The Night of the Arrest: Asiyih Khanum's Vigil

In *The Chosen Highway* Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, recounts the night of August 1852 when her father was taken from the family. Lady Blomfield writes the recollection down from her own conversations in Haifa with the Greatest Holy Leaf in 1922, and lets the older woman speak.

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The household had been at Niyávarán, in the foothills above Tihrán. The young Bahíyyih Khánum was perhaps six years old. ‘Abbás Effendi — the future ‘Abdu’l-Bahá — was eight. Their younger brother Mírzá Mihdí was an infant. Their father, Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʿAlí, had ridden up from the city in great haste; news had come that an attempt on the life of the Sháh had been made by two unstable Bábí youths, and that the round-up of Bábís had already begun in the capital.

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Soldiers arrived. They seized the father. They took Him on foot, in chains, down the path toward Tihrán; He would shortly be deposited in the underground dungeon called the Síyáh-Chál, the Black Pit. The household was simultaneously sacked.

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> They tore the rings from my mother's ears, the buttons from > her dress, the very combs from her hair.

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Bahíyyih Khánum recalled the sound of the looting. Her mother gathered the three children to her, sat down on the floor of the emptied room, and held them. She did not weep in front of them. She did not, the recollection records, allow them to feel the depth of what had happened. She told them, in a voice as ordinary as she could manage, that their father had been called on a journey and would return when he could.

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The children sensed, as children do, what the words concealed. But they took comfort in the firmness of her hold. Bahíyyih Khánum told Lady Blomfield, seventy years afterward, that what she remembered most clearly from that night was not the soldiers, not the looters, not the loss of the household treasures. She remembered her mother’s voice — composed, low, and tender — speaking, into the dark of the emptied room, as if everything had still some chance of being well.

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The vigil lasted, in various forms, for the months of Bahá'u'lláh's imprisonment in the Síyáh-Chál. Ásíyih Khánum did not know, week by week, whether He still lived. She kept the household together. She sold what little remained, piece by piece, for food. She sheltered the children. She prayed.

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Lady Blomfield closes the chapter on Bahíyyih Khánum’s recollection without comment. The Greatest Holy Leaf, by that time an old woman, did not need to draw the moral. She had lived it. The girl who had clung to her mother’s skirts in the plundered room had become, in time, the woman who held the affairs of an entire Cause across the early Guardianship. The school had begun, the chapter implies, on that August night.

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