Shining Embodiments of Every Ideal: The Merchant-Brothers of Iṣfáhán

A retelling drawn from Adib Taherzadeh's The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, his comprehensive history of Bahá'u'lláh's ministry and Tablets. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that account.

In the city of Iṣfáhán, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, there lived two brothers whose names the world has largely forgotten but whom Bahá'í history remembers by the titles Bahá'u'lláh Himself bestowed upon them: Sulṭánu'sh-Shuhadá, the King of Martyrs, and Maḥbúbu'sh-Shuhadá, the Beloved of Martyrs. They were born to a noble family of the city and were boys of about nine and ten years of age when the Báb declared His mission in 1844.

Their two uncles had embraced the Faith of the Báb in its earliest days and had even taken part in the historic Conference of Badasht; one of them, Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alí, was the father of Munírih Khánum, who would later become the wife of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Through these uncles the two youths were drawn toward the new Revelation. When the Báb came to Iṣfáhán and stayed for a time as a guest in the home connected with their family, the two boys were brought into His presence — a meeting that left an abiding impression on them. Later, accompanied by their uncle, they journeyed to Baghdád and attained the presence of Bahá'u'lláh, and there they recognized His exalted Station and returned home, the account says, "radiant as shining lights."

What they did with the rest of their lives is the heart of why their story belongs to a Feast of Perfection. In an age when merchants occupied a place of real standing in society, these two brothers became merchants of note, establishing a trading house so well run that it was among the most prosperous in Iṣfáhán. By every worldly measure they had arrived. And yet — and this is the point on which the histories dwell — they "were not attached to earthly possessions." Their wealth was not an end; it was a means.

With it they did two things. First, they used their resources to lighten the sufferings of Bahá'u'lláh and His companions through the long years of exile and imprisonment, sending support so that the burden of those successive confinements might be a little eased. Second, they poured out much of their enormous fortune upon the poor of their own city. The account preserves a particular instance: when famine struck Iṣfáhán, the two brothers provided food and other necessities for a great many starving people, and at all times they "lovingly harboured the distressed and the needy."

But it was not chiefly their giving that made them remarkable. It was the quality of their character in the daily conduct of their affairs. In their dealings with people — in the ordinary business of buying and selling, of contracts and credit and accounts — they were renowned, the history records, for their "trustworthiness, honesty, compassion, loving-kindness and generosity." Here was perfection of character not displayed in a place of worship but proved in the marketplace, where it is hardest to keep and easiest to compromise. A man may be pious on a holy day; these brothers were just and honest on every working day, in every transaction, with every customer. For this Adib Taherzadeh sums them up in a single sentence: "They were shining embodiments of all Bahá'í ideals."

The praise Bahá'u'lláh lavished upon them, the history adds, is "ample testimony to the loftiness of their station, the nobility of their character and the purity of their souls." That purity was sealed at last in the costliest way. In 1879, through the machinations of grasping clerics who coveted their wealth and resented their faith, the two brothers were falsely accused, condemned, and put to death in Iṣfáhán — and so the merchants of perfect dealing became the King and the Beloved of Martyrs.

This is the perfection the Feast of Kamál asks us to consider. It is easy to imagine excellence of character as something for saints and scholars and people removed from the press of the world. The two brothers of Iṣfáhán show us otherwise. They perfected their characters in a counting-house — honest in every sale, generous to every beggar, faithful through every trial — and proved that the highest nobility of soul can be lived out fully behind a merchant's table.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (4 volumes)*. George Ronald.