Amatu'l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum

1910 to 2000. Born Mary Sutherland Maxwell. Daughter of May Maxwell and William Sutherland Maxwell. Wife of Shoghi Effendi from 1937 until his death in 1957. Hand of the Cause of God appointed by Shoghi Effendi in 1952. The longest-lived of the original Hands and the principal living link between the Guardianship and the present era.

Early life

Mary Sutherland Maxwell was born in New York City on 8 August 1910 — the only child of May Bolles Maxwell and William Sutherland Maxwell. Her mother was the principal Bahá'í teacher of Paris in the early 1900s and the first Bahá'í of Canada; her father was the celebrated Canadian architect of Maxwell & Maxwell. The household into which Mary was born was already among the most distinguished of the early Western Bahá'í community.

She grew up in Montreal at the Maxwell home at 716 Pine Avenue West — the home in which 'Abdu'l-Bahá would later stay during His American journey of 1912 and which would become, after the Maxwells' deaths, a Bahá'í Shrine. From her earliest childhood Mary was steeped in the Bahá'í teachings, the Bahá'í community, and the company of the principal early Bahá'í figures of the Western hemisphere who passed through her parents' home.

She made her first pilgrimage to the Holy Land at age fifteen, with her mother. She met the household at Bahjí. She met Shoghi Effendi — then twenty-eight, in the early years of his Guardianship. The encounter began what would, twelve years later, become her marriage.

The marriage

In March 1937, after a long correspondence and several further pilgrimages, Mary Maxwell married Shoghi Effendi at the home of the Greatest Holy Leaf in Haifa. She was twenty-six. He was forty. He had been Guardian of the Cause for sixteen years, alone, with the burden of a worldwide Faith on his shoulders.

Bahá'u'lláh had given her, by tradition through dreams of certain elderly believers, a new name: Rúḥíyyih — "spiritual." 'Abdu'l-Bahá's family added Khánum, "lady." She became, from 1937 onward, Amatu'l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum — "the Handmaid of Bahá, the Spiritual Lady."

The years with Shoghi Effendi

For the next twenty years Rúḥíyyih Khánum walked beside Shoghi Effendi through every aspect of his Guardianship. She typed his letters. She filed his correspondence. She received the pilgrims when his time was overtaken with administrative work. She nursed him through illnesses. She made it possible for him to do his enormous work. He trusted her completely.

In 1952, at the second contingent of Hands of the Cause appointed by Shoghi Effendi, Rúḥíyyih Khánum was named. She was forty-two. The appointment was unprecedented: the wife of the Guardian, given the formal rank of Hand of the Cause. The two roles together gave her an unique position in the Bahá'í community of the time.

The death of Shoghi Effendi

On 4 November 1957, in London, Shoghi Effendi died of Asian influenza. He was sixty. Rúḥíyyih Khánum was beside him. She was forty-seven. Her account of the morning of his death — set down in her book The Priceless Pearl — is one of the most affecting passages in the literature of the Faith.

She organised the funeral. She received the Hands of the Cause as they flew in from every continent. She walked at the head of the procession to the New Southgate Cemetery. She watched as her husband was buried in foreign soil. She returned to Haifa with the Hands and supported their decision to assume the Custodianship.

She refused, throughout the years that followed, to claim any standing of her own. Her marriage to the Guardian and her own gifts could plausibly have been used to claim a particular institutional authority; she insisted instead on the Hands' collective leadership and on the proper election of the Universal House of Justice.

The post-1963 work

After the establishment of the Universal House of Justice in 1963, Rúḥíyyih Khánum continued her service to the Faith. She travelled extensively — eventually to more than 180 countries — on behalf of the Universal House of Justice. She visited believers in remote corners of the world. She represented the Bahá'í Faith at major international gatherings. She made documentary films about Bahá'í communities in indigenous cultures (her films on the Faith among the Native peoples of the Americas, the Inuit, and the indigenous peoples of South America are particularly notable).

She wrote books. Prescription for Living (1950) — a practical book on the Bahá'í teachings on personal life — remains widely read. The Priceless Pearl (1969) is her biography of Shoghi Effendi and the principal source for the history of the Guardianship. Twenty-Five Years of the Guardianship and other shorter works document the early decades of the Faith's worldwide expansion.

The "Green Light Expedition"

Among Rúḥíyyih Khánum's distinctive undertakings of the 1970s was the so-called Green Light Expedition — a long journey through the Amazon basin and the Andean countries in which she visited Bahá'í communities of indigenous South American believers and made a documentary film of the journey. She was in her sixties; the conditions were hard; the journey produced film footage and personal accounts that have become beloved in the Bahá'í community.

The death

Rúḥíyyih Khánum died at the family home in Haifa on 19 January 2000 at the age of eighty-nine. She had been a Hand of the Cause for forty-eight years and the principal living link between the Guardianship and the present era for forty-three years after Shoghi Effendi's ascension.

She was buried in the Bahá'í cemetery on Mount Carmel near the Shrine of the Báb, in the city she had made her home for sixty-three years. The Universal House of Justice cabled the worldwide community: "With sorrow-laden hearts announce passing into Abhá Kingdom dearly loved, valiant Hand Cause God Amatu'l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum…" Memorial gatherings were held across the world.

Her legacy

Rúḥíyyih Khánum's place in the worldwide Bahá'í community of the late twentieth century was, by any measure, unique. She was the wife of the Guardian. She was the senior surviving Hand of the Cause for many of her later years. She was the last living person who had walked daily beside Shoghi Effendi. She had travelled to almost every Bahá'í community on earth. She had written some of the most beloved books of the Bahá'í twentieth century.

Many Bahá'ís, in remembering her, focus on a particular quality: her combination of grandeur and accessibility. She carried the weight of her unique position with dignity, but she received the friends — even the most modest of them — with a warmth that made her seem, to many who met her, like an elder sister rather than a senior Bahá'í institution.