A Debt of Honour: Isfandíyár, the Faithful Servant

A retelling of an account 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself related during His visit to the United States in 1912, recorded in The Promulgation of Universal Peace. The words set in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own, or the words of Isfandíyár as He preserved them.

In the America of 1912, a country still torn by the colour line, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke again and again of the oneness of humankind. He told His listeners that the worth of a human being is not in the colour of the skin or the rank of the family, but in the character of the soul. And to make the teaching live, He would sometimes set before them a real person — someone He had known. One of those people was a man named Isfandíyár.

Isfandíyár had been, in the language of that society, a servant in the household of Bahá'u'lláh — and more than that. In the years before the Cause was proclaimed, the family of Bahá'u'lláh, like other families of standing in Persia, had owned household servants who were not free. When Bahá'u'lláh came into His own inheritance, He set them free. He emancipated those who had served His father, long before any law of the land required such a thing, and gave them their liberty as a matter of conscience. Isfandíyár was among those who were freed. And here the first remarkable thing in his story appears: being free to go wherever he wished, he chose to stay. He remained, as a free man, in the household he loved, and gave it his service not because he was bound to it but because his heart was bound to it.

He became, in time, one of the most trusted members of that household. He was entrusted, the account tells us, with its confidences — the kind of trust that is given only to a person whose discretion is beyond question. He carried what needed carrying, kept what needed keeping, and managed the daily affairs of the family with a faithfulness that those who knew him never forgot.

Then the storm broke. After an attempt was made on the life of the Sháh by a half-crazed youth — an act the followers of the Báb had neither planned nor desired — a wave of persecution swept over Persia. Bahá'u'lláh, though wholly innocent, was seized and cast into the Síyáh-Chál, the black pit beneath Ṭihrán. The family's wealth was plundered. The household that had been a place of dignity and plenty was scattered and reduced to fear and want. And the authorities, knowing how close Isfandíyár stood to the family and how much he knew, wanted him too. The Sháh, the account says, made inquiry after him continually. A great number of officers — by 'Abdu'l-Bahá's telling, perhaps more than a hundred men — were set to search for him through the city. To be found would have meant torture, and almost certainly death.

Isfandíyár knew all this. He understood exactly what the hunt for him meant. And he had the chance to escape — to slip out of Ṭihrán and disappear into the great distances of the country, where a single man could be lost and safe. The prudent thing, the natural thing, the thing almost anyone would have done, was to go at once, that very night, and not look back.

He would not go. And the reason he gave is the heart of the whole story. In the ordinary business of running the household, Isfandíyár had bought goods on credit — food and supplies from the shopkeepers of the bazaar, as households did, to be paid for later. Those debts were still outstanding. And he said, in words 'Abdu'l-Bahá preserved and repeated to His American audience half a century later: "I cannot go because I owe money in the street and in the stores. They will say that the servant of Bahá'u'lláh has bought and consumed the goods and supplies of the storekeepers without paying for them. Unless I pay all these obligations, I cannot go."

Consider what that means. A man with a hundred officers hunting him through the streets, a man whose discovery in those very streets would cost him his life, weighed his own survival against the possibility that some shopkeeper might one day say that a servant of Bahá'u'lláh had cheated him — and he judged that the good name mattered more than the life. It was not chiefly his own honour he was guarding. It was the honour of the One he served. He could not bear that the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh should be smeared, in the mouths of the bazaar, with the small, sordid charge of an unpaid bill.

So Isfandíyár did the most dangerous thing imaginable. He stayed. For one whole month, the account relates, he went out into the very streets and bazaars where his pursuers were looking for him. He had goods to sell, and he sold them, and out of what he earned he paid his creditors, one after another, gradually, patiently, walking each day under the shadow of capture. He did not pay them in part. He did not pay the large debts and let the small ones go. He paid them in full; not a single penny remained unpaid. Only when the last obligation was discharged, only when no shopkeeper in Ṭihrán could say a true word against the honour of his Master's house, did he at last consent to seek his own safety.

His later years carried the same stamp. When Bahá'u'lláh, released from the pit and banished from His homeland, had reached Baghdád, Isfandíyár longed to rejoin the household he loved. But in the time of danger another man — a minister of the Persian court — had sheltered him and kept him from harm. Bahá'u'lláh counselled Isfandíyár that loyalty was owed to that protector, and that he should remain in his service so long as he was needed. And Isfandíyár, who had refused to abandon a debt of money, would not abandon a debt of gratitude either. He stayed with his benefactor, faithfully, to the end of his days, and died in obscurity, his name unknown to the world.

But not unknown to 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Across the gulf of fifty years, in a great country on the other side of the world, the Master remembered the freed servant of His father's house and named him before a roomful of Americans who had never heard of him. He did not introduce him as a servant, or a man of the lowest class, or a former slave. He said something else entirely. "If a perfect man could be found in the world," He told them, "that man was Isfandíyár." And He added: "He was the essence of love, radiant with sanctity and perfection, luminous with light."

There is the whole teaching of the Feast of Sharaf in a single life. Sharaf means honour — and the world is forever certain that it knows where honour lives: in high birth, in wealth, in office, in the colour and class that a society happens to prize. The world looked at Isfandíyár and saw a servant. But honour, in the sight of God, is not conferred by any of these things. It is earned by what a soul is — by trustworthiness so complete that a man will risk his life rather than let a stranger be cheated, by a faithfulness that outlasts freedom and danger and gratitude alike. The man the world ranked among the lowest, 'Abdu'l-Bahá ranked among the perfect. And in doing so He showed where the true patent of nobility is issued, and Whose seal is upon it.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words in The Promulgation of Universal Peace.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/