By the Light of a Single Lamp: 'Abdu'l-Bahá Lays the Báb to Rest

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which records the entombment of the Báb's remains on Mount Carmel. Passages in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own words, and Shoghi Effendi's description, as preserved in that history.

For sixty years the dust of the Báb had known no rest. He had been shot in the barracks-square of Tabríz in 1850, and His followers, at peril of their lives, had rescued His remains and hidden them. From that day the sacred trust was carried in secret — concealed, moved from place to place, smuggled from one country to the next, kept always one step ahead of enemies who would have destroyed it. Through all the years of His own exile and imprisonment, 'Abdu'l-Bahá guarded that hope and bent His efforts toward a single end: to bring the remains of the Martyr-Prophet of Shíráz at last to a place of honour and permanence on Mount Carmel, the mountain Bahá'u'lláh Himself had blessed.

On the slope of that mountain 'Abdu'l-Bahá had, with great difficulty, raised a stone Shrine to receive them. And in 1909, on the day of Naw-Rúz — the festival of the New Year, the first Naw-Rúz He celebrated after His own release from the long confinement in 'Akká — the hour finally came. The marble sarcophagus prepared for the purpose was transported, Shoghi Effendi records, "with great labor" up to the vault made ready for it.

That evening, by the light of a single lamp, in the presence of believers gathered from both East and West, 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid within that sarcophagus, with His own hands, the wooden casket holding the sacred remains of the Báb. Picture the scene as the chronicle preserves it. The long concealment was over. The dust that had been hunted across two empires for six decades was about to come, at last, to rest. And 'Abdu'l-Bahá — who had cast aside His turban, removed His shoes, and thrown off His cloak — bent low over the still-open sarcophagus, His silver hair falling about His head, His face, in Shoghi Effendi's words, "transfigured and luminous." He rested His forehead on the border of the wooden casket and, sobbing aloud, "wept with such a weeping that all those who were present wept with Him." That night, Shoghi Effendi adds, He could not sleep, so overwhelmed was He with emotion.

In a Tablet written afterward to announce the news to His followers, 'Abdu'l-Bahá called it a "glorious victory." "The most joyful tidings is this," He wrote, that the "holy, the luminous body of the Báb," which for sixty years had been transferred from place to place "by reason of the ascendancy of the enemy, and from fear of the malevolent," and had known "neither rest nor tranquillity," had now, through the mercy of God, been "ceremoniously deposited, on the day of Naw-Rúz, within the sacred casket, in the exalted Shrine on Mt. Carmel."

There is a further detail the histories love to record. By a striking coincidence, on that very same day of Naw-Rúz a cablegram arrived from Chicago, announcing that the American believers had elected their delegates and resolved on the site and construction of the first House of Worship of the West. On the day the Báb was laid to rest on the mountain of God in the East, the foundations of His Cause were being laid in the New World — two victories, half a world apart, falling on a single day.

The grandeur of this episode is of a peculiar and moving kind. There were no armies on Mount Carmel that night, no banners, no crowds — only a lamp, a small company of the faithful, and an aged Servant weeping over a casket He had waited a lifetime to bury in safety. Yet what was accomplished there was a victory greater than any won by force. The enemies who had martyred the Báb and hunted His remains had commanded the power of the State; their power could not keep that dust from its honoured rest. The majesty of the Cause is shown, here, not in conquest but in faithfulness carried through sixty years of danger to its quiet, triumphant end.

To remember this night on a Feast of Grandeur is to learn that the greatest victories of God's Cause are often the quietest — won by patience, by love, and by a hope that outlasts every empire arrayed against it.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi (p. 276).

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