The Uncle Who Raised Him and Would Not Deny Him

A retelling based on A Traveler's Narrative, 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own account of the Báb and the early believers (translated by E. G. Browne). The narrative is retold in our own words; it follows the history preserved in that work.

When the Báb was still a child, His father died, and the care of the young boy passed to His mother's brother, Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ʻAlí, a merchant of Shíráz. It was this uncle who reared Him, who watched over His childhood, who took Him in time into the family trade, and who loved Him with the whole heart of a father. No one outside the Báb's own home had known Him longer or more intimately. He had seen the boy grow; he had marked the gentleness and the strange luminous purity of the One entrusted to his care.

So when the Báb declared His mission, this uncle did not stand among the doubters who demanded proofs. He had a lifetime of knowledge to draw upon. He recognized and embraced the Cause of the very One he had raised, and became His devoted follower — bound now to Him by faith as he had long been bound by love.

In 1850, in Ṭihrán, the storm that had been gathering against the believers broke upon a group of them at once. Fourteen were seized; among them was Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ʻAlí. The authorities offered the prisoners the customary bargain: deny your Faith, and you may go free. Half of the fourteen, under the shadow of death, gave way and were released — and no one who has not stood in such a place should be quick to condemn them. But seven would not recant, and these have been remembered ever since as the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. The Báb's uncle was the first of them.

His case was not hopeless in the world's eyes. He was a man of substance and good name, a respected merchant with connections among the influential. There were those who had no wish to see him die, and who came forward to save him. A ransom was offered for his release; friends and men of standing pressed him to accept the way out that lay open — to disavow his Nephew, or even merely to keep silent about Him, and so preserve his life. It would have cost him only a few words.

He refused them all. He would not be ransomed at the price of denying the One he had raised. He had reared the Báb from childhood; he would not, at the last, deny Him to save his own life. Wealth he had no need of where he was going, and a freedom bought by betrayal he counted no freedom at all. Having recognized the truth, he would not unsay it for any price the world could name. He chose, deliberately and without flinching, to die rather than to deny.

And so the uncle who had once held the Báb as a child went out to be the first of the seven to give his life for Him. There is something almost unbearably tender in that completion: the man who had guarded the beginning of that holy life now sealed his own devotion at its near end, joining in death the One he had loved in the cradle and followed in the truth. The bond of blood and the bond of faith came together in a single act of loyalty that nothing — not the offer of riches, not the pleading of friends, not the certainty of the sword — could break.

The bodies of the seven were left exposed for days before they were at last buried, their persecutors imagining that such treatment would frighten the living into submission. It did the opposite. The story of the Seven Martyrs, and of the Báb's own uncle at their head, passed from heart to heart among the believers and strengthened them. Here was proof that the Faith could call forth, even from a quiet merchant of Shíráz, a steadfastness that the threat of an agonizing death could not bend.

This is the glory of Jalál in one of its purest forms. We sometimes imagine heroism as the property of the young and the fierce. But here was an older man, a man of trade and family, who had every honourable reason offered to him to live — and who chose instead to die faithful, because the One he was asked to deny was the One he had raised and come to know as his Lord. He had loved the Báb before the world had ever heard His name; he would not stop loving Him when loving Him cost everything.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1886). *A Traveler's Narrative*. Cambridge University Press. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19300