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:*

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“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.”

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And again:

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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

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