The First to Suffer: Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí

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

Among the first eighteen disciples of the Báb — the company He named the Letters of the Living — was a scholar called Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí. He had spent years in the great seats of Islamic learning, searching with a restless sincerity for the Promised One; and when, soon after Mullá Ḥusayn had recognized the Báb, Mullá ʻAlí too came to recognize Him, the Báb gave him the title "the Second Who Believed." Then He entrusted him with a mission that would carry him into the very heartland of the religious establishment of the age.

The Báb sent him to the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbilá, in Iraq, where the most eminent and powerful clerics of Shíʻih Islam held their seats. There he was to herald the dawning of a new Day. But the Báb did not send him out with the comfortable promise of success. According to Nabíl, He sent him with words that named, plainly, what awaited him: "You are the first to leave the House of God, and to suffer for His sake." Mullá ʻAlí went anyway, knowing the road.

In those cities his words struck like sparks in dry grass. The announcement that the long-awaited One had appeared stirred such excitement and such controversy that the disturbance was noticed far beyond the believers' own circle. Numbers of people were drawn to the message. The established clergy were alarmed. Before long, the religious authorities had Mullá ʻAlí seized and brought to Baghdád to be tried.

What followed was extraordinary even by the measure of the time. To judge this single, unarmed scholar, the governor convened a great assembly of the foremost divines of the day — and not only the Shíʻih clergy, but the Sunní as well: the chief jurist of Baghdád and a long row of Sunní doctors of law beside the leading Shíʻih authorities. It was a thing all but unheard of, the two rival schools sitting together in a single tribunal. They examined a copy of the Báb's first book that Mullá ʻAlí had carried with him, and they grasped clearly that its author was advancing the claim of a fresh and direct revelation from God.

Against the gathered weight of so much learning and so much power, Mullá ʻAlí did not waver. He did not unsay what he had come to proclaim. The Sunní divines, for their part, did not hesitate: they pronounced both the unknown author of the book and its bearer to be heretics, and condemned them to death. The Shíʻih divines, caught in the political tangle of the moment, were more guarded and would consent only to banishment or imprisonment. But the verdict stood as the first formal condemnation the new Faith ever received — and it set the pattern for the denunciations that would follow for decades.

Mullá ʻAlí's own steadfastness never gave way. When he was at last taken on toward the Ottoman capital and questioned again, he openly declared his belief in the Báb's message, refusing to purchase safety with a denial. The authorities, fearing that exile would only let him spread the Cause further, sentenced him instead to hard labour for life in the naval dockyards. There, worn down by the cruelty of his condition, he died — and so the disciple of whom the Báb had said "you are the first to suffer" became, in literal truth, the first of all the believers to give his life for the Faith.

This is the might that the Feast of 'Izzat sets before us, in its earliest form. Mullá ʻAlí stood alone before an alliance of authority so vast that, to all appearances, he should simply have been crushed and forgotten. He had no army, no faction, no protection — only what he had recognized to be true, and the courage not to deny it. The tribunals had the power to take his life. They had no power to make him take back a single word. He shows us, at the very threshold of the Faith's history, that one soul holding fast to the truth can outweigh the massed strength of the powerful — and that the first to suffer for a Cause is often the one who proves it can be borne.

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

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/