The Few Against the Many: The Fort of Shaykh Ṭabarsí

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which records the upheaval of Ṭabarsí. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.*

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In the autumn of 1848, in the dripping forests of Mázindarán in northern Persia, a thing happened that the soldiers who witnessed it could never afterward explain. A few hundred men — students of religion, shopkeepers, scribes, a sifter of wheat, men whose hands knew the pen and the prayer-bead far better than the sword — gathered around a humble shrine deep in the woods, the tomb of a holy man called Shaykh Ṭabarsí. They raised a rough rampart of earth and timber about it. And there they made their stand for the Cause of the Báb.

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They had not come to make war. They had risen, as Shoghi Effendi records, to defend themselves and to demonstrate the reality of their faith. At their head were two of the greatest souls of that early springtime of the Faith: Mullá Ḥusayn, the first to believe in the Báb, and the youthful Quddús, last of the Letters of the Living, whom the Báb cherished above all His disciples. Around this small company the Cause's enemies now gathered in force.

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What came against them was not a mob but the organized might of a kingdom. Regiment after regiment of trained troops was sent into the forest, equipped with muskets and cannon, supported by mounted men and by the wealth and authority of princes and divines. The besiegers ringed the fort with seven barricades. They cut the defenders off from food and from the world. They brought up artillery and bombarded the little earthwork. By every law of warfare, the matter should have been settled in days.

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It lasted eleven months.

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Shoghi Effendi sets the wonder of it down plainly. A mere handful, "untrained and ill-equipped," withstood "the repeated onslaughts of a well-armed and numerically superior foe." The besieged were reduced to a hunger almost beyond belief. When their provisions failed, they ground the bones of their fallen horses for sustenance; they boiled grass; they ate, at the end, the leather of their own saddles and the roots they could dig from the forest floor.

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They were sick, they were starving, they were shrinking in number with every assault. And still, when they sallied out from their fort against the surrounding host, the trained soldiers broke and fled before them.

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The power on display was not the power of numbers, for they had almost none. It was not the power of arms, for theirs were few and poor. It was something the besiegers had no category for: men who had so completely surrendered their lives that the threat of death, the only weapon a tyrant truly owns, had lost its grip on them. Again and again the defenders were promised their freedom if they would but renounce the Báb.

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Not one of them, through eleven months of agony, accepted the bargain. To people for whom the world had already been let go, there was nothing left to take.

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In the end the fort fell — but it was not stormed. It could not be stormed. It was taken by a lie. The commander of the imperial forces, unable to defeat the survivors, swore upon the Qur'án a solemn oath of safe-conduct, inviting the famished remnant out under a guarantee of their lives. The defenders, honouring the sacred pledge, came forth. The oath was broken at once. Some were slaughtered, others sold, others carried off to torture and death.

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Mullá Ḥusayn had already fallen in a night sortie; Quddús was led away to a martyrdom of unspeakable cruelty in the streets of Bárfurúsh.

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By the world's reckoning, the besiegers won and the besieged were destroyed. But Shoghi Effendi does not record it as a defeat. The episode stands in the history of the Faith as one of its imperishable glories — proof, written in the forests of Mázindarán, that the spirit kindled by the Báb could not be put down by force.

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An empire had thrown its trained armies and its cannon against a few hundred unarmed believers and had been held at bay for the better part of a year, and had prevailed at last only by treachery. The bodies of the defenders lay in the earth; the power that had sustained them passed into the memory of the Faith and has never since been forgotten.

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This is the power the Feast of Qudrat sets before us. It is not the power that commands regiments, for the regiments were on the other side. It is the power that takes a handful of ordinary men — booksellers and students and a sifter of wheat — and makes them, for as long as their hearts hold to God, stronger than the army sent to crush them. The fort fell. The faith that built it did not.

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

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