The Unknown Stranger of Kurdistán

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh, which gathers the eyewitness chronicles and Tablets describing this period of Bahá'u'lláh's life. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in those histories or in Bahá'u'lláh's own words.

A little more than a year after Bahá'u'lláh reached Baghdád as an exile, a grief fell upon Him that had nothing to do with His enemies. The Bábí community there had grown divided and quarrelsome, and some, jealous of the love that gathered naturally around Him, stirred up strife. Bahá'u'lláh saw that His very presence, which He had used only to revive and unite the believers, was being turned by others into an occasion of contention. And so He made a choice that astonished everyone who learned of it later: rather than let the discord swirl about Him, He would remove Himself from it entirely.

In His own words, set down afterward, the one object of His retirement was "to avoid becoming a subject of discord among the faithful, a source of disturbance unto Our companions, the means of injury to any soul, or the cause of sorrow to any heart." Beyond that, He wrote, He cherished no other intention. He left secretly, told no one where He was going, and took with Him almost nothing — a change of clothing, the plainest provision. He walked out of the city and into the wild mountains of Kurdistán, to the region around the town of Sulaymáníyyih, and there, alone and unknown, He stayed for two years.

It was a hard country and a hard people. The mountain tribes of Kurdistán were proud, fierce, and quick to suspicion, and they had little reason to welcome a penniless stranger who appeared among them from nowhere and would not say who He was. For a time He lived in utter solitude in the heights, in a cave and on the bare mountainside, with no food on many a day and no rest on many a night. He sought out no one. He made no claim. He simply lived.

Yet a life cannot be hidden forever, and what could not be hidden in Him was His character. Little by little the people of the region became aware of the stranger in their mountains — of His dignity, His courtesy, His patience, and a kindness in Him that seemed to ask nothing in return. He was eventually drawn down toward Sulaymáníyyih and lodged for a while at a religious retreat there. The learned men of the town, the doctors of law and the leaders of the Ṣúfí orders — men accustomed to deference and slow to grant it — found themselves in the presence of a wisdom that humbled them. They came with their hardest questions on the deepest matters of the spirit, and went away not defeated but illumined, and drawn to Him as to a friend.

He had revealed His name to no one. They knew Him only as a stranger of evident nobility, and they could not stop talking about Him. His fame spread from the town outward through the mountains. The same wild tribesmen who would have robbed an ordinary traveller came instead to honour Him. The histories preserve that the affection in which the people of Kurdistán came to hold Him grew until they revered Him as few outsiders had ever been revered in that country. He had won them with nothing but the kindness of His presence — no wealth to give, no office to wield, no doctrine pressed upon them, only Himself.

This is what makes the Kurdistán years so quietly astonishing. Here was One who had every right to assert Himself and chose instead to vanish; who, in a place where He was wholly unknown and wholly without power, became beloved purely through goodness. He had gone into the wilderness so as to gather no one — so as never to be the cause of strife or sorrow to any heart. And yet mercy of that order cannot help but draw hearts to itself. The hardest country and the proudest people in that land bent toward Him as plants bend toward the sun.

Then, after two years, the summons came. Word of the nameless sage of Sulaymáníyyih had at last travelled back to Baghdád, and the believers there — leaderless, demoralized, sinking again into the very confusion His absence could not finally cure — realized who the stranger in the mountains must be. They begged Him to return. He had not intended to; His withdrawal, He wrote, "had contemplated no return," and His separation "had hoped for no reunion." But for the sake of the Cause and the scattered friends, He surrendered His own wish and came back down out of the mountains.

When He left Kurdistán, the people He had never asked anything of did not want to let Him go. He had come among them as a stranger with empty hands and left behind Him a whole region that had learned to love Him — the same thing that would happen, a few years later and on a far larger scale, when He rode out of Baghdád and the whole city wept. Wherever He went, even in disguise, even in silence, the mercy and nobility of His nature did their work, and human hearts turned to Him.

He had taught — and here, in the loneliest place, He had lived — that the way to move a heart is not to overpower it but to love it; and that a goodness which asks nothing for itself is the most irresistible force there is.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 1 by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (4 volumes)*. George Ronald.