The First to Suffer for the Báb

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, translated and edited by Shoghi Effendi, with details of the trial in Baghdád from H. M. Balyuzi, The Báb: The Herald of the Day of Days (chapter 4). Words in quotation marks are quoted from those books.

Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí was one of the foremost disciples of Siyyid Káẓim. Nabíl writes that he was so learned, and so conversant with the teachings of Shaykh Aḥmad, that many regarded him as even superior to Mullá Ḥusayn. In Shíráz he recognized the Báb and became one of the Letters of the Living.

The Báb chose him to carry the news of His appearance to Najaf and Karbilá, the great centres of Shíʻih learning in Iraq. He called Mullá ʻAlí to Him, spoke to him with kindness, told him of the trials that would befall him, and urged him to be steadfast to the end. "Your faith," He said, "must be immovable as the rock, must weather every storm and survive every calamity." And He added: "You are the first to leave the House of God, and to suffer for His sake. If you be slain in His path, remember that great will be your reward, and goodly the gift which will be bestowed upon you." Mullá ʻAlí rose at once and set out.

About a farsang outside Shíráz, the angry father of a young man who had followed him overtook them and beat Mullá ʻAlí severely. The father later recounted that Mullá ʻAlí told him these injuries, compared with what was destined to befall him, were "as a drop compared to the ocean," and then endured the beating in silence.

In Najaf, before Shaykh Muḥammad-Ḥasan, one of the most celebrated Shíʻih divines, and a large company of his disciples, Mullá ʻAlí announced fearlessly that the Báb had appeared. "His proof," he declared, "is His Word." The Shaykh pronounced him a heretic and expelled him from the assembly, and his disciples heaped indignities on Mullá ʻAlí. They handed him over in chains to an Ottoman official, calling him a wrecker of Islam and worthy of death, and he was taken to Baghdád and imprisoned.

In January 1845 the governor of Baghdád, Najíb Páshá, convened a court of Sunní divines of the city together with Shíʻih divines brought from Najaf and Karbilá. As Balyuzi relates from the reports of the British agent in Baghdád, Major Rawlinson, the Sunní jurists sentenced Mullá ʻAlí to death, while the Shíʻih divines held that he deserved no more than imprisonment or banishment. The case was referred to the government in Constantinople, and in the spring of 1845 he was sent there as a prisoner.

What became of him after that is not known. A merchant of Baghdád, whose account Nabíl records, tried to find out and could not; some believed he fell ill and died on the way, and others that he was martyred. "Whatever his end," Nabíl writes, "Mulla ‘Ali had by his life and death earned the immortal distinction of having been the first sufferer in the path of this new Faith of God, the first to have laid down his life as an offering on the Altar of Sacrifice."

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see chapter 3 of 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/