The prominent Nayriz Baha’i, Mirza Ahmad Nayrizi, later named ‘Vahidi’ after the great Babi martyr, was blessed with regular letters from ‘Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi.
Ahmad Nayrizi
Mirza Ahmad Vahidi rose from poverty to become a wealthy businessman and landowner. He loved to tell the story of how he became a Baha’i:
One day, he was passing by the shop of Karbelai Husayn who invited him and challenged him by asking if he knew the Hadith in which a believer is exhorted to search in the East and the West for the promised one and investigate his claim and, if so, why had Ahmad not inquired about the Baha’i claims. Ahmad asked a Mulla later about this hadith but the Mulla reacted with surprise that Ahmad had even listened to a lowly shopkeeper. This only made Ahmad more curious, and he returned to the shop for a series of discussions and later accepted the Baha’i faith and regretted that he, like many Nayrizis, had treated Baha’is with contempt.
(The similar story of the sifter of wheat HERE)
So began an active life of service during which Ahmad accumulated great wealth and spent it on the affairs of the Faith. He believed that by giving of his wealth, he would accrue spiritual merit, and he was very steadfast in his obedience to Baha’i laws. Once Shoghi Effendi told him that having more than one wife—the common custom among Muslims—was no longer allowed in the new dispensation, he immediately divorced one of his wives, though he supported her financially for the rest of her life.
Vahidi descended from Mirza Ahmad Koshnevis, whose highly developed use of the elegant Naskhi style made him one of the most distinguished Persian calligraphers of the 18th century. Koshnevis’s life’s work was a prodigious output of some seventy major works and between ninety and one-hundred and twenty Qur’ans, some of which are found in major museums today.
Tablet to Koshnevis