Go and Find Him

A retelling for children, based on The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, the chapter on the mission of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí.

In the city of Karbilá, there lived a teacher named Siyyid Káẓim. For almost twenty years, students had come from far away to sit and learn from him. He was carrying on the work of his own teacher, Shaykh Aḥmad, and that work was a strange and wonderful kind of teaching. Most teachers want you to remember their words forever. Siyyid Káẓim was getting his students ready for something else entirely. He was getting them ready to recognize someone.

For he believed, with all his heart, that the Promised One the whole world had been waiting for was about to appear — not in a hundred years, not far off in the future, but soon. Very soon.

As the years passed, Siyyid Káẓim spoke of this more and more openly. He sent his most trusted students on quiet journeys to talk with other learned men. One of those students was a bright young man named Mullá Ḥusayn. When Mullá Ḥusayn won the friendship of one of the most respected scholars of the whole age, Siyyid Káẓim was so pleased that he said to him:

Arise and perform this mission, for I declare you equal to this task. The Almighty will graciously assist you.

But Siyyid Káẓim never told his students the Promised One's name. Instead, he gave them clues — small hints, dropped here and there, the way you might leave a trail for someone you trust to follow. The Promised One, he told them, came from a noble family. He was a descendant of the Prophet of God. And He was young.

Why only hints? Because Siyyid Káẓim did not want his students simply to be told the answer. He wanted them to recognize it for themselves — the way you know a friend the moment you see their face in a crowd.

Then came the day Siyyid Káẓim felt that his own life was drawing to an end.

Now, when a great teacher knows he is dying, people expect one thing above all: that he will choose someone to take his place. His students must have waited, hardly breathing, to hear who it would be.

But Siyyid Káẓim did not choose anyone to take his place. He did something that surprised them all. He gathered his students close, and instead of keeping them near him, he sent them away.

The Promised One, he told them, was not waiting in any one room or city. He had to be searched for. And so the students could not stay comfortable and together — they would have to spread out across the world and look. He told them:

Scatter far and wide, detach yourselves from all earthly things, and humbly and prayerfully beseech your Lord to sustain and guide you.

He did not pretend it would be easy. He warned them, gently and honestly, that finding the Promised One might cost them everything — even their lives. And yet he called those who would pay that price the most fortunate of all:

Well is it with every one of you who will quaff the cup of martyrdom in His path.

Soon after, Siyyid Káẓim died. And his students did exactly as he had asked. They left Karbilá and scattered out across the land, each one searching, praying, watching for the face they had been taught to know but had never seen.

Here is the wonderful part. All that scattering was not the end of the story — it was the beginning. Before long, one of those students, Mullá Ḥusayn, would knock on a door in a faraway city and meet a young Man there. And everything Siyyid Káẓim had promised would come true, all at once, like the first light of a brand-new morning.

Siyyid Káẓim's last gift to his students was not an answer handed to them. It was a question, and the courage to go and find it. Sometimes the greatest thing a teacher can do is not tell you where to go, but trust you enough to send you looking.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "Scatter Far and Wide: Siyyid Káẓim's Last Charge".

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/