Siyyid Káẓim Sends His Students Searching

A retelling for children, based on The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, Chapters II and III, on the mission of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí and the Declaration of the Báb.

In the city of Karbilá there lived a teacher named Siyyid Káẓim. For many years students came from far away to learn from him. He was carrying on the work of his own teacher, Shaykh Aḥmad: getting people ready to recognize the Promised One, whose coming he believed was very near.

Once Siyyid Káẓim needed a messenger to go to the city of Iṣfahán, to a famous scholar who had stopped speaking up for Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Káẓim. Only one student offered to go, and Siyyid Káẓim did not send him. Instead he turned to a young student named Mullá Ḥusayn and said:

Arise and perform this mission, for I declare you equal to this task. The Almighty will graciously assist you, and will crown your endeavours with success.

Mullá Ḥusayn went, and he succeeded. The great scholar wrote, in his own hand, a letter praising Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Káẓim. When it reached Karbilá, Siyyid Káẓim was so happy that he stopped his lesson and read it out to his students.

Siyyid Káẓim did not tell his students plainly who the Promised One was. When they asked about the signs of His coming, he gave them clues. The Promised One, he said, came from a noble family. He was a descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad. He was young. "You behold Him with your own eyes," he often told them, "and yet recognise Him not!"

As his life drew to a close, whenever he met his students he told them to leave their homes and go out and search:

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

He told them, too, that some of them might give their lives for the Promised One, and he called them blessed:

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

Siyyid Káẓim died at the very end of the year 1843. Not all of his students did as he had asked; some stayed behind in Karbilá. But Mullá Ḥusayn set out to search. A few months later, at the gate of the city of Shíráz, he met the Báb, the One his teacher had sent him to find.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see the story of 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/