Composed and Smiling: Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq

*A retelling based on **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, His first-person reminiscences of believers who lived and served in the days of Bahá'u'lláh. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own, in the published translation.*

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When 'Abdu'l-Bahá came, late in His life, to set down His remembrances of the faithful who had passed before Him into the next world, He gave a place of honour among them to one of the Hands of the Cause of God: a man He calls Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq, a title that means the Most Truthful Name of God. The world had known him long before by another name.

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He was Mullá Ṣádiq, and across the whole of Persia he was famed for the purity of his life, so that men spoke of him simply as "Mullá Ṣádiq the saintly." He was a great scholar, learned and much honoured, counted among the most renowned divines of his age; the people of Khurásán, where he taught, were devoted to him.

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And of his whole long life 'Abdu'l-Bahá renders this single, sweeping verdict: he was "a servant of the Lord from the beginning of life till his last breath."

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That sentence is the key to everything. For the heroism of this man was not gathered into one blazing hour, as a soldier's might be. It was spread across an entire lifetime, an unbroken constancy that began in his youth and did not falter even at the very end — and it was tested, again and again, by sufferings that would have silenced almost anyone.

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The first great test came at the very dawn of the Faith. Mullá Ṣádiq had become a believer in Shíráz in the earliest days, and, being who he was, he did not keep his belief to himself. He began at once "to teach openly and boldly," in a city and an age where to do so was to invite the fury of the authorities. The fury came.

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They seized him, and they devised for him a public humiliation meant to break him and to warn off any who might be drawn to the new message. 'Abdu'l-Bahá records what they did, and what he did in return, in a few unforgettable words: "they hung a halter on him and led him about the streets and bázárs of the city. Even in that condition, composed and smiling, he kept on speaking to the people."

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Read that slowly. A renowned divine, a man accustomed to reverence, is paraded through the bazaars of Shíráz with a halter round his neck like a beast led to market, exposed to the jeers of the crowd, his honour deliberately trampled. And in the midst of that calculated degradation he is *composed and smiling* — and still teaching. The very procession meant to shame him into silence he turned into a pulpit.

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"He did not yield," 'Abdu'l-Bahá writes; "he was not silenced." There is a freedom in that picture so complete that his persecutors had no hold on it at all. They could bind his neck; they could not reach the place where he truly lived.

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When at last they released him, he did not creep away to safety. He left Shíráz, went to Khurásán, and there began once more to spread the Faith. And from there he travelled, in the company of the man the believers called Bábu'l-Báb — Mullá Ḥusayn, the first to recognize the Báb — to the fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, to take his place among that band of besieged defenders whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá calls "that band of sacrificial victims." There he passed through one of the most appalling ordeals of the heroic age.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá, who had heard the survivors tell of it, sets the scene with care, as if asking us not to look away. The enemy had ringed the fort completely and rained cannon balls into it from their siege guns without pause. The believers inside — Mullá Ṣádiq among them — "went eighteen days without food." Eighteen days.

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They lived, He tells us, on "the leather of their shoes"; and when even that was gone, they had nothing left but water, "a mouthful every morning," after which they "lay famished and exhausted in their Fort." And yet, 'Abdu'l-Bahá continues, when the army attacked, these starving men "would instantly spring to their feet, and manifest in the face of the enemy a magnificent courage and astonishing resistance, and drive the army back from their walls." He pauses over the wonder of it: to keep "an unwavering faith and patience" under such conditions, He says, "is extremely difficult, and to endure such dire afflictions a rare phenomenon."

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Mullá Ṣádiq did not slacken under that fire. When the fort fell, he was taken prisoner and handed over to the chiefs of Mázindarán, to be led about and then killed. But the story was not finished with him.

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As he lay bound in chains, awaiting his death, 'Abdu'l-Bahá records that "God put it into one man's heart to free him from prison in the middle of the night and guide him to a place where he was safe." Through all those agonizing trials — the halter, the siege, the starvation, the chains, the appointed execution from which he was delivered at the last hour — He testifies that Mullá Ṣádiq "remained staunch in his faith."

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And here is the most striking thing of all: deliverance did not soften him into caution. "Once freed," 'Abdu'l-Bahá writes, "he taught more widely than ever. He spent every waking breath in calling the people to the Kingdom of God." He had been disgraced, besieged, starved, imprisoned, and nearly killed — and he came out of it not chastened but emboldened, pouring the remainder of his long life into the very work that had cost him so much.

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In 'Iráq he attained the presence of Bahá'u'lláh, and again later in the Most Great Prison of 'Akká, receiving from Him grace and favour. Bahá'u'lláh revealed many a Tablet in his honour, and a special Tablet of Visitation after his passing.

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He died at last in his bed, full of years and of service, and his tomb is in Hamadán; 'Abdu'l-Bahá calls him "a great personage, perfect in all things," and ends His remembrance with a benediction: "He was truly Ismu'lláh, the Name of God."

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There is a particular shape to the glory of Jalál in this life, and it is worth naming, because it is not the shape we usually expect. We tend to imagine the hero as one who dies in a single magnificent moment. Mullá Ṣádiq did not. He outlived the siege, escaped the executioner, and ended his days peacefully.

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His heroism lies in the *length* of his fidelity, not the drama of its close — in the fact that across an entire lifetime, through every form of pressure that an age of persecution could bring to bear, he never once denied his Lord, never once fell silent, never once stopped teaching.

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The halter could not stop him; eighteen days of starvation could not stop him; chains and a death sentence could not stop him; and freedom, when it came, only sent him back to the work. Some give their lives for the Cause in an hour. He gave his, no less completely, across the whole span of his years — a servant of the Lord, as 'Abdu'l-Bahá says, "from the beginning of life till his last breath."

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

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