The Young Merchant of Shíráz: Esslemont's Portrait of the Báb

In Chapter 2 of *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era,* Esslemont introduces the Báb to His Western readers. Many of them, in 1923, had only the vaguest sense of who the Báb had been. The short biographical portrait Esslemont supplied has therefore done more than its modest length suggests to shape Western Bahá'í understanding of the Forerunner.

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The Báb, Esslemont notes, was born Siyyid 'Alí Muḥammad in Shíráz on the 20th of October, 1819. His father, a respected local merchant of the city, died when the boy was very young. The orphaned child was taken into the household and business of his maternal uncle, Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid 'Alí. The uncle raised him to the family trade.

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The portrait Esslemont then assembles, drawing on the testimonies of those who had known the young Siyyid in Shíráz, is the picture of a boy and young man whom, by no particular external sign, one would have set apart for greatness.

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> Pious, observant, scrupulously honest in his trade — long > before any declaration the young merchant was already what He > was about to become.

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The Báb attended the local *maktab,* the elementary religious school. The teacher, on more than one occasion, found himself in difficulty: the child's questions far outran what the teacher had been trained to answer. There was no malice in the questions. There was only, in the boy's face, an unflinching desire to understand. The teacher, it is said, eventually returned the boy to his uncle with the candid admission that the child had reached, by his own pace, a station the school could no longer help him climb.

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The young merchant grew. He took up his place in the family business. He travelled, in connection with the trade, to Búshihr on the Persian Gulf, where his uncle had commercial interests. There he established his reputation among the merchants of the port for the same scrupulous honesty He had shown in the classroom. His prices were not deceptive. His weights were true. His promises were kept. The buyers and sellers of Búshihr came to seek out the young Siyyid not because his prices were the lowest but because his dealings could be trusted.

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He made the long pilgrimage to the Hijaz. He returned to Shíráz. He married a young woman of the Khurasáni family of his maternal connections. By the spring of 1844 He was twenty-five years old. The whole shape of His youth — pious, observant, gentle, scrupulously honest — was the shape of a man the city had recognised as good without having any conception of what He was about to become.

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Esslemont preserved the portrait so that the Western reader would not imagine that the Báb's later announcement had come, in 1844, out of a vacuum. It had come from a soul whose life, quietly and patiently for twenty-five years, had been a preparation for what was about to break open.

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