The Báb Laid to Rest on Mount Carmel

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, chapter XVIII. Words in quotation marks and indented passages are quoted from that book.

After the Báb and the young disciple who died with Him were executed in Tabríz on July 9, 1850, their bodies were thrown on the edge of the moat outside the city. In the middle of the second night, through the efforts of a believer named Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán, they were carried to a silk factory owned by a believer from Mílán. The next day they were laid in a wooden casket and taken to a place of safety.

Fifty years in hiding

On Bahá'u'lláh's instructions the casket was brought to Ṭihrán. It was kept first in the shrine of Imám-Zádih Ḥasan, then in Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán's own house, then in the shrine of Imám-Zádih Ma'ṣúm. In 1867–68 a Tablet from Bahá'u'lláh in Adrianople directed two believers, Mullá 'Alí-Akbar-i-Sháhmírzádí and Jamál-i-Burújirdí, to move it at once. They hid it inside a wall of a ruined mosque on the road to Chashmih-'Alí, found the next day that the hiding-place had been discovered, and carried the casket secretly into the city, to the house of a believer, Mírzá Ḥasan-i-Vazír. It stayed there fourteen months, until so many believers began coming to the house that Mullá 'Alí-Akbar asked Bahá'u'lláh for guidance.

Another believer, Ḥájí Sháh Muḥammad-i-Manshádí, was then entrusted with the remains and buried them beneath the floor of the shrine of Imám-Zádih Zayd. Later, guided by a chart sent by Bahá'u'lláh, the remains were moved again, to a private house and then to several others in turn. In 1899, at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's direction, they were carried by way of Iṣfahán, Kirmánsháh, Baghdád, Damascus and Beirut, and then by sea to 'Akká, arriving on January 31, 1899, fifty lunar years after the Báb's execution.

Building the tomb

Bahá'u'lláh had blessed and chosen a site on Mount Carmel for the Báb's tomb, and had outlined the plan to 'Abdu'l-Bahá on one of His visits to the mountain. In 1899 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid the foundation stone with His own hands. A marble sarcophagus, the gift of the Bahá'ís of Rangoon, was made and shipped to Haifa.

For almost ten years the work met obstacle after obstacle. The owner of the site, influenced by enemies of the Faith, long refused to sell. An exorbitant price was demanded for opening a road to it. Officials raised endless objections, and those who had broken Bahá'u'lláh's Covenant spread grave accusations about the purpose of the building. For long periods 'Abdu'l-Bahá, again confined to 'Akká, could not supervise the work in person. He was often heard to say:

Every stone of that building, every stone of the road leading to it, I have with infinite tears and at tremendous cost, raised and placed in position.

An eye-witness recalled His account of one night when He was so hemmed in by anxieties that He recited over and over a prayer of the Báb that He had with Him. The next morning the owner of the land came, apologised, and asked Him to buy the property.

Naw-Rúz, 1909

The work was finished in 1909, the year Sultán 'Abdu'l-Ḥamíd lost his throne. On the day of Naw-Rúz, the first Naw-Rúz 'Abdu'l-Bahá celebrated after His own release from confinement, He had the marble sarcophagus carried with great labour into the vault prepared for it. In the evening, by the light of a single lamp, in the presence of believers from the East and the West, He laid within it with His own hands the wooden casket holding the remains of the Báb and His companion. Shoghi Effendi writes:

When all was finished, and the earthly remains of the Martyr-Prophet of Shíráz were, at long last, safely deposited for their everlasting rest in the bosom of God's holy mountain, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Who had cast aside His turban, removed His shoes and thrown off His cloak, bent low over the still open sarcophagus, His silver hair waving about His head and His face transfigured and luminous, rested His forehead on the border of the wooden casket, and, sobbing aloud, wept with such a weeping that all those who were present wept with Him.

That night He could not sleep. In a Tablet announcing the news He wrote that the body of the Báb, "after having for sixty years been transferred from place to place, by reason of the ascendancy of the enemy, and from fear of the malevolent, and having known neither rest nor tranquillity has, through the mercy of the Abhá Beauty, been ceremoniously deposited, on the day of Naw-Rúz, within the sacred casket, in the exalted Shrine on Mt. Carmel."

'Abdu'l-Bahá said more than once that bringing the remains safely to the Holy Land, building a fitting tomb for them, and laying them in it with His own hands had been one of the three principal objectives of His ministry.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, chapter XVIII.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/