The Stranger in Karbilá: Shaykh Ḥasan Recognizes Bahá'u'lláh

Following His release from the Síyáh-Chál in late 1852, Bahá’u’lláh was exiled by the Sháh’s government — first to Iraq, briefly to Karbilá and Baghdád, then on to longer sojourn. In Nabíl’s narrative the Karbilá interlude is brief but charged. The remnants of the Bábí community were scattered, leaderless, in the months after the Báb’s martyrdom; many of them, in their grief, had fallen into extreme expressions of devotion. Bahá’u’lláh’s arrival in Karbilá set them in order again.

Among those most affected was Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí. Years before, in the early days of the Bábí movement, he had been told by the Báb in person that he would live to behold the One whom God shall make manifest — the Promised One whose appearance was the central announcement of the Bábí dispensation. The promise was written; he carried it through the intervening years with patience and silence.

In Karbilá Shaykh Ḥasan saw Bahá’u’lláh on the streets. He did not yet know who He was. But the recognition rose in him unbidden. He returned, again and again, to gaze on this stranger whose presence stirred something in his heart he could not name. Bahá’u’lláh, knowing what was happening, addressed him quietly with an instruction that has remained in the Bahá’í memory:

Though your heart be aflame with His love, take heed lest any eye discover your inner agitation.

The Day was not yet to be publicly announced. The recognitions that occurred in Karbilá were to remain private. But they had occurred. Shaykh Ḥasan had seen.

Nabíl uses the same chapter to gather other recognitions and warnings of those years. He records Bahá’u’lláh's analysis of the political situation — particularly His sober warning that the faith which a member of the Qájár dynasty professes cannot be depended upon, a warning whose force the next generation would feel. He preserves the story of the remarkable Siyyid Básir-i-Hindí, blind from birth and yet possessed of such command of scholarship and argument that no one, however great his learning and experience, was able to reject the evidences he set forth in support of his claims. Siyyid Básir would be martyred under brutal conditions for his witness.

The Karbilá interlude was, in retrospect, the bridge between the Bábí dispensation and the Bahá'í. The Promised One whose appearance the Báb had taught had now been seen — quietly, in silence, by a man who had been waiting for Him for a decade — in the streets of the city of Imám Ḥusayn. The world would not be told for another decade. But the recognition had begun.

Source: Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, The Dawn-Breakers (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1932), Chapter XXV — Bahá'u'lláh's Journey to Karbilá. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/