The Light That Burned Till Morning

*A retelling for children, based on **The Priceless Pearl** by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.*

1 / 14

Late at night, when the city of Haifa had gone quiet and most people were fast asleep, one small window still glowed with light. Inside that room sat Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, bent over his desk with a thick stack of pages, a dictionary close at hand, and a pen in his fingers. While the rest of the world slept, he worked.

2 / 14

He was doing something that sounds simple but was very, very hard. He was taking a great book written in one language — Persian — and turning it, word by careful word, into another language — English.

3 / 14

The book mattered more than almost any other. Long before, a believer named Nabíl had set out to write down the true story of the early days of the Faith. As a young man, Nabíl had lived through those days himself. He had met people who knew the Báb. He listened to their stories, and he wrote down what he had seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears. Bahá'u'lláh Himself had encouraged him to make this record, so that it would not be lost.

4 / 14

The book Nabíl wrote was enormous. It was full of brave and beautiful and sometimes very sad stories about the followers of the Báb — ordinary people who showed extraordinary courage. But it was written in old, flowing Persian, the way scholars wrote long ago, with poems and difficult passages woven all through it. Almost no one in the Western world could read a single page of it. All those true and precious stories were locked away, like treasure in a chest that most people had no key to open.

5 / 14

Shoghi Effendi decided that he would be the one to open it.

6 / 14

He could have asked someone else to do it. He was the Guardian, after all, with a thousand things needing his attention. But he understood how important this book was, and he took the work upon himself.

7 / 14

So this is how he did it. Every day he answered letters and cared for the work of the Faith. Then, when night came and the house grew still, he would sit down at the desk in the Master's house and begin to translate. In front of him lay Nabíl's Persian pages. Beside him were the special dictionaries he had carefully made years before, back when he was a student at Oxford. And inside his own mind he held two whole languages at once, side by side, ready to help him find exactly the right word.

8 / 14

It was slow. It was patient. A translator cannot rush, because every sentence must be true to what the writer really meant. Shoghi Effendi did not make the stories sound nicer or softer than they were. The followers of the Báb had suffered greatly, and he let their story stay strong and honest, just as it truly happened. He even wrote little notes at the bottoms of the pages, explaining things so that a reader far away in the West could understand what life had been like in Persia long ago.

9 / 14

This was not the work of a single night, or even a single year. It went on, in stretches, across several years. Letters and other duties filled his days; the translation filled the quiet hours when no one else was awake. The light in his small room kept burning, late and late, until the early morning.

10 / 14

And at last, the work was finished. In 1932 the book was published — a great volume of nearly seven hundred pages. It came to be called *The Dawn-Breakers*, and it carried the whole sweeping story, from the day the Báb first spoke in Shíráz to the brave ones who gave their lives for Him. For the very first time, people all over the English-speaking world could read it for themselves. The treasure chest was open. To this day, when people want to learn about those early heroic years, this is the book they turn to.

11 / 14

Rúḥíyyih Khánum, who knew Shoghi Effendi well, said that those years showed something quiet and beautiful about him. He did not travel for fun. He did not throw parties. He simply worked, faithfully, hour after hidden hour, giving his best to a task that no one was watching him do.

12 / 14

That is something worth remembering. The most important work in the world is not always loud or seen by a crowd. Sometimes it is one person, alone in a quiet room, doing a hard and patient thing as well as it can possibly be done — and giving the whole world a gift it will treasure for generations.

13 / 14

*This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see ["Translating the Dawn-Breakers: Shoghi Effendi's Long Nights"](/stories/pp-translating-dawn-breakers).*

14 / 14