Strike No One: Mercy Inside the Fort of Tabarsí

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's eyewitness chronicle of the early days of the Faith, as translated by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

In the winter of 1848 a small company of the Báb's followers, led by His first and foremost disciple, Mullá Ḥusayn, took shelter at the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí in the forests of Mázindarán. They had not gone there to make war on anyone. They had gone because they were hunted, and because a remote wooden shrine in the woods offered them a place to hold together. Before long they were joined by the youthful Quddús, and before much longer they were surrounded — besieged by regiment after regiment of the royal army, cut off, and slowly starved.

What is most often remembered of Fort Ṭabarsí is the courage of its defenders. What deserves to be remembered just as much is their mercy. For from the beginning, the conduct of that little band was governed by a strict and tender discipline, and the man who set it was Mullá Ḥusayn himself.

His instruction to his companions, Nabíl records, was unmistakable. They were to defend their own lives, and no more. They were "on no account to allow the impetuosity of their feelings to overstep the bounds" set by their Faith. They were never to be the aggressors. They were never to strike the first blow. When an enemy fell or fled, they were not to pursue him, not to cut him down from behind, not to lift a hand against a man who was no longer a threat. Even amid the heat and terror of a night attack, even with their friends dying around them, they were bound by their leader's command to raise no weapon except in the plain defence of their lives, and to lower it the instant the danger passed.

This was no easy rule, and it was not kept in safety. These were men under siege, watching companions starve and fall, betrayed again and again by promises the besiegers broke. Every grievance the human heart can nurse, they had cause to nurse. And still they held the line their Faith had drawn. When the army's soldiers were within their reach, fleeing or fallen, the Báb's companions let them go. The histories preserve the wonder of the besiegers' own officers, who could not understand an enemy that would beat back an assault and then decline to take the revenge that lay open before it.

Quddús gave the discipline its meaning in words. They had not come, he reminded them, to wage war or to shed the blood of others. They had come to surrender their own lives in the path of God, and to show, by the manner of their living and dying, the truth of the Cause they had embraced. Their swords, he taught, were for the protection of their own lives alone, never for conquest, never for vengeance, never for the spreading of the Faith by force. The fort was not a fortress of war; it was a school of detachment and a witness of love. Even toward the men sent to annihilate them, the standard was restraint.

That restraint cost them dearly, and they paid it knowingly. Time after time the besieging commanders, unable to overcome the fort by arms, resorted to deceit — swearing oaths upon the Qur'án that the defenders would be spared if they came out, and then violating those oaths the moment the trusting men laid down their guard. The companions of Ṭabarsí were betrayed by the very mercy they extended in good faith. Yet the record is clear about who kept faith and who broke it. It was the hunted who honoured their word; it was the powerful who lied.

There is a particular grandeur in this. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and to most eyes the most justified, for these men to answer cruelty with cruelty — to pursue, to retaliate, to make their enemies pay. They had the provocation. They sometimes, briefly, had the opportunity. They refused it, because their Faith forbade it, because their leaders had bound them to a mercy higher than their own pain. In a land where prisoners were tortured for sport and whole families slaughtered for their belief, this small band in a wooden shrine in the forest insisted on drawing a line they would not cross even to save themselves.

Fort Ṭabarsí ended in betrayal and martyrdom. Mullá Ḥusayn fell; Quddús was later given over to a cruel death. But the witness of those months was not only one of bravery. It was a witness that the followers of the Báb would die rather than become like the men who were killing them — that they could be hunted without becoming hunters, struck without striking back beyond bare survival, and deceived without abandoning their own honesty.

The Master would teach, in the days to come, that the believer is to return poison with honey and cruelty with kindness. At Shaykh Ṭabarsí, in the cold and the hunger and under arms, that teaching was already being lived. The defenders of the fort showed that mercy is not the luxury of the comfortable and the safe. It is a discipline that can be kept by the starving and the besieged — and that it shines brightest, in fact, exactly there.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers by Nabíl-i-A'ẓam.

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/