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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
67 stories on this theme.
Shoghi Effendi's tribute to Bahíyyih Khánum records the cost of the Adrianople exile to her own body — a winter of exceptional severity, a poor and unhealthy lodging, and dire financial distress that left her, as a young woman, with a permanent loss of vitality and a shadow on her face that would remain until the end of her life.
Shoghi Effendi's tribute to Bahíyyih Khánum preserves a single small image from her childhood in Tihrán: when Bahá'u'lláh was thrown into the Síyáh-Chál and the family's wealth was seized within the space of a single day, Navváb — the mother — placed a handful of dry flour into the hand of her young daughter as the substitute for daily bread.
In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, J. E. Esslemont preserves the small, heartbreaking image of Persian believers who walked thousands of miles to the prison-city of 'Akká, were refused admittance at the gates, and contented themselves with standing on the plain beyond the third moat, looking up at the windows of the Blessed Beauty's quarters.
In *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*, Esslemont preserves Bahá'u'lláh's own brief description of the Síyáh-Chál — the underground prison in Tihrán in which He was held in chains for four months in 1852. The dungeon was *foul beyond comparison*, dark, and crowded with nearly one hundred and fifty fellow-prisoners.
Nabíl's chronicle preserves the day of July 9, 1850 in the public square of Tabríz. The Báb and His youthful companion Anís were suspended by ropes against a wall. The first volley of seven hundred and fifty muskets severed the ropes; the smoke cleared on an empty scene. The Báb was found in His cell, completing a conversation. A second volley was required to fulfil the sentence.
Late in 1844 the Báb, accompanied by Quddús, sailed from Búshihr for the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. The voyage was long, the water was scarce, the bedouins were thieves; and at the heart of the Sacred Mosque the Báb proclaimed His station openly to a prominent scholar of His age.
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the autumn of 1852, after the attempt on the life of Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh by two distraught Bábís acting without authorisation, Bahá'u'lláh was arrested at Níyávarán and confined in the underground dungeon of Ṭihrán known as the Black Pit. There, in chains, He received the intimations of the Mission that would shape the next forty years.
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the spring and summer of 1850, the city of Zanján was the scene of one of the most prolonged Bábí defenses of the early years. Mullá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zanjání, surnamed Ḥujjat, took refuge with his followers in the fortress of 'Alí-Mardán Khán; he and they held against the assembled forces of the Sháh's army for nine months.
Following the Báb's instruction sent from Máh-Kú, Mullá Ḥusayn left Mashhad in the summer of 1848 wearing the Báb's own green turban, the Black Standard unfurled before him. He was, the Master had told him, to march to *the Verdant Isle* — Mázindarán — and the seventy-two companions who would die at his side were already gathering.
Nabíl's chronicle records the death of Mullá Ḥusayn-i-Bushrú'í, first of the Letters of the Living, in the closing months of the siege of the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí in Mázindarán. He led the final sortie at dawn on February 2, 1849, and fell with a musket-ball to the chest in the same charge that broke the Imperial line.
After the betrayal of the Bábís at Fort Ṭabarsí in the spring of 1849, Quddús was led back into Bárfurúsh. He was eighteen of the Báb's Letters of the Living and the only one besides Bahá'u'lláh who would be honoured by the Báb with a written commentary. He was killed in the open square of the town. His last words were of the splendour of his nuptials.
Nabíl's chronicle records that in the early summer of 1850, Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí — known as Vaḥíd — withdrew with his followers from the city of Nayríz to the small fort at Khájih in the surrounding hills, where for several months he held off the forces of the governor of Fárs before being deceived, surrendered, and put to death.
A seventeen-year-old boy asked for one thing: to carry a letter from Bahá'u'lláh to the king of Persia. He walked for months to deliver it — and gave his life with a smile that no one who saw it could forget.
After the destruction of the defenders of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Bahá'u'lláh — who had set out to join them — was arrested in the town of Ámul, beaten in the local mosque until His feet bled, and stoned in the streets. Shoghi Effendi reads this episode as the moment Bahá'u'lláh stepped into the centre of the stage left vacant by the Báb.
In the prison of 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh's young son fell while lost in prayer. Given the chance to ask for his life back, he asked instead that his death open the prison doors to others.
A gentle young man in a faraway prison made the bravest wish of his whole life — and because of it, people who longed to see Bahá'u'lláh finally could.
On a frightening morning in a city square, the Báb showed a courage so steady that even the soldiers could not understand it.
The Báb set sail across rough seas to the holy city of Mecca, and there He bravely told the world who He really was.
In a faraway city, a brave teacher named Ḥujjat and his friends stood together inside an old fortress for many long months, holding on to their faith no matter what.
A brave believer named Mullá Ḥusayn set out on a long, dangerous journey with a black flag flying before him, ready to give everything for what he loved most.
Mullá Ḥusayn, the first person ever to believe in the Báb, gathered his hungry, weary friends one last time and led them out into the cold dawn for the One he loved.
A brave young hero named Quddús kept his promise to God to the very end, and spoke of joy even on the hardest day of his life.
A brave teacher named Vaḥíd led his friends to a tiny fort in the rocky hills and stayed true to what he believed, even when it cost him everything.
Bahá'u'lláh set out to help His friends in danger, and when the road was closed and He was hurt in a faraway town, He bore it all with quiet courage.
Two brothers from Káshán who emigrated to Adrianople with the community of believers, were arrested with the exiles and brought to 'Akká, and there both fell ill and died on the same night. Without permission for proper burial, the friends sold a prayer carpet to pay for their interment, and the two brothers were laid in a single grave, beneath the earth as in life embraced.
Mírzá Áqá of Káshán — known to the Bahá'í community as Jináb-i-Muníb — was a calligrapher, poet, and singer who left his daughter and his livelihood to walk on foot beside Bahá'u'lláh from Baghdád to Constantinople. He died, ill, in a Smyrna hospital during the exile to 'Akká, his last act being to drag himself to Bahá'u'lláh's feet and weep.
Two pure souls of Ádhirbáyján who freed themselves from the superstitions that had blinded them, left their province for Adrianople, and at length followed the exiles to 'Akká, where they died together of the fever that took so many of the early prisoners. Their two luminous tombs are in 'Akká.
In the flower of his youth Nabíl-i-Zarandí bade farewell to his family in Zarand and set out to find the One his soul was seeking. From that day he never turned back. Poet, traveller, herald, recluse — he spent his whole life pouring himself out in service to Bahá'u'lláh, holding nothing of the world in reserve, until at the end he could endure separation no longer.
Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, was a small child when soldiers seized her Father and stripped her home. From that day she shared every exile and every imprisonment of the Holy Family, set aside the ordinary hopes of a woman of her time, and gave her whole long life to service. Lady Blomfield's *The Chosen Highway* preserves the memory of that quiet, unbroken renunciation.
Mírzá Asadu'lláh of Khúy stood high in the world — a learned man, master of several tongues, a trusted official of the Persian state. When he recognized the Báb, he laid all of it down. The Báb gave him a title that bound him to the future of the Faith — "the Third Letter to believe in Him Whom God shall make manifest" — and Dayyán kept that covenant to the end, journeying to recognize Bahá'u'lláh and dying for Him.
Ḥájí Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí, the Afnán, was a kinsman of the Báb and a prosperous merchant of Yazd. After Bahá'u'lláh's ascension he gave up his comfort, his business, and his estates and went to 'Ishqábád, where he poured out his entire fortune to raise the first Mashriqu'l-Adhkár — the first Bahá'í House of Worship ever built. "This," 'Abdu'l-Bahá said, "is the way to make a sacrifice."
Keith Ransom-Kehler was a gifted American lecturer who could have spent her later years in comfort. When the Guardian asked her to undertake a long, hard teaching journey to Persia on behalf of her persecuted fellow believers, she accepted at once — with no Persian, no pioneering experience, and not in robust health. She gave the rest of her life to it, dying in Iṣfáhán in 1933, and Shoghi Effendi named her the first American Bahá'í martyr.
In 1912 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid with His own hand the foundation stone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship of the Western world, on the shore of Lake Michigan at Wilmette. Over the next forty years a community of working people — giving in dimes and dollars, across two world wars and a great depression — raised above that stone a temple of lacelike grandeur, a gift that most of its builders gave knowing they would never see it finished.
Before Bahá'u'lláh ever reached the Garden of Riḍván, He had to walk out of His house and through the streets of Baghdád — and the city wept. Men and women of every station crowded the route to the river, and a small child ran from the crowd and clung to His robe, begging Him not to go.
ʻAlí-Muḥammad Varqá, a poet and devoted teacher of the Faith, was imprisoned in Ṭihrán with his twelve-year-old son Rúḥu'lláh and a company of believers. When the murder of the Sháh was used as a pretext to crush them, father and son were threatened, tormented, and at last killed — the boy bearing witness with a serenity and courage before overwhelming power that astonished even his executioners.
During the long siege of Zanján, a young village woman named Zaynab could not bear to stand idle while her companions fell. She put on a man's garments, took up sword and gun, and begged the leader of the defenders for leave to fight. For days she stood in the front of the battle with a courage that astonished the army arrayed against her — a single peasant girl defying both an empire and the expectations of her age.
From His prison in 'Akká, Bahá'u'lláh addressed a Tablet to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia. A seventeen-year-old believer named Badíʻ asked for the honour of carrying it. Alone and on foot he crossed an empire, stood in plain sight before the royal camp, and delivered it — then bore three days of torture with a serenity his executioners could not break.
The Báb sent His disciple Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastámí into the great centres of Islamic learning with words that named his fate before he set out: "You are the first to leave the House of God and to suffer for His sake." Dragged before an unprecedented joint tribunal of the foremost divines, he would not deny what he had found — and became the first believer to give his life for the Faith.
Mírzá Qurbán-ʻAlí, a revered dervish with thousands of devoted admirers, was arrested as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán. The all-powerful Grand Vizier, besieged by pleas for the holy man's life, all but offered him a way out. The dervish refused it — declaring that he had weighed the Báb with the scales of justice, and would seal that judgement with his blood.
The first man on earth to recognize the Báb was also among the first to die for Him. Through the long winter siege of the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, Mullá Ḥusayn held a starving, outnumbered band against an imperial army — and at last, having prayed through the night, mounted his horse at dawn and led the charge in which he fell, sealing with his blood the discipleship he had begun on a May night in Shíráz four years before.
Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí, called Vaḥíd, was one of the most learned men of his age — sent by the Sháh himself to refute the Báb, he came away His devoted disciple. In 1850 his teaching set the city of Nayríz aflame with faith, and when the army came he withdrew with a small band to a hilltop fort and held it for months. He was deceived by an oath sworn on the Qur'án, and went out to a death he had foreseen, steadfast to the last.
In 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own early history of the Faith, the upheaval at Zanján stands among the great trials of the believers. Led by the fearless scholar Mullá Muḥammad-'Alí — surnamed Ḥujjat, "the Proof" — the Bábís of the city, attacked and besieged at the decree of the clergy, held out through battle after battle until they were at last lured into surrender by oaths sworn upon the Qur'án, and put to the sword.
In Memorials of the Faithful, 'Abdu'l-Bahá remembers Mullá Ṣádiq — famed across Persia for his saintliness and known to history as Ismu'lláhu'l-Asdaq, "the Most Truthful Name of God." Hung with a halter and led through the bazaars of Shíráz, he kept on teaching the Faith; starved for eighteen days at Fort Ṭabarsí, he kept his courage; through a whole lifetime of persecution he never once slackened or fell silent.
The recollections of the Holy Family, preserved in The Chosen Highway, tell of Mírzá Mihdí — the gentle younger brother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, known as the Purest Branch — who fell through a skylight while pacing the prison roof of 'Akká wrapped in prayer. Mortally hurt and offered by his Father whatever he might wish, he asked not to be healed but that his death be accepted as a ransom, so that the pilgrims barred from Bahá'u'lláh's presence might one day attain it.
In the terrible summer of 1852, a nobleman of Ṭihrán was offered his life and great wealth if he would only deny his Faith. He refused. Led through the streets to his execution with lighted candles set burning in his own flesh, Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán went to his death not weeping but rejoicing — chanting verses, distributing coins to the poor, and turning a public spectacle of cruelty into one of the most luminous acts of courage in Bahá'í history.
In Iṣfahán in 1879, two brothers — merchants famed throughout the city for their honesty and their boundless generosity to the poor — were stripped of their wealth, falsely accused, and put to death at the instigation of two powerful clergymen. Bahá'u'lláh, who had named them the King of Martyrs and the Beloved of Martyrs, mourned them as among the most precious souls to give their lives for His Cause.
Ṭáhirih — poet, scholar, and the only woman among the Báb's first eighteen disciples — spent her final hours in serene readiness, adorned as for a wedding rather than an execution. Led into a garden outside Ṭihrán in 1852 to be put to death, she met her end with a calm that astonished her captors, and left behind a prophecy about the freedom of women that history has been fulfilling ever since.
When the young believer Siyyid Ashraf of Zanján was captured and sentenced to death, his persecutors devised what they thought would surely break him: they brought his own mother before him to beg him to deny his Faith and live. She did the opposite. Rather than plead for his life, she charged him to remain steadfast — and warned him never to disgrace, by a moment's weakness, the Cause for which so many had already died.
Ḥájí Mírzá Siyyid ʻAlí was the merchant uncle who had reared the Báb from childhood and loved Him as his own son. When, as one of the Seven Martyrs of Ṭihrán in 1850, he was offered his life and a ransom by influential friends if he would merely disavow his Nephew, he refused — choosing instead to be the first of the seven to lay down his life, that he might join the One he had raised.
Long before the barrack-square of Tabríz, a young man named Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alíy-i-Zunúzí wept for one thing only — to look upon the face of his Lord. Kept from the Báb by his own stepfather, he poured out his soul in prayer, and in vision was promised the one gift he longed for above life: to share with the Báb the cup of martyrdom. On the 9th of July, 1850, that promise was kept.
After the firing squad, the remains of the Báb began a journey unlike any other in religious history — wrapped in a cloak, hidden in a silk factory, carried to Ṭihrán, buried beneath shrine floors, walled into a mosque, smuggled at last across mountains and seas to the Holy Land. For nearly sixty years the faithful passed this Most Holy of trusts from hand to hand, guarding it through every danger until 'Abdu'l-Bahá could lay it to rest on Mount Carmel.
Through the prison years the Báb's faithful amanuensis, Siyyid Ḥusayn-i-Yazdí, set down His revealed verses by candlelight and never left His side. On the last night the Báb bade him outwardly deny his faith — not to save himself, but to live and carry to the believers the things he alone had heard. It was to him the Báb was speaking when the soldiers came; and two years later he gave the life he had once been spared.
Forty days before He was led from His mountain prison to be martyred, the Báb quietly gathered up all that He possessed — His writings, His pen-case, His seals, and His rings — and placed them in trusted hands, with instructions that they be carried in secret to Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán. On the threshold of death, His last act of provision looked not backward in grief but forward to the One whose coming He had lived and would die to herald.
After the Báb was martyred, His body and that of His companion were flung outside the gate of Tabríz, at the edge of the moat, to be devoured — and a guard of sentinels was set to watch over them. Through the daring of a believer named Ḥájí Sulaymán Khán, the precious remains were carried away by night, hidden in a silk factory, and — at Bahá'u'lláh's own command — borne in secret toward safety. So began a hidden journey that would end, sixty years later, on Mount Carmel.
On the night before His martyrdom, lodged under guard in the barracks of Tabríz, the Báb's countenance shone with a joy such as had never before been seen in Him. To His grieving companions He gave words of comfort and quiet assurance, untroubled by the death that awaited Him at dawn. When the chief attendant came to lead Him away, the Báb warned that no earthly power could silence Him until He had said all He wished to say.
Hájí Mírzá Muḥammad-Taqí, the Afnán — a cousin of the Báb known as the Vakílu'd-Dawlih — gave up his comfort, his business, and his estates and hastened to 'Ishqábád, where he poured out nearly all he possessed to raise the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the world, becoming, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words, "the first builder of a House to unify man."
From the mountain prison of Chihríq, in the last spring of His earthly life, the Báb sent a beloved attendant on a long and perilous errand — bearing Tablets to the shrine of the Tabarsí martyrs and a message to Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán — with a single tender instruction: to hurry back in time to keep Naw-Rúz at His side, "that festival, the only one I probably shall ever see again."
In a city famous for the learning of its clergy, the first to recognise the Báb was an unlettered man who sifted wheat for his bread. In a single moment the Call remade him — and he took up his sieve and ran toward martyrdom, declaring he would sift whole cities for souls. A story of the power of God to raise the humblest heart to greatness.
A few hundred students, merchants, and craftsmen — most of whom had never held a weapon — were besieged in a makeshift fort in the forests of Mázindarán by the trained regiments and artillery of an empire. For eleven months they held, not by numbers or arms, but by a power their enemies could not understand and could not break.
For thirty-six years Shoghi Effendi carried the cares of the entire Bahá'í world from a small room in Haifa. The Priceless Pearl preserves the compassion at the heart of that labor — a Guardian who felt the believers' sorrows as his own, answered each in his own hand, and spent his strength without stint to comfort and protect them.
Besieged and starving in the shrine of Shaykh Ṭabarsí, the companions of the Báb were forbidden by their leader, Mullá Ḥusayn, ever to begin a fight, ever to pursue a fleeing enemy, and ever to strike a man already down. In a country drowning in cruelty, this little band held — even toward those who had come to destroy them — to a discipline of mercy.
In 1922 the Star of the West preserved a tribute by Martha Root to Mírzá Ḥaydar-'Alí — the eleven-year prisoner of Khartoum who had become, in his later years, the great traveling teacher of the Bahá'ís of Persia, called by the friends *the Angel of the believers.*
In 1933 the Bahá'í World, successor to the Star of the West, carried the story of Keith Ransom-Kehler — the American Bahá'í travel teacher who had gone to Iran in defense of the Faith and had died in Isfahán of smallpox, becoming the first American Bahá'í martyr.
In 1914 the Star of the West printed a letter from Lua Getsinger, the Mother Teacher of the West, written from Bombay where she had taken the Faith into the heart of British India. *I am here in His Name and for His sake,* she wrote — words that would become the keynote of her service.
The opening issue of the Star of the West, March 21, 1910, carried a memorial account of Mírzá Mihdí — the Purest Branch — younger brother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who fell from the roof of the barracks in 'Akká in 1870 and used his dying breaths to plead that the believers be admitted to see Bahá'u'lláh.
In November 1918 the Star of the West printed a letter from Elizabeth H. Stewart, the American teacher in Tehran, describing the wartime shortages — eggs at six cents apiece, flour scarce — and the unprecedented spectacle of Persian Bahá'í men bringing their wives to the public meetings of the friends.
In *A Traveler's Narrative*, 'Abdu'l-Bahá describes the morning of the Báb's martyrdom in the Tabríz barracks-square on the 9th of July, 1850 — the iron nail driven into the staircase, the two ropes by which He and His amanuensis were bound, the regiment that fired without harming Him, and the second regiment that did.