Brought Into the Light: The Báb Laid to Rest on Mount Carmel

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

On a July noon in 1850, the Báb was suspended before a great crowd in the barrack square of Tabríz and, with a young disciple at His side, was put to death by a firing squad. His broken remains were thrown to the edge of the city moat, that the beasts and the elements might do the rest. The authorities meant that to be the end of Him.

It was not the end. That very night, at great peril, believers recovered the remains and bore them away in secret. And so began one of the most extraordinary labours of love in religious history — a hidden journey that would last almost sixty years.

The precious remains were wrapped, concealed, and moved from place to place, always one step ahead of those who would have destroyed them. They were hidden in Tabríz, then carried to Ṭihrán; sheltered in a shrine, in a private house, under a floor; smuggled across borders; passed from trusted hand to trusted hand. Through changes of government, through persecutions, through the deaths of those who had guarded them and the raising up of others to take their place, the secret was kept. For a time only one or two living souls knew where the remains lay. Bahá'u'lláh Himself, during His own ministry, gave directions for their safekeeping, and on Mount Carmel — the mountain of God spoken of by the prophets of old — He pointed out to 'Abdu'l-Bahá the very spot where the Báb should at last be laid.

When the weight of the Cause fell upon 'Abdu'l-Bahá, He took up the unfinished task. The remains had by then been brought, still in secret, to the Holy Land. But there was as yet no tomb. And 'Abdu'l-Bahá undertook to build one on the slope of Carmel that His Father had designated — a labour that would consume ten years and tax Him almost beyond bearing.

Those were not easy years. He was still, in the eyes of the Ottoman state, a prisoner. His enemies within the Faith and without watched His every act. The work of raising a stone building on the mountainside, in such conditions and with such scant means, was beset at every turn by obstacles, suspicions, and betrayals; more than once the whole enterprise seemed about to be wrecked by those who reported His doings to the authorities as the building of a fortress. Shoghi Effendi records that the cares of those years pressed upon 'Abdu'l-Bahá so heavily that His hair turned white. Yet He pressed on, and the six-chambered tomb of stone slowly rose to completion.

At last it was ready. The marble sarcophagus, the gift of the believers of the East, was in place. And on the day of Naw-Rúz — the first day of spring — in 1909, the long pilgrimage of the remains came to its end.

Shoghi Effendi sets down the scene with great restraint, and it is the more moving for it. 'Abdu'l-Bahá with His own hands placed the casket containing the sacred remains within the marble vault prepared to receive it. The Faith had no clergy to officiate, no pomp to summon; there was only the Master, the small company of the faithful, and the mountain. 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 heart of Carmel, 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid His head upon the edge of the sarcophagus, and — overcome — He wept, until those around Him wept with Him.

He spoke afterward of what that morning had meant. The safe entombment of the Báb, He said, was one of the deepest joys and greatest reliefs of His life. For near to sixty years the Most Holy of trusts had been hunted and hidden, never resting, never safe. Now it rested. The Forerunner who had given His life to herald the Day was home, in the place His own Promised One had chosen, on the mountain of the Lord.

The Feast of Light keeps this story because of the shape of it: a Light struck down and flung into the dark by those who hated it, kept burning through six decades of secrecy by the quiet courage of countless believers, and brought at last — by the hands of the Master, on the morning of spring — out of hiding and into the open light of day, to shine from Carmel over the world. What tyranny buried in darkness, faithfulness carried into the light.

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

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