Composed and Smiling: Mullá Ṣádiq in the Streets of Shíráz

A retelling based on Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own reminiscences of the early believers. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.

Mullá Ṣádiq was already a great man before the Faith ever reached him. He had studied in his youth among the disciples of Siyyid Kázim; he had mastered the traditions of Islam; he was reckoned among the most renowned and accomplished divines of Persia, and the people of Khurásán were strongly attached to him. Such was the purity of his life that he was known across the land as "Mullá Ṣádiq the saintly." When he spoke, 'Abdu'l-Bahá tells us, it was with such eloquence and such extraordinary power that his hearers were won over with ease. He was a man, in short, with everything to lose: rank, reputation, the reverence of a whole province.

In the earliest days of the Cause, in Shíráz, he became a believer. And having recognized the truth, he did not keep it cautiously to himself. He began to teach it — and, the account says, he taught "openly and boldly." A man of his standing might have shared the new Faith quietly, among trusted friends, and preserved his honour while he did it. Mullá Ṣádiq did the opposite. He proclaimed it in the open, where everyone could hear, and where everyone could see who was doing the proclaiming.

His enemies answered with calculated humiliation. They seized him, and they hung a halter about his neck — the rope one would put on an animal or a condemned criminal — and they led him through the streets and the bázárs of the city, hauling him from one quarter to the next as a public spectacle. The whole point was to disgrace him: to take this honoured scholar, this saintly and respected figure, and parade him through the marketplaces as a fool and a heretic, so that the shame of it would crush him and frighten anyone tempted to follow.

It did not work. 'Abdu'l-Bahá sets down exactly how Mullá Ṣádiq bore it. "Even in that condition," He writes — halter on his neck, dragged through the jeering bázárs — "composed and smiling, he kept on speaking to the people." He turned his own punishment into a pulpit. The march that was meant to silence him became the occasion of his testimony; the crowd assembled to mock him became his congregation. "He did not yield," the Master records. "He was not silenced."

This was not the only trial he endured, nor the last. The same steadfastness carried him, in time, to the besieged company at Fort Ṭabarsí, where he lived through hunger so extreme that the defenders were reduced to eating the leather of their own shoes, and where, when the enemy attacked, the famished believers would spring to their feet and drive the army back from their walls. He was taken prisoner there, led off in chains to be killed, and delivered from death only by a sudden, unlooked-for rescue in the dead of night. Through all of it, 'Abdu'l-Bahá testifies, "he remained staunch in his faith." He lived to a great age, honoured at last as a Hand of the Cause of God; the Báb's successor, Bahá'u'lláh, revealed many a Tablet in his name. But the picture that lingers is the earliest one: the saintly scholar, rope around his neck, walking the bázárs of Shíráz, smiling, and still preaching.

Here is a quieter face of the might the Feast of 'Izzat honours. Mullá Ṣádiq was not, in that hour, threatened with the sword; he was threatened with shame, which for a man of reputation can be the harder thing to bear. His persecutors held the power to strip him of his dignity in front of the whole city. They could put the halter on him; they could not make him feel its shame, because his sense of worth no longer rested on what the crowd thought of him. A man who has anchored his honour in God cannot be dishonoured by men. That is why the procession meant to break him only displayed his strength — and why, "composed and smiling," he could not be silenced.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1915). *Memorials of the Faithful*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/memorials-faithful/