A Candle Burned to the Wick: Nabíl-i-Zarandí

A retelling based on Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.

Among the many believers whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembered in Memorials of the Faithful, there is one whose whole life reads like a single long act of renunciation — a man who, once he had given himself to the Cause, kept giving, year after year, until there was nothing of himself left to give. He is the historian Nabíl, Nabíl-i-Zarandí, and the Master's portrait of him is the portrait of a candle that burned all the way down to the wick.

It began, as such lives often begin, with a leaving. While he was still young — "in the flower of youth," the Master says — Nabíl bade farewell to his family in the town of Zarand and went out to teach the Faith and to seek the One his heart had set itself upon. That farewell was the first of his renunciations, and in a sense it set the pattern of all the rest: he was forever afterward a man on the road, a man who had let go of the settled comforts of home for the sake of a love that would not let him rest.

His seeking was not easy, and it was not quickly rewarded. He came looking for Bahá'u'lláh and could not find Him, for at that time Bahá'u'lláh had withdrawn into the mountains of Kurdistán and was living entirely alone in a cave at Sar-Galú, with "no companion, no friend, no listening soul." All news of Him was cut off; the little community of believers in 'Iráq had nearly gone dark, its flame almost out. Nabíl found the believers few and dispirited, and in bitter grief he had to withdraw and wait. Only when the Blessed Beauty returned at last from Kurdistán and made His way to Baghdád did Nabíl's long waiting end — and then, the Master says, there was "boundless joy," and Nabíl hastened into the presence of his Lord and became the recipient of great bestowals. He was, in those days in Baghdád, a man transformed: a gifted poet with an eloquent tongue, "a man of mettle, and on fire with passionate love," who spent his hours writing odes to celebrate the praises of God.

What is striking is that even after he had found the One he sought, the road did not end. Nabíl's renunciation was not a single heroic gesture but a way of life sustained across decades, and it asked of him an endless willingness to go where he was sent and to let go of wherever he was. He travelled to Karbilá and back, to Persia and back, to Kirmánsh-áh and back, and "on every journey was enabled to render a service." When Bahá'u'lláh and His family were exiled from Baghdád toward Constantinople, Nabíl did not stay behind in safety. He put on the rough dress of a dervish and set out on foot, catching up with the convoy along the road — a learned and gifted man making himself a wanderer, owning nothing, claiming nothing, that he might not be parted from his Lord.

From Constantinople he was directed back to Persia, to carry the news of all that had happened to the believers in its cities and villages, and then, in the year eighty, to hurry to Adrianople and enter the presence of Bahá'u'lláh once more. The Master records the cry on his lips as he went — "Lord, Lord, here am I!" — the cry of a soul that wanted nothing for itself but to be wholly at the disposal of the One it loved. And there in Adrianople he "drank of the red wine of allegiance and homage," and was sent out again, to travel everywhere and in every region to raise the call that the Sun of Truth had risen. "He was truly on fire," the Master writes, "driven by restive love." He flamed like a torch in every gathering; he was the star of every assemblage; to all who came he held out the intoxicating cup of the glad tidings.

His devotion cost him real hardship, and he did not flinch from the cost. When he tried, in disguise, to reach Bahá'u'lláh at the fortress of 'Akká during the years of the harshest restrictions, he was betrayed at the gate and expelled. Despairing, he withdrew — first to Safád, then to Haifa, where he made his home in a cave on Mount Carmel and lived "apart from friend and stranger alike," lamenting night and day, chanting prayers, a recluse waiting for the doors to open. Here is renunciation in one of its hardest forms: not the drama of the battlefield but the long, patient endurance of exile and waiting, alone in a cave on a mountainside, with nothing to sustain him but his certainty and his longing.

And when at last the gates were flung wide and Bahá'u'lláh issued forth from the prison-city, Nabíl hastened to Him with a joyful heart and gave himself, in his final years, more completely than ever. Now, the Master says, "he used himself up like a candle, burning away with the love of God." Day and night he sang the praises of the Beloved of both worlds; almost daily he was admitted into the presence of the Manifestation; and from those lips he heard, the Master tells us, marvellous things, and was shown the lights of Paradise. The poet who had left his family in youth had, at the close of his life, won his dearest wish: to spend his every remaining hour in nearness to his Lord.

There was, for Nabíl, one renunciation still to come — the hardest of all, and one he did not choose. When Bahá'u'lláh ascended, the loss undid him. "Utterly cast down, hopeless at being separated" from the One who had been the whole meaning of his life, fevered and weeping, he could endure the fire of that separation no longer. He had given everything else away long ago; now he could not bear to keep even his own grief. And so, the Master records with tenderness, he "became king of the cohorts of love," and gave up his life — released, at the last, from his despair, and no longer shut away from the One he had followed across a lifetime of roads.

'Abdu'l-Bahá's summary of him is the summary of a life held back from nothing. "Throughout all his life," He writes, "from earliest youth till he was feeble and old, he spent his time serving and worshiping the Lord. He bore hardships, he lived through misfortunes, he suffered afflictions." He kept no part of himself in reserve, set nothing aside for his own ease, declined no journey and no exile. He was, from first to last, a candle — and a candle gives its light only by consuming itself.

This is the loftiness the Feast of 'Alá' sets before us. The world prizes the life that accumulates: that gathers comforts, secures a name, holds something back against hard times. Nabíl's life accumulated nothing. He let go of his home in youth and never reclaimed it; he made himself a dervish, a wanderer, a recluse, an exile, all for love; and he poured himself out, day by day and year by year, until the flame reached the end of the wick. He was lofty not because he rose, but because he gave — without measure, without remainder, to the very end.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1915). *Memorials of the Faithful*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/memorials-faithful/