In the Twenty-Fifth Year: The Báb Begins to Speak

In A Traveler's Narrative, the work 'Abdu'l-Bahá composed in the closing years of Bahá'u'lláh's lifetime and which Edward Granville Browne of Cambridge translated and published in 1891, the Master gave to the Western world the first careful Bahá'í account of the rise of the Báb.

The narrative begins in Shíráz. The Báb, born Siyyid 'Alí Muḥammad in 1819, was twenty-five years old in the spring of 1844. He had married, joined the family merchant business, made the long pilgrimage to the holy cities of the Hijaz, and was back in His native Shíráz when the year of His Declaration opened.

In the year one thousand two hundred and sixty (A.H.), when He was in His twenty-fifth year, certain signs became apparent in His conduct, behavior, manners, and demeanor whereby it became evident in Shíráz that He had some conflict in His mind and some other flight beneath His wing.

The phrasing is the Master's own. Some other flight beneath His wing — the gentle Eastern image of the falcon already preparing for an ascent that the bystanders cannot yet see. The young merchant had begun to live, day by day, by a rhythm those who knew Him could not entirely read.

Before long the rhythm broke into utterance. He began to speak and to declare the rank of Báb-hood. The word Báb — Gate — was a deliberate choice. It announced that He was Himself the gate to a greater One who was to come, and that the long Shí'í expectation of the appearance of the Twelfth Imám was now to be fulfilled — first by Himself, as the herald, and afterwards by the Him Whom God shall make manifest whose advent the Báb would proclaim with increasing clarity through the rest of His short ministry.

The Master notes the response. It was divided. The greater part [of the learned] manifested strong disapproval. The senior doctors of theology in Shíráz could not, on a few moments' hearing, accept the claim of a young merchant. But certain of the Shaykhi divines — the spiritual school whose teacher Shaykh Aḥmad-i-Aḥsá'í had quietly prepared the country for just such an appearance — recognized in the young man what they had been listening for. Certain other recluses, men whose spiritual practice had carried them past ordinary religious certainties, also identified Him as significant.

The Báb was twenty-five years old. The crisis He was about to ignite would transform Persia, give the Bahá'í dispensation its herald, and lay down, in just six years, the visible foundation of a Faith that would reach every continent. The Master, recording the beginning of all this in A Traveler's Narrative, gave the Western world the date, the place, and the small first phrase by which a Revelation enters a city: certain signs became apparent.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, A Traveler's Narrative (translated by E.G. Browne, Cambridge University Press, 1891). Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19300.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1886). *A Traveler's Narrative*. Cambridge University Press. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19300