The Báb and the Governor of Shíráz

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's chronicle of the early days of the Bábí Revelation. The narrative is retold in our own words; short phrases in quotation marks are preserved from that history.

In the first years after the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz, His teaching ran through that city like a flame. Young students, merchants, and even men of religion were drawn to the new message; the talk of the Promised One could be heard in its streets and gathering-places. To the man who governed Shíráz, this was not glad tidings but a threat to be put down — and Ḥusayn Khán, the governor, was exactly the sort of man to attempt it.

Nabíl, in The Dawn-Breakers, records him as cruel, arrogant, and ruthless in the use of his office. When reports reached him of the stir the Báb's followers were causing, he resolved to crush the movement at its source. He set his agents to hunt down those who spread the teaching, and he gave orders that the Herald of the Faith Himself be seized and brought under his power.

The Báb did not hide. He returned to Shíráz of His own accord and submitted to arrest. Brought into the governor's presence, He faced a man who held, in that city, all the power of the throne — the power to imprison, to flog, to banish, to kill. Ḥusayn Khán used it. The Báb was insulted and reviled; on the governor's order one of His followers was savagely beaten in an effort to terrorise the rest; and the Báb Himself was struck a blow across the face by an officer of the governor's guard. Then He was bound by a pledge meant to silence Him and placed under the strict surveillance of the state, with the threat of worse to follow if He persisted.

And here the chronicle records the thing that all the governor's violence could not overcome. Through every indignity, the Báb bore Himself with a serenity and a majesty that His persecutors could neither shake nor understand. He answered cruelty with calm. The blows fell upon His body; they could not reach the place where He truly lived. Ḥusayn Khán commanded force, and force did its work upon flesh — and yet the Prisoner before him remained, in some way the governor could not touch, entirely free. Every weapon the governor possessed broke against a dignity he could neither intimidate nor comprehend. He could bind the Báb's movements; he could not bend His spirit, nor frighten Him, nor wring from Him a single word of submission to falsehood.

Then power passed, suddenly, out of the governor's hands altogether — and not through any revolt or decree, but through a thing no ruler can command. An outbreak of plague descended upon Shíráz. Nabíl describes the terror that gripped the city as the disease spread and the dead multiplied. The governor's authority, which had seemed absolute the day before, dissolved in the panic. Ḥusayn Khán himself fled the stricken city to save his own life, his designs against the Báb abandoned and his grip on Shíráz broken. In the confusion the Báb was released from the immediate danger that had hung over Him, and He departed the city in peace. The governor who had set out to destroy the Cause had been swept aside, while the One he had struck went free.

This is why such an episode belongs to the Feast of Sovereignty. Ḥusayn Khán is a small portrait of what worldly power is and is not. It is real; it can arrest and beat and threaten; it can make a whole city tremble. But it is also borrowed and brittle — it could not touch the inner freedom of the Soul it sought to crush, and it could not stand for a single week against a calamity it had no power to control. The Báb, owning nothing and commanding no one, possessed a sovereignty the governor's office could not rival: the unconquerable dignity of one whose confidence rested wholly in God. The throne fled before a plague; the Cause it had struck endured, and endures still.

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*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://bahai-library.com/nabil_dawnbreakers