The Trusted Merchant of Búshihr: The Báb in His Youth

*A retelling drawn from **The Dawn-Breakers**, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, together with the accounts it preserves of the Báb's youth. Phrases in quotation marks are words recorded in those accounts.*

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Long before the world had heard His name, and years before the night in Shíráz when He would declare Himself the Promised One, the Báb lived an outwardly ordinary life in an ordinary place. As a boy of about fifteen He left His native Shíráz and travelled down to the hot, busy port of Búshihr on the Persian Gulf, where His uncle kept a trading house.

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There, among the wharves and warehouses and the merchants of many lands who passed through that gateway to India and Arabia, the youthful Báb learned the work of commerce and in time took the business into His own hands.

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It was, by every test the world applies, a humble apprenticeship. Yet those who dealt with the young Merchant in those years never forgot Him — and what they remembered was not His skill at trade but the beauty of His character. Those who knew Him in His youth testified to the purity of His character, to the charm of His manners, and to His unfailing honesty.

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He kept company with every sort of person who came to that crossroads of the Gulf — learned clerics and rough sailors, established merchants and the poorest of shopkeepers — and He bore Himself toward all of them in a manner so gracious, so just, so free of guile, that men of every station found themselves praising Him.

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His honesty was not the cautious honesty of a man watching his reputation. It went deeper than that, all the way down to a love of justice that would not bend even where bending was expected. The bazaars of that day had their customs, and some of those customs were simply dressed-up forms of taking advantage.

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One such custom let a buyer, after a sale had been struck and the papers signed, come back and press the seller to lower the price he had already agreed to. When certain merchants tried this on the young Báb, He would not allow it. **"You made a bargain,"** He told them, **"signed papers, and the transaction has been completed."** They appealed, as men always do, to tradition — this is how it has always been done.

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He answered that tradition was no excuse for injustice: **"Many of these customs,"** He said, **"are wrong and will soon be abolished."** And rather than profit from the practice, He set His face against it entirely — **"I am ending this custom"** — and would sooner take the merchandise back into His own shop than yield to their bargaining.

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The same beauty showed itself from the other side as well. He held Himself to a standard of fairness so high that He would rather lose than let another be shortchanged. The accounts tell that on one occasion, settling with a merchant, He added some of His own money to the payment so that the man should receive the full and just value of his goods — refusing to let another bear a loss merely because the market had moved.

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He was, in His dealings, the opposite of the grasping trader: He sought His own advantage less than He sought to do right by the person before Him.

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When at last the time came for Him to leave Búshihr and turn toward the holy cities, He did not slip away as some might. He closed His affairs with the same care and integrity that marked everything else: He settled every account, prepared His ledgers in perfect order, sealed up His office, and left clear instructions behind.

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When His uncle later examined the records the young Báb had kept, he found them — in the plain words of the account — entirely accurate and satisfactory. Not a thing was out of place. The beauty of His character was not a manner He put on for the marketplace; it reached into the last column of the last ledger.

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This is the beauty the Feast of Jamál holds before us, and it is well that one of its stories should come from a bazaar rather than a shrine. Before the Báb spoke a single word of His mission, before any soul knew who He truly was, the loveliness of His character had already won the hearts of clerks and clergy and common traders in a dusty Gulf port.

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A beautiful soul, the story tells us, does not wait for a great occasion to shine. It is beautiful in the weighing of goods and the keeping of accounts — beautiful, above all, in being just to the person who would never have known the difference.

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*This is a retelling. For more on the Báb's life, see **The Dawn-Breakers** by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam.*

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