The Warden of Máh-Kú: 'Alí Khán's Change of Heart

In the summer of 1847 the Báb was transferred from Tabríz to the remote fortress of Máh-Kú, in the Kurdish mountains on the Russo-Persian frontier. The Grand Vizier had calculated that distance and isolation would cool the rising influence of the young Prisoner. The warden, ‘Alí Khán, was instructed to maintain the strictest possible confinement.

Shoghi Effendi takes up the story in God Passes By. For a time the orders were obeyed. The Báb was held alone in a chamber of the fortress; visitors were turned away; the villagers below were warned off.

Then something happened to ‘Alí Khán. Shoghi Effendi notes that the warden experienced a strange vision. He does not tell us the contents of it; he tells us only the result. From that morning, ‘Alí Khán began to relax the discipline he had been told to enforce. He could not, the chronicle says, look at his Prisoner the same way.

'Alí Khán felt such mortification that he was impelled to relax the severity of his discipline, as an atonement for his past behavior.

Word travelled down the mountain. The villagers of Máh-Kú, who had been kept at a distance by the warden’s rules, now began to come up. They did not come for sermons; the Báb was not preaching. They came simply for a sight of the face of the One in the upper room.

Shoghi Effendi’s sentence is striking:

Their first act every morning was to seek a place where they could catch a glimpse of His face.

The valley filled, slowly, with a hush of reverence the local clergy had not foreseen. When the Grand Vizier’s agents reported this back to Tihrán, the response was predictable. The Báb was moved further away — to the still more remote fortress of Chihríq — in April 1848.

But the lesson of Máh-Kú had been delivered, and Shoghi Effendi sets it down as one of the recurring patterns of the Bábí period: the spiritual power of the Manifestation cannot be confined by walls, and even the men sent to guard Him will, in time, be disarmed by Him.

Paraphrased from God Passes By (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1944), pages 16-20; see original for full text.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/