The Journey from Tihrán to Baghdád, Winter 1853

In *The Chosen Highway* the Greatest Holy Leaf — Bahíyyih Khánum — gives Lady Blomfield her own first-hand recollection of the family’s exile from Tihrán to Baghdád in the winter of 1852–1853.

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Bahá'u'lláh had been released from the Síyáh-Chál in late 1852 on condition of immediate exile from Persia. The destination named was Iraq — the territory of the Ottoman Empire, beyond the reach of the Persian government. He was not permitted time to recover, time to gather provisions, time to organise the children for the journey. The order was peremptory: leave at once.

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The household set out, the recollection records, in mid-winter. The route ran westward across the high passes of Iran, through Hamadán, Kirmánsháh, and the great snowfields of the western mountains. The journey would take, in the end, three months. It was undertaken on horseback and on the backs of mules. There were no carriages; the high passes did not permit them.

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> The snow was deep, the children cried with the cold, and the > road went on for three months.

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Ásíyih Khánum, the recollection preserves, had no proper winter clothing for the children; the Tihrán household had been sacked, and what little remained had not foreseen the demands of an immediate exile. She wrapped them in what she could — shawls, blankets borrowed at the last moment from the neighbours, the lining of her own coat. She held the youngest, Mírzá Mihdí, in her own arms.

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The young ‘Abdu’l-Bahá — eight years old — kept beside His father on the road. He fell ill; He was made to ride on a mule’s pack-saddle when His own legs would not carry Him. The weather worsened. The road was, in places, almost impassable. Bahíyyih Khánum recalled to Lady Blomfield that she remembered falling asleep on the back of her mother’s horse; she would wake and find that they were still moving, in the same darkness, in the same snow.

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Lady Blomfield does not, in her brief chapter, dwell on the suffering. The Greatest Holy Leaf had not dwelt on it either. She had told the story, she said, only because the next generation of Western Bahá'ís who came to ‘Akká must know what the family had crossed in order to arrive there.

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The party reached Baghdád in early April 1853. The household that emerged from the road was not the household that had set out from Tihrán. The children were thinner; the parents were older; the small luxuries of the Persian noble life were gone and would not return. What remained was the family, and the faith for which the family had been made to walk, that had proved, on the road, sufficient.

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