The Faithful Pen: Mishkín-Qalam

*A retelling based on **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved by the Master in that book.*

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The world is sure it knows where honour lives. It lives, the world says, in reputation — in being known, sought after, received with deference in the houses of the great. By that measure there were few men in nineteenth-century Persia more honoured than the calligrapher whom history remembers as Mishkín-Qalam. And yet the true honour of his life lay in everything he was willing to lose.

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The Feast of Sharaf, the Feast of Honour, finds one of its clearest portraits in his story, because his life draws so sharp a line between the honour the world hands out and the honour that is earned by a faithful soul.

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Before he ever heard the name of Bahá'u'lláh, Mishkín-Qalam stood at the summit of his art.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá tells us plainly what he had been: "He was the leading calligrapher of Persia," a man "well known to all the great." He "enjoyed a special position among the court ministers of Ṭihrán, and with them he was solidly established." His fame, the Master says, "reached out to every land"; he "was famed throughout Asia Minor; his pen was the wonder of all calligraphers." In a civilisation that prized the written word as the highest of the visual arts, he was a master of every style, and the doors of palaces opened to him.

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He had, in short, exactly the kind of honour the world understands — and he had it in full.

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Then word of the Cause of God reached him in Iṣfáhán, and the whole direction of his life turned. He did not weigh his options or count what it might cost. He set out at once to find Bahá'u'lláh.

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The Master describes the journey with affection: he "crossed the great distances, measured out the miles, climbing mountains, passing over deserts and over the sea, until at last he came to Adrianople." There, in the presence of his Lord, "he reached the heights of faith and assurance," and "drank the wine of certitude." He was so overcome with love that he seemed, the Master says, "reeling to and fro like a drunkard." And out of that love he made his offering of the one thing that was wholly his to give: his art.

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He began to write out the Most Great Name — *Yá Bahá'u'l-Abhá* — "with marvelous skill, in many different forms," and to send these out into the world. The pen that had served kings now served the King of kings.

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What happened next is the heart of the matter. Mishkín-Qalam was sent to Constantinople, the seat of Ottoman power, and there the leading Persians and Turks received him at first "with every honor," "captivated by his jet black, calligraphic art." Had he wished, he could have settled into that welcome and let his fame carry him. Instead "he began boldly and eloquently to teach the Faith." And for this, the Persian ambassador set out to destroy him.

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He went to the Sultán's ministers and slandered Mishkín-Qalam to their faces. *This man is an agitator,* the ambassador told them — sent to "stir up trouble and make mischief" in the capital, a danger who would "burn up the whole world."

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Consider how false that charge was. 'Abdu'l-Bahá draws the contrast in a single luminous paragraph. "Actually that mild and submissive man," He writes, "was occupied solely with his calligraphy and his worship of God. He was striving to bring about not sedition but fellowship and peace. He was seeking to reconcile the followers of different faiths, not to drive them still further apart. He was of service to strangers and was helping to educate the native people.

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He was a refuge to the hapless and a horn of plenty to the poor. He invited all comers to the oneness of humankind; he shunned hostility and malice." Here is a man whose honour — his actual, inward honour — was so far above the lie told about him that the lie could not even reach it. The ambassador could blacken his name in the ministries; he could not touch the truth of who the man was.

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The slander did its work, as slander often does. They jailed him. They sent him first to Gallipoli, where he joined the very company of exiles being driven from Bahá'u'lláh's presence, and then despatched him to the island of Cyprus while Bahá'u'lláh and His family were sent on to the prison of 'Akká. On Cyprus, Mishkín-Qalam was held a captive in the citadel at Famagusta.

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There he remained, the Master records, "from the year 85 till 94" — by the Bahá'í reckoning, some nine long years locked away on an island, far from his Beloved, far from the friends, for no crime but his faith and his refusal to be silent about it.

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Nine years is a long time to test a man's loyalty. It is long enough for bitterness to set in, long enough for a soul to begin bargaining with itself. What did those years make of Mishkín-Qalam? When Cyprus at last passed out of Turkish hands and he was set free, he did not go in search of ease or vindication.

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He went straight "to his Well-Beloved in the city of 'Akká," to live once more under the shadow of the prison that held Bahá'u'lláh. And there, the Master tells us, "he was at all times joyous of spirit, ashine with the love of God, like a candle burning its life away, and he was a consolation to all the believers." The prison had not soured him. It had refined him.

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His deepest test came after the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh, when the Covenant was attacked from within by those who envied 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Here the gentle calligrapher, the "mild and submissive man," showed the steel that faithfulness is made of. "Mishkín-Qalam remained loyal," the Master writes, "solidly established in the Covenant. He stood before the violators like a brandished sword.

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He would never go half way with them; he feared no one but God; not for a moment did he falter, nor ever fail in service." The same soul who would not return hatred for slander would not, either, yield an inch where loyalty to the Cause was at stake. That is the paradox of true honour: it is gentle toward persons and unbending toward principle.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá's final tribute gathers up the whole man. "He was a compendium of perfections," He says — "believing, confident, serene, detached from the world, a peerless companion." And then the sentence that names the very quality the Feast of Sharaf celebrates: "For sincerity and loyalty he had no match, nor for patience and inner calm.

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He was selflessness itself, living on the breaths of the spirit." The Master adds the observation that makes the cost of it all clear: "If he had not been in love with the Blessed Beauty, if he had not set his heart on the Realm of Glory, every worldly pleasure could have been his. Wherever he went, his many calligraphic styles were a substantial capital." He could have had it all.

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He chose, instead, to belong wholly to God — and so "could float and soar in the spirit's endless sky."

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The world honoured Mishkín-Qalam for his pen and then, when that pen began to write the Name of God, tried to dishonour him as an agitator and lock him away. But the honour that mattered was never in the world's gift. It was the dignity of a soul that stayed faithful through nine years of exile, that answered slander with service, and that stood like a sword for the Covenant when standing was costly. That honour no ambassador could slander away and no citadel could imprison. It is the only honour that lasts.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **Memorials of the Faithful** by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.*

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