O Concourse of Kings: A Passage from the Qayyúmu'l-Asmá

In the night of His Declaration in May 1844, in the small upper room of His house in Shíráz, the Báb began to write the *Qayyúmu’l-Asmá’* — a commentary on the Súrih of Joseph that He revealed to Mullá Ḥusayn at extraordinary speed, chanting the verses aloud as He set them down. It became His earliest book, and the inaugural revelation of His Cause.

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The Báb was twenty-five years old. The room held only Himself and one listener. Yet from that beginning, in language modelled on the Qur’án itself, the verses lifted their address upward and outward to the great political powers of the earth.

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In *Selections from the Writings of the Báb,* this passage from the *Qayyúmu’l-Asmá’* is preserved in English translation:

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> O concourse of kings! Deliver with truth and in all haste the > verses sent down by Us to the peoples of Turkey and of India, > and beyond them, with power and with truth, to lands in both the > East and the West…

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The young Merchant of Shíráz, in the first hours of His public ministry, was already commanding emperors. The Tablet does not acknowledge that they did not know He existed. It treats the kings of the earth as if their first duty were already known to them: to carry the new revelation, in haste, to the nations under their care.

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He continues with a promise:

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> And know that if ye aid God, He will, on the Day of Resurrection, > graciously aid you, upon the Bridge, through Him Who is His Most > Great Remembrance…

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The kings did not, of course, deliver the verses. Most never read them. But the verses delivered themselves: from the upper room of Shíráz to the dungeons of Tabríz, then over the Caucasus to the gardens of Bahjí, and from there into a Faith that now reaches every continent. The Bridge stands. The Day of Resurrection has, on the Bahá’í reading, come. The kings missed their chance. The small believers — Mullá Ḥusayn, then Quddús, then Ṭáhirih, then Bahá’u’lláh — did not.

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