him north to find the one of his own heart's choosing. In Ṭihrán, Mullá Ḥusayn placed a scroll in the hands of a young Nobleman, Bahá'u'lláh — and when the answer came back, the Báb's joy revealed that the greatest Light of all had recognised the Day.
Hidden behind a curtain in Bahá'u'lláh's house in Ṭihrán, Táhirih listened as the celebrated divine Vahíd discoursed on the proofs of the new Day. Then she raised her voice and interrupted him with a few burning sentences that turned the whole meaning of speech inside out — calling not for more learned words, but for the deeds and the bold utterance that would promote the Word of God.
In Ṭihrán in 1850, seven believers of utterly different stations — a great merchant, a beloved dervish, a learned theologian among them — were each offered their lives, and more than their lives, if they would deny the Báb. To the very last, with the sword before them, every one refused. A story of the power of God to make ordinary souls unbreakable.
When Bahá'u'lláh lay chained in the Black Pit of Ṭihrán, condemned without cause and surrounded by the executions of His fellow-prisoners, help came from an unlooked-for quarter: the Russian Minister at the Persian court, who took up His case, pressed for His release, and afterward offered Him the protection of his government. Nabíl records it as one of the signs that no power on earth could extinguish the Cause of God.
Long before exile and prison, the young Bahá'u'lláh was already beloved in Persia for the open hand He stretched out to the destitute and the fearless voice He raised for the wronged. Taherzadeh gathers the witness of the early years — how a Nobleman of rank turned away from the comforts of His station to become, in the people's own phrase, the Father of the Poor.
When His father the Vazír died, the young Bahá'u'lláh was offered the ministerial post the family had long held — an honour the court pressed upon Him. He declined it. God Passes By preserves the moment, and the words of the Prime Minister who, baffled and impressed, sensed that this young Nobleman was destined for something the world could not yet name.
ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's own narrative remembers the young Bahá'u'lláh as a Nobleman who was never trained in the schools of the learned, yet whose wisdom astonished all who came near Him — and who, the moment the Báb's Cause arose, embraced it with His whole heart and became its devoted champion. A reflection on the early life that A Traveler's Narrative preserves.
Mullá ʻAlí-Akbar of Shahmírzád — known as Ḥájí Ákhúnd, and later named a Hand of the Cause — taught the Faith so openly in Ṭihrán that he was the first to be seized whenever trouble broke out. Again and again he was chained, jailed, and threatened with the sword; a famous photograph shows him sitting in his fetters utterly composed. 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered him in a single unforgettable line: openly at odds with his oppressors, he defied them, and he was never vanquished.
In His own words, in the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahá'u'lláh recalls the four months He spent chained in the lightless underground dungeon of Ṭihrán — and how, in that very darkness, the first intimations of His Revelation broke upon Him like a dawn, a Voice calling from above His head and a sense that the whole creation had been set astir.
Isfandíyár had been a servant in the household of Bahá'u'lláh, freed when Bahá'u'lláh emancipated His father's slaves. When persecution scattered the family and the Sháh's officers hunted him, he had every chance to flee — yet he refused, because he owed money to the shopkeepers of Ṭihrán and would not let it be said that a servant of Bahá'u'lláh had taken goods without paying. Half a century later, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called him a perfect man.