The Third Letter: Dayyán

A retelling based on God Passes By, Shoghi Effendi's authoritative history of the Faith's first century. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles and words preserved in that history.

In the years when the Faith of the Báb was sweeping across Persia, the men who embraced it were not, for the most part, men with much to lose. They were village mullás and seminarians, tradesmen and youths. But here and there the new Cause reached into the very upper rooms of the state, and laid its claim upon someone who had everything the world prizes. One such man was Mírzá Asadu'lláh of Khúy.

He was, by every outward measure, a success. He was a man of deep learning, versed in the religious sciences of his age; he had command of several languages; and he held a position of trust in the service of the government — the kind of post that men spend whole lives intriguing to reach. He moved among the powerful. He had standing, security, and the respect that learning and rank together confer. The road of his life ran smoothly upward.

Then word of the Báb reached him, and the smooth road ended. Mírzá Asadu'lláh investigated the claim of the imprisoned Prophet of Shíráz, and what he found overturned everything. He recognized the Báb. And recognition, for a man in his position, was not a private adjustment of opinion that could be kept quietly to oneself. It meant aligning his life with a movement that the throne and the clergy had already marked for destruction — a movement whose followers were being hunted, imprisoned, and put to the sword across the land. To accept the Báb was to lay down, freely and at once, the rank and the safety he had spent his life acquiring.

He laid them down. And the Báb, recognizing the calibre of the soul that had come to Him, raised him up in another order entirely. The Báb conferred on him the title Dayyán — and singled him out, before all others, with a designation that reached past the Báb's own ministry into the future. He named him "the Third Letter to believe in Him Whom God shall make manifest."

That phrase is the heart of the story. Throughout His Writings the Báb spoke, again and again, of One greater than Himself who was to come after Him — "Him Whom God shall make manifest" — and He bent the whole purpose of His own Dispensation toward preparing souls to recognize that Promised One when He should appear. To be named, by the Báb Himself, among the first who would believe in that One was to be entrusted with a covenant. It bound Dayyán not merely to the Faith he could see, but to a loftier Faith not yet revealed. It asked him to keep faith with a future.

He kept it. After the Báb's martyrdom the Bábí community passed through years of darkness and confusion, scattered and leaderless, many of its brightest lights extinguished. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for a learned man of standing to drift quietly back into the life he had left, to let the dangerous chapter close. Dayyán did not. He held to what the Báb had told him, and he waited and watched for the One the Báb had promised.

When at last Bahá'u'lláh, exiled to Baghdád, began to let the first intimations of His station be known, Dayyán did exactly what the title laid upon him to do: he set out to find Him. He undertook the journey to Baghdád, came into the presence of Bahá'u'lláh, and recognized in Him the very One of whom the Báb had spoken — "Him Whom God shall make manifest." The covenant of the title was kept. The Third Letter had believed.

And for that belief, as for so many of the noblest souls of that age, Dayyán gave his life. He fell at length among the Faith's martyrs, having renounced, in the end, not only his rank and his learning but his life itself for the Cause he had recognized.

This is what the Feast of 'Alá' — Loftiness — sets before us. The world has its ladder, and Dayyán had climbed high on it: position, knowledge, the trust of kings. Loftiness, in the spiritual sense, is the freedom to step off that ladder entirely the moment a higher summons is heard — to hold every earthly attainment loosely enough that it can be released in an instant for the love of God. Dayyán was lofty not because of how high he had risen in the state, but because of how freely he let it all fall away, and how faithfully he kept a covenant that reached beyond his own lifetime.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/