A Name Equal to Muḥammad: Nabíl-i-A'ẓam

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, with details preserved in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Memorials of the Faithful. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in those histories.

In a village called Zarand, in central Persia, there was born a boy whose name was Muḥammad. He grew into a young man of fire and feeling — a poet by gift and by temperament, with a tongue that could pour out verse and a heart easily set ablaze. When word of the new Faith reached him, that heart caught fire at once. He bade farewell to his family and his village and set out, as so many of the early believers did, to find the One for whom his soul was longing.

His search was not an easy one. By the time he reached Mesopotamia, the One he sought — Bahá'u'lláh — had withdrawn to the mountains of Kurdistán, living for two years in utter solitude in a cave, His whereabouts unknown even to the believers. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in His own loving memorial of this man, recalls how he arrived to find the little community scattered and grieving, the lamp of the Cause all but gone out. He waited. And when at last Bahá'u'lláh returned from Kurdistán to Baghdád, the young poet's grief turned to boundless joy. He hastened into the presence of his Lord and, in the words of that memorial, "became the recipient of great bestowals." From that day he spent his life writing odes in praise of Bahá'u'lláh and travelling tirelessly to carry the glad tidings across Persia and beyond.

It was Bahá'u'lláh who gave him the name by which the whole Bahá'í world would come to know him: Nabíl-i-A'ẓam — the Most Great Nabíl. There is a quiet marvel folded into that name. By the old system of reckoning, in which every letter of the alphabet carries a numerical value, the letters of the word Nabíl add up to exactly the same sum as the letters of the word Muḥammad — the name the poet had been given at birth. The name conferred upon him by Bahá'u'lláh thus carried his own first name hidden within it, transposed into a new key, lifted into the service of a new Day. A name, the gift seemed to say, is never merely a label. It can hold within itself a whole correspondence of meaning, a destiny, a secret accord between who a person was and who they were called to become.

And the name proved prophetic of the work for which Nabíl is most remembered. In the closing years of Bahá'u'lláh's earthly life, Nabíl undertook to set down, in order and in detail, the whole heroic and harrowing story of the Faith's beginnings — the declaration of the Báb, the Letters of the Living, the sieges and the martyrdoms, the rise of Bahá'u'lláh. He gathered the testimony of those who had been there. He wrote with the assistance of Bahá'u'lláh's own brother, and portions of what he composed were reviewed and approved by Bahá'u'lláh Himself and by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The result was the great chronicle the English-speaking world now knows as The Dawn-Breakers — the single most important narrative we possess of the Faith's first generation. Without this one devoted poet, the memory of an entire age might have slipped into the dark.

Nabíl had loved Bahá'u'lláh with a love that could not survive His passing. When the Blessed Beauty ascended in 1892, Nabíl was inconsolable; he could not bear the separation, and not long afterward he laid down his own life. 'Abdu'l-Bahá mourned him as one of the most distinguished of the believers — erudite, wise, and eloquent, his poetic gift "like a crystal stream."

The Feast of Asmá' — the Feast of Names — invites us to ponder what it means to be named by God. Nabíl's name was not an empty honour. It was a recognition of who he already was, a calling toward the work he would do, and even a kind of cipher in which his old self and his new self were shown to be one. He had come to Bahá'u'lláh as Muḥammad of Zarand, an unknown poet from a small village. He left to the generations that followed the name Nabíl, and the priceless gift of their own remembered history.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi and Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

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