The Boy Who Carried a Letter to the King: Badíʻ

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.*

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From His prison in the fortress-city of 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh did something that no captive of two empires would be expected to do. Walled in and watched, He turned His pen toward the kings and rulers of the earth. To one of them — Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia, in whose realm so much of the believers' blood had already been shed — He revealed a long and weighty Tablet, summoning him to justice and to God.

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But a Tablet sealed inside a prison reaches no one. It had to be carried by hand, the whole long way from 'Akká into the heart of Persia, and placed before the Sháh himself. Everyone understood what that meant. Whoever carried it would be walking, with open eyes, toward almost certain death.

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A youth stepped forward to beg for exactly that errand.

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His name was Áqá Buzurg, but the Faith would remember him by the name Bahá'u'lláh bestowed on him: **Badíʻ** — "the Wonderful." He was about seventeen. He had only lately found Bahá'u'lláh, and the meeting had remade him; a restless, unsettled boy had become, almost overnight, calm, luminous, and afraid of nothing. When he heard that a bearer was needed for the Tablet to the king, he pleaded for the task as another might plead for a treasure. It was granted to him.

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And so he set out — a teenager, alone, on foot — to cross the mountains and deserts that lay between 'Akká and Ṭihrán, a journey of months. He travelled mostly by night. He kept apart from the believers he passed along the way, so that no danger from his mission would fall upon them. He carried the Tablet hidden against his body and a heart that had already surrendered everything the world could take.

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When at last he reached the place where the Sháh had encamped for the summer, Badíʻ did not creep or scheme or look for a back way in. He climbed to a high spot in plain view of the royal tents and waited, with perfect composure, for the king to pass. As the Sháh approached, the youth called out that he bore a message for the king from a great Cause, and asked that it be delivered.

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His bearing was so dignified, so plainly unafraid, that he was noticed at once. The Tablet was taken from him, and in time it reached the king's own hands.

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Then came the questioning, and with it the cruelty.

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They wanted names. They wanted Badíʻ to betray other believers, to recant, to say that the Cause was nothing to him. He would do none of it. For three days they tortured him, pressing heated irons against his body, trying by sheer pain to break the boy who would not break.

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A photograph was taken of him as he sat among the men who were tormenting him — and the thing remembered ever after about that image is the look on his face. He is not cringing. He is serene, composed, untouched in the place where he truly lived, as though the agony could not reach him there.

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When he still would not yield, they killed him, hid his body, and supposed the matter closed.

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It was not closed. From 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh poured out His love upon the memory of that youth. He gave him the title **"the Pride of Martyrs."** He revealed Tablets in his honour. And for three years the anniversary of Badíʻ's death was kept and commemorated, so that a seventeen-year-old who had carried a letter on foot across an empire, and laid down his life rather than name a single friend, would never be forgotten.

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There is a particular meaning of might in this story — the meaning the Feast of 'Izzat sets before us. The Sháh commanded armies, prisons, and the lives of his subjects. Badíʻ commanded nothing; he owned nothing; he had not even years on his side. Yet between the two of them, it was the unarmed boy who stood unmoved and the all-powerful king who could not bend him. Worldly power can compel the body.

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It could not compel Badíʻ's soul to say one word it did not mean. He shows us that the truest might is not force at all, but a love that has stopped counting the cost — and that such love, standing alone and empty-handed before a throne, is stronger than the throne.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi.*

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