The Long Concealment: Sixty Years Guarding the Báb

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum, drawing on the record of the transfer of the Báb's remains preserved in the histories of the Faith. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

When the second volley fell silent in the barrack-square of Tabríz on the 9th of July, 1850, the authorities believed the matter closed. They were wrong by sixty years. For what followed was one of the strangest and most tender journeys in all of religious history — the long, secret pilgrimage of His earthly remains, carried by the faithful from hiding place to hiding place across half a century, until at last they came to rest upon Mount Carmel. To trace that journey is to watch a love that would not let go.

The first nights

The enemies of the Báb meant even His body to be destroyed. The two martyred forms were dragged from the square and flung down at the edge of the moat outside the city walls, left exposed to the night and the beasts. A guard was set. From the pulpits it was given out that wild animals had devoured them.

But the believers came. On the second night, at midnight, they recovered the sacred remains at the hazard of their lives. Within two days the body of the Báb had been wrapped and carried in secret to the silk factory of one of the believers of Mílán, and there reverently laid in a small wooden casket. From that moment the casket became the most precious and most hunted object in all of Persia — and the believers became its lifelong guardians.

A trust passed from hand to hand

Word reached Bahá'u'lláh, then still in Ṭihrán, and under His direction the remains were brought to the capital. There began a concealment so careful, and so prolonged, that even to list its stages is to feel the weight the friends carried.

The casket was first hidden in the shrine of Imám-Zádih-Ḥasan. From there it was moved to the house of Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán, and then to the shrine of Imám-Zádih-Ma'ṣúm. At one point, to keep it from discovery, the remains were concealed within the very wall of a place of worship. When a danger of exposure arose, they were carried to a private house; later they were taken to the shrine of Imám-Zádih-Zayd and buried beneath its floor, and afterward removed again to the homes of trusted believers in Ṭihrán.

Read that again and notice what it cost. Each move meant a hole opened in a floor at night, a heavy casket lifted and wrapped, a cart or a pair of shoulders, a road walked in fear, a new and secret resting place prepared — and then silence, sometimes for years, until the next danger forced the next move. Bahá'u'lláh Himself, through the long years of His own exiles to Baghdád, to Adrianople, to the prison-city of 'Akká, never ceased to watch over the safety of this trust from afar. For a time only one or two living souls knew where the remains actually lay. Guardians grew old and died; new guardians were raised up and sworn to the secret. A whole chain of believers, most of whose names we will never know, spent their courage on a casket they could not openly honour and a tomb they would never see.

The crossing

When the weight of the Cause descended upon 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the unfinished trust became His. The hour had come to bring the remains out of Persia altogether and toward the Holy Land, where Bahá'u'lláh had already, with His own hand, pointed out to 'Abdu'l-Bahá the very spot on Mount Carmel where the Báb should one day be laid.

It was a perilous undertaking. 'Abdu'l-Bahá dispatched a trusted believer, Mírzá Asadu'lláh, with exact instructions to carry the body of the Báb out of the land of its martyrdom. The casket was taken first to Iṣfahán, and then — by a long, roundabout road chosen to avoid suspicion — onward through Kirmánsháh, to Baghdád, and across to Damascus, and so at last to the shores of the Holy Land. After half a century of hiding within a single country, the Most Holy of trusts crossed mountains and a sea, and reached its destination on the 31st of January, 1899.

Even arrival was not rest. The remains had come to the Holy Land, but there was as yet no tomb, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá was Himself still a prisoner of the Ottoman state, watched by enemies within the Faith and without. So the casket was concealed once more, this time near 'Akká and Haifa, while He bent Himself to a labour of ten years: the raising, against every obstacle, of a stone sepulchre on the slope of Carmel that His Father had designated. The strain of those years, the histories record, turned His hair white.

The mountain

At last the tomb was ready. On the day of Naw-Rúz — the first day of spring — in 1909, the long journey came to its end. With His own hands 'Abdu'l-Bahá placed the wooden casket within the marble sarcophagus prepared to receive it, in the heart of the mountain of God. There was no clergy, no pomp; only the Master, a small company of the faithful, and the silence of Carmel. When the work was finished and the Forerunner of the new Day rested safe at last, 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid His head upon the sarcophagus and wept, until all those around Him wept with Him.

He said afterward that the safe entombment of the Báb was among the deepest joys and greatest reliefs of His life. We can feel why. For nearly sixty years the remains had never truly rested — hunted, hidden, lifted, carried, buried, and unburied, never safe for long. Now they were home, in the place chosen for them, on the mountain the prophets had sung of.

The faithfulness we inherit

The Holy Day of the Martyrdom keeps this hidden journey because of what it asks of us. The believers who guarded the casket through those decades were not performing for any audience; there was no audience. They could not boast of it, could not mark the grave, could not even, many of them, learn where it ended. They simply kept faith — quietly, dangerously, across generations — with a trust that mattered more to them than their own safety or their own lifetimes.

What the powers of an empire flung outside the gate to be devoured, the faithful carried in their arms for sixty years, and laid at last upon the mountain of God. A golden dome now crowns that spot, visible for miles across the bay, drawing pilgrims from every corner of the earth. But beneath the gold lies the long, unglamorous labour of countless hidden hands — and beneath that, the simple refusal of love to let its Beloved be thrown away.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.