The Trusted Messenger

A retelling for children, based on Bahá'í Chronicles, "Mírzá Muhammad-‘Alíy-i-Qazvíní."

In the city of Qazvin, in Persia, there lived a young man named Mírzá Muhammad-‘Alí. He came from a famous family. His father, Mullá ‘Abdu’l-Vahháb, was a mujtahid — one of the most respected religious teachers in the whole city. People came from far and wide to ask his father questions and to listen to him speak.

So you might think young Muhammad-‘Alí had everything already figured out. But there was a question burning in his heart that all the learning in Qazvin could not answer. It was the biggest question of all: When would the Promised One come?

For hundreds of years, people had been waiting and hoping for a great Messenger of God — One who had been promised long ago, who would come and change the whole world. Many people only talked about Him. But Muhammad-‘Alí was not the kind of person who only talked. He truly meant to find Him.

He was not searching alone. He had a cousin named Táhirih — who was also his sister-in-law — and she was as brilliant and brave as anyone he knew. Together, far from home in the city of Karbala, the two of them studied and searched and longed for the same thing. They were sure, deep down, that the Promised One was near. They could almost feel it.

Then the wonderful news came: the Promised One had appeared. He was called the Báb. And Muhammad-‘Alí was given an honor so great that there were only a handful of people in all the world who shared it. He became one of the very first to recognize and follow the Báb — one of a small group later known as the Letters of the Living. He was the sixteenth of them.

Now, here is the part that shows just how much Táhirih trusted her cousin.

Táhirih could not go to the Promised One herself just then. But she had words in her heart that she longed for Him to hear. So she wrote them down, sealed the letter shut, and placed it into Muhammad-‘Alí's hands. She also gave him a message to speak out loud — words meant only for the One they had both been seeking for so long.

Think about that. Of all the people she might have chosen, she trusted him to carry her sealed letter and her spoken message safely to the Promised One. That is the kind of trust you only give to someone whose heart is true and whose word can be counted on. Muhammad-‘Alí carried it faithfully, exactly as a trusted messenger should.

In the days that followed, Muhammad-‘Alí did not hide quietly at home, even when following the Báb became dangerous. He stood up for what he believed. He was there at a gathering called Badasht, where the early believers came together at an important moment in their young faith. And when other believers gathered to defend themselves at a place called Shaykh Tabarsí, he was among them. He gave his life there, faithful to the very end, never turning back from the One he had searched so long to find.

Some people spend their whole lives only wondering about the things that matter most. Muhammad-‘Alí did something braver. He searched until he found the truth, he kept faith with the people who trusted him, and he stayed loyal no matter what it cost. A promise kept and a trust honored — those are treasures that outlast a person's whole life.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "Mírzá Muhammad-‘Alíy-i-Qazvíní".

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/mirza-muhammad-ali-qazvini/