Forty Days Before the End: The Báb Entrusts His Trust

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

By the early summer of 1850 the Báb had spent the better part of three years in captivity. He had been confined first in the fortress of Máh-Kú, then in the grim mountain prison of Chihríq, on the remote northwestern frontier of Persia, where distance and stone walls were meant to seal His influence away from the world. They had not. From behind those walls His Cause had only spread, until the chief minister of the realm resolved at last to end His life. The order to bring Him down to Tabríz, and to His death, was already on its way.

What is most striking about the Báb in those final weeks is not what He felt for Himself, of which the histories say little, but what He did for Another. Shoghi Effendi records, in God Passes By, that the Báb had foreknowledge of His approaching end, and that He used the time He had left not to lament but to set His affairs in order — and the affairs He cared for were not His own comfort or His own memory, but the safekeeping of His sacred trust.

And so, the chronicle relates, "forty days before His final departure from Chihríq He had even collected all the documents in His possession, and placed them, together with His pen-case, His seals and His rings, in the hands of Mullá Báqir" — one of the Letters of the Living, the first to believe in Him. These were not idle keepsakes. They were the very instruments of His revelation: the pen with which the Word of God had flowed from Him in torrents through the long prison years; the seals with which He had marked His tablets and letters; the rings He had worn; and, above all, the documents — the writings in which His Cause was enshrined. He gathered them all and entrusted them to a faithful hand.

But the instruction He gave with them is the heart of the matter. Mullá Báqir was charged to deliver these treasures, not to a shrine, not to a place of keeping, not even to the body of the believers — but onward, to a particular Soul. He was to entrust them to Mullá 'Abdu'l-Karím-i-Qazvíní, a believer surnamed Mírzá Aḥmad, who in turn "was to deliver them to Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán."

Consider what this means. The Báb stood on the threshold of martyrdom. Every material thing of value that He possessed — the records of His own Dispensation, the implements of His own pen — He chose, in His last weeks, to gather up and send across the country, in secret and at peril, into the hands of a young Nobleman of Núr whom the world knew only as a generous and retiring member of an illustrious family. The world did not yet know Bahá'u'lláh as the Promised One. But the Báb knew. He had always known. From the first days of His mission He had taught that He was the Herald of One greater than Himself, the Gate before "Him Whom God shall make manifest." And now, at the very end, He acted upon that truth in the most concrete and personal way possible: He placed His entire legacy into the keeping of the One for whose sake He had come.

There is a quiet majesty in this that the noise of the martyrdom can almost drown out. We rightly remember the firing squad, the ropes, the volleys, the crowds. But before any of that, in the silence of a mountain cell, the Báb had already turned His face toward the future. He was not a Figure clutching at His own legacy as the end approached. He was a Herald handing on the lamp He had carried, making sure that what He had been given would pass safely to the One who would fulfil it.

To remember the Martyrdom of the Báb is to remember not only how He died but for Whom He lived. His pen-case, His seals, His rings, His writings — the dearest possessions of the Manifestation of God — were sent ahead of His own death to Bahá'u'lláh, as a man sends his inheritance ahead to his heir. The Báb gave His life in Tabríz; but forty days before, in Chihríq, He had already given away, deliberately and lovingly, everything He owned, that the trust might be safe in the hands appointed to receive it. The herald's task is to point beyond himself. To the very last, the Báb pointed beyond Himself.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/