The Two Dreams of the Mujtahid of Núr

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's Narrative of the early days of the Faith, which records the encounter of the young Bahá'u'lláh with the mujtahid of Núr and the two dreams that followed. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

In the years before the Báb declared His mission, the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí — He whom the world would come to know as Bahá'u'lláh — was already a familiar figure in the mountain district of Núr, where His family held its estates. He had attended no college of religion and sat at the feet of no teacher, yet His understanding of the deepest questions of faith was so evident that the learned men of the region found themselves, again and again, drawn into conversation with Him and quietly astonished by what they heard.

Nabíl preserves one such meeting. In Núr there lived a celebrated divine, Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqíy-i-Núrí, a mujtahid of high rank with a large following. One day this man was seated among his students — more than two hundred of them, the account says — expounding the teachings of Islám. Into that gathering, almost by chance, came Bahá'u'lláh with a few companions. He "paused for a while to listen to his discourse," standing among the listeners with no wish to draw attention to Himself.

At a certain point the mujtahid put forward an abstruse and difficult theory and turned to his disciples, inviting them to explain it. They could not. The men who had studied under him for years sat silent, unable to unravel the question their own teacher had raised. Then the young Nobleman who had only stopped to listen gave, in a few clear words, "a lucid exposition of that theory" — opening what had baffled the whole assembly as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

The effect on the mujtahid was not gratitude but a kind of wounded amazement. That a question beyond all his trained disciples should be resolved, plainly and at once, by a young man who had never entered a seminary — it disturbed him. He was vexed at the poverty of his own students set beside this stranger's ease. He said little. But the moment lodged in him, and it would not let him rest.

Then came the dreams. The mujtahid himself afterward described them, and through his own telling they have been preserved.

"In my first dream," he said, "I was standing in the midst of a vast concourse of people, all of whom seemed to be pointing to a certain house in which they said the Ṣáḥibu'z-Zamán" — the Lord of the Age, the long-promised Redeemer — "dwelt." Filled with longing, he pressed forward and tried to enter that house, that he might attain the presence of the Promised One. But at the threshold he was turned back. "The promised Qáʾim," he was told, "is engaged in private conversation with another Person. Access to them is strictly forbidden." And when he asked who that other Person might be, the answer named the very young man who had answered his question in the lecture: it "was none other than Bahá'u'lláh." So in the dream the One the multitudes sought stood in intimate converse with Him whom the mujtahid had met and envied — and no one might come between them.

The second dream was stranger still. "In my second dream," he continued, "I found myself in a place where I beheld around me a number of coffers, each of which" belonged, he was made to understand, to Bahá'u'lláh. Drawn by curiosity, he opened them. "I found them to be filled with books," he said. "Every word and letter recorded in these books was set with the most exquisite jewels. Their radiance dazzled me." He could hardly bear to look upon the brilliance pouring out of those pages — chest after chest of writings, every letter a flashing gem — and all of them belonging to the same young Man.

The mujtahid did not, so far as the record tells, rise up at once and follow Him. Knowledge of a thing and surrender to it are not always the same, and the learned of that age had much to lose. But he could not pretend the dreams away. He had seen, sleeping, what he had refused to see awake in his own lecture-hall: that the One the whole world was waiting for was already among them, and that the treasure of His future words would one day blaze with a glory beyond any learning the schools could give.

Nabíl set the two dreams down beside the many other signs that gathered, in those quiet years, around the unannounced Promised One. To the people of Núr He was a young Nobleman of unusual wisdom. To a troubled scholar in the secret of his sleep, He was something immeasurably greater — the Companion of the Lord of the Age, and the Author of books whose every letter was a jewel.

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

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/