No Courier to Compare With Him: Shaykh Salmán and the Bond of the Covenant

A retelling based on Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá — the Master's own reminiscences of the believers of the heroic age. Short phrases in quotation marks are His words as rendered into English.

The Covenant of God is, at heart, a bond — a living connection between the believers and the One God has appointed to be their centre. On the Day of the Covenant we honour the appointment of 'Abdu'l-Bahá as that centre. But it is worth remembering, too, the humble souls through whom the bond of the Covenant was literally carried, in their own hands, across deserts and mountains, in the days before there was any other way. Among them, none is honoured more warmly by the Master than a poor and tireless wayfarer named Shaykh Salmán.

'Abdu'l-Bahá preserves his memory in Memorials of the Faithful, the book of tributes He composed for the believers of the early days. The portrait of Shaykh Salmán is brief, but it shines, and it tells us something essential about what faithfulness to the Cause can look like when it takes the form of a single, unbroken, lifelong service.

His work was to carry letters. For some forty years — from about the year 1869 until the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh in 1892 — Shaykh Salmán was the courier between the Persian believers and their Lord in exile. Once every year, the Master tells us, he would set out from Persia and make his way to the Holy Land: to Baghdád in the earlier years, then to Adrianople, then to the prison-region of 'Akká, wherever Bahá'u'lláh was held. He carried with him the letters of the friends — their questions, their pledges, their supplications, gathered up across the whole breadth of Persia — and laid them before Bahá'u'lláh. And when the Tablets were revealed in answer, Shaykh Salmán gathered those up in turn and carried them all the way home again, delivering each one faithfully into the hands of the believer for whom it was meant.

Consider what that journey was. He travelled, the Master records, on foot. Year after year he crossed the long, hard distance between Persia and the Holy Land with nothing but his own two feet to carry him. He was poor, and he lived poorly on the road; 'Abdu'l-Bahá notes that, as a rule, he ate "nothing but onions and bread." No caravan of comforts, no purse of provisions — only the road, the bread and onions, and the precious cargo of the Word of God bound to his person. And he did this not once or twice, in a burst of youthful zeal, but every single year, for the better part of half a century.

The detail the Master singles out for special praise is his perfect trustworthiness. In all those years, across all those journeys, through whatever dangers the roads of that time held — bandits, officials, the suspicion that fell on any known Bábí or Bahá'í — Shaykh Salmán "was never once held up and never once lost a letter or a Tablet." Every letter the friends entrusted to him reached Bahá'u'lláh. Every Tablet Bahá'u'lláh revealed reached the soul it was addressed to. Nothing was mislaid, nothing miscarried, nothing fell into the wrong hands. Think of the weight of that. He was carrying, quite literally, the correspondence of a Manifestation of God with His people — and he bore it, year upon year, without a single failure.

This is why 'Abdu'l-Bahá lifts him so high. In one of the most striking sentences of the whole memorial, the Master declares: "From the dawn of history until the present day, there has never been a messenger so worthy of trust; there has never been a courier to compare with Salmán." It is an extraordinary tribute. Across all the centuries, all the kingdoms and their emissaries, all the bearers of urgent news in the long story of the world — the Master sets this poor Persian wayfarer above them all, for the one quality that mattered most in his calling: he could be trusted, absolutely, with what was placed in his care.

There is a deep harmony between Shaykh Salmán's life and the meaning of the Day of the Covenant. The Covenant is the assurance that the Word of God will reach the believers undistorted — that the connection between heaven and the human heart will be kept faithful and unbroken. Shaykh Salmán was, in his own modest way, a picture of exactly that faithfulness. He was a channel that did not leak, a bearer who added nothing of his own and lost nothing of his Lord's, a thread that held the scattered friends of Persia bound to the One they loved. The Tablets that shaped countless lives across that country passed through his loyal hands.

And his devotion did not end when Bahá'u'lláh ascended. The Master records that, even after that great loss, Shaykh Salmán went on serving in the same spirit, continuing as a courier in the days of 'Abdu'l-Bahá — turning, as every faithful soul must, to the new Centre of the Covenant, and carrying on his humble, vital work in obedience to Him. The same constancy that had bound him to the Father bound him now to the Son. That, in a single life, is the very shape of firmness in the Covenant.

We tend to picture firmness in the Covenant as something dramatic — a defiant stand against the violators, a public profession under threat. Shaykh Salmán reminds us that it can also look like this: a poor man with bread and onions, walking the same thousand-mile road for forty years, never losing a letter, asking nothing for himself, content to be the faithful link between the believers and their Lord. He sought no station and won the highest praise. He carried the Word and kept it whole. And the Master, who became the Centre of the Covenant he went on serving, made sure that the name of the courier without equal would never be forgotten.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1915). *Memorials of the Faithful*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/memorials-faithful/