The Last to Come, the Highest Raised: Quddús Finds the Báb

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, the chronicle of the early days of the Faith translated by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

In the late spring of 1844, in a modest house in the city of Shíráz, a new Day had broken upon the world. A young Merchant of that city — known to history as the Báb, the "Gate" — had declared Himself to be the Bearer of a fresh Revelation from God, and one by one a small company of earnest seekers had found their way to His door and recognised Him. They were the disciples of Siyyid Káẓim, scattered across Persia after their teacher's death and sent out under his last charge to search for the Promised One. As the weeks passed, seventeen of them had arrived in Shíráz, drawn by an inward summons each could neither name nor resist, and each had taken his place among the first believers. The Báb called them the Letters of the Living.

But the Báb had told Mullá Ḥusayn, the first to believe, that the number was not yet complete. Seventeen had enrolled beneath the standard of the Faith of God, He said, and there remained one more. The eighteenth place was reserved — and the Báb gave no hint of when, or how, the one who was to fill it would appear.

He came at last in the heat of the summer, on foot, from the far northern province of Mázindarán. His name was Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Bárfurúshí, and he was very young — barely past twenty, the youngest of all the company that would form around the Báb. He had been, like the others, a student of Siyyid Káẓim; and like the others he had set out searching, journeying the long roads south toward Shíráz with the conviction that the object of his search was near. Nabíl, the chronicler of these days, records that he reached the city after a hard and wearing journey, and that he came to the Báb almost wordlessly, with none of the learned dispute that might have been expected of a divine.

What passed between them is told by Nabíl with a striking simplicity. This youth did not arrive demanding proofs, nor did he set out to test the One he had come so far to find. He recognised the Báb at once. The witness of his own heart was enough; he needed no sign beyond the certainty that flooded him in the Báb's presence. He took his place among the believers quietly, and so the number of the Letters of the Living was completed at eighteen — the Báb Himself, as the Point from which they all proceeded, making the nineteenth.

And then came the wonder that has always attached itself to this story. The last to arrive, and the youngest of them all, the one who had spoken least and made the least show of his learning, was raised by the Báb above every one of the Letters of the Living. The Báb conferred upon him the title by which the world has known him ever since: Quddús, "the Most Holy." Of all the eighteen, it was this youth from Bárfurúsh whom the Báb singled out for the highest station, and whom He would soon choose, out of all His disciples, to be His sole companion on the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca.

It is worth pausing on the strangeness of this, for it overturns nearly everything the world ordinarily honours. Quddús had no seniority; he came last. He had no advantage of age; he was the youngest. He had not distinguished himself, in those first hours, by feats of scholarship or the eloquence of his argument; he had simply recognised his Lord and given Him his heart. Yet it was precisely this soul that the Báb lifted to the summit of His company. The recognition that counted, plainly, was not the recognition that announces itself most loudly. It was the recognition that goes all the way down — the wholehearted, unreserved surrender of a soul that has found what it was made for and holds nothing back.

The histories agree that there was something extraordinary in the young man himself, a quality that those around him felt rather than measured. A refinement of bearing; a courtesy that never failed; a serenity that nothing seemed able to disturb; and beneath it all a depth of devotion and an ocean of latent knowledge that would astonish his companions in the years to come. Nabíl preserves the memory of how, even in the darkest later trials — under house arrest, and again under siege in the fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí — Quddús would pour out commentaries of such copiousness and such depth that those who heard them were filled with wonder. But all of that lay ahead. In Shíráz, in the summer of 1844, what the Báb saw in him was already enough. He looked upon this last and youngest of His seekers, and He raised him highest.

There is a tender symmetry in the way the company of the Letters of the Living was completed. It began with Mullá Ḥusayn, the most tireless of seekers, whose months of searching had brought him to the Báb's threshold on the night of the Declaration. It ended with Quddús, who came quietly at the close, the eighteenth and last, to fill the place that had been held open for him from the start. Between the first and the last stood sixteen others, each found and recognised in his turn. Together they formed the first complete unit of the new Dispensation — the small band through whom, the Báb taught, His Cause would go out into the world. And the Báb, having gathered them, would soon send them forth, each to his own field of labour, charged to herald the Day that had dawned, while instructing them to refrain from open proclamation until His own pilgrimage to Mecca was accomplished.

Within a few short years, most of that company would be dead — by sword, by fever, by the long agonies of fortress and prison. Quddús among them: betrayed at the end of the siege of Ṭabarsí and put to a cruel death in the streets of his native Bárfurúsh, still young, his bearing unbroken to the last. But the line of heroism he began did not die with him. From those eighteen, in less than two decades, would arise a Faith that outlived the empires then ruling the lands of their birth.

To remember Quddús on the Day of the Declaration is to be reminded that the doors of the new Revelation were not opened only to the foremost and the famous. They were opened also to the last comer, the youngest, the one who arrived footsore at the close of the day with little to offer but the whole of his heart — and that this was the soul the Báb chose to honour above all the rest. The Most Holy was the last to come; and the last to come was raised the highest of them all.

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/