The First to Bear the Blows: Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Muqaddas

A retelling based on Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá's reminiscences of the early believers. The short phrases in quotation marks are preserved in the Master's portrait of this companion.

The Feast of Qudrat celebrates the power of God to sustain a soul against odds — and there is a particular weight to that power when it must hold a person steady not for a single hour of crisis, but across a whole lifetime of suffering, and when that person is the very first to be asked to bear it. There is no precedent to draw strength from when you are the precedent; no example of endurance to imitate when you are the example others will later remember. Among the early believers whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá set down in his Memorials of the Faithful is one such man — Mullá Ṣádiq-i-Muqaddas of Khurásán, who was among the first ever to feel, on his own body, what it would cost to follow the Báb.

He was not a young enthusiast carried away by novelty. Long before the dawn of the new Day, Mullá Ṣádiq was already a cleric of recognised standing in the Khurásán region, a man whose life was ordered by religious discipline and austerity. So evident was his piety that his own community had given him a title of honour: Muqaddas — the Holy. It was not a name he claimed; it was a name his neighbours had pressed upon him, in recognition of a devotion they could see. He was, in short, exactly the kind of established, respected divine whom one would expect to be cautious about any new claim, slow to risk his reputation, careful of his standing.

But when the news of the Báb's declaration reached him, Mullá Ṣádiq did what the truly devout among the clergy did so rarely. He did not weigh his reputation. He investigated the claim, found himself persuaded, and accepted it — and in accepting it, he stepped, knowingly, out of the safety of his honoured position and into the path of those who would be persecuted.

The cost came quickly, and it came in Shíráz. In the early months after the Báb's declaration, the small body of believers in that city had begun certain devotional practices that the Shí'ih clerical authorities judged to be unlawful innovations. Mullá Ṣádiq, together with the youthful Quddús — who would later die a martyr's death — was at the centre of one such gathering. The two were arrested. And the sentence passed upon them was designed to be both cruel and humiliating: the bastinado, the public beating of the soles of the feet, and the tearing-out of the beard, the standard public disgrace inflicted on a cleric who had transgressed.

So it was that Mullá Ṣádiq became one of the first believers in the history of the Faith to be publicly tortured for it. There was no one who had gone before him in that square, no record of a believer who had borne such a thing and survived it with his faith intact, to give him heart. He had only the new conviction itself, and whatever power that conviction carried with it.

The sentence was carried out in the public square of Shíráz, before the eyes of the city. And here the power of which the Feast of Qudrat speaks showed itself — not in any escape or rescue, for there was none, but in the bearing of the man under the blows. Mullá Ṣádiq endured the bastinado without crying out. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, recording it long afterward, captured the whole meaning of that day in a single sentence: "His back bore the marks of the bastinado, and his soul bore the marks of the heavenly sojourn." The body was beaten; the spirit was somewhere the beating could not reach. He came away from that punishment with his title transformed in its meaning. He had been called Muqaddas, the Holy, by the deference of his fellow clerics; now the name was fixed to him forever, not by their courtesy, but by the witness of his own suffering. He had earned, in the square, the title he had been given in the seminary.

What is most remarkable about Mullá Ṣádiq, though, is not that he bore one ordeal well, but that the ordeals did not stop, and neither did he. He was banished from Shíráz. He returned to Khurásán and took up, again, the patient work of teaching the Cause. And in the years that followed he suffered further imprisonments and further banishments — not one trial, but a succession of them, stretching across his life. A power that can carry a soul through a single dramatic hour is one thing; a power that can keep a soul faithful, and even joyful, through decade after decade of imprisonment and exile, without souring into bitterness or hardening into despair, is something rarer and deeper. That is the power that held Mullá Ṣádiq. The years of suffering did not embitter him. They did not shake his conviction. They seemed only to confirm and deepen it.

He moved through the great upheavals of the early Bábí period as one of its veterans. He was present, in one capacity or another, at several of its decisive events. By a providential turn of circumstance, he was delayed elsewhere at the moment when the band of believers gathered at the fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí for that fateful and nearly fatal stand, and so he survived a siege that consumed so many of his companions. He lived on, where others of the dawn-breakers fell.

And because he lived on, his constancy faced one further test — the test that proved its true depth. When, in the fullness of time, the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh came to be proclaimed, many who had loved the Báb had to decide whether they could follow where the Cause now led. Mullá Ṣádiq did not hesitate. He had, in a sense, been waiting for exactly this second clarification of the truth he had given his life to. He recognised the new Revelation at once and transferred his loyalty to its Centre without a moment's wavering, and he continued his teaching work, now as a Bahá'í, to the end of his days. The man who had been among the very first to suffer for the Báb was among the steadfast who carried that same devotion, unbroken, into the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh.

He died at last in old age, in his own province, full of years. And 'Abdu'l-Bahá, closing the Memorial of this companion, set him among the company he had earned by a lifetime of constancy, recording that "his place is high among the heroes of the Dawn-Breaking, and his name shall not be forgotten while the Cause endures."

This is the power the Feast of Qudrat asks us to remember. There was no army to save Mullá Ṣádiq from the bastinado, no influence to spare him from banishment, no earlier hero whose endurance he could lean upon, for he was himself among the first. There was only the strength that the Cause poured into him — a strength that let him take the blows in silence, that carried him unembittered through a life of imprisonment and exile, and that kept his loyalty whole across the turning of a whole Dispensation. The world could mark his body and move him from city to city against his will. It could not, in all his long life, make him afraid, and it could not make him deny. That constancy was not his own doing; it was the power of God, sustaining one faithful soul against every odds the age could set against him.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Memorials of the Faithful by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1915). *Memorials of the Faithful*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/memorials-faithful/