The Gate of the Gate: Mullá Ḥusayn

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, translated by Shoghi Effendi. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are words or titles preserved in that history.

Of all the names conferred in the first hours of a new religion, none was given sooner, or carried a stranger weight, than the one the Báb bestowed upon the man who first believed in Him. It was not "the first to recognise" nor "the most learned" nor "the foremost disciple," though Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í was, in his way, all of these. The name pointed away from the man himself and toward everyone who would come after him. He was to be Bábu'l-Báb — "the Gate of the Gate."

To feel the weight of it, one must remember the night it was given. Mullá Ḥusayn was a young divine of Khurásán, a favourite student of the great Siyyid Káẓim of Rasht. When his teacher died, he had charged his pupils to scatter and seek the Promised One whose advent was at hand. Mullá Ḥusayn went out and sought. He fasted; he prayed; the Dawn-Breakers records a retreat of forty days of prayer and self-purification before he came at last to the city of Shíráz. On the evening of the twenty-third of May, 1844, outside the gates of that city, a Youth of radiant countenance, wearing a green turban, came forward to meet him, embraced him as though they were old friends, and invited him home.

Inside that modest house the long examination unfolded, though it was less an examination than a quiet, irresistible unveiling. Mullá Ḥusayn described the One he was seeking — youthful, of the lineage of Fáṭimih, unlettered yet possessed of an innate knowledge. The Youth replied that He answered to every sign. Mullá Ḥusayn produced a treatise he had written on the most abstruse problems of his school; the Youth, in a few minutes, "unravelled all its mysteries and resolved all its problems." Then He took up His pen and, with astonishing speed, began to reveal a commentary on the Súrih of Joseph, chanting the verses aloud as they flowed.

When at last Mullá Ḥusayn, overwhelmed, rose to leave, the Youth bade him sit and addressed him with the words that would mark him for life:

O thou who art the first to believe in Me! Verily I say, I am the Báb, the Gate of God, and thou art the Bábu'l-Báb, the gate of that Gate.

There is a beautiful logic folded into that sentence, and it is the logic of the whole Feast of Names. The Báb's own title means "the Gate" — He was the threshold through which a waiting world might pass into a new Day. And the very first thing He did, in the very hour of His Revelation, was to make of His first believer a gate as well: not the Gate, but a gate of that Gate, a door set before a door. Mullá Ḥusayn was not told, "You have arrived." He was told, in effect, "Now you are a way in for others." The honour and the assignment were one and the same.

He spent the rest of his life living up to it.

The Báb instructed Mullá Ḥusayn to tell no one, for the present, of what he had found, and to wait until the full number of the first disciples — the Letters of the Living — had been completed. Mullá Ḥusayn obeyed, watching in wonder as, one by one, seventeen other souls were drawn to that same house and recognised the same truth, some of them, the chronicle says, identifying the Báb in dreams and visions before ever they reached Shíráz. But once the seal of silence was lifted, Bábu'l-Báb became exactly what his name had promised. He went forth as the Báb's foremost herald, the opener of the way.

His first great journey was to Iṣfáhán, to Káshán, to Tihrán, and onward to Khurásán, proclaiming the advent of the Promised One. And it was on this journey that the deepest meaning of his name was revealed, in a way Mullá Ḥusayn himself could not yet grasp. In Tihrán the Báb had given him a specific charge: a scroll, and instructions to seek out a particular soul in that city. Mullá Ḥusayn made inquiries and, through a young follower of a certain household, arranged for the scroll to be delivered to a Personage of Núr. When word came back of how that Exalted One had received the message — He had risen, the account preserves, and greeted the news with words of acceptance and praise — Mullá Ḥusayn understood that he had been the instrument of something beyond his knowing. The One to whom he had been a gate in Tihrán was Bahá'u'lláh. The Gate of the Gate had opened a door whose far side he could not yet see.

That is the quiet grandeur of the title. Mullá Ḥusayn was not the destination of anyone's search; he was the passage. Through him the Cause reached Khurásán and beyond. Through him, in a sense no one fully understood at the time, the message of the Báb reached the One whom the Báb Himself had come to announce. A gate does not keep the traveller; it lets him through. Mullá Ḥusayn let through everyone he could.

The years that followed were years of mounting peril. The new Faith spread, and with it spread the fury of those who opposed it. Mullá Ḥusayn travelled ceaselessly, taught fearlessly, and bore insult, hardship, and danger without complaint. When at last the believers of the north gathered to defend themselves against the armies sent to destroy them, it was to the fortress of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, in the forests of Mázindarán, that Mullá Ḥusayn led a small and ill-armed band. He raised there the Black Standard, the unfurling of which, the traditions of Islám had foretold, would herald the appearance of the Promised One. The man who had been made a gate at the beginning now stood at a gate of a different kind — the narrow defence of a besieged fort against overwhelming force.

His courage in those months passed into legend, but it was never the swaggering courage of a soldier. It was the courage of a man who had given his whole self away and had nothing left to protect. Against companies of trained troops and artillery, the defenders of Ṭabarsí held out with a steadfastness that astonished their enemies. And there, before the fort, Mullá Ḥusayn was at last struck down and martyred — the first to believe, and among the first to die. The Báb, on receiving the news of his passing, was plunged into grief; for nine days, the histories record, He would receive no one, and He revealed visiting prayers in honour of His beloved Bábu'l-Báb, exalting his station in the most moving terms.

What does it mean that the loftiest practical title of the early Faith — the title of the very first believer — was a title of service to others? The Báb might have named him "the Beloved" or "the Crown" of the disciples. Instead He named him a gate, a threshold, a door for the feet of strangers. And Mullá Ḥusayn took the name and made it the shape of his life: seeking until he found, and then, from the moment he found, spending himself utterly so that others might find too. He never kept the light for himself. He passed it on, in Iṣfáhán and Tihrán and Khurásán, until the last hour, on a battlefield in Mázindarán, when he passed even his life on, for the Cause that had made him its door.

This is what the Feast of Asmá', the Feast of Names, sets quietly before us. A name from God is rarely a reward for what we have been; more often it is a summons to what we are meant to become — and, in the noblest cases, what we are meant to become for the sake of someone else. The first name of the new Dispensation was the name of a servant: not a man who had arrived, but a man who had become a way in. The highest thing the Báb could call His first disciple was a gate. And the highest thing that disciple could do was to swing wide, and stay open, and let the others through.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's narrative, translated by Shoghi Effendi.

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/