The Search After Truth: Mullá Ḥusayn and the Gate of Shíráz

*A retelling based on **The Dawn-Breakers**, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, translated and edited by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.*

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The Feast of 'Ilm — the Feast of Knowledge — sets before us the great Bahá'í principle of the independent search after truth. Few stories show what that search costs, and what it can find, more vividly than the account, preserved in Nabíl's *Dawn-Breakers*, of how the first man to recognise the Báb came to stand at His door.

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His name was Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í, and he was no untrained seeker stumbling toward the light.

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From early childhood he had devoted himself to study, and his progress in theology and jurisprudence, Nabíl tells us, had won him "no little consideration." He was a man "whose great learning and strength of character were acknowledged even by his enemies." He had become a foremost disciple of Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí, the renowned teacher of Karbilá who, with his own master Shaykh Aḥmad before him, had spent decades preparing a band of students for the imminent appearance of the Promised One.

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Mullá Ḥusayn was the brightest of that company — entrusted by his teacher with missions of such delicacy that, on one of them, he obtained the open allegiance of one of the most respected scholars of the age.

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So when Siyyid Káẓim died at the close of 1843, the natural thing — the worldly thing — would have been for Mullá Ḥusayn to step into the empty place.

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The grief of the disciples was deep; their teacher was gone, and they felt themselves "leaderless and unsure." When Mullá Ḥusayn returned to Karbilá and gathered the most trusted of them, asking what their departed leader's last wishes had been, they told him the charge the Siyyid had repeated again and again in his final days: to leave their homes, "scatter far and wide," purge their hearts "from every idle desire," and dedicate themselves to the quest of the One whose advent he had so often foretold.

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The veils between them and the Promised One, the Siyyid had said, were such "as only you can remove by your devoted search." Nothing short of "prayerful endeavour, of purity of motive, of singleness of mind" would tear them asunder.

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Here the disciples did a revealing thing. They turned to Mullá Ḥusayn himself. "Such is our confidence in you," they said, "that if you claim to be the promised One, we shall all readily and unquestionably submit." It was an offer of the very station men spend their lives reaching for, laid at his feet by his own peers. And Mullá Ḥusayn refused it on the spot. "God forbid!" he exclaimed.

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"Far be it from His glory that I, who am but dust, should be compared to Him who is the Lord of Lords!" Had they truly understood their teacher, he told them, they "never would have uttered such words." Their first obligation, and his, was not to fill a vacant chair but "to arise and carry out, both in the spirit and in the letter, the dying message of our beloved chief."

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This is the first lesson the story holds for the Feast of 'Ilm. The most learned man in the room measured his own learning honestly, and knew it did not make him the goal of the search; it only obliged him to undertake it. He went at once to the other prominent disciples who had not been present and pressed the same charge upon them.

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Their answers were "evasive and unworthy." One pleaded that their enemies were many and they must stay to "guard the vacant seat" of their departed chief; another, that he must remain to care for the children the Siyyid had left behind. Mullá Ḥusayn recognised "the futility of his efforts" and, saying no more, left them to "their idle pursuits" and set out — accompanied only by his brother and his young nephew.

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Then comes the detail that makes this an 'Ilm story and not merely an adventure. Mullá Ḥusayn did not rush headlong toward Shíráz. On the road, he stopped at a mosque and resolved to spend forty days there in retirement and prayer.

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"By his fasts and his vigils," Nabíl writes, "he prepared himself for the holy adventure upon which he was soon to embark." The most accomplished scholar of his circle, on the threshold of the greatest discovery in the history of his faith, judged that what was needed first was not more study but a purer heart. His brother joined him in the worship; his nephew attended to their daily needs, kept the fasts, and shared their devotions.

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Even Mullá 'Alíy-i-Bastámí — another foremost disciple, so deeply versed in the teachings of Shaykh Aḥmad and Siyyid Káẓim that some reckoned him superior to Mullá Ḥusayn — came upon them and found Mullá Ḥusayn so "wrapt in his devotions" that he could not bring himself to interrupt with a question, and withdrew to keep a forty-day retreat of his own.

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When the forty days were complete, Mullá Ḥusayn made his way at last toward the south of Persia, and at Búshihr, on the Persian Gulf, "for the first time, he inhaled the fragrance of Him" who had lived in that city for years "the life of a merchant and humble citizen." He could not tarry. Drawn, Nabíl says, "as if by a magnet which seemed to attract him irresistibly," he turned north toward Shíráz.

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A few hours' journey from the city, the long search reached its appointed hour. As he approached the gate, a young Man of radiant countenance, wearing a green turban that marked Him a descendant of the Prophet, came forward and greeted him with a smile, "as though He had been an intimate friend." Mullá Ḥusayn supposed the Stranger must be one of the disciples of Siyyid Káẓim who had learned of his coming.

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The young Man invited him to His home. Worn from the road and conscious of his companions waiting at the mosque, Mullá Ḥusayn tried to excuse himself — but the gentle insistence of the Stranger overcame him, and he went.

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What followed that night was the first sunrise of a new Day, and it turned upon knowledge. For Mullá Ḥusayn did not accept his Host on the strength of a feeling. He carried with him the very criteria his teacher had taught — the marks by which the Promised One was to be known.

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He told his Host, when at last he was asked, exactly what he sought and exactly what tests the One he sought must satisfy: that the Promised One should be "of pure lineage," "of illustrious descent," young in years, and possessed of certain physical and spiritual signs; and, above all, that He should reveal, unbidden and without hesitation, a commentary upon a particular chapter of the Qur'án that had defied the learned.

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To his amazement, the young Man told him that every sign was present in Himself. And then, taking up His pen, He began — swiftly, and without a moment's pause for thought — to reveal a commentary of such beauty and power that the trained scholar listening was overwhelmed. The learning Mullá Ḥusayn had spent his life gathering had become, at the last, exactly the instrument by which he could recognise the One he sought.

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His Host was the Báb, and the night was the eve of the twenty-third of May, 1844.

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This is why the search of Mullá Ḥusayn belongs at the heart of the Feast of 'Ilm. His knowledge was real and it mattered — without it he could not have known what to look for, nor recognised it when it came. Yet his knowledge alone did not deliver him to the door.

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What carried him the last distance was the detachment to refuse a station that was not his, the honesty to keep searching rather than settle, and the humility to spend forty days purifying his heart before he presumed to seek the truth. The independent search after truth, this story teaches, is the work of the whole soul: a trained mind, yes — but a mind made ready by a cleansed and prayerful heart.

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

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