Memorial of Ḥájí Abu'l-Ḥasan-i-Amín (the Trustee of Ḥuqúqu'lláh)

Among the small number of believers entrusted by Bahá'u'lláh with a particular institutional responsibility was Ḥájí Abu'l-Ḥasan-i-Amín — known throughout the Persian Bahá'í community simply as Ḥájí Amín, the Trustee.

His responsibility was the institution of Ḥuqúqu'lláh — the Right of God — the financial offering by which the believers, in voluntary discharge of a spiritual law, contributed a portion of their increased wealth to the central fund of the Cause. The institution had been established by Bahá'u'lláh in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Its custody had been given, by direct designation of Bahá'u'lláh, to Ḥájí Amín.

The work was the work of a fifty-year journey. Ḥájí Amín travelled, on foot and by mule, the entire breadth of the Persian provinces, year after year. He visited the small Bahá'í communities of every region. He sat with the believers privately. He explained the spiritual law of the offering. He received what they wished to give. He kept the records carefully. He carried the funds, in the discreet form of bank drafts or trusted intermediaries, to the central treasury of the Cause in 'Akká.

The Master records the consistent quality of his conduct. Through every door in Persia he was admitted, for he carried no purse of his own. The Trustee was visibly poor. He owned no property. He maintained no household beyond the modest needs of a travelling man. The funds passing through his hands — in their fifty-year accumulation, very large — never adhered to him.

This visible poverty was not asceticism for its own sake. It was the practical demonstration of the distinction between custody and ownership. The believer who carried the funds of the Cause needed to be unmistakably not the owner of those funds. Ḥájí Amín's life-condition was the public proof of the distinction.

He was twice imprisoned during his decades of travelling. The imprisonments were not because of any irregularity in his custody. They were because of the visible Bahá'í identity that the work had inevitably given him. He bore the imprisonments with the same calm with which he bore the travels. After each release he returned to the work.

The Master praises particularly his good cheer. The Trustee was not a grim accountant. He was, at every gathering of the believers, a source of warmth, of encouraging report from the other regions, of small good news carried between distant friends. His visits to the small Bahá'í communities were anticipated as occasions of refreshment as well as of duty.

He died in old age, in the road that had been his life's work. The Master closes the Memorial with the observation that his trust was not violated, his record was not soiled, his ascent was clean.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Memorials of the Faithful (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1915). Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19279.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1915). *Memorials of the Faithful*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/memorials-faithful/