The Trumpet-Blast at Badasht: Ṭáhirih's Unveiling

In the summer of 1848, in the hamlet of Badasht in northern Persia, a small conference was held that would mark the formal break of the Bábí community with Islamic law. Bahá’u’lláh had rented three gardens for the occasion. He kept one for Himself; He assigned the second to Quddús, and the third to the poet and theologian Ṭáhirih.

At the heart of the gathering, Shoghi Effendi recounts in God Passes By, was an event so unexpected that some of those present could not bear it. Ṭáhirih — the embodiment of chastity and the incarnation of the holy Fáṭimih, in Shoghi Effendi’s phrase — appeared before the assembled disciples adorned yet unveiled.

The act was not impulsive. By prearrangement with Bahá’u’lláh, Quddús had positioned himself as the spokesman for caution, so that the alarm of the more conservative friends could be aired and met. Ṭáhirih now stood before them, in the unveiled face of the new Dispensation, and tore through her fiery words the veils guarding the sanctity of the ordinances of Islám.

The reaction was immediate. Fear, anger, bewilderment, swept their inmost souls. One man — ‘Abdu’l-Kháliq-i-Iṣfahání — was so overwhelmed that he turned a knife on himself. Quddús, mute with arranged fury, sat as though about to strike her down. The room trembled at what it was witnessing.

Ṭáhirih did not retreat. She delivered, in language patterned on the Qur’án itself, what Shoghi Effendi calls a fervid and eloquent appeal. Then she pronounced the words that have echoed through Bahá’í history:

I am the Word which the Qá’im is to utter, the Word which shall put to flight the chiefs and nobles of the earth!

Shoghi Effendi reads the moment as the trumpet-blast announcing the formal extinction of the old, and the inauguration of the new Dispensation. Modest in setting, narrow in numbers, the act nevertheless completed what could not be undone. The break with the old religious order was now declared in the open. From that day forward the Bábí community moved as a body bearing a new law.

Ṭáhirih would be martyred four years later, in 1852, with the same unveiled courage that had carried her through the gardens of Badasht.

Paraphrased from God Passes By (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1944), with two quoted sentences from Ṭáhirih and from Shoghi Effendi's narration; 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/