The Boy Who Would Hear Both Sides

Hand of the Cause Mr. ‘Alí-Akbar Furutan, in his collection *Stories of Bahá’u’lláh,* gathers a number of recollections from the family and household that surrounded Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alí during His childhood in the noble Núrí family of Mázandarán. Among them is a quiet image, repeated in several memoirs, of the kind of boy He was when His playmates fell into a quarrel.

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The other children of the household, the witnesses recalled, would sometimes come running to Him as the natural arbiter of their small disputes. He would not, however, simply pronounce. He would listen to the first child’s account in full. Then He would go and find the other child and listen, with the same patience, to that account in full. Only when both sides had been heard would He quietly speak.

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The pattern struck the adults of the household. A child of His age might have been expected to weigh in by sympathy, by friendship, by who had spoken first. He weighed in only by what He had heard. And He was unwilling, even at five or six, to be hurried.

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> Even as a child He sought justice — and would not give a verdict > until He had heard the other side.

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The story is small. But Furutan, like the early Bahá’í chroniclers who had preserved it, sees in it the early outline of a Manifestation whose ministry would later be devoted to *the most great peace,* and whose Tablets to kings would call the rulers of the earth to the same disciplined fairness — the unwillingness to judge without having heard.

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The household began, the witnesses say, to feel a quiet authority in the boy. They could not have known what it foreshadowed. But they could already see, in the childhood courtyard, a refusal to settle anything by partiality. The seed of a Revelation was already visible in the manners of the child.

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*Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh (Ali-Akbar Furutan, George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.*

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