In His Own Words: 'Abdu'l-Bahá Recounts the Martyrdom

A retelling based on A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, written anonymously to set the story of the Báb before the wider world. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that account.

Of all the accounts of the Báb's martyrdom, one carries a unique weight: the one written by 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself. In the work later translated under the title A Traveler's Narrative, He set down the history of the Báb's Cause for readers far from Persia — calmly, exactly, with the restraint of one who has no need to exaggerate a truth so great. To read His telling of the final day is to stand beside the Centre of the Covenant as He points, without a wasted word, at what was done in Tabríz and what it meant.

The order

'Abdu'l-Bahá fixes the responsibility precisely. The death of the Báb was not the verdict of a court of justice or the demand of a frightened populace; it was the calculated decision of one man at the summit of the state — Mírzá Taqí Khán, the Amír-Niẓám, the all-powerful Grand Vizier. It was he who set the machinery in motion, instructing his brother, Mírzá Ḥasan Khán, in terms 'Abdu'l-Bahá records almost as a list of commands: to obtain a formal sentence from the learned doctors of Tabríz, "the firm support of the Church of Ja'far" and the "impregnable stronghold of the Shí'ite faith"; to "summon the Christian regiment of Urúmíyyih"; to "suspend the Báb before all the people"; and to "give orders for the regiment to fire a volley."

There is a cold thoroughness in that order. Every element was chosen: the clerics to lend it the appearance of law, the soldiers to carry it out, the open square to make of it a public spectacle, the volley to leave no doubt. The Vizier meant to erase the Báb and to terrify His followers in a single morning.

The square

So the Báb was brought to the barrack-square, and with Him a devoted young man whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá names — Áqá Muḥammad-'Alí, the youth who had begged to die at his Master's side. The two were bound and hung up before the crowd. 'Abdu'l-Bahá records it with a plainness that needs no ornament: "By one rope the Báb was suspended and by the other rope Áqá Muḥammad-'Alí, both being firmly bound."

The regiment took its position. 'Abdu'l-Bahá notes the detail that the soldiers "ranged itself in three files" — three ranks of men, so that the volleys might come in waves and nothing be left to chance. And the order was given. "The first file fired; then the second file, and then the third file discharged volleys." Hundreds of muskets, three times over, into two bound and unarmed figures. By every law of nature it was the end.

It was not the end. When the smoke of that triple discharge drifted clear, the square beheld what 'Abdu'l-Bahá records without flourish: the storm of lead had struck only the ropes. The cords were cut to pieces; the prisoners had fallen free, unharmed. And the Báb was not where the soldiers had left Him. He was found — calm, unhurried — "seated by the side of His amanuensis Áqá Siyyid Ḥusayn in the very cell" He had occupied before, finishing the words He had been speaking when they came for Him. He had said, in effect, that no power on earth could silence Him until He had completed what He wished to say; and now, the saying done, He was ready.

The second regiment

The first regiment would not fire again. What they had seen had unstrung them. And so the apparatus of the state, refusing to read the sign set before it, simply summoned a second regiment to do what the first would not. The Báb and His companion were suspended once more. The order was given again. And this time, 'Abdu'l-Bahá records, the volleys took their effect.

It was, He notes, the twenty-eighth day of Sha'bán in the year 1266 of the Muslim calendar — the 9th of July, 1850. The Forerunner of a new Day, then in the thirty-first year of His life, had given that life in the open square of Tabríz before a multitude of His own countrymen.

Even then the malice of the authorities was not satisfied. 'Abdu'l-Bahá tells how the two bodies were taken from the square and cast down at the edge of the moat outside the city, left exposed through the night. From the pulpits it was proclaimed that wild beasts had devoured the remains — a story that inquiry would soon disprove, for on the second night, at midnight, the believers came and carried the bodies away to safety. What was meant to be a final humiliation became the first night of a sixty-year labour of love.

The lesson 'Abdu'l-Bahá draws

Here is what makes His account more than a record. 'Abdu'l-Bahá does not leave the event as a bare catalogue of cruelty; He lifts His readers' eyes to its meaning. The Grand Vizier's whole strategy, He observes, achieved the reverse of its aim. The persecution intended to crush the Cause only spread and deepened it. "Quaking and affliction," He writes, "resulted in constancy and stability, and grievous pains and punishment caused acceptance and attraction."

And then He states the principle in words that have outlived the empire that killed the Báb — a law, He says, that governs all such matters of conscience:

In the case of such matters of conscience laceration causeth healing; censure produceth increased diligence; prohibition induceth eagerness; and intimidation createth avidity.

It is a sentence to weigh slowly. The tools of the tyrant — the wound, the rebuke, the ban, the threat — are, in the realm of the spirit, exactly the wrong tools. Try to cut out a living faith, and you cauterise and strengthen it. Forbid it, and you make it desirable. Threaten it, and you make men hungry for it. The Amír-Niẓám had every worldly advantage and used every one of them, and the only monument his verdict raised is a golden-domed Shrine upon a mountain in the Holy Land, visited by pilgrims from every nation on earth.

Why we keep His telling

We commemorate the Martyrdom of the Báb each year at noon, the hour of the second volley. There are many narratives of that morning, and we treasure them all. But there is a particular grace in hearing it from 'Abdu'l-Bahá — the One who would Himself bear decades of imprisonment and exile, and who would one day lay the Báb's recovered remains to rest with His own hands. He does not write as a partisan settling a score. He writes as a witness to a truth, with the dignity of one who already knows how the story ends: that the bound and unarmed Figure in that square held a power the regiments could not touch, and that the very wounds inflicted upon His Cause were, in the providence of God, the means of its healing and its spread.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see A Traveler's Narrative by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1886). *A Traveler's Narrative*. Cambridge University Press. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/travelers-narrative/