The Seven Brave Friends

A retelling for children, based on The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative (trans. Shoghi Effendi). The one line in quotation marks is word-for-word from the book.

In the city of Tihrán, long ago, fourteen friends were taken away and locked up. Their only "crime" was that they believed in the Báb.

The people in charge gave them a choice. It sounded like an easy one. If they would just say they did not believe, they could go home to their families. But if they would not say it, they would die.

Seven of the friends, frightened of dying, said the words they were told to say, and they were allowed to go free. We should never feel angry at them. It takes great courage to face such a thing, and a frightened heart deserves kindness, not blame.

But the other seven would not say the words. No matter what, they would not pretend that the thing they loved most was not true.

Here is what made these seven so wonderful. They were not all the same kind of person at all. One was a rich merchant from the city of Shíráz — and he was also the Báb's own uncle, the very man who had helped raise Him when He was young. One was a gentle, much-loved dervish, a man who wandered from place to place with almost nothing of his own. One was a wise scholar who had spent his life studying and learning.

A rich man, a wandering traveler, and a scholar. In everyday life, these three might never even have met. But now they stood together in the same square, for the same beloved Faith, as if they had been brothers all along.

One by one, each of the seven was offered his life — all he had to do was give up his belief. And one by one, each of them said no.

The people watching expected to see the friends crying and afraid. But that is not what they saw. Instead, the seven seemed almost glad, shining with a quiet, happy peace, as if they were going toward something beautiful. One of them turned to the man who was about to take his life and said:

The sooner you strike off my head, the greater will be my gratitude to you.

All seven of the brave friends gave their lives that day, there in the public square.

We remember them together, and we call them the Seven Martyrs of Tihrán. We remember them because they taught the world something it finds very hard to understand: that there are some things a person can love even more than life itself. To stay true to such a love — all the way to the very end — is not losing. It is a kind of winning. The merchant, the dervish, and the scholar came into that square as strangers from different worlds, and they left this life as brothers.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Seven Who Would Not Recant".

Nabíl-i-Aʻẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers (Nabíl's Narrative)*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://reference.bahai.org/en/t/nz/DB/