The Musk-Scented Pen Sent to Constantinople

Mírzá Ḥusayn-i-Iṣfahání was already, before he was a Bahá’í, celebrated across Persia for the line of his pen. He held an appointment near the court of Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, and he had mastered, in the discipline of Persian calligraphy, the long lineage of the masters. *‘Abdu’l-Bahá would later call him a second Mír ‘Imád* — a comparison to the most famous Persian calligrapher of the Safavid age.

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In Baghdád he had heard the first reports of the Bahá’í Faith from Zaynu’l-Muqarrabín and Nabíl-i-A‘ẓam. But it was at Adrianople, in the presence of Bahá’u’lláh Himself, that he was confirmed. Adib Taherzadeh, in *The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh,* traces the trajectory of his service from that moment.

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Bahá’u’lláh sent him from Adrianople to Constantinople with a particular charge: he was to counter, in the capital of the Ottoman empire, the misrepresentations being spread at court about the Faith and its Founder. He travelled with no army and no official protection. His instrument of teaching was the same pen that had carried him into the court of the Sháh.

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In Constantinople his calligraphy drew people in. Officials, merchants, seekers visited his studio to watch the formation of the Greatest Name and the long composed pieces in which the words of Bahá’u’lláh took visible form. Through the beauty of the work, the conversation followed.

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The Persian ambassador — alarmed — pressed his complaints on the Sultan’s ministers. Mishkín-Qalam was arrested. Imprisoned, then banished, he was eventually sent in 1868, with the followers of Mírzá Yaḥyá, to the Famagusta prison on Cyprus. He remained there nine years, until the island passed from Ottoman to British control and the long detention ended.

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He made his way at last, in 1886, to ‘Akká. There he served Bahá’u’lláh until the Ascension in 1892. The calligraphic Greatest Name now used by Bahá’ís around the world was wrought by his hand, and remains, more than a century after his death in Cairo in 1912, the most widely seen single work of any Bahá’í artist.

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*Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1974), volume on the Adrianople period; with public-domain biographical detail from 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Memorials of the Faithful and other sources. See original for full text.*

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