The Walking Pilgrim and the Tablet of the Nightingale

In The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, Adib Taherzadeh devotes a chapter to the Tablet of Aḥmad, one of the most beloved Tablets of the Adrianople period. The Tablet itself is read across the Bahá’í world. The story of the man for whom it was revealed is less commonly known.

Aḥmad-i-Yazdí was a believer of perhaps sixty years of age, living in Baghdád. He was not, by ordinary measure, a young or strong man. He had heard, however, that Bahá’u’lláh had been sent on from Baghdád to Constantinople and from Constantinople to Adrianople. He felt called to attain the Master’s presence.

He had no wealth for travel. He had only legs. He set out on foot.

Taherzadeh records that he walked the entire distance from Baghdád to Constantinople — over 1,700 kilometres, across mountains and seasons. There he paused, exhausted, and sent inquiries forward to ask permission to come the further 260 kilometres to Adrianople and present himself to Bahá’u’lláh.

While he waited for an answer, the answer came in a different form. A Tablet was revealed for him in Adrianople and sent back to where he stood. Aḥmad opened it with reverence. He had expected, perhaps, an instruction about how to proceed. The Tablet said nothing about his request. It spoke instead of the station of Bahá’u’lláh, of the imperative of teaching, of the condition of the seeker’s soul.

He read it again, and again. He understood it, at last, as permission to do something different. The Tablet was not asking him to come to Adrianople. It was asking him to turn around and to walk back into Persia and to teach the Cause.

He turned around.

Aḥmad walked the 2,240 kilometres back to Persia. There, for the rest of his life, he travelled from town to town teaching the Faith — sustained, in his own testimony, by daily recitation of the Tablet that had come to him by the wayside. He called it the Tablet of the Nightingale. The Bahá’í community would, in later generations, call it simply the Tablet of Aḥmad.

It is read for the strengthening of the believer in time of difficulty. The closing image is the one Aḥmad himself heard as his commission:

In Him let the trusting trust.

The old man who walked across an empire and back, on the strength of a single Tablet, is the first teacher of how that verse may be lived.

Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 2 — Adrianople 1863-68 (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1977); see original for full text.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1977). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 2 — Adrianople 1863-68)*. George Ronald.