Arabic: “O King! I have come to thee from
Sheba with a weighty message.” (This is what the lapwing said to Solomon when it returned from seeing Balkis on her golden throne:
Qur’án 27:22) The
Tablet was taken from the boy and delivered to the priests. They read it, and recommended that the boy be put to death. The executioners branded him with hot irons for three days; a photograph, taken of him under torture, is extant. Then they beat his head to a pulp with a rifle butt and threw his body down a hole.
Bahá’u’lláh wrote, in a Tablet to the boy’s father—Ḥájí ‘Abdu’l-Majíd, who himself was to suffer martyrdom later on in
Khurásán: “
Dost thou think that he is dead? No, by the Revealer of Signs! Through him the spirit of life joyfully moveth in the hearts of the universe.” In the same Tablet, Bahá’u’lláh says that in
Badí‘ “the spirit of might and power was breathed”; that he was created anew; that he smiled, and “should We have commanded him, he would have subdued all in heaven and upon the earth.” That “Joy overtook him,” and that he went to his death “with power and authority, advancing with such strength as to overturn the
Supreme Concourse and the denizens of the Cities of Names.”
The point is that Badí` was recreated. He was in Bible terminology born again. He saw the truth and died as a sacrifice to it. Those who believe in Bahá’u’lláh today are seldom called to join the ranks of the more than 20,000 who gave up their lives in the
Heroic Age of His Cause—who, as the present text