The Last Great Tablet: The Epistle to the Son of the Wolf

A retelling based on the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, the last major Tablet revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, with historical context drawn from the standard Bahá'í histories. The passages in quotation marks are Bahá'u'lláh's own words, as rendered in the authorized English translation.

When we think of the closing years of Bahá'u'lláh's life, we rightly picture the Mansion of Bahjí, the gardens, the pilgrims, the gathering quiet before His ascension. But those were also years of revelation. The Pen that had poured forth tablets and books for four decades did not fall silent at the end. In about the year 1891, in His final year on earth, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the last great work of His ministry — the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf.

The title carries a story of its own. Years before, in the city of Isfáhán, a powerful cleric named Shaykh Muḥammad-Báqir had brought about the deaths of two brothers, devoted believers so loved by the community that Bahá'u'lláh had given them the titles "the King of Martyrs" and "the Beloved of Martyrs." For his part in that cruelty, Bahá'u'lláh had named the cleric "the Wolf." The Epistle is addressed to that man's son — Shaykh Muḥammad-Taqí, known as Áqá Najafí, himself a leading divine of Isfáhán who had persecuted the believers in his turn. The "Son of the Wolf," then, was no friend. He was an enemy of the Cause and the heir of a persecutor.

And yet the Tablet addressed to him is not a curse. It is a summons — an invitation to justice, and through justice, to God. "Give ear, O distinguished divine," Bahá'u'lláh writes to him, "unto the voice of this Wronged One. He, verily, counselleth thee for the sake of God, and exhorteth thee unto that which will cause thee to draw nigh unto Him." Again and again the Epistle appeals not to fear but to fair-mindedness, beseeching God to aid the recipient "to be just and fair-minded," and calling him to weigh the Cause with his own eyes rather than through the prejudice he had inherited. Here, at the very end of His life, the One who had been wronged by such men for forty years reached out a hand to the son of one of them.

The Epistle opens, as His Tablets so often do, not with grievance but with praise: "In the name of God, the One, the Incomparable, the All-Powerful, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise," it begins, before turning to extol "God, the Eternal that perisheth not, the Everlasting that declineth not." From that height it descends to its work — and that work, those who have studied the Tablet observe, is in large part a gathering-in. Throughout the Epistle, Bahá'u'lláh quotes extensively from His own earlier Writings: passages on the recognition of God, on detachment, on the trials He had borne, on the unity of humankind, on trustworthiness as "the supreme instrument for the prosperity of the world." He recalls the underground dungeon of Ṭihrán, the Síyáh-Chál, where the first intimations of His mission had descended upon Him; He restates, in condensed form, the central themes of a lifetime of revelation.

This is part of what makes the Epistle so fitting a work for His last year. It reads, in places, like a summing-up — a drawing-together of the teachings of a whole ministry into a single Tablet, set before one of the Faith's persecutors as both a final proof and a final mercy. The Cause that had begun in a pit-prison was here recapitulated by its Author near the threshold of His passing, and offered, of all people, to the son of "the Wolf."

The recipient, history records, did not respond to the call. The hand stretched out to him was not taken. But the offer itself stands as a luminous emblem of what Bahá'u'lláh was. To the end He returned good for evil. His last major Tablet was not a settling of scores with those who had hounded Him from land to land; it was an open door, held out to an enemy, with the words: turn, and be just, and draw near to God.

When the believers keep the Ascension of Bahá'u'lláh, they remember a Life poured out, without reserve, for the good of the world and the happiness of the nations. The Epistle to the Son of the Wolf is among the last things that Life produced — and it shows, in His own final words, exactly the spirit in which the whole of it had been lived.

This is a retelling. For the fuller text, see the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf by Bahá'u'lláh.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1891). *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/epistle-son-wolf/