The Gift of the Flock: 'Abdu'l-Bahá as a Child

A retelling based on the documented recollections of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's childhood, as preserved in Bahá'í Chronicles and in the standard biographical histories of the Holy Family. Phrases in quotation marks are words actually recorded as Bahá'u'lláh's, or documented facts of the account.

Before 'Abdu'l-Bahá was the grey-bearded Master who would feed the poor of 'Akká and carry the message of oneness across the world, He was a child in a noble Persian household — the eldest son of Bahá'u'lláh, in the years before exile and imprisonment fell upon the family. He was born into comfort and rank. His father, known then by His given name Mírzá Ḥusayn-'Alí, was a man of distinguished lineage and considerable means, famous throughout the region for His goodness to the poor; people called Him the Father of the Poor. The family held lands in the green northern province of Mázindarán, and among their possessions was a great flock of sheep and goats — some four thousand of them — kept and tended in the hills by a company of shepherds under an overseer named Áqá Raḥím.

When 'Abdu'l-Bahá was a small boy, old enough to sit a horse, Áqá Raḥím took Him out to the country to see the flock. It was a happy occasion, the kind of thing arranged to delight a child and to let the people of the estate set eyes on the young son of their lord. The shepherds — some eighty of them, by the account — put on their finest clothes and came down to greet Him, and a country feast was spread in His honour, a great open-air barbecue under the sky. The boy was made much of, as the heir of the house, and the day went merrily.

When the feasting was over, there came the awkward little moment that the grown people around Him understood and He did not. By the custom of that country, when the landlord or the landlord's son visited the men who worked his land, he was expected to leave them a gift — some token of thanks for their faithful labour. The shepherds, in their roundabout country way, let it be known that such a present would be the proper thing. And here was the difficulty: the boy was only a child, brought out for the day. He had no money in His pocket. He had nothing of His own at all to give. By every ordinary reckoning He was stuck.

But the child's heart found a way the grown world would never have dared. He looked about Him at what there was, and what there was, all around Him on the hillside, was sheep — thousands of them, His father's flock, the very flock the shepherds had spent their lives tending. And so, with the bright unhesitating logic of a generous child, He gave the shepherds the sheep. Not a coin, which He did not have; not a small token; but the animals themselves. To each shepherd, a share of the flock — until the whole great flock had been given away to the men who kept it.

One can only imagine the faces of the shepherds — astonished, perhaps half disbelieving, certainly delighted — as they understood what the little boy had just done. He had not given them a tip. He had given them, in effect, their own livelihood made into their own possession. It was a child's gift, wildly out of proportion, taking no account whatever of cost or consequence; and it was, for exactly that reason, a perfect picture of a generosity that does not stop to calculate.

Word of it, of course, reached Bahá'u'lláh. And here the story turns from charming to luminous, for it shows us how such a deed was received in that house. Bahá'u'lláh did not scold the boy for giving away a fortune in livestock. He did not lecture Him on the value of property or the foolishness of open-handedness. He laughed — laughed heartily, the account says, with evident delight in what His son had done — and He said to Áqá Raḥím the overseer that they would have to take measures. "We must appoint a guardian," He said, "to protect Áqá from his own liberality; else, some day, he may give away everything." Áqá — master — was the affectionate name the household used for the boy. The words were spoken in play, but they were also a kind of prophecy, and Bahá'u'lláh surely knew it. The child who could not be kept from giving away His father's sheep would one day be the Man who gave away His comfort, His freedom, His rest, and at last His whole self, in the service of God and of the poor.

What the story holds up for us is the beauty of a character before the world had shaped it — generosity not as a discipline painfully acquired, but as the boy's very nature, present in Him from the start. He gave because giving was simply what His heart did when it was confronted with people who had served faithfully and deserved thanks. He did not weigh it. He did not measure His gift against His means, because He had no means; He measured it only against the worth of the men in front of Him, and gave accordingly. And the father who watched over Him saw in that reckless open-handedness not a fault to be corrected but a glory to be cherished — a sign of the soul the boy already was.

This is the beauty the Feast of Jamál sets before us, and it is fitting that one of its stories should be of a child. Long before 'Abdu'l-Bahá had a single follower or spoke a single word of teaching, the loveliness of His character had already shown itself on a hillside in Mázindarán, in a gift so large and so guileless that His father laughed for joy. A beautiful soul, the story tells us, does not wait to be grown, or rich, or wise in the ways of the world, before it begins to give. It gives with whatever is at hand, to whoever stands in need — and counts the cost not at all.

This is a retelling. For more on the early life of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, see Bahá'í Chronicles and the published biographies of the Holy Family.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/