The Scholar Three Times Imprisoned: Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl

A retelling based on the biographical account of Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl in Bahá'í Chronicles. The narrative is retold in our own words; it follows the documented outline of his life.

There is a kind of courage that flares up in a single terrible hour — the courage of the martyr before the firing squad, of the prisoner who will not deny under the threat of the sword. The Feast of ʻIzzat, the Feast of Might, is full of such souls. But there is another kind of might, slower and less dramatic and in its own way just as costly: the might of a man who lays down everything he has spent his life building, and then gives what remains of that life, year after patient year, to the Cause that cost him so much. That was the might of Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl.

He was born in 1844 — the very year of the Báb's declaration — in the town of Gulpáygán in central Persia, and he was given the name Muḥammad. His father was a prominent Muslim religious leader, and the son was bred to learning from his earliest years. He proved extraordinarily gifted. He immersed himself in philosophy and in the mystical traditions, studied widely and deeply, and rose so high in the world of Persian scholarship that while still a young man he became the head of an important religious college in the capital. By every measure his society recognized, he had arrived: he was a master of the learning of his age, honoured, established, with a brilliant career opening before him.

It was at this height that he first encountered the Bahá'ís — and his first instinct, as a learned defender of the established religion, was not to listen but to refute. Here the great irony of his life unfolds, an irony he shared with more than one of the Faith's most eminent converts. The very erudition that made him formidable made him honest; and a mind trained to weigh evidence could not, in the end, refuse the evidence when it came. Over the course of several months of contact with the believers, he read two of Bahá'u'lláh's Tablets — the Súriy-i-Raʼís and the Lawḥ-i-Fuʼád — which contained, among much else, the prophecy that the chief minister of the Ottoman Empire would fall and that Adrianople would pass out of the Sulṭán's hands. When those very events came to pass, the learned head of the college could no longer hold back. On the twentieth of September, 1876, Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl became a Bahá'í.

He must have known what it would cost. To be a Bahá'í in the Persia of that day was not a private opinion one could hold discreetly; it was, for a man in his position, professional and social ruin at the very least, and often far worse. And the cost came. He was imprisoned for his Faith — not once, but three separate times. The standing he had spent his whole life acquiring, the headship of his college, the respect of his peers, the safe and honoured future: all of it was swept away by the single decision to follow a truth he had originally set out to disprove. The man who had sat at the summit of Persian learning now sat in a prison cell, stripped of everything his world valued, for the sake of a persecuted Faith.

What he did with the rest of his life is the measure of his might. He did not retreat into bitterness or silence. When he was at last released from prison, Bahá'u'lláh sent him letters urging him to travel and to teach — and Abu'l-Faḍl answered that call with everything he had. He chose for himself the name by which the world would come to know him: Abu'l-Faḍl, which can be rendered "father of virtue" or "father of grace." And he spent the remaining decades of his life pouring the whole of his immense learning into the service of the Cause. The scholar who had once been groomed to defend the old order became the foremost expositor and defender of the new one. He carried the Faith to Egypt, where he taught in the very shadow of the ancient seat of Islamic learning; he laboured in Turkmenistan; and at length, at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's direction, he crossed the ocean to the United States.

There, at the gatherings of seekers at Green Acre in Maine and in the cities of America, the old learning found a new audience. His lectures drew professors of philosophy from Harvard and Columbia, and men and women of every kind of distinction, and they came away amazed — for here was a Persian scholar who could meet Western thought on its own ground and illumine the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh with a depth and a range that few in the world could match. He had become, in truth, what his chosen name proclaimed: a father of grace, scattering the seeds of the Faith across three continents. When 'Abdu'l-Bahá later asked him to return to the Middle East, he went, and he continued his labours until his death in Cairo in 1914.

The honour the Faith paid him tells us how it valued his life. 'Abdu'l-Bahá named one of the outer doors of the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel after Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl — a permanent place at the very threshold of the holiest of the Faith's shrines. And the histories record a detail that throws his devotion into the sharpest possible relief: he was one of the few among the most distinguished servants of Bahá'u'lláh who never actually attained His presence in person. He gave his learning, his position, his liberty, and the whole labour of his later life to a Beloved he had never met face to face. His certitude rested not on the memory of a meeting but on the truth he had examined with the full rigour of a trained mind and found unanswerable.

This is the form that ʻIzzat — might before overwhelming power — takes in the life of Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl. The overwhelming power that pressed upon him was not, in his case, chiefly the headsman or the mob; it was the immense weight of everything he stood to lose, and did lose: a lifetime of study, a place at the top of his profession, the esteem of the learned world, his very freedom. Against all of that he set a single conviction, and the conviction held. Three imprisonments could not make him recant; the loss of his whole worldly position could not make him regret; and the rest of his days, instead of being spent in mourning what was taken from him, were spent in giving away what could never be taken — the truth he had found, shared freely with everyone who would listen.

The world he gave up has long since vanished; the college he once headed, the honours he once held, are forgotten. But the door at the Shrine of the Báb still bears his name, and the books he wrote in defence of the Faith are read by believers around the world to this day. The foremost scholar of his age weighed everything he had against the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh, and judged the Cause worth more than all of it. That judgement — made by a man supremely equipped to judge — is its own kind of testimony, and its own kind of might.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the biography of Mírzá Abu'l-Faḍl in Bahá'í Chronicles.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/mirza-abul-fadl/