Memorial of Sakínih Sulṭán (the Mother of the Martyrs)

Among the women remembered in *Memorials of the Faithful* is Sakínih Sulṭán, the mother of the celebrated Iṣfahán martyrs — the *King of Martyrs* (Mírzá Muḥammad-Ḥasan) and the *Beloved of Martyrs* (Mírzá Muḥammad-Ḥusayn) — who together were put to death in Iṣfáhán in 1879 at the instigation of the Iṣfáhání clerics.

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Sakínih Sulṭán was a believer in her own right. She had embraced the Cause as a young woman, before the births of her sons. She raised them in a household where the Writings were read aloud, where the daily prayer was performed, where the visiting believers were welcomed. The two sons grew up in that household and became, by their own conviction, two of the most celebrated young teachers and merchants of the Iṣfáhání community.

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Their public reputation as Bahá'ís brought, in the year 1879, the persecution that ended in their martyrdom. The *Memorials of the Faithful* devotes several chapters to the sons' execution. The chapter on Sakínih Sulṭán is the chapter of the mother who survived them and who, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's portrait, transformed the loss into a ground of teaching.

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The Master records that her conduct under the news of her sons' deaths was carried with a steadiness that astonished the witnessing community. She did not curse the executioners. She did not protest the injustice. She accepted, as part of the same faith her sons had borne, the cost of the bearing. The witness of her composure was, in the days following the martyrdom, one of the Iṣfáhání community's principal testimonies of the spiritual reality of the Cause.

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The years that followed she spent in the steady quiet teaching of the Cause among the Iṣfáhání women. She became the unofficial centre of the women's gatherings of the Iṣfáhání community. She taught the Writings to those who came to her. She received, as the years passed, an increasing number of female inquirers who sought her out specifically because of her standing as the *mother of the martyrs.*

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She lived to a great age. The Master records that her last years were spent in the company of her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren — many of whom, born after their fathers' martyrdoms, grew up under the direct shaping of their grandmother's teaching. The Iṣfáhání Bahá'í community of the early twentieth century was, in significant measure, the community Sakínih Sulṭán had helped raise.

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The Master closes the *Memorial* with the observation that *the mother of the martyrs bore her loss as a holy gift, and her face was lit by it.* The bearing was the legacy.

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