The Light in the Black Pit: Bahá'u'lláh's Own Account

A retelling based on Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, one of the last great Tablets revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, in which He sets down in His own words His recollection of the dungeon of Ṭihrán. Passages in quotation marks are His own words as rendered into English by Shoghi Effendi.

There are some places so dark that no lamp seems able to reach them. In the late summer of 1852, Bahá'u'lláh was cast into one of them.

The Faith of the Báb had been all but crushed. The Báb Himself had been martyred two years before; the heroic companies at Ṭabarsí, Nayríz, and Zanján had been overwhelmed; the believers were scattered and hunted. Then two young Bábís, half-crazed with grief and acting on no one's authority, made a foolish and abortive attempt on the life of the Sháh. The whole community was made to pay for it. Among those swept up in the round-up that followed was Bahá'u'lláh, known then in Ṭihrán only by His given names, a Man of noble family famous in the capital for His kindness to the poor.

He was marched on foot, bareheaded and in chains, through the streets of Ṭihrán under the jeers of the mob, and brought to the place where He would be held. It was called the Síyáh-Chál — the Black Pit. It had once been the reservoir of a public bath: a vault sunk three flights of steps below the ground, without a window, without a lamp, the air thick and fetid. Some hundred and fifty prisoners were chained along its walls, many of them condemned criminals. There was no light by which to tell the day from the night. About His neck was fastened a chain so heavy that it bowed His head down upon His chest, and its weight left marks He would carry for the rest of His life.

Each day some of the prisoners chained beside Him were led up the steps to be put to death. The food brought down was foul, and at times poisoned. By every measure the world knows, it was a place of ending — the dark in which a cause goes to die.

And it was there, in that exact darkness, that the light dawned.

Long afterward, near the close of His life, Bahá'u'lláh set down His own recollection of those nights in the Tablet known as the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. He did not describe a vision He had gone seeking. He described something that came upon Him, unbidden, in the worst place on earth. He wrote:

During the days I lay in the prison of Ṭihrán, though the galling weight of the chains and the stench-filled air allowed Me but little sleep, still in those infrequent moments of slumber I felt as if something flowed from the crown of My head over My breast, even as a mighty torrent that precipitateth itself upon the earth from the summit of a lofty mountain. Every limb of My body would, as a result, be set afire. At such moments My tongue recited what no man could bear to hear.

He recorded, too, the Voice that called to Him out of the dark — words of consolation and of commission, promising that God would make Him victorious by His own self and by His Pen, that He need not grieve nor be afraid, for He was in safety, and that in His own time God would raise up the treasures of the earth, men who would aid Him through His own Name. To one chained in a pit awaiting death, surrounded by the bodies of the slain, came the assurance that he was, in truth, in safety — and that an age was beginning.

What is most striking in His own telling is His humility before it. He insists that He had not desired this. "I was but a man like others, asleep upon My couch," He wrote of the time before His call, "when, lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over Me, and taught Me the knowledge of all that hath been." He had sought no station. The light was not lit by Him; it was lit upon Him. He was its bearer, not its author.

He remained in the Black Pit four months. At length the efforts of His family, and the intervention of a foreign minister who could not believe One of such noble character could be guilty, secured His release — not to freedom, but to exile. The chain was struck from His neck. He climbed the three flights of steps and came out into the air a Prisoner banished from His native land forever. But He came out carrying within Him the dawn that had broken in the dark, and the forty years that followed — the Tablets, the proclamation to kings, the remaking of countless lives — were the unfolding of what had begun in that lightless room.

This is why the Black Pit stands at the very heart of the Feast of Light. It testifies to a truth the believers have clung to ever since: that the darkness of the world, however total it seems, is not the final word; that God's light can dawn in the one place from which every hope has been shut out; and that the deepest pit a tyrant can dig may become, in the hand of God, the cradle of a new creation.

This is a retelling. For Bahá'u'lláh's own account, see Epistle to the Son of the Wolf.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1891). *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/epistle-son-wolf/