A Promise to Be Kept: Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's eyewitness chronicle of the early days of the Faith, as translated by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Among the early companions of the Báb was a man of pure heart named Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí. He had attached himself to the Cause in its first days, and his devotion was of the deep and quiet kind that does not seek notice. For a time he lived in the holy city of Karbilá, in Iraq — one of the great centres of pilgrimage and learning, a place thronged with the devout, where men came to pray at the shrines and to wait for the One their traditions had promised would appear.

It was there, the narrative recounts, that the Báb conferred upon him an extraordinary gift — and, with it, an extraordinary discipline. The Báb made known to Shaykh Ḥasan that he was destined to live to see the Day of the Promised One; that he would behold, with his own eyes, "Him Whom God shall make manifest" — the very One whose advent the Báb had come to herald and to prepare the way for. But the gift came wrapped in a charge. Shaykh Ḥasan was to keep this knowledge hidden. He was not to speak of it, not to publish what he had been told, not to point men toward it before its time. He was to wait.

Consider what that asked of him. He had been told the most thrilling thing a believing heart could be told — that the Promised One of all ages was at hand, and that he himself would live to look upon Him. Every instinct of love and joy would have urged him to proclaim it from the rooftops, to gather the seekers and say, He is coming, and soon. And he was forbidden to do any of it. He had to carry the secret the way one carries a lamp through a storm, shielding it, saying nothing, letting the years go by.

So he waited. Through the long, dark interval that followed the Báb's martyrdom — years in which the Bábí community was scattered and persecuted, its hopes seemingly buried — Shaykh Ḥasan held fast to the word he had been given. He did not let the silence breed doubt. He did not conclude, as the faint-hearted might, that the promise had been empty or that the day would never come. He simply kept faith, in patience and detachment, waiting upon a future he had been assured of but could not hasten.

And the day came. While Shaykh Ḥasan was in Karbilá, Bahá'u'lláh — exiled from Persia and not yet known to the world as the One the Báb had foretold — came to that same city. The two met. And in that meeting, the long covenant of waiting was fulfilled: Shaykh Ḥasan beheld Bahá'u'lláh, and recognized in Him the fulfilment of the very promise the Báb had planted in his heart years before. He had been told he would behold "Him Whom God shall make manifest," and now, in Karbilá, he did. The lamp he had carried through all that darkness was at last set down in the light.

What is striking in the whole account is how much of Shaykh Ḥasan's faithfulness took the form of restraint. We are used to thinking of devotion as action — as teaching, building, sacrificing, doing. Here was a devotion that expressed itself chiefly in not acting: in keeping a secret, in holding still, in declining to run ahead of God's own timing. That, too, is a form of self-surrender. To possess a treasure and not flaunt it, to know a glorious thing and keep silence until the appointed hour, to renounce even the natural joy of telling — this is a detachment subtler and in some ways harder than the detachment that gives away possessions.

This is the loftiness the Feast of 'Alá' celebrates. Shaykh Ḥasan-i-Zunúzí rose above his own eagerness, above the pull of the present moment, to keep a promise that reached across years. He held his heart in readiness for a Day whose hour he could not command, and when that Day dawned, he was found waiting — empty of all but expectation, and so able to receive the One he had been promised.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/