Mullá Husayn, surnamed the Bábu’l-Báb, the first to
recognise and embrace the new Revelation. At the age of eighteen, he, too,
departed from his native town of Bushrúyih in Khurásán for Karbilá, and for a
period of nine years remained closely associated with Siyyid Kázim. Four years
prior to the Declaration of the Báb, acting according to the instructions of
Siyyid Kázim, he met in Isfáhán the learned mujtahid Siyyid Báqir-i-Rashtí and
in Mashhad Mírzá Askarí, to both of whom he delivered with dignity and
eloquence the messages with which he had been entrusted by his leader. The
circumstances attending his martyrdom evoked the Báb’s inexpressible sorrow, a
sorrow that found vent in eulogies and prayers of such great number as would be
equivalent to thrice the volume of the Qur’án. In one of His visiting Tablets,
the Báb asserts that the very dust of the ground where the remains of Mullá Husayn
lie buried is endowed with such potency as to bring joy to the disconsolate and
healing to the sick. In the Kitáb-i-Íqán, Bahá’u’lláh extols with still greater
force the virtues of Mullá Husayn. “But for him,” He writes, “God would not
have been established upon the seat of His mercy, nor have ascended the throne
of eternal glory!”
- Nabil (‘The
Dawn-Breakers’, translated and edited by Shoghi Effendi)