Memorial of Pahlaván Riḍá

Among the believers of Yazd celebrated by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Memorials of the Faithful was Pahlaván Riḍá, a man whose ordinary life before the Cause had been the life of a champion wrestler. The title Pahlaván — strong man or champion — was the recognition his own city had given him. He was, by common Yazdí reckoning, the strongest man of his generation in the town.

Pahlaván Riḍá heard of the Cause of God when the new teachings reached Yazd in the years of Bahá'u'lláh's exile. The testimony of the Yazdí believers — most of them ordinary townsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, none of them the social peers of the celebrated wrestler — had its effect. He sought out the believers, asked his questions, and arrived at a settled conviction.

The Master records that the conversion was complete. The wrestler did not become a different man. He became the same man pointed in a different direction. The whole great frame of his physical strength, the celebrated discipline of his body, the proven courage of the wrestling ring, were turned to the single service of the Cause. He took up the visible defence of the small Yazdí community in a city where, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Bahá'ís were under periodic violent attack.

When mobs assembled to threaten the believers' homes, Pahlaván Riḍá was in the front of the defending group. When the believers needed safe escort across the dangerous districts of the city, he was the escort. When the small gatherings of the friends needed a guard at the door, he was the guard. The threatening of his very name was sufficient to deter most assailants. The town had learned not to challenge him in the wrestling ring; it would not challenge him at the door of a Bahá'í gathering.

The Master adds that Pahlaván Riḍá's spiritual qualities matched the physical. He was generous, manly, with a fine nature. The wrestler's old vices — the swagger, the temper, the fondness for the wrestling-ring's small worldly glories — had fallen away. What remained was the strength itself, purified, and laid at the door of the Cause.

He was, in the years of the Yazdí persecutions, eventually arrested. The records of his interrogation indicate that he did not deny the Faith. He bore his trial with the same calm he had borne the contests of his earlier life. He was released after a period of imprisonment and continued his service among the Yazdí friends.

He died in old age, in his own city, surrounded by the believers whose lives he had so often physically guarded. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Memorial preserves the wrestler whose strength, by the grace of God, became the strength of the small Yazdí community.

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/