Ḥujjat Proclaims the Báb in Zanján

A retelling based on Nabíl's The Dawn-Breakers, with Shoghi Effendi's God Passes By. Words in quotation marks are from those histories.

Mullá Muḥammad-'Alí was the son of one of the leading mujtahids of Zanján. He studied at Najaf, lived for a time in Hamadán, and on his father's death came home, where for seventeen years he taught and preached from the pulpit of a mosque his friends had built for him. Nabíl calls him "a man of independent mind, noted for extreme originality and freedom from all forms of traditional restraint." He was often in conflict with the other clergy of Zanján, and once, summoned to Tehran to answer them before the Sháh, he defended himself successfully.

When the Call from Shíráz reached him, he sent a trusted disciple, Mullá Iskandar, to make an independent enquiry. Mullá Iskandar met the Báb, stayed forty days in Shíráz, and returned to Zanján at a moment when the city's leading 'ulamás were gathered with his master. Asked whether he believed, he laid the Báb's writings before Mullá Muḥammad-'Alí and said he would follow whatever his master decided. Mullá Muḥammad-'Alí was angry: "How dare you consider matters of belief to be dependent upon the approbation or rejection of others?"

He took up the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá', read one page, fell prostrate, and declared before the assembly:

I take you, members of this assembly, as my witnesses: I pledge such allegiance to the Author of this Revelation that should He ever pronounce the night to be the day, and declare the sun to be a shadow, I would unreservedly submit to His judgment, and would regard His verdict as the voice of Truth.

His opponents now petitioned Muḥammad Sháh, complaining that he had won "two-thirds of the inhabitants of Zanján" to the new Faith and that the mosque could no longer hold the crowds who came to pray behind him. Once more he was called to Tehran, answered every question, and was sent home with the Sháh's favour.

Some time later another envoy, Mashhadí Aḥmad, whom he had sent to Shíráz with a petition and gifts, brought him a sealed letter from the Báb. In it the Báb gave him one of His own titles, Ḥujjat (the Proof), and urged him to proclaim His teachings from the pulpit "without the least reservation." Ḥujjat at once dismissed his students, told them to close their books, and ended his classes, saying:

Of what profit are study and research to those who have already found the Truth, and why strive after learning when He who is the Object of all knowledge is made manifest?

When he began to lead the Friday prayer, as the Báb had directed, the Imám-Jum'ih of Zanján protested that the right was his alone. The clergy complained to the Sháh's minister, Ḥájí Mírzá Áqásí, and this time the Sháh ordered Ḥujjat brought to the capital. There he told Ḥájí Mírzá Áqásí that the Báb was "the very One whose advent you yourself, with all the peoples of the world, are eagerly awaiting." At several meetings with the clergy of Tehran he argued his case, and although they declared him an infidel, the Sháh continued to protect him. Still, Nabíl writes, "Hujjat was virtually a prisoner in Tihran," unable to leave the capital or meet his friends freely.

He later escaped to Zanján. There, in 1850–51, he and no fewer than eighteen hundred of his fellow believers gave their lives in the upheaval that Shoghi Effendi describes in God Passes By. That is told in another story.

This is a retelling. For the full account, see Nabíl's The Dawn-Breakers, chapters IX and XXIV.

Nabíl-i-A'ẓam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl's Narrative of the Early Days of the Bahá'í Revelation*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/dawn-breakers/