The Rescue by Night: Saving the Remains of the Báb

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.

It was a little after noon on the 9th of July, 1850, when the second volley took effect in the barrack-square of Tabríz, and the Báb and His young companion Anís were martyred together before a crowd of thousands. For the men who had ordered His death, that should have settled the matter. But their malice was not yet spent. They were determined that not even His body should rest.

Shoghi Effendi records what was done. On the evening of that same day the mangled remains of the two martyrs were taken up and "transferred from the courtyard of the barracks to the edge of the moat outside the gate of the city." There they were cast down and left exposed — flung out beyond the walls, in the open, to be devoured by the beasts and worn away by the elements. It was a final calculated indignity, meant to erase Him from the earth and to terrify any who loved Him.

And the authorities were not careless about it. Knowing that the Báb's followers would surely try to recover what had been thrown away, they set a watch. "Four companies, each consisting of ten sentinels," the chronicle relates, "were ordered to keep watch in turn over them." Forty guards, in rotating shifts, stood between the believers and the bodies of their Beloved. To approach that place was to risk one's life.

The believers came anyway.

What love would not attempt, faith now dared. In the middle of the following night, while the city slept and the sentinels kept their grim vigil, a follower of the Báb named Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán resolved to rescue the sacred remains. He did not act alone; through the help of a certain Ḥájí Alláh-Yár, and at the hazard of discovery and death, he reached the bodies and bore them away. Shoghi Effendi sets down the bare facts with great restraint: Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán "succeeded, through the instrumentality of a certain Ḥájí Alláh-Yár, in removing the bodies to the silk factory owned by one of the believers of Mílán." There, the next day, the precious remains were reverently placed in a specially made wooden casket, which Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán then carried on to a place of safety.

The danger was not over; in truth, it had only changed shape. The remains were now safe from the moat and the sentinels, but they could not simply be buried in the open. And here the story turns toward the One to whom, even in death, the Cause of the Báb belonged. No sooner had word of the rescue and the transfer of the remains been conveyed to Bahá'u'lláh — then still in Ṭihrán — than He gave a command. He directed that same Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán to bring the casket to the capital. The remains were carried to Ṭihrán and taken to the shrine of Imám-Zádih-Ḥasan, and from there, in the years that followed, they were moved again and again from one hiding place to another, kept always one step ahead of those who would have destroyed them.

So began one of the most extraordinary labours of love in all religious history. The body that the powers of the State had flung outside the gate as refuse would be guarded in secret for nearly sixty years — concealed, smuggled, passed from trusted hand to trusted hand, across cities and across borders — until at last, in 1909, 'Abdu'l-Bahá would lay it to rest with His own hands in the Shrine He had built upon Mount Carmel, the mountain of God. The first link in that long chain was forged on a single dangerous night outside Tabríz, by men who counted their own lives cheap beside the sacred trust they had come to save.

This is part of what we remember on the Day of the Martyrdom. The enemies of the Báb commanded armies, prisons, and the machinery of an empire; they could silence His voice and cast out His body. What they could not command was the love of His followers. They threw Him away; the faithful carried Him home. What tyranny meant for an ending, faithfulness made into a beginning — and the dust they had despised now shines beneath a golden dome over the Holy Land.

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/