A Scattered Flock Made Whole: Bahá'u'lláh in Baghdád

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh, the comprehensive study of Bahá'u'lláh's ministry and Tablets, together with the history it draws upon. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in those histories.

When Bahá'u'lláh came down at last from the mountains of Kurdistan and returned to Baghdád, the sight that met Him would have broken a lesser heart. The community of exiled Bábís He had left behind two years before had fallen into a state close to ruin.

The cause of the collapse was not chiefly the persecution from without, though there was plenty of that. It was the decay within. The nominal head of the Bábí community in those years, Mírzá Yaḥyá, had hidden himself away and given no guidance, and into that vacuum had crept ambition, rivalry, cowardice, and worse. Some who called themselves Bábís had sunk to brigandage and disgraceful conduct, so that the very name "Bábí" had become, in the streets of Baghdád and beyond, a byword for lawlessness and a thing of shame. The believers were dispirited and divided, scattered in spirit even where they were gathered in body. The Faith of the Báb, for which so many of the noblest souls of Persia had already laid down their lives, seemed in that city to be guttering out in confusion and disrepute.

Bahá'u'lláh had withdrawn to Kurdistan precisely to avoid becoming the centre of the factions tearing at the community. Now He returned, and He set about a work of restoration. He held no office that the world could see. He commanded no soldiers, controlled no treasury, wielded no authority that any government recognized. He had, by every outward measure, nothing with which to rebuild a shattered people — nothing but His own presence, His words, and the love that poured from Him.

It proved to be enough, and more than enough.

Taherzadeh, drawing on the histories of those years, records the change that came over the community as one of the wonders of the Baghdád period. Quietly, patiently, Bahá'u'lláh began to revive the believers' faith and to reform their conduct. He summoned them away from contention toward unity, away from passivity toward service, away from anything that would shame the Cause toward a rectitude that would adorn it. He breathed into a demoralized remnant a fresh spirit of courage and devotion. The despondency lifted. The factions quieted. The believers who had been a source of scandal began, instead, to be a source of wonder.

And the transformation was not hidden in their hearts alone; it showed in their lives, where strangers could see it. In a few short years the same community whose name had been a reproach became known, even among those outside the Faith, for the dignity of its members, the purity of their lives, their trustworthiness in dealing, their gentleness, and the love they bore one another. The despised "Bábís" of Baghdád became people whose character drew respect and even reverence from the very society that had scorned them. Seekers came; the influence of the exiles spread; and Baghdád, the place of their banishment, became the place from which the Cause rose again to new life.

No edict had done this. No army, no wealth, no inheritance of office. He held no station that men could see, yet the broken remnant gathered about Him was, within a few years, transformed beyond recognition. The only instrument had been a single exiled Figure, Himself under sentence of banishment, working upon human hearts by a power that needed no throne.

This is the power the Feast of Qudrat holds before us. There is a kind of strength that can conquer a city and never change a single soul within it. And there is another kind — the kind at work in Baghdád — that changes the souls themselves: that takes the frightened and makes them brave, takes the divided and makes them one, takes the disgraced and clothes them in dignity, and does it not by force but by the transforming touch of the Word of God. The years in Baghdád would build toward the supreme hour in the Garden of Riḍván, when Bahá'u'lláh would at last declare openly the station that had been hidden within Him all along. But the rebuilding of that shattered community was itself a sign of what He was — a quiet, early proof that the power of God had once again appeared among men.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 1*. George Ronald.