Four Months in the Síyáh-Chál

In The Promised Day Is Come, Shoghi Effendi recalls the four months Bahá’u’lláh spent in 1852 in the Síyáh-Chál, the underground dungeon of Ṭihrán:

“We were consigned,” He wrote in His “Epistle to the Son of the Wolf,” “for four months to a place foul beyond comparison. As to the dungeon in which this Wronged One and others similarly wronged were confined, a dark and narrow pit were preferable.... The dungeon was wrapped in thick darkness, and Our fellow prisoners numbered nearly a hundred and fifty souls: thieves, assassins, and highwaymen. Though crowded, it had no other outlet than the passage by which We entered. No pen can depict that place, nor any tongue describe its loathsome smell. Most of these men had neither clothes nor bedding to lie on. God alone knoweth what befell Us in that most foul-smelling and gloomy place!” “‘Abdu’l-Bahá,” writes Dr. J.E. Esslemont, “tells how one day He was allowed to enter the prison-yard to see His beloved Father when He came out for His daily exercise. Bahá’u’lláh was terribly altered, so ill He could hardly walk. His hair and beard unkempt, His neck galled and swollen from the pressure of a heavy steel collar, His body bent by the weight of His chains.” “For three days and three nights,” Nabíl has recorded in his chronicle, “no manner of food or drink was given to Bahá’u’lláh. Rest and sleep were both impossible to Him. The place was infested with vermin, and the stench of that gloomy abode was enough to crush the very spirits of those who were condemned to suffer its horrors.” “Such was the intensity of His suffering that the marks of that cruelty remained imprinted upon His body all the days of His life.”

— Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day Is Come, “This Judgment of God” (Nabíl’s words are from The Dawn-Breakers, p. 608)

Source: Baha'i Stories Blog (https://bahaistories.blogspot.com/2022/11/for-three-days-and-three-nights-no.html).

Various. *Baha'i Stories Blog*. https://bahaistories.blogspot.com/2022/11/for-three-days-and-three-nights-no.html