The Child Who Was Taught by No One: 'Abdu'l-Bahá on the Báb's Youth

A retelling drawn from A Traveler's Narrative, the history of the Báb and the early believers that 'Abdu'l-Bahá composed in the closing years of Bahá'u'lláh's lifetime, translated and published by Edward Granville Browne of Cambridge. The account is retold in our own words and follows the history preserved there; phrases in quotation marks are words recorded in that work and in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's later testimony.

When 'Abdu'l-Bahá set out to tell the Western world the story of the Báb, He did not begin with miracles or marvels. He began with a fact that any merchant or mullá of Shíráz could have confirmed — a plain, checkable, almost ordinary fact, which is exactly why it was so extraordinary. The Báb, He recorded, had grown up among the people of Shíráz; they had watched Him as a boy; they knew where He had been and where He had not been. And what they knew was this: that He had sat in no scholar's circle and had been the pupil of no learned master.

This was not a small matter in Persia. In that land, knowledge of religion was the slow harvest of decades. A boy who showed promise was sent to study; he spent his youth and his early manhood in the seminaries, memorizing texts, mastering grammar and logic and law, sitting at the feet of one teacher after another, until at last, grey and accomplished, he might be reckoned among the 'ulamá — the learned doctors of the faith. The whole edifice of religious authority rested on this long apprenticeship. A man's right to speak on sacred things was earned, year by year, in the lamplight of the schools.

The Báb passed through none of it. He was, as the city well knew, a merchant. As a boy He had been sent briefly to a neighbourhood school, and even there, the accounts tell, His teacher could not keep Him. From about the age of fifteen He had stood behind a counter, weighing goods and keeping accounts, first in Shíráz and then in the Gulf port of Búshihr. He had made the pilgrimage to the holy cities and returned. That was the sum of His outward education. He had read no course of theology, debated in no seminary, won no certificate from any master. By the only measure the world recognized, He was unlearned.

And then He stood forth. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's testimony is precise on this point, and He returned to it again in His later table-talks: it was universally admitted by the Shí'is that He had never studied in any school and had not acquired knowledge from any teacher; all the people of Shíráz bear witness to this. Nevertheless, the Master continues, He suddenly appeared before the people, endowed with the most complete erudition. The merchant who had sat in no classroom now revealed Books and verses with a swiftness and a power that left the learned speechless. Although He was but a merchant, He confounded all the 'ulamá of Persia.

Picture what that meant. The very men who had spent fifty years in the schools — the keepers of orthodoxy, the masters of every fine point of doctrine — came to dispute with this untaught Youth, and came away unable to answer Him. Their long learning availed them nothing against the knowledge that had risen in Him from no earthly source. He had not climbed the ladder of the seminaries; He needed no ladder. The light He carried, as His old schoolteacher had perceived when He was still a small boy, had not been lit by any human hand.

For 'Abdu'l-Bahá, this is offered not as a wonder to be marveled at and set aside, but as a proof to be weighed. The appearance of so much wisdom, so much transforming power, in One who had never been taught — the effect He produced upon the minds and the morals and the very customs of a whole people — this, the Master argues, is the greatest proof that the Báb was a divine Educator, a Teacher sent from God and not made by men. A just person, He adds, will never hesitate to believe this.

There is comfort in the story for any soul, and not only for the learned. The knowledge that matters most, it tells us, is not finally a thing we accumulate; it is a light God can kindle in a heart that turns toward Him. The Báb came into the world carrying that light from His first hour. On the anniversary of His birth we remember the Child whom no one taught and who, in the end, had something to teach to all the world.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1886). *A Traveler's Narrative*. Cambridge University Press. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19300