From the Hand of the Greatest Holy Leaf: Wartime Relief in Haifa

The First World War reached the eastern Mediterranean in 1914. Haifa was then under Ottoman rule, and as the war went on food grew scarce. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, who was living in Haifa, had grain grown on lands in the Jordan Valley, at 'Adasiyyih and elsewhere, to relieve the hunger around Him.

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In his tribute to the Greatest Holy Leaf, written after her passing in 1932, Shoghi Effendi describes the scene at the Master's house:

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> The residence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Haifa was besieged, all throughout that dreary conflict, by a concourse of famished men, women and children whom the maladministration, the cruelty and neglect of the officials of the Ottoman Government had driven to seek an alleviation to their woes.

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Bahíyyih Khánum, then around seventy, was at the heart of that work:

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> 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.

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The Guardian lists what she gave: words of cheer and comfort, food, money and clothing, and remedies "which, by a process of her own, she herself prepared and diligently applied." All these, he writes, "had their share in comforting the disconsolate, in restoring sight to the blind, in sheltering the orphan, in healing the sick, and in succouring the homeless and the wanderer."

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Her health had been undermined half a century earlier, during the exile in Adrianople. Even so, Shoghi Effendi writes that she "had reached, amidst the darkness of the war days the high water-mark of her spiritual attainments," and that few of those who relieved the sufferings of that conflict "gave as freely and as disinterestedly as she did."

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*A retelling based on Shoghi Effendi's tribute to the Greatest Holy Leaf (July 1932), in **Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf**, compiled by the Bahá'í World Centre (1982); the detail of the grain at 'Adasiyyih is from H. M. Balyuzi, **'Abdu'l-Bahá: The Centre of the Covenant**. Quoted passages are Shoghi Effendi's words.*

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