The Same Smiling Face: Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí in Exile

*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. Short phrases in quotation marks are His words as rendered into English.*

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Among the many believers whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá lovingly remembered in *Memorials of the Faithful* is Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí, a teacher of the Cause whose life ran the whole length of Bahá'u'lláh's exile and reached on into the ministry of the Master Himself. He was born in Iṣfáhán, recognized the Faith in his youth, and became, in the decades that followed, one of its most tireless and best-loved teachers in the Persian lands. His was not the teaching of dispute.

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The Master records that "in whatever land he was, he was the joy of the believers and the light of the gathering" — a warm, patient, story-laden way of drawing souls to God through love rather than argument.

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A man so effective in spreading the Cause was bound to draw the enmity of its opponents, and his life was punctuated by imprisonment and banishment. The heaviest of these trials was the Sudanese exile. In the later years of the nineteenth century the Persian government, acting together with the Ottoman authorities, ordered him deported far from his homeland to the remote southern reaches of the Ottoman dominions.

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He was sent across deserts to Khartoum, deep in the central Sudan, and there he was held in exile for some nine years — cut off from his fellow believers, far from the Holy Land where his heart longed to be, sentenced to waste, by every worldly measure, the better part of a decade in a place chosen for its remoteness.

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What is striking is what he did with those years. He did not treat the exile as a calamity to be merely survived. He received it as the will of God and looked at once for the work God might intend to be done in it. The Master treats this Sudanese period at length, and the picture is unmistakable: Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí turned his place of banishment into a field of service.

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He learned the conditions of the land, made friends among the merchant community, and quietly began the patient labour of introducing the Bahá'í teachings into the Sudanese cities. The small community of believers that would, in later generations, take root in that country traces its earliest seed to the exiled teacher of those years. He had been sent to the Sudan to be silenced; he made of the Sudan a place where the Cause first took breath.

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And then comes the detail that the Master singles out, the detail that turns a story of hardship into a portrait of submission to the will of God. After his long banishment was over and he was at last released, Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí made his way to 'Akká and entered the presence of Bahá'u'lláh. Nine years of exile lay behind him — the heat, the loneliness, the wearing away of strength in a far country.

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Such years leave their mark on most men; they sour the temper, they bend the back of the spirit. They had left no such mark on him. 'Abdu'l-Bahá records that he came into the presence "with the same smiling face with which he had set out on the road of exile" all those years before. He had gone into banishment smiling, trusting his Lord; he came out of it smiling still, the trust unbroken, the joy undimmed.

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That single image is the whole teaching. A man who has truly handed himself over to the will of God is not made bitter by what God permits to befall him, because he has stopped measuring his life by comfort and freedom and has begun measuring it by nearness to God and service to His Cause. Exile could change Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí's circumstances; it could not change his face, because it could not reach the place where his peace was kept.

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He spent his last years in the Holy Land in the service of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, dividing his time between 'Akká and the slope of Mount Carmel near the rising Shrine of the Báb, and it was in this period that the Master conferred upon him the title by which he is remembered — *the Angel of Carmel.* When he died, full of years, the Master described his passing as a gentle ascent, befitting the long, quiet, smiling life of service that had gone before it, and testified that his was "a soul that had passed through the fires of trial and emerged as gold."

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Gold is not destroyed by fire; it is purified by it. So it had been with Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí. The trials that were meant to consume him only burned away whatever was less than pure, and left him shining — and smiling — to the end.

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

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