Renowned at Thirteen: The Boy Who Could Speak on Any Subject

In Chapter 3 of *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era,* Esslemont gathered a small set of recollections about the early life of Bahá'u'lláh in the Núrí ancestral house and the family town residence in Tihrán. Most of the recollections came, ultimately, from 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself. One is the brief sentence about His Father's early years.

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> When He was only thirteen or fourteen years old He became > renowned for His learning. He would converse on any subject > and solve any problem presented to Him.

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The setting is important. Mírzá Buzurg, the patriarch, was a prominent court official; the Núrí house drew clerics, jurists, philosophers, poets, and government secretaries. The family was a small intellectual centre of its own. The conversation in the courtyards was, at any given hour, on the high topics of the period — the Qur'ánic sciences, the metaphysics of Mullá Ṣadrá, the news from the court, the translation of European books then beginning to reach Persian shelves.

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Into that conversation, by the age of thirteen or fourteen, the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-'Alí had already entered. He had not been sent to a *madrisah* — formal seminary education was not the custom of His class for sons not destined for the clergy. His learning had grown by the household's own discipline: by reading, by listening, by quiet attention to the visitors, by an extraordinary natural capacity that resisted any account in ordinary terms.

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Esslemont preserves the specific detail. The young Bahá'u'lláh *would converse on any subject.* The clerics who came expecting to test the boy on a Qur'ánic question found that He met them on the question and went past it. The jurists who came expecting to press a difficult point of *fiqh* found Him already in possession of the answer. The poets who came to recite found Him able to speak in their own metres.

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The boy did not become arrogant. He did not advertise. He sat, according to the witnesses, in the calm and dignity that had been visible in Him as a still younger child. The wisdom flowed when it was asked for, then quieted when the conversation turned.

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The detail mattered to Esslemont because of what it foreshadowed. The young man who, at thirteen, could speak on any subject would later, as the Manifestation of God for the present age, reveal in His Tablets the answer to the great questions the modern world had not yet learned to ask. The capacity that the visitors of the Núrí courtyard saw in the boy was the same capacity that the Western diplomatic world would, much later, recognize in the Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh. The reservoir was already full. It had only, for many years, been waiting to be opened.

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