The Jailer Who Changed His Heart

A retelling for children, based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

High in the cold mountains, on the very edge of the country, there stood an old stone fortress called Máh-Kú. Its thick walls looked out over a lonely valley, and below it sat a small village. It was the kind of place you sent someone when you wanted the whole world to forget about them.

That is exactly why a powerful man in the government chose it. He was worried — frightened, even — of a young Prisoner whose name was on everyone's lips. The man hoped that if he locked the Báb away somewhere distant and freezing and far from any city, people would slowly stop listening, and all the love and excitement around Him would fade away like a fire with no more wood.

So the Báb was brought to Máh-Kú and shut inside. The man in charge of the fortress was a stern warden named 'Alí Khán, and his orders were as strict as orders could be. Keep the Prisoner alone. Let no visitors in. Turn the villagers away. Make sure nobody so much as comes near.

And for a while, that is just what 'Alí Khán did. The Báb was kept by Himself in an upper room. People who came hoping to see Him were sent back down the mountain. The villagers were warned to stay away. The warden did his job, and the heavy doors stayed shut.

Then something happened to 'Alí Khán — something he had not expected at all.

We are not told everything about it. The one who wrote this story down, Shoghi Effendi, says only that the warden had a strange vision. He does not tell us what 'Alí Khán saw. He tells us only what it did to him. After that morning, the stern jailer was a different man. He found he simply could not look at his Prisoner in the same hard way ever again.

'Alí Khán felt so ashamed of how he had been acting that he began to gentle his rules, one by one, as a way of making up for the way he had behaved before. The man who had been sent to be the strictest of guards started, quietly, to loosen his grip.

Word of this drifted down the mountain to the village. And the people who had been kept away for so long began to climb up.

They did not come to hear a speech, because the Báb was not giving any. They were not asking for anything to be explained. They came for one simple reason — they only wanted to see His face. Shoghi Effendi puts it in a way that is hard to forget:

Their first act every morning was to seek a place where they could catch a glimpse of His face.

Imagine it. Every single morning, before doing anything else, the villagers of Máh-Kú would find a spot where they could look up and catch sight of the One in the high room. Little by little, that lonely valley filled with a quiet, wondering kind of love that none of the important people had planned for or wanted.

When the news of all this reached the powerful men far away, they did the only thing they knew how to do. They moved the Báb again — to another fortress even farther off and even harder to reach.

But by then the lesson of Máh-Kú had already been taught, and it is a lesson worth carrying with you. You cannot lock goodness away behind stone walls. You cannot keep light shut up in the dark. The man sent to be the hardest jailer of all had his own heart softened — and a whole village discovered that the One they had been told to ignore was the very One they most longed to see.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Warden of Máh-Kú: 'Alí Khán's Change of Heart".

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/