The Most Trusted Courier: Shaykh Salmán

*A retelling drawn from 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own tribute in **Memorials of the Faithful**. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved by the Master in that book.*

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The world gives its honours to the powerful and the prominent — to scholars, princes, and men of wealth. The Faith of Bahá'u'lláh has a different scale of worth, and nowhere is the difference plainer than in the life of a humble man named Shaykh Salmán, whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá chose to honour in His **Memorials of the Faithful** above the great ones of the age.

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Salmán was a villager from the district of Hindíyán, in the south of Persia. He had no learning to speak of and no station; he was a poor man who lived simply and walked everywhere on his own two feet. When the summons of the new Revelation first reached his ears, the Master writes, "his heart leapt for joy." That joy set him in motion, and he never afterward stopped moving.

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When Bahá'u'lláh was exiled to 'Iráq, Salmán was the very first of the believers to reach His holy presence in Baghdád. From that day forward he made himself the living thread that bound the scattered, persecuted believers of Persia to their Lord in exile. Once every single year — across the high mountains and the burning deserts, through bandit country and hostile towns — Salmán walked.

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He walked from Persia to Baghdád; and when the exile was moved on, he walked all the way to Adrianople in the far west; and when Bahá'u'lláh was banished at last to the prison-fortress of 'Akká, Salmán walked there too. Then he turned around and walked the whole way back, carrying Tablets to be delivered, one by one, to the believers in Iṣfáhán, Shíráz, Káshán, Ṭihrán, and the rest.

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He did this, year upon year, from about 1853 until the passing of Bahá'u'lláh nearly forty years later. Picture what that means: an old road, walked again and again until it must have been worn into his very soul; an annual pilgrimage on foot across a continent, undertaken for the sake of love. He had, the Master records, "remarkable powers of endurance." As a rule he ate nothing on the road but onions and bread.

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And here is the heart of it. In all those decades, through all those thousands of miles, "he was never once held up and never once lost a letter or a Tablet." Every single letter entrusted to him was safely delivered; every Tablet reached the precise hand for which it was intended.

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To carry the private correspondence of a hunted community — to bear sacred Writings through provinces where being known as a Bahá'í could cost a man his life — and to do it flawlessly for forty years: this is a faithfulness almost beyond reckoning.

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He was arrested and severely tried more than once, especially in Iṣfáhán, yet he remained, the Master says, "patient and thankful under all conditions." Even those who were not Bahá'ís marvelled at him, and gave him a title of their own: they called him "the Bábís' Angel Gabriel" — the bearer of the heavenly message.

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When Bahá'u'lláh passed away, Salmán did not waver. He stayed faithful to the Covenant and simply continued, exactly as before, coming each year to 'Akká with the letters of the friends and returning with the answers, until at last, in Shíráz, he laid down his pilgrim's staff and "winged his way to the Kingdom of glory."

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Then 'Abdu'l-Bahá set down the verdict that is the whole point of the story. This poor, unlettered villager — a man the world would never have noticed — He raised above every messenger who had ever lived: "From the dawn of history until the present day," the Master wrote, "there has never been a messenger so worthy of trust; there has never been a courier to compare with Salmán."

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The Feast of Sharaf is the Feast of Honour. The honour it celebrates is not the kind that is inherited or bought. It is earned, mile by faithful mile, by a trust kept perfectly over a lifetime. Salmán possessed nothing the world esteems, and won an honour no prince of his age could buy: to be named, by the Master, the most trustworthy courier in the history of the world.

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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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