In the Heart of Islam: The Báb Proclaims His Mission at Mecca

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont, the classic introduction to the Faith, which recounts the Báb's pilgrimage to Mecca and the proclamation of His mission. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that account.

When the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz in the late spring of 1844, His first act was not to gather crowds or seek the protection of the powerful. He waited quietly until the first eighteen disciples — the Letters of the Living — had found their way to Him, each by his own seeking. Then He sent them out. As Esslemont records, these first disciples, with the Báb Himself making the nineteenth, were dispatched to different parts of Persia and Turkistán to spread the news of His advent. They scattered across a vast land, carrying word that the long-promised Day had dawned.

And meanwhile the Báb Himself set out upon a journey of His own — the great pilgrimage to Mecca, the journey every devout Muslim hopes once in a lifetime to make. He did not go merely to perform the rites that countless pilgrims had performed before Him. He went, Esslemont tells us, to declare His mission openly in the very heartland of Islam. If the claim He had made in a small upper room in Shíráz was true, then it had to be sounded not only in the provinces of Persia but at the spiritual centre of the faith from which He had arisen — in the holiest city, before the holiest shrine, where it would meet the fullest measure of scrutiny.

He arrived at Mecca in December 1844. And there, in that sacred place, He openly declared His mission. Esslemont states it with a plainness that carries its own weight: there the Báb openly declared His station. Consider what that meant. The city was thronged with pilgrims and scholars drawn from across the Muslim world. It was the seat of an ancient and jealously guarded orthodoxy. To stand in such a place and announce that one was the Bearer of a new Revelation from God — the Promised One whose coming the faithful had awaited for a thousand years — was to invite the gravest danger and the fiercest opposition. The Báb did not shrink from it. He chose to speak the truth not in some sheltered corner where it might pass unchallenged, but in the one place on earth where it would be most severely tested.

His companion on that arduous journey was Quddús, the youngest of the Letters of the Living and the one whom the Báb had raised highest. Out of all His disciples, the Báb had chosen this single youth to accompany Him across the long miles of sea and desert to the holy cities and back again. Through the hardships of the road, through the press of the pilgrim crowds, it was Quddús who attended Him, served Him, and shared the dangers of the way.

Then the Báb turned homeward. And it was on His return that the great storm broke. Esslemont records that when the Báb came back to Búshihr, on the Persian Gulf, the announcement of His Bábhood caused tremendous excitement. The news could no longer be contained. What had begun in secrecy in Shíráz, and had now been proclaimed aloud in Mecca, swept back into Persia and set the whole country talking.

Esslemont gives us, in a single luminous sentence, the qualities in the Báb that stirred this excitement. It was, he writes, the fire of His eloquence, the wonder of His rapid and inspired writings, His extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, His courage and zeal as a reformer. These were not the marks of an ordinary teacher. Here was a Youth whose words burned, whose pen poured out verses with a speed and majesty that astonished all who saw it, whose knowledge seemed to come from a source beyond the schools, and whose courage in calling for the renewal of a corrupt and slumbering society was unlike anything His age had seen.

But the very qualities that kindled love in some kindled alarm in others. The same proclamation that aroused the greatest enthusiasm among His followers, Esslemont tells us, excited a corresponding degree of alarm and enmity among the orthodox. The doctors of religion, seeing their authority threatened, vehemently denounced Him. They worked upon the Governor of Fárs, Ḥusayn Khán — whom Esslemont describes as a fanatical and tyrannical ruler — and persuaded him to undertake the suppression of what they branded a dangerous heresy.

So the proclamation at Mecca, and the excitement that followed it, marked a turning point. From that moment, Esslemont records, there commenced for the Báb a long series of trials: imprisonments, deportations, examinations before hostile tribunals, scourgings, and indignities of every kind. That long road of suffering would end only with His martyrdom in 1850, in the barrack-square of Tabríz.

It is worth weighing the shape of this story. The Báb knew, surely, what His open proclamation would cost. He had every human reason to be cautious — to soften His claim, to confine it to friendly hearers, to avoid the great centres where the guardians of orthodoxy held sway. He did the opposite. He carried His mission to the very heart of Islam and declared it there, in the full light of the holiest place He could find, before the assembled faithful of the Muslim world. And He returned to Persia knowing that the announcement would unleash the enmity that would, in the end, take His life.

This is the courage that the Day of the Declaration sets before us in its later chapter. The Declaration began in a quiet upper room, witnessed by one man. But it did not stay quiet. The Báb carried it outward — first through the eighteen He sent into the provinces, and then with His own voice in Mecca itself — until it could not be ignored, and the powers of the age were forced to reckon with it. He proclaimed the truth in the place where it would be most tested, and He accepted the consequences without flinching.

To remember the Báb's proclamation at Mecca is to be reminded that the new Revelation was never meant to be hidden. It was announced in the holiest city of the old order, by One who knew the price, and who paid it gladly so that the Day He proclaimed might break upon all the world.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19241/pg19241-images.html