The Epistle Recalls the Síyáh-Chál

In the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, in the course of addressing the subject of the persecutions endured by the followers of God, Bahá'u'lláh briefly recalls the most significant of the persecutions endured by Himself — the four months He spent in the underground dungeon of the Síyáh-Chál in Tihrán in the late summer and autumn of 1852.

The historical setting was the aftermath of the abortive attempt by two young Bábí believers, acting without the sanction of the Bábí community as a whole, on the life of Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh in August 1852. The attempt had failed. The Persian government, in retaliation, launched a wave of arrests against the wider Bábí community. Bahá'u'lláh, then known by His given name Mírzá Ḥusayn-'Alí of Núr, was identified as a prominent member of the community and arrested.

He was conveyed to the Síyáh-Chál — the Black Pit — a former underground cistern that had been converted into a dungeon for political prisoners. The conditions of confinement were severe. The cell was deep underground, without natural light. Heavy chains were placed on the prisoners. The food and water were minimal. Disease was constant.

Bahá'u'lláh, in the Epistle, recalls the conditions without elaboration. He notes the chains. He notes the darkness. He notes the cohabitation with the non-political criminals who shared the dungeon and the ordinary nineteenth-century horrors of vermin and stench.

What He emphasises, however, is not the suffering. It is the spiritual event. In that darksome pit My soul rose to the heights and the Most Great Spirit descended. The Síyáh-Chál was, in Bahá'u'lláh's own retrospective testimony, the place of the first manifest intimations of His Revelation. The Spirit of God descended on Him there, in the depths of the dungeon, and made known to Him the mission He would in time discharge openly.

The Tablet preserves a brief description of the experience. He recounts the sensation of a stream of words descending upon Him from above; of the inner quickening that He felt distinctly, even as His outward body lay chained in the dungeon; of the sense of having been called, definitively, to the work that would constitute the rest of His life.

The recollection in the Epistle is brief — perhaps a single page in the printed English text. But it is among the most consequential autobiographical passages in the entire body of Bahá'u'lláh's Writings. It identifies, in His own voice, the specific moment at which the Bahá'í Dispensation was inaugurated in the inner reality of its Founder, even though the public proclamation would be delayed by another decade for the conditions of its declaration to mature.

The Síyáh-Chál was demolished by the Persian government in the early twentieth century. The site was, in the late twentieth century, identified by the Bahá'í community of Iran. It is preserved in the institutional memory as the literal cradle of the Revelation that, four decades after the events recounted in the Epistle, would by the Master's journey of 1912 be reaching the cities of the West.

Source: Bahá'u'lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1891). Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1891). *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/epistle-son-wolf/