Scatter Far and Wide: Siyyid Káẓim's Last Charge

After Shaykh Aḥmad’s death, his lieutenant Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí carried forward the work of preparing students for the imminent Manifestation. He chose Karbilá as his centre. There, for nearly two decades, he taught a body of disciples who would later become the first ranks of the Bábí dispensation — Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú’í chief among them.

Nabíl describes Siyyid Káẓim as increasingly explicit, in his last years, about the nearness of the Promised One. He sent trusted emissaries — including the young Mullá Ḥusayn — on quiet missions of theological diplomacy. Mullá Ḥusayn’s success in Iṣfahán in obtaining the open allegiance of Ḥájí Siyyid Muḥammad-Báqir, one of the most respected scholars of the age, moved the Siyyid to commission him still further:

Arise and perform this mission, for I declare you equal to this task. The Almighty will graciously assist you.

The Siyyid would also drop, before his closer students, hints about the specific person they should expect. The Promised One, he said,

is of noble lineage. He is a descendant of the Prophet of God, of the family of Háshim. He is young in age.

These hints were partial by design; the disciples were not to be told outright, but to recognise.

When the Siyyid sensed his own death approaching, he gave them the charge that Nabíl treats as the immediate prologue to the Declaration of the Báb. He gathered them in Karbilá, and instead of appointing a successor in the ordinary sense, he sent them away. The Promised One was not in any one place; He was to be sought, and the seekers would have to scatter:

Scatter far and wide, detach yourselves from all earthly things, and humbly and prayerfully beseech your Lord to sustain and guide you.

He warned them of what would be asked of them. The price of recognition would not be cheap.

Well is it with every one of you who will quaff the cup of martyrdom in His path.

Siyyid Káẓim died on the day of ‘Arafih in 1259 A.H., fulfilling a prophetic dream of a humble shepherd Nabíl records earlier in the chapter. His students dispersed across Persia. Within months, one of them — Mullá Ḥusayn — would knock at the door of a young Siyyid in Shíráz, and the dispersal that the Siyyid had commanded would gather, all at once, into the first sunrise of the new Day.

Source: Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, The Dawn-Breakers (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1932), Chapter II — The Mission of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí, pages 19-47. 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/