Quddús
After a few years in Sárí, he was sent to another madrassa in Mashad, where he became a member of a small group of Shaykhi students which included Mullá Husayn and a number of other future Bábís.
[9] When he was eighteen, Quddús left for the Shia holy city of Karbala in Iraq, where he spent four years studying under Sayyid Kázim, then the leader of the Shaykhi denomination.
He returned to Babol circa 1843, now a fully trained and licensed mullá—a Shia legal scholar endorsed by a teacher, and able to issue judgements on matters of religious law.
[12] The Báb gave the first nineteen converts to Bábism the title of the Letters of the Living, and entrusted them with tasks that would fulfill important prophecies from Shia eschatology.
[13] Quddús was selected to accompany the Báb on pilgrimage to Mecca, where they would announce the start of a new revelation in the holiest city in the Muslim world.
[15][16] The pilgrims left Shiraz on September 10, 1844,[17] departing from the port of Bushehr on the 19th of Ramadán (October, 1844), and arriving in Mecca on the first of Dhi'l-Hájjih (December 12, 1844).
[20] During this pilgrimage the Báb publicly claimed to be the Qa'im,[21] meeting with a number of prominent religious figures in an attempt to gain their allegiance.
[23] The Báb's decision not to gather his growing community of followers in Karbala was disappointing to many who had expected him to lead a military revolution against the forces of orthodoxy, fulfilling the role of the Mahdi.
[24] While the Báb engaged in correspondence with Persian government ministers seeking to gain Mullá ʻAlíy-i-Bastami freedom from imprisonment in Ottoman territory, he ordered Quddús to travel to Shiraz on a mission of evangelism.
"[25]Before Quddús arrived in Shiraz, a small number of other Bábís had already begun to engage in evangelical activity in the city including the provocative action of appending a statement about the Báb's to a call to prayer proclaimed from the minaret of a prominent mosque.
The governor ordered Muqaddas to be whipped, and all three Bábís had their beards burned, then their noses pierced, and threaded with halters; "then, having been led through the streets in this disgraceful condition, they were expelled from the city.
"[26][24] The brutal treatment of the Bábís became a matter of international news, covered by newspapers in the UK starting November 1, 1845,[27] followed by the US,[28] Australia, [29] and New Zealand.
When Quddús returned to Babol after his pilgrimage, he retained some popularity from his time there in 1843, and stories of his travels had reached his hometown, inflating his prominence in local discourse.
[32] Quddús now took a more prominent role in the rivalry between Shari'atmadar and the Sa'id al-Ulama, openly criticizing the corruption of the clerical class, and advancing messianic theology, but not yet promoting Bábism or revealing the identity of the Báb.
[33] In response to Quddús' growing popularity, the Sa'i'd al-Ulama and other Usuli leaders organized for him and his followers to be harassed by lutis, teamsters who also acted as gangs of street toughs in the ongoing contest between the Nematis and Haydari's.
[34] Along with Tahirih and Baha'u'llah, Quddús was one of three major figures in the Conference of Badasht (June–July 1848), where prominent Bábí's gathered to clarify matters of doctrine and determine the next steps to be taken by the growing community in the face of increasing persecution at the hands of Persia's clerical and civil leadership.
However, this was in fact part of what Shoghi Effendi described as "a pre-conceived plan designed to mitigate the alarm and consternation which such a conference was sure to arouse" [35] and, to the dismay of some Bábí's and the appreciation of others, Quddús wholeheartedly embraced Tahirih's radicalism and the two departed Badasht together on the same camel.
Nabil records: "By the testimony of Baháʼu'lláh, that heroic youth, who was still on the threshold of his life, was subjected to such tortures and suffered such a death as even Jesus had not faced in the hour of His greatest agony.
His writings make clear that his many thwarted attempts to engage the clerics in debate, the general dismissal of the Bábí movement by prominent theologians, the role of the mullas in whipping up violent opposition to the Bábís, and the extreme persecution and physical violence he himself had endured since 1844, had left him bitter and fiercely opposed to the entire class.
