The Shepherd's Dream

A retelling for children, based on Nabíl's Dawn-Breakers (Chapters II and III — the last days of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí).

In the city of Karbilá there lived a teacher named Siyyid Káẓim. For many years he had been teaching his students, just as his own teacher, Shaykh Aḥmad, had taught before him. All those years he had been getting them ready for one thing: to recognize the Promised One when He came.

As time went on, Siyyid Káẓim spoke about this more and more plainly. The Promised One was very near, he said, so near that his students might already be looking at Him without knowing it. And compared with the knowledge of that Promised One, he told them, his own knowledge was only a drop.

When his life was coming to an end, he told his students again and again: leave your homes, scatter far and wide, let go of the things of this world, and pray to God to guide you. He told them that Shaykh Aḥmad had once said to him that neither of them would live to see that Day, but that many of Siyyid Káẓim's students would.

Every year Siyyid Káẓim went to visit the holy shrines at Káẓimayn, near the city of Baghdád. In the last year of his life he set out as usual with some friends. On the way he stopped at a mosque to pray. When he had finished, a shepherd came up and hugged him. The shepherd said he had had a dream. In the dream, the Prophet Muḥammad had told him to wait at that very mosque, to greet Siyyid Káẓim there, and to give him a message: three days after he returned home to Karbilá, his life would end, and soon after that, the Promised One would appear.

Siyyid Káẓim smiled. He said the dream was true. His friends were very sad, but he asked them whether their love for him was not really for the sake of the Promised One, and whether they would not want him to die, if it meant the Promised One would be revealed.

He finished his journey and went home to Karbilá. That very day he fell ill, and three days later, on the last day of the year 1843, just as the shepherd's dream had said, he passed away.

His leading student, Mullá Ḥusayn, was far away at the time, on a journey his teacher had sent him on. When he came back to Karbilá, he asked the other students what their teacher's last wishes had been. Go out and search, they told him; that is what he asked of us. So why, asked Mullá Ḥusayn, are you still here?

Mullá Ḥusayn did not wait. He spent forty days praying and fasting at a mosque, and then he set off on his journey. On a spring day in 1844, just outside the gate of the city of Shíráz, he met the Báb, the very 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 days.

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/