The Jailer Who Changed His Heart

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

Máh-Kú was a fortress with four towers, high on a mountain in the far north-west of Persia, near the borders of two other empires. In 1847 the government sent the Báb there as a prisoner. The Grand Vizir, the Sháh's chief minister, expected that in such a faraway place the Báb's hopes would come to nothing.

The warden of the fortress, 'Alí Khán, was given very strict orders. For the first two weeks nobody was allowed to see the Báb except His secretary and His secretary's brother. The Báb Himself later wrote that His room, made of sun-baked bricks, did not even have a door, and that at night He did not have a lamp.

The people who lived near the fortress were proud and unruly. But little by little they were won over by the Báb's gentleness, His modesty and His good advice, and they came to love Him. The warden scolded them, and messages came from the capital threatening punishment, but they kept coming. Shoghi Effendi writes:

Their first act every morning ... was to seek a place where they could catch a glimpse of His face, and beseech from afar His benediction upon their daily work.

That means that every morning, before they started work, they looked for a place where they could see Him and ask His blessing on their day. When two of them had a quarrel, they went to the foot of the fortress, looked up toward His room, said His name, and promised each other to tell the truth.

Then 'Alí Khán himself had a strange vision. Shoghi Effendi does not tell us what he saw, only what it did to him. The warden felt so ashamed of the way he had been acting that he made his rules gentler, to make up for how he had behaved before.

After that, more and more visitors were let in at the gates. One of them was Mullá Ḥusayn, who had walked all the way from the city of Mashhad, in the far east of Persia, and was able to celebrate the New Year festival of Naw-Rúz with the Báb.

But spies were watching 'Alí Khán, and they told the Grand Vizir what was happening. He ordered the Báb moved to another fortress, called Chihríq. The warden there, Yaḥyá Khán, began by being very harsh. In the end, Shoghi Effendi tells us, he too was won over by his Prisoner.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Warden of Máh-Kú".

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