Badí': The Pride of Martyrs

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.

From His prison in 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh did an astonishing thing. Though He was a captive of two empires, watched and walled in, He addressed Himself to the kings and rulers of the earth — and to one of them, Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia who had shed so much of the blood of the believers, He revealed a long and weighty Tablet, calling him to justice and to God.

But a Tablet shut inside a prison helps no one. It had to be carried, by hand, all the way from 'Akká into the heart of Persia, and placed before the Sháh himself. Whoever carried it would be walking, knowingly, toward almost certain death.

A youth stepped forward to ask for that very honour.

His name was Áqá Buzurg, but history would remember him by the name Bahá'u'lláh gave him: Badí' — "the Wonderful." He was about seventeen years old. He had recently found Bahá'u'lláh, and the meeting had set his whole soul on fire; the boy who had been restless and unsettled became, in a single transformation, calm, radiant, and utterly fearless.

When he learned that a bearer was needed for the Tablet to the Sháh, Badí' begged for the task as others might beg for a treasure. It was given to him.

And so he set out — a teenager, alone, on foot — to cross the mountains and deserts between 'Akká and Tihrán, a journey of months. He travelled mostly by night and kept apart from the other believers along the way, so as not to endanger them. He carried the Tablet hidden on his person and a heart that had already let go of everything the world could take from him.

When at last he reached the place where the Sháh was encamped for the summer, Badí' did not skulk or scheme. He climbed to a high spot in plain view, near the royal tents, and waited with perfect composure for the king to pass. Then he called out that he had brought a letter from a great Cause, and asked that it be delivered to the Sháh. His bearing was so dignified, so unafraid, that he was noticed at once. The Tablet was taken from him and, in time, reached the king.

Then the questioning began — and with it, the cruelty.

They wanted names. They wanted him to betray other believers, to recant, to say the Cause meant nothing to him. Badí' would do none of it. For three days he was tortured. They pressed heated bricks and branding-irons against his body. A photograph was even taken of him as he sat among his tormentors — and the most extraordinary thing about that picture, remembered ever after, is the look on his face. He is not cringing. He is serene. Some who saw him said he seemed almost to be smiling, as though the pain could not reach the place where he truly lived.

When he would still not yield, they killed him, and hid his body, and thought that was the end of it.

It was not the end. From 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh poured out His love upon the memory of that boy. He named him "the Pride of Martyrs." He revealed Tablets in his honour. And for three years afterward, the anniversary of Badí''s death was kept and commemorated, so that a seventeen-year-old who had carried a letter on foot across an empire would never be forgotten.

What makes Badí' shine across the years is not how he died but the spirit in which he lived those last months — light, free, afraid of nothing, because he had already given his whole heart away and kept nothing back for himself. He shows us that courage is not the absence of danger. It is what love looks like when it has stopped counting the cost.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

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