Not a Single Farthing: The Honesty of the Young Merchant

A retelling drawn from The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, which preserves the testimony of Ḥájí Siyyid Javád-i-Karbilá'í, a man who knew the Báb. The account is retold in our own words and follows the history recorded there; the words in quotation marks are the Báb's own, as preserved in that work.

Long before the night in Shíráz when He would declare His mission, and years before the world had any reason to remember His name, the Báb lived the unremarkable life of a young merchant. He kept a shop. He bought and sold. He weighed out goods, settled accounts, and dealt, day after day, with the ordinary traffic of the bazaar in the busy Gulf port of Búshihr. It was, by every outward sign, a small and humble occupation — and it was precisely there, in the unwatched dealings of trade, that the beauty of His character first declared itself to those who knew Him.

Among them was Ḥájí Siyyid Javád-i-Karbilá'í, who preserved a single small episode that says more about the young Merchant than a volume of praise could. A certain man, the account tells, confided to the Báb's care a quantity of goods — a trust placed in His hands to be sold. The owner named the price he wanted and asked the Báb to dispose of the merchandise for that fixed sum, and no more was said. This was an everyday arrangement; merchants handled such trusts all the time, and the keeping of them was a matter of plain honesty.

The Báb sold the goods. But the market had been kind, and He obtained for them a sum that considerably exceeded the price the owner had fixed. Here the story turns, and turns on a point so small that most men would never have seen it. When the Báb sent the man his money, He sent not the agreed price but the whole of the larger sum — every coin the goods had fetched.

The owner was astonished. He counted what he had received, saw that it far surpassed the limit he himself had set, and wrote at once to the Báb to ask why. Surely there was a mistake; surely the Báb had paid out too much. The Báb's answer has been remembered ever since. What I have sent you, He replied, is entirely your due. There is not a single farthing in excess of what is your right. The goods, He explained, had at one time been worth exactly that much; He had not managed to sell them at that value, and so He now felt it His duty to hand over the whole of that sum. In the Báb's reckoning, the higher price was not a windfall He had earned by His skill — it was the just measure of the man's property, and therefore it belonged to the man.

The owner could not accept it. However much the goods might once have been worth, the price had been agreed; the surplus, by every custom of the bazaar, was the seller's to keep, and gladly would he have let the Báb keep it. Again and again he entreated Him to take back the excess. And again and again the Báb refused. He would not retain a single coin that He judged to be another's by right — not even when that other was pressing it upon Him, not even when no law of the marketplace and no whisper of conscience would have faulted Him for taking it. The matter was not, for Him, a question of what He could keep without blame. It was a question of what was true.

Set that small scene against the world the Báb lived in. The bazaars of His day had their customs, and many of those customs were simply polished forms of taking advantage — sellers who shaded the truth, buyers who reneged on bargains, a hundred quiet ways in which the sharp profited from the trusting. Into that world came a young Merchant who would not gain even a farthing unfairly, and who spent His own care to make certain that the man who trusted Him received his full and rightful due. His honesty was not the cautious honesty of a man guarding his name. It went all the way down — into the last coin of the last account.

This is the texture of the life Bahá'ís remember on the anniversary of His birth: not only the dawn of a great Revelation, but the loveliness of the soul who bore it, already shining in the smallest things. A beautiful character, the story tells us, does not wait for a great stage. It shows itself in the weighing of goods, in the keeping of a trust, in the handing back of money no one would have missed — in being just to the person who would never have known the difference.

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

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/