[Baha'u’llah left Baghdad to travel alone in the mountains
of Kurdistan for two years. He did not tell anyone there who He was. There were
others in Baghdad who wanted people to believe that they were the Promised One.
Baha'u’llah left so that He would not hurt even the ones who wanted to be His
enemies. You can read about His journey in ‘God Passes By’, by Shoghi Effendi,
pp. 120-126, or in Baha’u’llah: The King of Glory, by H. M. Balyuzi, pp.
115-122. Here is a story from that time.]
Story:
The boy was sitting on the hillside crying bitterly. He
could see the mountain village below which was his home. He wanted to go home
but was afraid. He had been punished at school and would be punished again at
home. So instead, he ran to the hills and cried.
A stranger, who did not live in the village, heard his
crying. Coming closer the stranger asked the boy why he was crying. The boy
looked up. There, coming toward him, was a dervish, a man without a home who
spent his days wandering the countryside praying and thinking about God.
The boy answered, "Oh, sir, my teacher has punished me
for writing so badly. I can't write nicely and now I've lost the lesson he gave
me to copy. I can't go back to school without it or I will be punished even
more. And I can't go home for my parents will be ashamed."
Then the boy began to cry some more. The stranger gently
asked him to stop crying. He then offered to write a lesson and to teach the
boy to copy it so that his teacher would be proud of him.
From his clothes the stranger took out a pen and paper and
wrote beautiful letters. Then he showed the boy how to copy them. The boy
copied the writing again and again. After a time he could do it so well you
could hardly tell the difference between one writing and the other.
The stranger told the boy to take his writing lesson to show the teacher now that he could write so well.
With a happy heart the boy jumped up and went running down
the hillside to his village and his teacher. "Thank you, kind sir,"
he called back with a smile full of joy.
Breathlessly the boy arrived at his school. There was the
teacher sternly waiting for him. The teacher demanded, "Where have you
been!?" And, "Is your lesson ready?"
"Oh yes," answered the boy proudly. "Here is
the work I've done." The boy showed the teacher the writing of the
stranger and his own copy underneath.
The teacher was astonished. "Where did you find this
writing? It is beautiful. Do you know the kind of people who write this
way?"
"No, sir," answered the boy. "A strange
dervish saw me on the hillside and wrote it for me."
''Your strange dervish is no dervish at all," replied
the teacher. "Only people connected with the royal family and ministers of
the king write in this manner.” The teacher wondered why a member of the royal
court would be wandering in the mountains as a dervish.
The teacher told his friends about this stranger in the
mountains and the writing of the boy. His friends told their friends, and they
told their friends. Soon everyone in the village knew there was a strange and
wonderful person in the mountains but no one knew who he was.
Note: We don't know the name of the boy, but we do know
where this happened. It is Sulaymaniyyih, and it is in the mountains of Iraq.
The "dervish" was Baha'u’llah, and the story really happened. He
disguised Himself as a dervish so He could be alone to pray and meditate to
prepare Himself to teach the Faith of God for this new age.
- by Duane Herrmann (Brilliant Star, Summer Schools 1991, Special Edition; Adapted and reprinted from ‘Child's Way’, September-October 1982)
