The Dawn Charge: Mullá Ḥusayn at Shaykh Ṭabarsí

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative (translated by Shoghi Effendi), the eyewitness chronicle of the early days of the Faith. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

He had been the first. On a spring evening in Shíráz, in May of 1844, a young scholar named Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í had crossed a threshold, accepted the hospitality of a Youth he had met by the city gate, and through the long hours of that night become the first soul on earth to recognize in the Báb the Promised One whom a whole people had been awaiting. He had asked for proofs, and the proofs had been given; and when the night was over he was no longer the man who had entered the house. He had found what his teacher Siyyid Kázim had bidden his disciples go out and seek, and he gave the rest of his life to it without reservation.

That life had now, in the winter of 1848 to 1849, come to a remote shrine in the forests of Mázindarán, the tomb of an early saint called Shaykh Ṭabarsí. There a band of the Báb's followers — some three hundred men, scholars and villagers and a few of high birth — had gathered and thrown up earthworks and dug a moat around the little enclosure, and there they were besieged by the assembled forces of the imperial army. Mullá Ḥusayn held the practical command of the defence. He had marched to that place beneath a black standard, which the believers understood as the fulfilment of an old and solemn prophecy. Into the fort, in the early weeks, had come Quddús, the youngest of the Báb's first disciples; and with his arrival the inward, spiritual life of the garrison had been transfigured, so that men who were starving carried themselves like men at a festival.

The conditions inside that enclosure, as the winter deepened, passed beyond what words can easily carry. The supplies failed utterly. The defenders ate the grass that grew within the walls; they ate, at the last, the leather of their own saddles and the bark stripped from the trees, ground and boiled. For long stretches they had nothing at all but water, a mouthful swallowed in the morning, and they lay through the days famished and spent. The dead lay buried in the cold ground beneath the snow. Many of the living were wounded; many were ill. And against them, week by week, the besieging army only grew — fresh detachments, fresh artillery, fresh supply trains rolling up out of the country behind it, while the little band inside the moat could be replenished by nothing but its own courage.

And yet — this is the thing the chronicle insists upon, the thing the besiegers could never understand — the spirit inside the fort did not break. When the cannon thundered and a breach seemed near, the defenders would spring up out of their exhaustion and meet the attackers at the walls with a vehemence that drove the imperial soldiers back in confusion, and then sink down again to their hunger and their prayers. Nabíl, who gathered the testimony of the few who survived, records that the men of the fort were sustained not by their rations, of which there were none, but by something the army outside did not possess and could not take from them. They had set their hearts on a Beloved beyond the reach of any siege, and a body that is starving can still be the dwelling-place of a soul that is satisfied.

By the closing days of January 1849 it was plain that the ordeal could not run on much longer in the way it had. On the evening of the first of February, Mullá Ḥusayn gathered the remaining defenders together at the foot of the shrine. He prayed at length — for he was, above everything else, a man of prayer, and the witnesses remembered the length and the fervour of that last vigil. He spoke to his companions of the bond that had been forged in the room at Shíráz on that May night now four years and nine months past. He spoke of the Cause for which their present suffering was the seed, and of the Promise hidden within it that they themselves might not live to see flower. And he gave his instructions for the sortie he had resolved to lead when the light came.

The chronicle preserves the morning of the second of February with the care of a man for whom each detail is holy. In the grey first light Mullá Ḥusayn made his ablutions, mounted his horse, and drew his sword.

Mounted on his horse, his sword unsheathed, he led the remnant of his companions out of the gate into the grey light of the dawn.

He charged straight at the first line of the besiegers. The line broke before him. He pressed on with his small body of horsemen into the very camp of the army — overturning tents, scattering the soldiers who fled in their hundreds before so unlooked-for an onslaught, riding down toward the batteries to silence the guns. For a few wild minutes a handful of half-starved men carried all before them, and the great host recoiled in panic from the fury of their attack.

It was at the very height of that success, with the enemy in flight around him, that a musket-ball struck Mullá Ḥusayn in the chest. More than one survivor testified afterward that he did not fall at once; that he kept his seat in the saddle for some minutes still, continuing the charge, before he turned his horse and rode back toward the shrine. They carried him, dying, into the small room where Quddús was waiting. Quddús received him into his arms. The two of them spoke together at length — but they had drawn apart, and no witness stood near enough to preserve what passed between the leader of the defence and the soul who had become its heart. As the sun came up over the forest on that second day of February, Mullá Ḥusayn died. He was thirty-five years old.

The siege would drag on for three more months after his death. In the spring, Quddús too would be taken and slain. The fort itself would fall at last not to courage but to treachery, when a sworn oath upon the Qur'án lured the survivors out and was broken the moment they had laid down their defence. By the world's reckoning the whole defence of Shaykh Ṭabarsí ended in disaster: the band destroyed, the heads sent to the capital, the imperial dispatches boasting of a victory. But the central figure of it all — the first man to recognize the Báb, the bearer of the black standard, the leader of the dawn charge — had already crossed over into the Kingdom for whose sake he had ridden out of Mashhad the year before.

There is a particular completeness to the glory of Jalál in this man's story. We sometimes picture the hero as one who arrives, late and brilliant, for a single shining deed. Mullá Ḥusayn was not that. He was the disciple who had been there from the very beginning — the first to seek, the first to find, the first to believe — and who carried that fidelity, without a single faltering, all the way to its end in the snow of Mázindarán. He had recognized his Lord on a quiet spring night when no danger attended the recognition; and he laid down his life for that same Lord on a winter dawn when fidelity cost everything a man has. The arc of his life is the whole arc of discipleship: to see, and then to follow, and then, when the hour comes, to give. The walls he defended fell. The recognition that began in Shíráz, and was sealed at Shaykh Ṭabarsí, has never fallen since.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative, translated by Shoghi Effendi.

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/