The Watchmaker in the Rowing Boat

A retelling based on Nabíl-i-A'ẓam's own narrative, as quoted in Bahá'u'lláh, The King of Glory by H. M. Balyuzi, with details from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, volumes 1 and 3, by Adib Taherzadeh. Words in quotation marks are from those books.

Towards the end of His stay in Adrianople, Bahá'u'lláh sent Nabíl-i-A'ẓam to Egypt to appeal to the Khedive on behalf of seven believers whom the Persian Consul, Mírzá Ḥasan Khán, had managed to have sent to the Sudan. One day in a Cairo square people surrounded Nabíl and told him he was wanted at the Seraye. They took him instead to the Consul's house, and an official put him in chains. In prison he dreamed that Bahá'u'lláh was telling him: "Within the next eighty-one days, to thee will come some cause of rejoicing."

In time he was sent to Alexandria, to the higher prison there. Among the prisoners was Fáris, a Syrian Christian, a physician and clergyman. He tried to convert Nabíl "to the Protestant Faith." "We had long talks," Nabíl wrote, and the physician became a Bahá'í, probably, Taherzadeh writes, the first Christian to do so.

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The eighty-first day fell on Thursday, 27 August 1868. Around sunset Nabíl was on the roof of the prison when he caught sight of Áqá Muḥammad-Ibráhím in the street, escorted by a guard. He had done the catering for Bahá'u'lláh and His companions in Adrianople. Nabíl called out, and he came up.

Nabíl knew nothing of the exile. Áqá Muḥammad-Ibráhím told him that Bahá'u'lláh and the companions were being taken to 'Akká, and pointed to the ship, which could be seen from the prison. He had come ashore with a policeman to buy provisions and could not stay long. "He set my being on fire and went away," Nabíl wrote.

Fáris came in the evening and found him in tears, reciting these lines: "The Beloved is by my side and I am far away from Him; I am on the shore of the waters of proximity and yet deprived I am. O Friend! Lift me, lift me to a seat on the ship of nearness; I am helpless, I am vanquished, a prisoner am I."

"You were telling me that on the eighty-first day of your dream, you must receive some cause of rejoicing, and that today was that eighty-first day," Fáris said. "Now, on the contrary, I find you greatly disturbed."

"Truly that cause for rejoicing has come," Nabíl answered, "but alas! 'The date is on the palm-tree and our hands cannot reach it'."

When he heard that Bahá'u'lláh was on the ship, Fáris too was greatly disturbed. Had the next day not been a Friday, with the Seraye closed, he said, both of them could have got permission to board. "But still, something can be done. You write whatever you wish. I will also write."

Neither of them could sleep that night. Nabíl wrote his story and gathered all the poems he had composed in the prison. Fáris wrote of his great sorrow. "It was very touching," Nabíl recalled. Fáris put everything in one envelope and gave it to a young Christian watchmaker named Constantine, to deliver early in the morning. Nabíl gave him the names of some of the companions and told him not to hand it over until he had found one of them.

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In the morning Constantine went out, and the two prisoners watched from the roof. They heard the signal and the noise of the ship moving, saw it steaming away, and feared he had not reached it. Then the ship stopped. After a quarter of an hour it started again. They were, Nabíl wrote, "on tenterhooks, when suddenly Constantine arrived."

He handed Nabíl an envelope and a package in a handkerchief, and exclaimed, "By God! I saw the Father of Christ."

Fáris kissed his eyes and said, "Our lot was the fire of separation, yours was the bounty of gazing upon the Beloved of the World."

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The envelope and package held a Tablet, a letter from 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and a paper of almond sweets from the Purest Branch. In the Tablet Fáris was particularly honoured and assured that he would soon be released. One of the attendants had written: "Several times I have witnessed evidences of power which I can never forget. And so it was today. The ship was on the move, when we saw a boat far away. The captain stopped the ship, and this young watch-maker reached us, and called aloud my name. We went to him and he gave us your envelope. All eyes were on us and we are exiles. Yet no one questioned the action of the captain."

Constantine had come out in a rowing boat. The attendant took the envelope to Bahá'u'lláh, who read Fáris's letter aloud to those assembled in His presence. Taherzadeh gives a summary of part of that letter. It opens, "O Thou the Glory of the Most Glorious and the Exalted of the Most Exalted!" It begs Him "not to deprive me and my family, these poor ones, from beholding the glory of Thy countenance." And it turns to the ship itself: "Art Thou sailing in an ark made of wood? O how I long to be a part of that vessel, for it is blessed to be a carrier of the Lord."

Bahá'u'lláh then called the messenger to His presence and handed him the Tablet "with loving kindness and affection." Having "come face to face for a brief period with the Supreme Manifestation of God, and seen a glimpse of His glory, he left the ship overwhelmed and awestruck," Taherzadeh writes.

Fáris was released from prison three days later, as Bahá'u'lláh had promised, and he devoted his time to teaching the Cause among his own people. Nabíl, freed soon after and ordered to leave Egypt, went on to the Holy Land in pursuit of his Lord.

In a Tablet revealed soon after His arrival in 'Akká, as Taherzadeh recounts it, Bahá'u'lláh told of the letter He had received from the hand of a Christian messenger. God, He said, had transformed the heart of its writer and created him anew, and such a creation is greater in the sight of God than the creation of earth and heaven.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh, The King of Glory by H. M. Balyuzi and The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, volume 3, by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1983). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 3*. George Ronald.