The Hour Is Near: Siyyid Káẓim's Last Days at Karbilá

Nabíl’s Dawn-Breakers records the final months of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí, the second of the two great preparatory teachers, in the autumn and winter of 1843-44. He had succeeded Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í as the head of the small but influential school in Karbilá that had, for a generation, been preparing its students for the appearance of the Promised One.

By 1843 Siyyid Káẓim was an old man. His health, never robust, was giving way. The opposition to his teaching from the orthodox clergy of Najaf and Karbilá had grown into open hostility. There were repeated petitions to the Ottoman authorities to remove him from the holy cities; the school was under perpetual surveillance.

He continued, in spite of it, to teach. The chapters of the Dawn-Breakers preserve the texture of those last months: the upper room where the lessons were given; the close circle of students who attended; the increasing emphasis, in Siyyid Káẓim’s own discourse, on the nearness of the appointed hour.

He was speaking less, the chronicle records, of the doctrines he had himself developed and more of what was to come. He turned aside the questions that had occupied earlier years and turned the students’ attention to the future. I am, in this world, he told one of them, but a leaf which has fallen to the ground; the tree itself is yet to bloom.

He spoke openly of his own death. He spoke openly of the appearance, soon, of the Manifestation. He told the students that the time of waiting was ending and that the time of seeking had begun.

Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú’í — the eldest and most distinguished of the students, who would in less than a year become the first Letter of the Living — was sent in the closing weeks on a particular errand to Tihrán. The errand, the chronicle records, was a covering business; the deeper purpose was to prepare him for what was coming. Siyyid Káẓim wished his principal student to be at a distance from Karbilá when the end arrived, so that the death itself should not bind him to the school.

The death came on January 31, 1844. Siyyid Káẓim died in his own house, surrounded by his closest students. The funeral prayers were said by them.

Several days after the burial the students gathered, in mourning and in confusion, for guidance about what to do next. The chronicle preserves the counsel that the older disciples drew from the late teacher’s own last words:

Scatter far and wide, set out from your homes, search Him out, and rest not until you have found Him.

The students obeyed. Mullá Ḥusayn returned from Tihrán and joined the search. He went south, with his brother and his nephew, toward Shíráz, fasting forty days at the small mosque on the way.

On the evening of May 22, 1844 — fewer than four months after Siyyid Káẓim’s death — Mullá Ḥusayn met, in the streets of Shíráz, the Young Man whose presence answered the search his master had sent him on.

The work of Siyyid Káẓim, in that meeting, was complete.

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