From the Pulpit of Shíráz: The Báb Speaks to the People

A retelling based on the narrative preserved in Nabíl's The Dawn-Breakers, the chronicle of the early days of the Bábí Cause. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words kept in that history.

By the time the Báb was brought back to His native city of Shíráz, the air there was already poisoned against Him. One of His followers, the devoted Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Khurásání, had begun to proclaim the Báb's name openly in the call to prayer, and the act had thrown the city into an uproar. Wild rumours flew. It was said — by men who had never heard Him and would not have understood Him if they had — that this young Merchant was making vast and blasphemous claims, that He was a danger to faith and order, that He aimed at a kind of authority no man had a right to. The governor of the province, Ḥusayn Khán, a cruel and contemptuous official, had the Báb seized and brought before him, treated with violence, and held under guard. The city had been told what to think of Him before it had heard a word from His own lips.

It is against that background that one of the boldest acts of proclamation in the early history of the Cause must be understood. The Báb did not answer the slanders against Him in private, nor through intermediaries, nor by quietly waiting for the storm to pass. On a Friday — the day of the congregational prayer, when the population of the city gathered in its numbers — He went, Nabíl records, to the Masjid-i-Vakíl, the principal mosque of Shíráz, and there ascended the pulpit before the assembled people.

Imagine the scene. Here was a young Man, lately dragged through the city as a prisoner, accused of the gravest offences a religious community can name, facing a congregation that had been deliberately turned against Him. The pulpit He stood in was the very seat from which the city's own preachers held forth; the crowd beneath Him contained those who had believed the rumours and those who waited, curious, to see the impostor exposed. A lesser soul, given the chance to speak at all, might have hedged, or pleaded, or tried merely to save Himself. The Báb did something else.

He addressed the people to their faces. He affirmed, clearly and without fear, the truth of His mission — the Cause He had in fact come to declare. And, with the same clarity, He repudiated the falsehoods that had been heaped upon Him: the extravagant and false claims that others had spread in His name, the exaggerations and distortions that had been used to inflame the city against Him. He drew, in effect, the line that slander always tries to blur — between what He had truly proclaimed and what His enemies had pretended He proclaimed. The histories preserve that He invoked the judgment of God upon any who would attribute to Him what He had not said. He neither denied His station to escape danger, nor allowed the lies to stand. He told the truth, the whole of it, in the most public place the city possessed.

The effect upon the gathering was not what His accusers had arranged. A Man expected to cower had instead spoken with calm authority from their own pulpit; the spectacle prepared for His humiliation had become, instead, the occasion of His open testimony. For the moment, at least, the fever of the city was checked, and the violence that had been gathering against Him was, for a time, restrained. The slanders did not vanish, and the persecution of the Báb was far from over — the road to the barrack-square of Tabríz still lay ahead of Him. But on that Friday in Shíráz He had shown what bold proclamation looks like when it is most costly: not a speech delivered to friends in safety, but the truth declared, unafraid, before a hostile crowd in the very heart of the place that had been roused to reject it.

This is why the Feast of Qawl — the Feast of Speech — may turn to that pulpit in Shíráz. The world's habit, when it cannot silence a voice, is to twist it — to put false words in its mouth and then condemn the words it never spoke. The Báb met that ancient device in the way truth must always meet it: by speaking openly, naming the falsehood for what it was, and letting His own clear word stand in the light of day. He answered the lie not with silence, but with speech.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Nabíl's The Dawn-Breakers.

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/