Chased Through the Streets of Tihrán

In 1852 Bahá’u’lláh was imprisoned in Tihrán, the Bábís were ferociously persecuted, His house was pillaged, and His family was reduced from opulence to penury. One day, while in Europe, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá recalled the sufferings of those bleak times:

“Detachment does not imply lack of means; it is marked by the freedom of the heart. In Tihran, we possessed everything at a nightfall, and on the morrow we were shorn of it all, to the extent that we had no food to eat. I was hungry, but there was no bread to be had. My mother poured some flour into the palm of my hand and I ate that instead of bread. Yet, we were contented.”

And again:

“At that time of dire calamities and attacks mounted by the enemies I was a child of nine. They threw so many stones into our house that the courtyard was crammed with them . . . Mother took us for safety to another quarter, and rented a house in a back alley where she kept us indoors and looked after us. But one day our means of subsistence were barely adequate, and mother told me to go to my aunt's house, and ask her to find us a few qirans . . . I went and my aunt did what she could for us. She tied a five-qiran piece in a handkerchief and gave it to me. On my way home someone recognized me and shouted: ‘Here is a Babi’; whereupon the children in the street chased me. I found refuge in the entrance to a house . . . There I stayed until nightfall, and when I came out, I was once again pursued by the children who kept yelling at me and pelted me with stones . . . When I reached home I was exhausted. Mother wanted to know what had happened to me. I could not utter a word and collapsed.”

(Nine in the reckoning of the lunar year; the qiran was an Iranian silver coin of the period.)

Source: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Centre of the Covenant (H. M. Balyuzi), pp. 9–10.

Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: bullying).

Various. *bahaistories.com archive*. https://bahaistories.com/subject/bullying