Forty Lamps in One Year: The Woman from Ardistán

In Issue 19 of Volume 3 of the *Star of the West,* dated the second of March, 1913, the editors printed a brief story the Master had recently told to a group of pilgrims at 'Akká about a Persian woman from Ardistán — a small town in Iṣfáhán Province, halfway between Iṣfáhán itself and the desert city of Yazd.

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The Master gave the story without elaborate framing. The woman, He said, had been a recent and obscure convert. She had come to the Faith at no great age and from a household of no particular distinction. Within a relatively short period after her own confirmation in the Cause she had returned to her own home town and begun to teach.

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> She was made radiant and became a Bahá'í. She returned to her > home. In one year she was enabled to ignite forty lamps.

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The Master's image — *to ignite forty lamps* — was the Eastern phrase for awakening forty souls to the love of God. *Lamp,* in this register, is the heart of the believer; the *igniting* is the moment in which the divine light is first kindled in a soul previously dark. The woman from Ardistán had, in the twelve months after her return, kindled forty such lamps.

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For a small Persian provincial town — without printing presses, without public meeting halls, without any of the public infrastructure later teachers would enjoy — the figure was remarkable. Forty new believers in twelve months meant that the woman had been carrying the message into kitchens and courtyards and small womens' gatherings, week after week, patiently, carefully, with the discipline of someone whose own heart was on fire.

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The Master then turned the story into a quiet challenge for His Western audience. The American friends, He observed, had material resources, social mobility, public access, and educational training the woman from Ardistán had never enjoyed. The standard she had set for herself — forty lamps in twelve months — should, by the natural arithmetic of opportunity, be exceeded a hundredfold by the friends of any Western city.

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> Now you must ignite four thousand lamps in one year.

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The figure was deliberately enormous. The Master was not issuing a numerical quota. He was making a point. If a Persian woman without resources could light forty lamps, an American or European Bahá'í community with all the advantages of a modern city should be able to light vastly more — provided only the same inward discipline of fire was at work.

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The American friends, reading the report in the *Star of the West,* understood what they were being told. The arithmetic the Master had named was a long-term standard, not a yearly ledger. It still stands. The lamps are still being lit. The woman from Ardistán has been preserved in Bahá'í memory not only for her own faithful work but for the standard she set — quietly, in a small Persian town, while no Western observer was watching.

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