The Executioner Who Returned: A Witness in the Síyáh-Chál

The Síyáh-Chál — the *Black Pit* — was the deepest dungeon of the Sháh’s prison system in Tihrán. Bahá’u’lláh was confined there in the autumn and winter of 1852, in chains, in near-total darkness, with a band of fellow Bábís most of whom were destined for the gallows.

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Each morning a jailer’s voice called down a name. The named prisoner would rise, embrace Bahá’u’lláh and the rest, and walk out to be executed. The executions took place in public — on a square above ground, before the city — and the executioners knew their men personally before killing them.

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Furutan preserves a small remembrance from those months that illuminates the spiritual character of even those who had been ordered to do the killing. The executioner of the Síyáh-Chál, whose duty it was to lead the Bábís to the place of death and to carry out the sentence, came in the course of the months to recognise something of what he was witnessing.

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He had no doctrinal commitment to the Bábí Cause. He had no authority to release the prisoners. But he had eyes, and over the weeks he saw what he saw. The men he killed were not fanatics; they were not raving; they were not cursing the king. They walked to the gallows with a serenity he had never encountered in any other prisoner of his career. They embraced him before he killed them. They prayed for him.

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What the executioner did, at the prompting of his slowly ripening conscience, is what Furutan preserves. After each execution he climbed back down into the Síyáh-Chál — past the guards, past the iron grilles, into the dark — and he sought out Bahá’u’lláh.

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> After each martyrdom, the executioner, who had grown to admire > Bahá’u’lláh, would come to Him and inform Him of the > circumstances of the martyr’s death and the joy with which he > had endured.

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He had become, without intending it, a kind of witness on behalf of the dead. He came down into the pit, the executioner of the Sháh, to tell the prisoner whose friend he had just killed how the friend had borne it.

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Furutan's book preserves the testimony without dramatising it. He simply records that the executioner did this, and that Bahá'u'lláh received him. The cruelty of the institution had not extinguished the conscience of the man who served it; and the prisoner in the chains had received from the executioner the kind of report that one bereaved family member receives from another at a funeral.

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It is one of the strangest of the small miracles of the Síyáh-Chál: that even there, in the deepest pit of that imprisoning regime, the human heart had room enough to bring, into the dark, the simple courtesy of a true witness.

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

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