The First to Fall

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative (trans. Shoghi Effendi). The narrative below is retold in our own words; the short line in quotation marks is verbatim from the book. Read the full text for Nabíl's complete account.

In the earliest days of the Faith, there was an Arab named Shaykh Sálih, a resident of Karbilá. He came to believe through the teaching of Ṭáhirih — the brilliant poet and the only woman among the Báb's first eighteen disciples — and her words kindled in him a devotion that would carry him all the way to the end.

When Ṭáhirih set out on her journey toward Khurásán, Shaykh Sálih went with her, one of the company drawn into her orbit. But these were dangerous years for those who had embraced the new Cause. After a prominent cleric was murdered in Karbilá, his heirs looked for someone to blame — and they fixed the charge, falsely, upon Shaykh Sálih. He was arrested, carried to Tihrán, and condemned to die.

And so it fell to this Arab convert, guided to the Faith by a woman's teaching, to become the very first believer to shed his blood on Persian soil for the Cause of God — the first of a great company of martyrs who would follow.

What struck those who saw his end was not his suffering but his gladness. He did not approach the gallows as a man dragged to a dreaded fate. He went radiant, almost eager, with a serenity that bewildered the crowd. The words Nabíl preserves from him reveal the secret of that calm — the testimony of a soul that had already let go of everything the world could threaten or take away:

I discarded the hopes and the beliefs of men from the moment I recognised Thee.

There it is, the whole of it. Once he had recognized his Lord, the opinions of men, their approval, even their power over his life, had quietly lost their hold on him. He had nothing left for fear to grip.

He is remembered, this first martyr, not for the injustice done to him — though it was great — but for the joy he carried through it. He shows us what faith looks like when it has gone all the way down: not grim endurance, but a strange, unconquerable gladness, born of having found the one thing worth more than life itself.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted line is verbatim from The Dawn-Breakers (Nabíl, trans. Shoghi Effendi). See the source for the complete account.

Nabíl-i-Aʻẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers (Nabíl's Narrative)*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://reference.bahai.org/en/t/nz/DB/