The Last Charge: Mullá Ḥusayn Falls at Ṭabarsí

Nabíl’s *Dawn-Breakers* preserves the closing chapter of the life of Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú’í in considerable detail. The chronicle had opened, four years earlier, with the same young scholar arriving at Shíráz on the night of May 22, 1844, and becoming the first soul on earth to recognise the Báb as the Promised One. The chronicle now closes that arc at the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí in Mázindarán, in the cold of the winter of 1848-49.

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The siege of the shrine had begun in October 1848. The Bábí defenders, numbering some three hundred, had taken refuge in the small enclosure around the tomb of an early Shí’ah saint. They had built earthworks, dug a moat, and held against the assembled forces of the Imperial army through the winter.

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Quddús had arrived at the fort in the early weeks; his presence had transformed the spiritual atmosphere of the garrison. Mullá Ḥusayn — who had marched to Mázindarán beneath the Black Standard the Prophet had foretold — held the practical command of the defense.

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The conditions in the fort, by January 1849, were beyond description. The defenders had eaten the leather of their saddles and the bark of the trees. The bodies of the fallen lay where they had been buried in the snow. Many of the survivors were wounded; several were ill. The besieging army, with its fresh detachments, its cannon, and its supply lines, grew stronger with each week.

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On the evening of February 1, 1849, Mullá Ḥusayn called the remaining defenders together. He addressed them at the foot of the shrine. He prayed at length. He spoke of the bond that had been established in the room at Shíráz on the May night four years and nine months before. He spoke of the Promise of which the present sacrifice was the seed. He gave instructions for the order of the sortie that he had decided to lead at dawn.

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The chronicle preserves the morning of February 2:

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> Mounted on his horse, with his sword unsheathed, Mullá Ḥusayn > led the remnant of his companions out of the gate.

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He charged the besiegers’ first line. The line broke. He pressed forward with his small body of horsemen into the camp itself. Tents were overturned; the artillery batteries were spiked; soldiers in their hundreds fled before the sortie.

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In the moment of the charge’s success a musket-ball struck Mullá Ḥusayn in the chest. He continued his attack — Nabíl preserves the testimony of more than one survivor that he remained in the saddle for some minutes after the ball had struck him — and then turned his horse back toward the fort. He was carried, dying, into the small room where Quddús waited for him.

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Quddús received him in his arms. They spoke at length, the chronicle records, but no witness was within hearing distance to preserve what was said. Mullá Ḥusayn died as the sun rose on the second of February. He was thirty-five years old.

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The siege would continue for three more months. Quddús would be martyred at Bárfurúsh in the spring. The fort itself would fall by treachery. But the central figure of the defense — the first man to recognise the Báb, the holder of the Black Standard, the leader of the dawn charge — had already crossed into the Kingdom for whose Cause he had marched out of Mashhad the year before.

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