Memorial of Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Muqaddas-i-Khurásání

Among the great early figures of the Bábí Cause whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembers in *Memorials of the Faithful* is Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Muqaddas-i-Khurásání — the Khurásání cleric whose recognition of the Báb in the early days of the Dispensation made him one of the first martyrs-by-suffering of the Faith.

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Mullá Ṣádiq was already, before the dawn of the Dispensation, a cleric of recognised piety in the Khurásán region. The honorific *Muqaddas* — *the Holy* — was applied to him by his own community in recognition of his ascetic discipline and his evident devotion. When the news of the Báb's declaration reached him in 1844, he investigated, was persuaded, and accepted.

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The Bábí community in Shíráz, in the early months following the Báb's declaration, conducted certain devotional acts that the Shi'a clerical authority of the city judged unlawful. Mullá Ṣádiq, with Quddús, was at the centre of one such gathering. The two were arrested. Both were sentenced to the bastinado — the public beating of the soles of the feet — and to the tearing-out of the beard, the standard public punishment for clerical infraction in Shi'a Persia.

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The sentence was carried out in the public square of Shíráz. Mullá Ṣádiq bore it without crying out. *His back bore the marks of the bastinado,* the Master records, *and his soul bore the marks of the heavenly sojourn.* He emerged from the punishment with the title *Muqaddas* — *the Holy* — now permanently affixed to his name not by the deference of his clerical colleagues but by the witness of his suffering.

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He was banished from Shíráz. He returned to Khurásán and took up the work of teaching. He suffered, in the years that followed, further imprisonments and further banishments. He was present, in a peripheral capacity, at several of the great events of the early Bábí period. He survived the Shaykh Ṭabarsí siege by the providential circumstance of having been delayed elsewhere when the body of believers gathered there.

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When the new teachings of Bahá'u'lláh came to be promulgated in the Adrianople period, Mullá Ṣádiq accepted them at once. He had been waiting for the second clarification. He transferred his loyalty to the new Centre without hesitation and continued his teaching work as a Bahá'í.

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He died, in old age, in his own province. The Master closes the *Memorial* with the observation that *his place is high among the heroes of the Dawn-Breaking, and his name shall not be forgotten while the Cause endures.*

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