Content in All Things: Áqá Mírzá Maḥmúd and Áqá Riḍá

A retelling based on Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá — the Master's own reminiscences of the believers of 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.

When we think of submission to the will of God, we may picture some great single test — a martyrdom, an exile, an hour of crisis met with serenity. But there is another, quieter form of it, harder in its own way because it must be renewed every single day: the contentment of a soul that wants nothing the world can give, and is therefore perfectly at peace with whatever comes. 'Abdu'l-Bahá preserves a luminous portrait of two such souls in Memorials of the Faithful — Mírzá Maḥmúd of Káshán and Áqá Riḍá of Shíráz, "like two lamps lit with God's love from the oil of His knowledge." For fifty-five years, the Master says, they rendered every kind of service, and "their services were countless, beyond recording."

The image that fixes them forever in the memory belongs to the great exile of 1863, when Bahá'u'lláh and a large company left Baghdád to begin the long journey toward Constantinople. Bahá'u'lláh rode in a howdah; a crowd of the banished moved with Him; and along the way the caravan met with famine conditions. Through all of it, these two men "strode along on foot, ahead of the howdah," covering, the Master tells us, "a distance of seven or eight farsakhs every day" — many hours of walking, day after day, over hard country, hungry.

Here is what makes them extraordinary. Most travellers, arriving at the day's halting-place "wayworn and faint," would have collapsed to rest. Mírzá Maḥmúd and Áqá Riḍá did the opposite. "Weary as they were," the Master writes, "they would immediately set about preparing and cooking the food, and seeing to the comfort of the believers." They had just walked seven or eight farsakhs on empty stomachs — and their first act on arriving was not to lie down but to feed everyone else. "The efforts they made were truly more than flesh can bear," 'Abdu'l-Bahá says, and then gives us the measure of it: "There were times when they had not more than two or three hours sleep out of the twenty-four." Once the friends had eaten, these two would be busy collecting and washing the dishes and the cooking pots, and this would take them till midnight; only then would they rest. At daybreak they would rise, pack everything up, and set out once more, on foot, in front of the howdah of Bahá'u'lláh.

That was the rhythm of their lives for the whole journey, from Baghdád to Constantinople: walk all day, cook and serve and clean far into the night, sleep a little, rise at dawn, and walk again. "See what a vital service they were able to render," the Master marvels, "and for what bounty they were singled out." They walked close beside Bahá'u'lláh; "they made every one of the friends happy; they brought rest and comfort to all; they prepared whatever anyone asked." And the inner spirit in which they did it is captured in a line that is itself a teaching: "Áqá Riḍá and Mírzá Maḥmúd were the very essence of God's love, utterly detached from all but God. In all that time no one ever heard either of them raise his voice. They never hurt nor offended anyone."

How could two men live like this — pouring themselves out past the limit of the body, robbed of sleep, hungry on the road — and never grow sharp, never complain, never let the strain show in a raised voice? The answer lies in what the Master tells us of their earlier days in Baghdád, and it is one of the most beautiful pictures of contentment in all the Memorials. There was in Baghdád, he recalls, "a company of seven leading believers who lived in a single, small room, because they were destitute." They could "hardly keep body and soul together" — and yet, the Master says, "they were so spiritual, so blissful, that they thought themselves in Heaven." Sometimes they would chant prayers all night long, until the day broke. By day they would go out to work, and one might earn ten paras, another twenty, others forty or fifty, and these small sums would buy the evening meal for them all.

Then comes the detail no one who reads it forgets. "On a certain day one of them made twenty paras, while the rest had nothing at all. The one with the money bought some dates, and shared them with the others; that was dinner, for seven people." Seven grown men, sharing one small purchase of dates, and calling it supper. By every worldly reckoning this is poverty at its rawest. And the Master's verdict on it is breathtaking: "They were perfectly content with their frugal life, supremely happy."

That is the soil in which submission to the will of God grows. These were not men grimly putting up with hardship while secretly longing for more. They were genuinely, joyfully content with almost nothing — because the one thing they wanted, they had. "Their sole desire was to please Bahá'u'lláh," the Master writes. "To them, nothing was a bounty at all, except service at His Holy Threshold." Once a person's whole heart is set on a single treasure, and that treasure is the nearness of God, then everything else — wealth or want, comfort or exhaustion, a full table or a handful of dates — becomes a small matter, accepted easily from the hand of God because it neither adds to nor takes from the one thing that matters. That is why they could walk all day and serve all night without bitterness. They had already let go of the world; what was left was simply gladness.

The Master dwells on the quality of their souls with evident love. "These two honoured men devoted their days to all that is best in human life: they had seeing eyes; they were mindful and aware; they had hearing ears, and were fair of speech." They were "trustworthy, loyal, true." Bahá'u'lláh "showered blessings upon them," and "they were continually entering His presence and He would be expressing His satisfaction with them." Through it all they remained "lowly, humble, unassuming," and — this above all — "in all that long period, they never uttered a word which had to do with self." Half a century of selfless service, and not one word for themselves.

When "the Supreme Affliction" came and Bahá'u'lláh passed from this world, the two friends "were consumed with sorrow, like candles flickering away." They longed for death, yet stayed firm in the Covenant and laboured "hard and well to spread that Daystar's Faith," remaining the close and trusted companions of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who could rely on them in all things. And at the last, during an absence of the Master, they took their flight to the Kingdom of unfading glory. 'Abdu'l-Bahá closes with a tenderness that reveals how dear they were to Him: "I sorrowed much because I was not with them when they died. Although absent in body, I was there in my heart, and mourning over them."

The witness of Mírzá Maḥmúd and Áqá Riḍá is not the witness of one heroic hour but of ten thousand ordinary ones, each accepted gladly from God. They show us that the deepest submission to the divine Will may wear the plainest clothes — a man walking ahead of a caravan, a pot scrubbed at midnight, a handful of dates divided seven ways and received as a feast. Wanting only to please God, they found that whatever God sent was enough, and were "supremely happy" with a life the world would have called destitute. To want one thing, and to want it wholly, is to be content with everything.

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/