The Angel of the Believers: Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí

In Issue 4 of Volume 13 of the *Star of the West,* the editors printed an address by Martha Root in which she remembered Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí, the great Bahá'í teacher of nineteenth-century Persia.

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Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí had, in his youth, served eleven years in the prisons of the Sudan — banished there by the Egyptian and Ottoman authorities along with a small group of Bahá'ís, in the period of Bahá'u'lláh's confinement at 'Akká. Eleven years of prison in Khartoum and the harsh garrisons of the upper Nile would have broken many men. They did not break him. He emerged, when the British conquest of the Sudan finally opened the doors, with his faith intact and his sense of mission, if anything, deepened.

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He was permitted to attain the presence of Bahá'u'lláh at 'Akká. After Bahá'u'lláh's Ascension in 1892, he received from 'Abdu'l-Bahá a singular charge: to travel from the Holy Land back to Persia and there encourage, strengthen, and console the Bahá'í communities scattered across the great country.

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Martha Root's address gave the detail that fixed him in Bahá'í memory.

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> He started out from the Holy Land to Persia without even the > equipment of a donkey, and became known as the Angel of the > believers.

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He travelled on foot. He carried nothing but what he wore. He visited Bahá'í community after Bahá'í community, sat in the small rooms where the friends gathered in fear of their neighbours, told them the news of the Master, settled their disputes, taught their children, prayed with their dying. He moved from village to village in Khurásán, then on to the towns of central Persia, then south through Yazd and Iṣfáhán, then northwest to Tabríz.

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The friends, meeting him for the first time, would later say that they had been visited by an angel. The phrase stuck. He became, across the Persian community, *the Angel of the believers* — malak-i-aḥibbá. Letters written to him used the title openly. The Master Himself, in tablets, blessed his journeys.

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He died in old age in 1920. By that time he had touched personally, in his decades of slow walking, almost every Bahá'í community in Persia. Martha Root, addressing the American friends in 1922, was ensuring that his memory would now travel west across the Atlantic and find a home in the parlours of America. The *Star of the West* preserved her words. The Angel of the believers, by way of a Chicago magazine, was given a second wing.

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