Comfort and Torment in the Same Spirit: Mírzá Muḥammad-Qulí

A retelling based on Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá — the Master's own reminiscences of the believers who lived within Bahá'u'lláh's circle. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are His words as rendered into English.

Among the souls whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá lovingly recalled in Memorials of the Faithful was one who is easy to overlook precisely because he never sought to be noticed — a man who passed his entire life in the nearness of Bahá'u'lláh, served Him by day and night, and through every turn of an exile that grew harder with the years, met whatever came with the same untroubled, thankful heart. His name was Mírzá Muḥammad-Qulí, and he was a loyal younger brother of the Blessed Beauty. The Master calls him "this great man," and tells us that he was known even from childhood for nobility of soul.

There is a circumstance at the very beginning of his life that shaped all the rest. He was newly born when his distinguished father passed away. And so, the Master records, it came about that from the beginning of his days to the end of them he spent his whole life "in the sheltering arms of Bahá'u'lláh." He had no other home. He was reared under Bahá'u'lláh's care in Persia, and afterward in 'Iráq, where he was especially favoured. He grew up not at the edge of the Cause but at its very heart, in the household of the One whose advent that Cause proclaimed.

What kind of man did he become? The Master draws him in a few quiet strokes. He was "detached from every selfish thought," averse to every conversation except whatever concerned the Holy Cause. In the presence of Bahá'u'lláh it was he who would pass around the tea — a small, homely office, faithfully kept — and he "waited upon his Brother at all times, by day and night." And then this brief, telling line, repeated of him more than once: "He was always silent." He was not a teacher of brilliant discourse, not a scholar whose arguments won crowds, not a figure who left a great public mark. He was a man who stayed near, who served without being asked, and who kept still. The Master tells us he "always held fast to the Covenant" — to the eternal pledge of "Am I not your Lord?" — and that, encompassed by loving-kindness, "he was invariably patient and forbearing, until in the end he reached the very heights of Divine favour and acceptance."

He kept always to his own unchanging way of being, and that steadiness was tested on the road. For Mírzá Muḥammad-Qulí did not remain in some safe corner while the storms broke over his Brother. He travelled in the company of Bahá'u'lláh through the whole long descent of the exile. From 'Iráq to Constantinople he went with the convoy, and at every halting-place along that hard journey it was his task to pitch the tents. He served, the Master says, "with the greatest diligence, and did not know the meaning of lethargy or fatigue." Picture the labour hidden in that one sentence: a caravan of the banished moving day after day across a strange country toward an unknown fate, and at the end of each exhausting stage this silent man rising to set up the shelters so that others might rest. In Constantinople, and afterward in the "Land of Mystery," Adrianople, he continued on — and here the Master uses a phrase that is the key to his whole character — "in one and the same invariable condition." Whatever the place, whatever the difficulty, he was the same.

Then came the harshest exile of all. With his "peerless Lord" he was banished to the fortress of 'Akká, that pestilential prison-city on the coast of the Holy Land, condemned by the order of the Sultán to be imprisoned forever. This was the place chosen to break the Cause and all who clung to it; the early years behind its walls were a misery of sickness, foul water, and close confinement, and more than one of the company did not survive them. And it is exactly here, at the lowest point of the descent, that the Master sets down the words that make Mírzá Muḥammad-Qulí a true emblem of submission to the will of God.

"But he accepted in the same spirit all that came his way," the Master writes, "comfort and torment, hardship and respite, sickness and health." Read that slowly. It is not the description of a man who merely endured his sufferings grimly, gritting his teeth until they passed. It is the description of a man for whom comfort and torment had ceased to be opposites that the heart must greet differently. Ease did not elate him; affliction did not embitter him; the swing between them did not unsettle him at all, because his peace was not lodged in his circumstances. He had given his life over to God, and he received back from God's hand whatever that day held — and received it, the Master adds, gratefully. "Eloquently, he would return thanks to the Blessed Beauty for His bounties, uttering praise with a free heart and a face that shone like the sun."

That last image is worth keeping. A prisoner in the worst prison of the empire, under a life sentence, in a place built to extinguish hope — and his face shone like the sun, and his heart was free, and the word most often on his lips was thanks. This is what it looks like when a soul truly says yes to the will of God: not a forced resignation, not a clenched submission, but a face lit from within and a tongue that praises. The walls held his body. They could lay no hand on the freedom of his heart.

Even in that confinement he kept his old quiet round. Each morning and each evening he waited upon Bahá'u'lláh, the Master tells us, "delighting in and sustained by His presence; and mostly, he kept silent." The nearness of his Lord was bounty enough; he asked for nothing the prison could not give, because the one thing he wanted, the prison could not take.

The deepest test of his submission came at the end, with a loss no walls could shut out. When "the Beloved of all mankind ascended to the Kingdom of Splendors" — when Bahá'u'lláh passed from this world — Mírzá Muḥammad-Qulí's grief went beyond all telling, yet even that grief he bent to the will of God. He "remained firm in the Covenant," turning away from the craft and malice and hypocrisy that broke out in those days, and gave himself wholly to God in prayer and supplication. He counselled those who would listen; he called to mind the days of the Blessed Beauty; and, the Master says, he "grieved over the fact that he himself lived on." After the departure of Bahá'u'lláh he never again drew an easeful breath. He kept company with almost no one, staying by himself in his small refuge, "burning with the fires of separation," until day by day he grew feebler and at the last "soared away to the world of God." His luminous grave lies at Naqíb, by Tiberias.

So this is the whole arc of a hidden life: born into Bahá'u'lláh's shelter, raised within it, faithful through every exile, silent, serving, thankful in torment as in comfort, firm in the Covenant to the end. He won no battles and left no famous sayings. What he left was something quieter and, for those who would learn submission, more useful — the example of a heart so wholly at rest in the will of God that ease and affliction drew from it the very same response: praise, with a free heart, and a face that shone like the sun.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1915). *Memorials of the Faithful*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/memorials-faithful/