The Mujtahid Who Sent a Messenger: Ḥujjat Investigates the Báb

A retelling drawn from Nabíl's The Dawn-Breakers, the chronicle of the early days of the Faith, together with the accounts preserved in standard Bahá'í histories. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

In the city of Zanján, in the years before the Cause of the Báb had shaken Persia, there lived a religious leader unlike most of his fellows. Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání was a mujtahid — a cleric of the highest rank, learned in the law and entitled to give independent legal judgments — and he was reckoned among the ablest ecclesiastical figures of his age. But what set him apart was not merely his learning. It was his independence. Where other divines moved in a herd, anxious never to stray from the safe consensus of their colleagues, this man thought for himself. He had a reputation for boldness, for breaking with the crowd when his own conscience and reason pointed another way, and for caring more for the truth as he saw it than for the approval of his peers. Such a man had already made himself enemies.

Then the news came. From the south, out of Shíráz, reports began to spread of a young Merchant who had advanced a stupendous claim — that He was the bearer of a new Revelation from God, the Promised One whom the faithful had long awaited. The report was the kind that divides people instantly. Most of the clergy reacted as clergy so often do to anything that threatens the established order: with reflexive hostility, condemning what they had not examined, denouncing what they did not understand. To join the chorus of denunciation would have cost Ḥujjat nothing and preserved everything — his rank, his income, his standing among the learned.

He did not join the chorus. But neither did he simply believe the rumours and rush to embrace the new claim on hearsay. He did something harder and rarer than either: he set out to find out. He dispatched his most trusted messenger, a man named Mullá Iskandar, to journey to the source, to enquire directly into the claims of the new Revelation, to observe the Báb and His followers with his own eyes, and to bring back a faithful account. Ḥujjat would not decide the gravest question of his life on the strength of gossip, whether hostile or favourable. He would investigate.

Mullá Iskandar made the journey and carried out his charge. He saw for himself; he weighed what he saw; and when he returned to Zanján, the report he brought was such that it could not be dismissed. With the messenger came something more than a report — a sealed letter from the Báb Himself, addressed to the mujtahid of Zanján. When Ḥujjat opened and read it, he found that the Báb had conferred upon him one of His own titles — Ḥujjat, meaning "the Proof" or "the Argument" — and had called upon him to proclaim from the pulpit, without the least reservation, the fundamental teachings of the new Faith.

Here was the moment that tested everything. A man so placed, with so much to lose, might have hesitated, hedged, looked for some middle course that would let him keep both the truth and his comfortable station. Ḥujjat did no such thing. Having sought the truth honestly, he was prepared to obey it completely. He declared his resolve to devote himself at once to enforcing whatever the Báb's Tablet contained — and from that day he threw the whole weight of his learning, his eloquence, and his fearless temperament into the service of the Cause he had taken the trouble to verify. He would later become one of its most heroic defenders, sustaining the great struggle at Zanján to its bitter end.

What shines out of the beginning of his story is not heroism in battle but something quieter and, in its way, just as brave: the willingness to investigate. Ḥujjat lived in an age when most learned men decided what to think about the Báb before they had examined a single proof — for or against — and clung to that borrowed verdict because the crowd held it. He refused. He sent a man to see. He read the evidence. He let the truth, once found, command him.

This is the very heart of what the Feast of Masá'il — the Feast of Questions — calls us to. The Bahá'í teachings insist that every soul must investigate reality for itself, unassisted by the noise of imitation and the pressure of the crowd. Ḥujjat-i-Zanjání did exactly that, generations before the principle was written plainly into the Bahá'í Writings. He asked the question that mattered, refused to let others answer it for him, and built his whole future on the truth he found.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Nabíl's The Dawn-Breakers.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/