The First to Believe: The Letters of the Living and Their Charge

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, together with the account in The Dawn-Breakers. Short phrases in quotation marks are words or titles preserved in those histories.

Every great Revelation begins with a handful of souls. In the springtime of the Bábí Faith, that handful numbered eighteen. They are known to history as the Letters of the Living — the first to believe in the Báb, the company gathered around Him in the earliest weeks of His Dispensation, before His Cause had a name in the wider world or a single enemy aware of its rising.

Shoghi Effendi, in his history of the Faith's first hundred years, dwells on what kind of people these first believers were, and the answer is itself part of the story. They were not, for the most part, the powerful or the renowned of their age. They were not princes or governors, not the chief divines whose word ruled the religious life of Persia, not men of great wealth or worldly influence. They were, in the main, young students of religion — the disciples of Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Káẓim, the two heralds who had spent their lives proclaiming that the Promised One was at hand. After Siyyid Káẓim's death, these disciples had scattered in obedience to his parting charge, leaving their homes and their studies to wander the roads in search of the One whose advent was now imminent. They were souls whom God Himself had prepared to recognise Him.

And recognise Him they did, each in his own way and by his own seeking. Mullá Ḥusayn came first, on the night of the Declaration, after months of prayer and fasting and searching. Then, in the days and weeks that followed, the others began to arrive in Shíráz — drawn, the histories tell us, by an inward summons each could neither name nor resist. The pattern repeated itself with a wonder that never grew stale to those who witnessed it: a seeker would come expecting an examination, and the Báb would meet him before he had spoken, address him by name, and answer the very question he had been preparing to ask. One after another, the disciples acknowledged Him, until seventeen had taken their places. The eighteenth and last to come, of his own search, was the youthful Quddús, whom the Báb would raise above them all. With the Báb Himself as the Point from which they proceeded, these eighteen made nineteen — the first complete unit of the new Dispensation.

It is striking that no one was added to make up the number, and no one was sought out to fill a gap. The Báb did not recruit. He waited. He let the work of recognition be done by God's own preparing of hearts, and He accepted those who came when they came, each having found Him by the labour of his own soul. This, Shoghi Effendi makes plain, was the very meaning of their station: they were the first to believe, the foundation-stones of the edifice, the channels through whom the Cause of God would flow out into the world.

When the company was complete, the Báb gathered them and gave them their charge. Here the histories preserve words of great weight. He told them that they had been chosen as the bearers of His Name and the depositories of His Cause; that theirs was the high honour of being the first to embrace the new Revelation; and that upon their faithfulness the future of His Faith now rested. He likened them to the letters from which His Word was composed — gateways through which His teaching would reach mankind. And He reminded them that the privilege they had been given carried a corresponding weight of responsibility: they were to be detached from all save God, to purify their hearts, to teach His Cause with wisdom and steadfastness, and to fear no one on earth in the discharge of their sacred trust.

Then He sent them out. Each was assigned a field of labour — a province, a city, a region of that vast land — and instructed to arise and proclaim the dawn of the new Day. But He laid upon them a discipline of timing: they were to scatter and teach, yet to refrain from openly announcing His station until His own pilgrimage to Mecca had been accomplished and the proclamation made in the heartland of Islám itself. So the Letters of the Living departed Shíráz quietly, one by one, carrying with them the news that the long-awaited One had come, and bearing copies of the verses He had begun to reveal.

What followed is among the most extraordinary chapters in religious history. These young men, with no army, no wealth, no protection, and no permission from the powers of their day, went out into a hostile land and set it ablaze. Within a few short years the Faith they carried had spread through every province of Persia and drawn into its ranks scholars and shepherds, princes and poor men alike. And within those same few years, most of the Letters of the Living were dead. They were cut down by the sword, consumed by the agonies of fortress siege, struck by fever in prison, hunted and killed by an enemy that grew to fear them. They had been warned of nothing less. The Báb had told them plainly that the path before them led through suffering; and they had embraced it with open eyes.

Shoghi Effendi sets the magnitude of what they accomplished against the smallness of their means, and the contrast is the heart of the matter. Eighteen souls — young, unarmed, untitled, drawn from the ordinary religious life of a single country — became the foundation of a Faith that would, in time, encircle the globe and outlive every empire then ruling the regions of their birth. They had no advantage the world recognises. What they had was recognition, and the willingness to give everything for what they had recognised.

To remember the Letters of the Living on the Day of the Declaration is to be reminded how God begins. He does not begin with the strong, the famous, the established. He begins with prepared hearts — with souls who have searched and found, and who, having found, hold nothing back. The first to believe were not the great ones of their age. They became great by believing, and by laying down their lives to bear witness to the Day that had dawned.

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/