The First Word Reaches Its Lord: A Scroll Carried to Bahá'u'lláh

*A retelling based on **The Dawn-Breakers**, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, translated and edited by Shoghi Effendi. The conversation and the verses are preserved in that history; phrases in quotation marks are its own words.*

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Every revelation has a first reader. Before a holy Book is copied a thousand times and carried to the ends of the earth, there is one hour in which its Words pass, for the very first time, from the Hand that revealed them into the keeping of another soul. The Faith of the Báb has such an hour, and Nabíl, the chronicler of those early days, has preserved it.

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It is the story of a scroll — a small roll of newly revealed verses — and of the unsuspecting young man who carried it across Persia to a destination he could not have guessed, where it reached the One for Whom, though no one yet knew it, it had been written.

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## A charge given in the night

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The story begins in Shíráz, in the upper room where, on a May evening in 1844, the Báb had declared His mission to Mullá Ḥusayn and had begun, that same night, to reveal the first Book of His Dispensation. In the days that followed, the Báb gathered about Him the first to recognise Him — the eighteen who would be called the Letters of the Living — and sent them out, each to his appointed task, to herald across the land the dawning of a new Day.

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To Mullá Ḥusayn, the first of all to believe, the Báb gave a charge unlike the rest. He was to go to Ṭihrán, the capital. And there, the Báb told him, dwelt a Mystery, a hidden Treasure of God, whose recognition would crown his service. Nabíl preserves the words in which the Báb spoke of this errand to His first disciple, words at once luminous and veiled:

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> A secret lies hidden in that city. When made manifest, it shall turn the earth > into paradise. My hope is that you may partake of its grace and recognise its > splendour.

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The Báb did not name the One He meant. He set Mullá Ḥusayn on the road with a sealed expectation and a scroll of His revealed verses, trusting — and here is the wonder of it — trusting the Word itself to find its way to the heart for which it was destined.

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## The teacher who overheard

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Mullá Ḥusayn came to Ṭihrán and lodged in one of the religious schools of the city, in a room adjoining that of a certain divine, a man named Ḥájí Mírzá Muḥammad, who was hostile to anything resembling the new teaching. In the same school lived one of that teacher's favoured pupils, a young man named Mullá Muḥammad, a native of the district of Núr in Mázindarán. Nabíl preserves this young man's own account, and it is through his eyes that we are permitted to watch what happened.

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Mullá Ḥusayn engaged the hostile divine in conversation, and the pupil, in his adjoining room, overheard the whole of it. He was struck to the heart — not by his own teacher, whose answers he found evasive and whose manner he found proud and contemptuous, but by the stranger, by "the ardour, the fluency, and learning of that youthful stranger." A longing seized him to meet this visitor for himself. At the hour of midnight, unable to master the desire, he knocked at Mullá Ḥusayn's door.

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He found him awake, seated beside his lamp. Mullá Ḥusayn received the young man "with extreme courtesy and tenderness," and the pupil, undone by such kindness after his teacher's coldness, unburdened his heart, and as he spoke the tears ran from his eyes that he could not hold back. And Mullá Ḥusayn, looking at this weeping youth from Núr, understood something. "I can now see," he said, "the reason why I have chosen to dwell in this place.

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Your teacher has contemptuously rejected this Message and despised its Author. My hope is that his pupil may, unlike his master, recognise its truth."

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## The questions by lamplight

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Then Mullá Ḥusayn began to ask questions, and the eagerness with which he asked them astonished the young man. He wanted to know whether, among the family of a certain late nobleman of Núr — Mírzá Buzurg, renowned for his character and his charm and his artistic gifts — there was anyone now living who had inherited his father's distinction.

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Yes, the young man answered. One of his sons had distinguished Himself by the very traits that had marked his father — by His virtuous life, His high attainments, His loving-kindness and His liberality.

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What, asked Mullá Ḥusayn, was His occupation?

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"He cheers the disconsolate and feeds the hungry," the young man replied.

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What of His rank and position? He had none, the youth said, apart from befriending the poor and the stranger. And His name? *Ḥusayn-'Alí.* How did He spend His time? He roamed the woods, the young man said, and delighted in the beauties of the countryside. And His age? Eight and twenty.

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Nabíl records the change that came over Mullá Ḥusayn as the answers came. His face beamed; he welcomed every particular "with a sense of delight." He had been sent to find a hidden Treasure in the capital, and with each reply he drew nearer to it — though it was not in the capital's palaces that the Treasure lived, but in the quiet life of a young Nobleman known to the poor of Núr. At last Mullá Ḥusayn could contain his joy no longer. "I presume," he said, "you often meet Him?"

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The young man answered that he frequently visited His home.

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"Will you," said Mullá Ḥusayn, "deliver into His hands a trust from me?"

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Most assuredly, the youth replied.

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## The scroll delivered at dawn

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Then Mullá Ḥusayn gave him a scroll, wrapped in a piece of cloth, and asked him to hand it to Bahá'u'lláh the next day at the hour of dawn. "Should He deign to answer me," he added, "will you be kind enough to acquaint me with His reply." The young man took the scroll, and at break of day he arose to carry out the trust.

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He came to the house and met one of Bahá'u'lláh's brothers, Mírzá Músá, at the gate, and told him of his errand. The scroll was carried in. And then the young messenger witnessed the thing he would remember all his life. Bahá'u'lláh received the roll of verses, opened it, and read. And as He read, He turned to those present, and Nabíl preserves the words in which He acknowledged what He held — the first utterance of the new Revelation, recognised at once by the One for Whom it had been sent:

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> Verily I say, whoso believes in Him hath believed in God, and whoso turns away > from Him hath turned away from God.

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The Báb in Shíráz had not told Mullá Ḥusayn the name of the One he was to seek. Mullá Ḥusayn had not told the young messenger the meaning of the scroll he was to carry. And the young messenger had no idea that he had become the bearer of the first Word of one Manifestation of God to Another. The Word had been passed from hand to hand, each hand ignorant of the next, and it had arrived, unerringly, at its appointed heart.

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Bahá'u'lláh did not send back an argument or a question. He sent back joy. He bade His brother carry to Mullá Ḥusayn, together with His loving greetings, a gift — Nabíl records it as a present of Russian tea and a small token — in acknowledgment of the trust. When the gift and the message reached him, Mullá Ḥusayn was filled with a gladness beyond describing. The hidden Treasure of Ṭihrán of which the Báb had spoken had begun, for him, to be unveiled.

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## What the Word found

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It would be years before the world understood what had happened in that house at dawn. Bahá'u'lláh's own station was, as Nabíl says of those days, still "veiled from the eyes of men." To the divines and the powerful of Ṭihrán He was a young nobleman who gave away His substance to the poor. The young messenger who carried the scroll would later marvel that he had been chosen, of all people, for so great an errand, and would understand only afterward whom he had served.

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This is a story made for a Feast of Words, for its whole movement is the journey of a single revealed utterance from the Hand that revealed it to the Heart that recognised it. No army carried it; no fortune cleared its way. A small scroll wrapped in a piece of cloth passed through the hands of a first disciple and an unsuspecting schoolteacher and arrived, at the hour of dawn, exactly where it was meant to arrive.

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The Báb had said that a secret lay hidden in that city which, when made manifest, would turn the earth into paradise. The Word He sent ahead of that unveiling found the One in Whom the secret lived — and was answered, not with words alone, but with the gladness of recognition.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Dawn-Breakers** by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam.*

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