God Is Sufficient: The Bábís Chanting in the Síyáh-Chál

In Stories of Bahá’u’lláh Furutan gathers many of the small testimonies that came down from the inmates of the Síyáh-Chál — the Black Pit, the underground dungeon beneath the Sháh’s palace in Tihrán in which Bahá’u’lláh was confined in the autumn and winter of 1852.

The pit had no light and almost no air. Bahá’u’lláh and a band of fellow Bábí prisoners — among them several of the Letters of the Living and other survivors of the recent persecutions — were chained together, neck and ankle, in conditions Bahá’u’lláh Himself would later describe as unparalleled. Each day a jailer would call out the name of one of the prisoners. The named prisoner would rise, embrace Bahá’u’lláh, embrace his fellows, and walk out to be killed.

What sustained them, Furutan records, was a practice Bahá’u’lláh Himself taught them. Each night, in the dark of the pit, the prisoners divided into two facing rows. The first row would chant a verse:

God is sufficient unto me. He verily is the All-sufficing.

The second row would reply:

In Him let the trusting trust.

The chant would alternate, line and answering line, until the voices rose together to fill the vault of the dungeon. The guards above could hear it. The Sháh in his palace could hear it. The chant was, in its own way, a public refusal: of the condition the chained men had been put into; of the death that would be called for one of them tomorrow; of every claim on the soul except the claim of God.

Furutan also preserves the testimony of the executioner who took the Bábí martyrs to the gallows day by day. He had grown, over the months, to admire Bahá’u’lláh in particular. After each execution he would come back down into the pit to report to Bahá’u’lláh how the martyr had died — with what bearing, what last words, what unbroken joy. The executioner himself was, in some manner the records do not fully name, transformed by what he had been a part of.

Bahá’u’lláh was Himself released from the Síyáh-Chál four months after His imprisonment, and exiled to Baghdád. In the pit, however, He had received the first stirrings of the Revelation that would, in the next forty years, reshape the religious history of the planet. The chant of God is sufficient unto me belongs to the same vault, and the same months, in which that Revelation began.

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.