The Last Point: The Perfection of Quddús

A retelling drawn from The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative, the great chronicle of the early days of the Faith, translated and edited by Shoghi Effendi, together with the titles preserved in God Passes By. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in those histories.

When we think of the perfection of a human being, we usually think first of a long life — of a character refined slowly, over decades, until its excellence is beyond dispute. The story of Quddús unsettles that expectation. He was very young. He had only a handful of years between the dawn of his faith and the day of his death. And yet, in that brief span, those who watched him agreed that they were in the presence of a soul brought to an extraordinary completeness — in learning, in bearing, in courtesy, in serenity, in steadfastness. The Báb Himself, naming the stations of His disciples, raised this youth above them all.

His given name was Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Bárfurúshí, and he came from Bárfurúsh, a town in the northern province of Mázindarán. He was the last to arrive of the eighteen who, of their own search and by their own recognition, found the Báb in the first months of His Revelation and became the Letters of the Living — that first company of disciples whom the Báb likened to the gateways through which His Cause would reach mankind. Quddús was the youngest of them and the last to be enrolled; and the Báb, who gave each of them a designation, conferred upon him the most exalted of all. He immortalized him as Ismu'lláhi'l-Ákhir — "the Last Name of God." Years afterward Bahá'u'lláh would confer upon him the further appellation of Nuqtiy-i-Ukhrá, "the Last Point," and would elevate him, in another Tablet, to "a rank second to none except that of the Herald of His Revelation." 'Abdu'l-Bahá would call him the "Moon of Guidance." These are titles of staggering height for any soul, let alone for a youth of barely more than twenty.

The first great sign of the trust reposed in him came at once. When the Báb set out on the long and sacred journey of pilgrimage to Mecca and Medína — the pilgrimage every Muslim hopes once in a lifetime to make — He took with Him, out of all His disciples, a single companion: Quddús. Across the months of that arduous journey by sea and by land, in the crowds of the holy cities and on the lonely stretches of the road, it was this young man who attended the Báb, served Him, and shared the hardships and the dangers of the way. To be chosen as the sole fellow-pilgrim of the Báb was an honour that needs no comment; and what is remembered of Quddús in it is the quiet faithfulness and dignity with which he filled the role.

But the perfection that the histories dwell on most is something subtler than honour, and it showed itself most brightly when the honour had been stripped away. After the conference of the believers at Badasht, Quddús was set upon by his opponents while travelling toward his home town and placed under house arrest in the town of Sárí, in the residence of a leading cleric named Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí. Here was a young man suddenly a captive, watched, in the power of men who held his life cheap. And here is what he did with his confinement.

His captor, perhaps to test him, perhaps out of curiosity, asked him to write a commentary on a particular chapter of the Qur'án — the Súrih of Ikhláṣ, the brief, dense affirmation of the oneness of God that runs to only a few lines. Quddús took up the task. Nabíl, the chronicler of these events, records the astonishing result. Confining himself to the interpretation of a single letter — the letter "Ṣád" of the word Ṣamad, "the Eternal" — Quddús "composed a treatise which was thrice as voluminous as the Qur'án itself." From one letter of one word he drew an ocean. Nabíl adds that "that exhaustive and masterly exposition had profoundly impressed Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí, and had been responsible for the marked consideration which he showed towards Quddús" — though in the end that same man would shrink from the courage of his own admiration and join in compassing the death of the heroes of Mázindarán.

What is striking here is not only the depth of the young man's learning, but the serenity of mind that could pour out such treasures from a place of captivity. He was not crushed into silence or bitterness by his arrest. He simply went on being what he was — a soul overflowing with knowledge and devotion, exact and tireless in its expression — exactly as though the walls around him were not there.

That same composure followed him into far harsher trials. Released through the efforts of his fellow Letter of the Living, the dauntless Mullá Ḥusayn, Quddús made his way to the company of believers who had taken refuge at the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, deep in the forests of Mázindarán, where they were besieged by overwhelming forces and reduced to terrible extremity by hunger, cold, and relentless assault. And there, in the heart of a siege, surrounded by an implacable enemy, the young commentator did not lay down his pen. Nabíl records that "Quddús continued, while besieged in that fort, to write his commentary on that Súrih, and was able, despite the vehemence of the enemy's onslaught, to pen as many verses as he had previously written in Sárí." Think of the picture: a fortress under attack, provisions failing, death pressing in on every side — and within it a youth calmly composing pages of luminous interpretation, hour after hour, as though his soul moved in a region the siege could not reach.

Of the effect this had upon his companions, Nabíl leaves a precious testimony. "The rapidity and copiousness of his composition," he writes, "the inestimable treasures which his writings revealed, filled his companions with wonder and justified his leadership in their eyes. They read eagerly the pages of that commentary which Mullá Ḥusayn brought to them each day, and to which he paid his share of tribute." Here is the perfection of Quddús reflected in the faces of those around him. Starving and beleaguered men, who had every reason to despair, were lifted up daily by the writings of this young leader — and the foremost of them, the heroic Mullá Ḥusayn himself, carried those pages from hand to hand and bowed to the genius within them. A perfected character is known, in part, by what it kindles in others; and what Quddús kindled, even in the darkest extremity, was wonder and hope.

The histories testify to the qualities that ran through it all: a refinement of manner, a courtesy that never failed, a dignity that impressed even his enemies, and above everything a serenity of soul that the worst the world could do never disturbed. He was, in the words the Báb's own writings used of him, a soul "on whose detachment and the sincerity of whose devotion to God's will God prideth Himself amidst the Concourse on high." When at last the long siege ended in betrayal, and Quddús was taken captive and put to a cruel death in the streets of his native Bárfurúsh, he met that end with the same composure that had marked his every hour — young still, his face unclouded, his bearing unbroken.

This is the perfection the Feast of Kamál sets before us, in one of its purest and most demanding forms. Quddús had no long life in which to perfect himself by slow degrees. What he had was a soul so wholly given to God that it was already complete — exact in knowledge, gracious in manner, tranquil in danger, faithful unto death. He shows us that the excellence of a human being is not measured by the length of a life but by the wholeness of a heart; and that the truest perfection of character is the kind that does not change when honour turns to captivity and welcome turns to siege, but goes on quietly being itself, pouring out its treasures, to the very end.

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

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://bahai-library.com/nabil_dawnbreakers