The Fort at Khájih: Vaḥíd's Defense at Nayríz

Nabíl’s *Dawn-Breakers* devotes a chapter to the events at Nayríz in 1850. The chapter follows in the chronicle the long account of Siyyid Yaḥyá’s recognition of the Báb at Shíráz; it records the further steps of the same biography to its conclusion.

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Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known by the title the Báb had given him, *Vaḥíd,* the One — had returned from his audience with the Báb a transformed man. He had begun to teach openly. He had gone first to Yazd, where his preaching had aroused the hostility of the local authorities; he had moved on to the city of Nayríz in the province of Fárs, where his family estates lay and where his moral authority was great.

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In Nayríz he was received as the master his upbringing and station gave him every right to be. He gathered the believers into the great mosque of the city. He addressed the population from its pulpit. Some of the most prominent families of the district declared their faith.

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The governor of Nayríz, alarmed by the rapid growth of the new community, appealed to the governor of Fárs at Shíráz. A detachment of troops was dispatched. Vaḥíd, recognising that to fight in the streets of the city would expose its inhabitants to general slaughter, withdrew with his followers to a small fort at Khájih, in the rocky hills outside the city. The Bábís of Nayríz numbered, in the days of the withdrawal, somewhat above seventy.

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The siege of the fort at Khájih lasted, Nabíl records, several months. The defenders sortied repeatedly against the besieging army. They inflicted heavy losses. Their position, however, worsened with each week — the small fort had no water source, the supplies dwindled, and the besieging forces grew with each fresh detachment.

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The chronicle preserves the saying Vaḥíd repeated to his followers in the fort:

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> My disciples are nearer and dearer to me than mine own kin.

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He spoke also, in the closing days of the siege, of his foreknowledge that the defense would not succeed in worldly terms — but that the Cause for which they fought would not, by their fall, fall.

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The end came by deception. The commander of the besieging forces sent into the fort a copy of the Qur’án with an inscription sworn upon it: that if Vaḥíd would surrender, his followers would be spared and he himself dismissed in honour. Vaḥíd recognised the deception in the offer. He nevertheless agreed to it. He went out, into the camp of the besiegers, under the conditions of the oath.

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The oath was at once broken. The defenders were massacred. Vaḥíd himself was treated with great cruelty: he was bound behind a horse and dragged through the streets of Nayríz until he died. The chronicle preserves the names of the principal men involved in the betrayal; the chronicle also preserves the names of the fallen.

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The chapter closes with one of Nabíl’s characteristic observations. The defense at Nayríz, in the worldly record, ended in disaster. In the spiritual record — the only record the chronicle is finally interested in keeping — it ended in the seal of a man’s testimony to what he had seen in the room at Shíráz.

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