A Lineage of Prophets: The Descent of Bahá'u'lláh

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which sets down the lineage and station of Bahá'u'lláh. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

On the twelfth of November, 1817, between the first light and the rising of the sun, a Child was born in a noble house in Tihrán. His name was Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí; the title He would later take, and by which the world would know Him, was Bahá'u'lláh — the Glory of God. The Bahá'í community keeps the day of His birth as one of its holiest, the twin in its calendar of the birth of the Báb. But the Holy Day is more than the marking of a single morning in Tihrán. It is also the remembrance of a long preparation — of the many centuries, and the many peoples, whose hopes converged upon that birth.

For the family into which Bahá'u'lláh was born was no ordinary family, and Shoghi Effendi, in setting down the story of the Faith, pauses over the lines of descent that met in Him. Bahá'u'lláh, he writes, "derived His descent, on the one hand, from Abraham" — the patriarch revered by Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike — and "on the other from Zoroaster," the prophet of ancient Persia from whom the Zoroastrian faith took its name. He was, moreover, "a descendant of Jesse," the father of King David, and so stood within the royal lineage of Israel from which the Hebrew prophets had foretold a Deliverer would arise. And through His own father He was joined to the splendour of Persia's past, a scion of the kings of that land in the days of its ancient glory.

It is a remarkable convergence. The great religions of the past had each, in its own scriptures and its own tongue, looked forward to a Promised One — the Jews to their Messiah of the line of David, the Zoroastrians to their world-renewing saviour, and so on across the traditions of mankind. In Bahá'u'lláh, Shoghi Effendi shows, these separate streams of expectation were gathered, by the accident of birth, into a single Person, who was kinsman to the very peoples who awaited Him. The One whom many faiths had promised was born of the blood of those faiths' own founders and kings.

His immediate family stood high in the Persia of its own day as well. His father was Mírzá ʿAbbás, "better known as Mírzá Buzurg" — Mírzá the Great — "a nobleman closely associated with the ministerial circles of the Court" of the Sháh. The household was wealthy and distinguished, long accustomed to service in the government and the affairs of state. By every worldly measure, the Child born that November morning came into the world possessed of rank, lineage, and expectation.

And yet, as His life would show, none of this was the source of His greatness. The nobility that mattered in Bahá'u'lláh was not the nobility printed in a family tree. He would, in time, be stripped of His inheritance, robbed of His possessions, and driven from the land of His birth — and it was then, in emptiness and exile and imprisonment, that the glory hidden in Him would be revealed. The ancient lineages converging in His person were a sign, not a cause: an outward token, set in the order of things, of the inward truth that the long-promised Day had at last come.

So the Holy Day of the Birth is, in a quiet way, a window onto a vast horizon. Bahá'ís who gather to celebrate it remember a Child born in Tihrán in 1817 — but behind that Child stand Abraham and Zoroaster, the house of David and the kings of Persia, and beyond them the patient hope of peoples across the earth and down the ages. "He derived His descent, on the one hand, from Abraham, and on the other from Zoroaster." In a single newborn, on a single morning, the promises of a world began to come true.

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

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