A Father and His Boy: Varqá and Rúḥu'lláh

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.

Among the believers whose names Shoghi Effendi gathers into the record of the Faith's heroic age, there is one that he sets apart with a particular tenderness: Ḥájí Mírzá ʻAlí-Muḥammad, surnamed Varqá — "the Dove." He was a man of two gifts. He was a poet, whose verses in praise of the Cause were treasured by the friends; and he was a teacher of rare power, who travelled through the towns and villages of Persia kindling faith wherever he went. He had attained the presence of Bahá'u'lláh, and the love that meeting left in him never cooled. When 'Abdu'l-Bahá became the Centre of the Covenant, Varqá turned to Him with his whole heart, and was numbered among the most ardent and trusted of His supporters.

A man so active, so eloquent, and so plainly devoted could not long escape the notice of the Faith's enemies. The clergy who feared the new teaching, and the officials who served them, marked Varqá as a man to be silenced. In the mid-1890s he was arrested, and with him a small company of believers — and, most poignantly, his own son. The boy's name was Rúḥu'lláh. He was about twelve years old.

It is worth pausing on that. The men who held the power of life and death in Persia in those years were not in the habit of being delicate. When they imprisoned Varqá, they imprisoned his child along with him; and the child, by every account that has come down to us, did not shrink. Rúḥu'lláh was a boy of unusual gravity and unusual fire. He had grown up in a household where the love of God was the very air, and he had absorbed it as children absorb the speech of their parents — not as a lesson learned but as a nature formed. Already he could speak of the Cause with a fluency and a fearlessness that startled grown men, and in prison he became, young as he was, a comfort and an encouragement to the others.

The arrest of Varqá and his companions came at a dangerous hour. In 1896 Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh — the same king who had reigned through the long decades of the Faith's persecution, the king to whom the youth Badíʻ had once carried Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet — was assassinated. The man who fired the shot had no connection whatever to the Bahá'ís; the deed sprang from another quarter entirely. But the enemies of the Faith seized upon the panic that followed as they had seized upon every such occasion before. A king had fallen; someone must be made to pay; and the defenceless community of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh was, as always, the readiest victim. The prisoners already in hand — Varqá and his son among them — found the shadow of the murdered Sháh thrown across their cells.

They were in the custody of a man whose cruelty has fixed his name in the history of those days, an official remembered as the Ḥájibu'd-Dawlih. To him fell the handling of these prisoners, and he handled them with a savagery that the chronicle does not soften. He tried first, as such men always tried, to break their faith with threats and with the offer of escape: deny this Cause, and live. It was the oldest bargain in the long martyrology of the Faith, and it had been refused a thousand times by men and women who counted their lives a small thing beside their certitude. Varqá refused it now.

What followed is among the hardest passages in the whole record, and it must be told plainly because the courage of it cannot be understood otherwise. The father was killed first — done to death with a brutality meant as much to terrify the boy as to destroy the man. And the executioners turned to Rúḥu'lláh, having arranged it so that the child should witness the slaying of his father, in the expectation that no boy of twelve could look on such a thing and still hold firm. They offered him, over the body of his father, the same bargain they had offered the father: recant, and you will be spared.

He would not. A boy of twelve stood before the power of an empire — before the men who had just killed the person he loved most in the world, before the whole apparatus of a state that wanted only a word of denial from him — and he would not deny what he knew to be true. He did not rage; he did not break; by the testimony preserved in the histories of the Faith, he met his tormentors with a composure that unsettled them, answering their threats with a serenity that belonged to something far older and far stronger than his years. And so they killed him too, this child, with a cruelty that the keepers of the Faith's memory have never been able to recount without grief.

Shoghi Effendi places the martyrdom of Varqá and his son Rúḥu'lláh among the sufferings that marked the opening years of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's ministry, and the Faith has honoured the father in the highest way it knows: in time to come, Varqá's son Valíyu'lláh would be named a Hand of the Cause, and the family's name would be woven into the very fabric of the Cause's later history. But it is the boy himself, Rúḥu'lláh, who has lodged most deeply in the hearts of the believers — the child who, standing in the place where the world's power was absolute and his own helplessness was complete, proved by his stillness that the power was not, after all, absolute, and that the helplessness was not, after all, the last word.

This is the heart of what the Feast of ʻIzzat — of Might — sets before us. We are accustomed to think of might as a thing of armies and offices and the long reach of the strong. The murder of a poet and the murder of his twelve-year-old son in a prison in Ṭihrán is, by every ordinary measure, a demonstration of exactly that kind of might: the state could do as it pleased with them, and it did. And yet when we read the account, it is not the Ḥájibu'd-Dawlih whose strength we feel. It is the boy's. The men with the power were the ones who needed the denial, who arranged the cruelty precisely because they feared a child's "no." The child, who had no power at all, needed nothing from them, and gave them nothing. The might that the Feast celebrates is this: the unconquerable thing in a faithful soul that the whole weight of an empire cannot move, even when that soul belongs to a boy of twelve standing over the body of his father.

It would be a mistake to read such a story and feel only sorrow, though sorrow is right and the histories themselves are full of it. What the keepers of the Faith's memory ask us to see is also the victory hidden inside the defeat. The empire that killed Varqá and Rúḥu'lláh is gone; the dynasty whose murdered king was their pretext has passed into the dust of history; and the Cause they would not deny has spread to every corner of the earth, carrying their two names with it as a treasure. The Ḥájibu'd-Dawlih wanted a word of denial from a child and could not get it. By every measure that lasts, the child won.

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/