She Restored Sight to the Blind: Bahíyyih Khánum's Wartime Relief Work in Haifa

The years 1914 to 1918 brought the Great War to the eastern Mediterranean. Haifa, then under Ottoman administration, was hungry. The British naval blockade had cut off imports. Conscription had taken the working men. Refugees from the fighting in Syria and Palestine were arriving in the city by foot. The streets, by the autumn of each war year, filled with the displaced.

The household at the foot of Mount Carmel — the household of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the Greatest Holy Leaf — became, through those years, a small daily centre of the city's relief. The Master had Himself foreseen the food crisis and had directed the friends in 'Akká to plant grain at Adasiyyih on the eastern bank of the Jordan. The crops, when ready, were brought to Haifa in caravans under His personal direction and distributed to the hungry.

But the daily distribution itself — the visible work of placing food into the hands of the queues that formed each morning at the gate — fell, more and more, to Bahíyyih Khánum. The Master was occupied with His correspondence to a war-torn world; the Greatest Holy Leaf, already in her seventies, took up the practical relief.

The tribute Shoghi Effendi later composed records what she did, in his characteristic restrained but exact language.

From the hand of the Greatest Holy Leaf, and out of the abundance of her heart, these hapless victims of a contemptible tyranny, received day after day unforgettable evidences of a love they had learned to envy and admire.

She gave food. She gave money — what little money was still moving in the city. She gave clothing — plain shirts and shawls and shoes that were sewn or sourced from her own household.

The remedies which, by a process of her own, she herself prepared and diligently applied.

She had, over many years, learned the small medicines of an old Eastern household — herbal preparations, cataplasms for wounds, eye-washes for the trachoma that haunted the region. These she made by her own hand and applied to the people who came needing them. The Guardian's words preserve the breadth of what those preparations achieved:

Comforting the disconsolate, restoring sight to the blind, sheltering the orphan.

She was past seventy. She had a body the Adrianople winter had once weakened. She had no formal training. What she had was decades of devotion and the household discipline of a noble Persian woman who knew that no service was beneath her.

Haifa survived the war. Many did so, in part, because of the hand at the household gate that placed food and clothes into their open palms day after day, with the same gentle dignity her own mother had once placed a handful of flour into hers.

Paraphrased from Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf (Bahá'í World Centre); Section III.6, Shoghi Effendi's tribute. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19242. See original for full text.

Various. *Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf*. Bahá'í World Centre. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19242