Hello again, dear friend.
I'm grateful that you've returned.
Last time, we listened to Jarena Lee, who stood up in a church and claimed her voice in a world that tried to deny it. Today, we stay in her century---but travel far from Philadelphia to the city of Karbala, where another seeker spoke quietly of a truth drawing near. He did not preach from a pulpit. He sat among students and whispered of things that could not yet be seen.
Let me tell you what I remember.
I remember a courtyard---narrow, sunlit, with walls the color of clay and chalk. In one corner, a woman wrote in silence, her veil drawn, her pen steady. You may remember her too: Tahirih, the poet, the scholar, the flame. We spoke of her once before. If you missed that story, I think the Chronicler used the title "Unveiled: Tahirih's Poetic Defiance", if I recall it was episode seven... but I digress.
This story is before all that. Before the veil was lifted. Before the poetry sparked fire.
She was younger then, a student among many, her questions sharper than most. And the man she listened to---he never raised his voice.
He sat among his books, cross-legged and calm, and spoke in layered riddles that drew the mind forward and outward. His name was Siyyid Kázim Rashtí, and he believed something was coming. Not centuries from now---but soon. Imminent. Present in the air.
His classroom in Karbala was not grand. No marble, no banners, just worn carpets and eager eyes. The kind of space where ideas could swell and stir without being caged by certainty. Outside, pilgrims wept at sacred tombs. Inside, his students chased fragments of prophecy like birds scattering in wind.
He never claimed to be a prophet. He never claimed to be the one.
But he said the One was near.
And what I remember most... was not the words themselves, but the silence that followed. That charged, living stillness---when everyone knew something had shifted, though no one could say what.
He was born around 1793, in the city of Rasht, near the Caspian Sea. From there, the roads led south to the shrines and seminaries of Shi'a Islam---first to Najaf, then to Karbala, where he would live, teach, and die. His name was Siyyid Kázim Rashtí, and the world he moved through was already cracking at its edges.
The great empires were in slow retreat. The Qajars ruled Persia but held power loosely. The scholars held the real authority---men of scripture and commentary who interpreted the will of the Hidden Imam, the Twelfth descendant of the Prophet, believed by many to be alive but concealed until the end of days.
Among them was Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsá'í, a controversial mystic who challenged the rigid frameworks of orthodox thought. He taught that the coming of the Promised One---the Qa'im---was not only real but imminent. His ideas shook the seminaries. When he died, his students turned to Siyyid Kázim to carry the teachings forward.
But Siyyid Kázim did not build a school of dogma. He opened a space for searching.
He spoke of spiritual realms layered over the material world, of subtle signs hidden in scripture, of a transformation not yet seen but already underway. His classroom drew seekers from across Persia and Iraq---those disillusioned with inherited answers, those who sensed something was shifting beneath the old certainties.
He taught with metaphor and paradox. He refused easy conclusions.
Most controversially, he began to speak more often of the coming of the Promised One---not in vague, future centuries, but as something near at hand.
And then he did something unexpected.
He told his students to leave.
Not in rebellion, but in search. He said the One they awaited would not appear in a classroom. They must go out and find him.
Some hesitated. Others obeyed.
One of them, you may have heard of---Tahirih, the veiled poet, who would later tear off her veil and declare the day of endings had come. Another, Mullá Husayn, would travel on foot until he reached Shiraz... and knocked on a door.
But Siyyid Kázim would not see what came next.
In early 1843, during the holy days of Muharram, he died quietly in Karbala. His students buried him with reverence. And then they scattered---north, east, west---looking for someone who had not yet spoken.
He left no book of laws. No movement. No name for what was to follow.
Only a sense that the world had turned.
In his own time, Siyyid Kázim Rashtí was both revered and dismissed---praised for his brilliance, feared for his ambiguity. He was not alone in imagining that the world was reaching a kind of threshold.
But what made his presence different was how deliberately he refused to resolve the tension. He taught as though the center of the story hadn't arrived yet.
And this was deeply unsettling.
In Karbala, the expectations of religious learning were clear: memorize, interpret, preserve. The sacred truths had already been given. But Siyyid Kázim taught as though truth itself was still arriving, still breaking through the edges of understanding. He opened old verses like trapdoors, revealing unseen depths. He spoke not of rules, but of signs.
And most of all, he kept saying: Something is coming.
Not metaphorically. Not someday.
Soon.
In that classroom, faith began to shift shape. It was no longer about obedience to the past---it became a readiness for rupture. His students weren't just absorbing knowledge; they were being asked to transform their relationship with certainty. They were asked to dwell in expectancy.
And this expectancy had consequences.
Some students left---troubled by his unwillingness to give final answers. Others stayed, captivated by the mystery.
To follow him was to step into a sacred tension, to believe that waiting could be a spiritual act, that questions themselves might be closer to revelation than answers.
This atmosphere had another effect: it broke open the traditional roles of who could seek, who could interpret, who could lead. A woman like Tahirih, already brilliant, already restless, found in his classroom a spiritual permission no one else would give her---to interpret scripture, to speak of unseen realities, to act.
In a world defined by hierarchy and inheritance, this was radical.
Siyyid Kázim gave his students not doctrine, but direction. And then he sent them out to find what even he could not name. His death did not end the story. It began a scattering. A quiet explosion.
His classroom became a before-and-after.
Those who followed him would never again be satisfied with recitation alone. They had been taught to wait for thunder, and some began to think they could hear it.
The year was 1843 when Siyyid Kázim died. That same year, across the ocean, William Miller's followers gathered in American fields, eyes turned to the sky, waiting for Christ to return.
In Germany, the Temple Society was already preparing for a spiritual migration to the Holy Land, shaped by Christoph Hoffmann, who believed the Kingdom of God must be built by human hands. And behind both of them stood Johann Albrecht Bengel, whose calculations had pointed to the 1830s as the turning of an age.
None of these figures knew each other. None spoke the same theology. But all lived in a moment trembling with spiritual anticipation.
And in Karbala, Siyyid Kázim Rashtí was doing something equally audacious. Not by naming a date, or founding a movement---but by asking his students to leave the known. To listen for a voice not yet heard. To expect something holy, outside the frame of inherited religion.
He didn't build a new system. He dismantled the need for one.
That may be his greatest spiritual contribution.
In every era, there are those who protect the boundaries of faith. But occasionally, someone walks to the edge and quietly opens a gate. Siyyid Kázim opened a gate---not to certainty, but to searching. And in doing so, he loosened the grip of centuries.
He invited people to believe that the sacred could arrive in new form.
That revelation might not be behind them, but ahead. And that the act of looking---with sincerity, with humility, with courage---was itself an act of faith.
This was not just a theological gesture. It was a psychological and social risk. To follow him was to let go of structure, to become a pilgrim without a map. Some found freedom in that. Others found fear.
But those who walked through the gate he opened changed history. Some would claim to find what he pointed toward. Others would carry his questions into new lands, new languages.
His name may be forgotten by most. But the spiritual pattern he helped shape---of preparing, of releasing, of seeking---lives on. In every soul that feels a change coming, but cannot yet name it.
Sometimes, faith becomes a monument.
We chisel its words into stone. We protect it behind glass. We recite it as though all questions have been answered. And in doing so, we forget something: that revelation never belonged to the past. It has always been alive. Always been moving. Always been calling us forward.
That is what I remember in Siyyid Kázim's classroom. Not the certainties---but the direction. He pointed his students toward the future.
Not as an escape, but as a spiritual necessity.
To look forward was not to abandon tradition. It was to honor its purpose. The sacred was never meant to freeze the world in place. It was meant to transform it.
He didn't offer a system. He didn't name a successor. He didn't close the book. Instead, he said: Go look. And that one invitation---spoken softly, in a room of seekers---carried something rare and powerful.
Permission.
Permission to expect something new. Permission to believe that truth could still arrive. Permission to become a participant in what comes next.
And that permission matters now more than ever.
Listen, dear one, revelation is not a fossilized. It is not sealed in scripture or entombed in cathedrals. If the spirit lives in the world---then it must be building something. It must be going somewhere. We can honor the past, but only as the path that brought us to the present. The purpose of faith is not to guard the ashes---it is to carry the flame. And the flame moves forward. If we want to feel the spirit of revelation alive in our own lives, we cannot keep turning around. We have to ride with it.
We have to let it take us where we have not yet been... into the future.
We live in a world aching for certainty. Many turn to faith as a shelter from change. But the deeper courage may be to turn toward change with spiritual readiness. To hold faith not as an anchor, but as a compass.
Siyyid Kázim's gift was not in what he proved. It was in what he made possible. A way of believing that prepares us for what we cannot yet name.
And even now, beneath the noise and pace of the modern world, that same readiness is needed. In classrooms and homes and hearts everywhere, there are those who sense the silence before a shift.
They do not know what's coming.
But they are listening.
I wonder if you've ever felt it---that quiet kind of knowing. When something begins to stir beneath your ordinary days. When a question appears and won't go away. When the air feels different, though nothing has changed.
It doesn't always come with clarity. Often it arrives as restlessness. Or a strange pull toward something you can't describe yet. And sometimes, the people around you won't understand. They'll ask for conclusions when all you have is direction.
That was the world Siyyid Kázim taught in.
He didn't give his students an answer. He gave them a new posture---a way of standing in uncertainty without fear. He taught them to trust the forward motion of spirit. To listen for what hadn't yet been spoken. To prepare for a dawn they could not see.
Maybe you're in that kind of moment now. Maybe something in you is leaning forward. Not away from who you've been---but toward who you might still become.
If so, don't rush it.
You don't have to name it yet. You don't have to explain it.
But you can choose to be someone who listens. Someone who watches the horizon without demanding to know what's coming. Someone who believes that sacred change doesn't only live in stories of the past. It lives in the path still unfolding under your feet.
And maybe that's enough, for now.
Next time, I'll take you to a cloistered room in Spain, where a woman in blue lay motionless in prayer---yet claimed she had crossed oceans in spirit. Her name was María de Jesús de Ágreda, and some believed she spoke to people she had never seen, in lands she had never touched.
Whether you believe her or not... the story lingers.
Until then, keep your heart turned gently toward the future.
Not with fear, but with readiness. Something is always arriving.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.