The Boy Who Did Not Cry: Bahá'u'lláh's Childhood

In Stories of Bahá’u’lláh the Hand of the Cause Mr. ‘Alí-Akbar Furútan gathered, late in his life, the early oral and written remembrances of the Blessed Beauty’s family circle. Two of those remembrances belong to His earliest childhood in the village of Núr, where He had been born in 1817 to the wealthy and pious household of Mírzá ‘Abbás-i-Núrí.

The first is a domestic note. His mother, Furútan records, used to remark with a kind of bewildered tenderness on the unusual quality of her infant son:

This child never cries. He is so unlike other babies who cry and scream.

His father attributed the unusual composure to His unusual intellect. Visitors to the household commented on the same quality. The boy carried, from infancy, a stillness which the family found difficult to describe in ordinary terms.

The second story belongs to His fifth or sixth year. Furútan preserves the account from the family tradition. The boy described to His father a vivid dream He had had: He stood in or near a great body of water, and many sea creatures rose against Him. Birds attacked Him from the air. Each in turn fell upon Him without succeeding in causing the least harm.

The father, troubled and curious, took the dream to a noted interpreter of dreams in the region. The interpreter heard Him out and gave the family a reading they would remember:

This dream indicates that the Child shall be the founder of a great Cause. He will be victorious over all.

The phrase founder of a great Cause meant, in the language of nineteenth-century Persia, very little to a small landed gentleman in Mázindarán. It meant a great deal more to the boy who, two and a half decades later, would receive His own Revelation in the Síyáh-Chál pit beneath Tihrán; and it meant more again to the dispensation that would arise, after His ascension, on the foundation of His Tablets.

Furútan’s book preserves the early memories not as fanciful hagiography but as the testimony of those who knew the family. The infant who did not cry, and the boy whose dream was interpreted as a prophecy, were already, in the household’s own recognition, the same Person.

Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh by 'Alí-Akbar Furútan (George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.

Furutan, A.. (1986). *Stories of Bahá'u'lláh*. George Ronald.