Look Well at Me

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield (George Ronald). The narrative is retold in our own words; the short lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the book. Read the full text for the original account.

It was the evening of the 22nd of May, 1844, in the city of Shíráz in southern Persia.

A young man named Mullá Ḥusayn had been searching — for years, and across many miles — for the Promised One whose coming the holy traditions had foretold. His teacher had died urging his students to scatter and find Him; and Mullá Ḥusayn had prayed and fasted and waited for some sign. That evening, near the city gate, a gracious young merchant approached him, greeted him with great warmth, and invited him home.

Mullá Ḥusayn went. And in that quiet house, the conversation turned, as if by itself, to the very thing that had consumed his life: the signs by which the Promised One would be known. Mullá Ḥusayn carried in his mind a careful list of those signs — the lineage, the bearing, the knowledge that the awaited One must possess. His host listened gravely as he named them.

Then the young Man did something that stopped Mullá Ḥusayn's heart. He removed the green turban from His head, and said simply:

Look well at me, do I not show these signs?

He reminded His guest of a question Mullá Ḥusayn had once raised — about the inner mystery of the Súrih of Joseph — and then, taking up His pen, He began to write: a flowing commentary unveiling meaning after hidden meaning, faster than thought, with an authority no learning could explain. As Mullá Ḥusayn read, the careful seeker fell away and the finder was born. In the words the family preserved, his eyes were opened, and he became greatly perturbed and overcome, and excited — the whole long ache of his searching dissolving at last into recognition.

The young merchant was Siyyid 'Alí-Muḥammad — the Báb, "the Gate." This was the night His mission began. Yet even in that overwhelming hour He counselled patience, telling His first believer not to rush out and proclaim what he had found, but to wait until others should come of their own accord:

Wait until eighteen persons of insight shall of themselves... have recognized me.

And so, gently, the new Day dawned — not with thunder, but with a conversation between two people in a lamplit room, and one seeker finally coming home. There is a tender wonder the believers have always treasured in the timing of it: that this very night, when the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz, was the same day, far away in Tihrán, that a child was born into the family of Bahá'u'lláh — the One the world would come to know as 'Abdu'l-Bahá. On a single day, heaven seemed to open two doors at once.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted lines are verbatim from The Chosen Highway (Lady Blomfield, George Ronald). See the source for the complete account.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/blomfield_chosen_highway