I Slept in the Room of Ásíyih Khánum

Lady Sara Louisa Blomfield came to ‘Akká in the spring of 1922, in the months after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, to sit with the Greatest Holy Leaf — Bahíyyih Khánum — and to gather, in preparation for the volume that would become The Chosen Highway, the family’s own recollections of the early days. Several chapters of the book are her own observation; several are Spoken Chronicles taken down at Bahíyyih Khánum’s side.

In one passage Lady Blomfield describes the small house in ‘Akká in which Bahá’u’lláh and His family had lived for twelve years of the imprisonment. The conditions had been beyond anything a Western visitor could easily imagine. She records, almost in shock:

In one of the rooms thirteen persons, pilgrims and the ladies, sometimes slept. A shelf was there, on which an agile pilgrim would repose.

The household, in those years, made room for whoever arrived. There was no other room to be made. The thirteen-person chamber, the shelf for the agile pilgrim, the long quiet patience of women preparing meals on charcoal — these were the conditions under which the central documents of a world religion had been revealed.

Lady Blomfield was permitted, on her own pilgrimage, to sleep in a particular chamber: the one that had once been Ásíyih Khánum’s. The Greatest Holy Leaf accompanied her quietly and left her there. The next morning she could not keep what she had felt to herself. She told the company:

I am sleeping in the room of Ásíyih Khánum. I was conscious all night of its benign atmosphere.

The Greatest Holy Leaf, Lady Blomfield notes, was with us while we listened. She heard her mother named with reverence by a Western pilgrim and did not interrupt. Her eyes charged with memories, she stood and listened. She herself had been in that house, in those rooms, when the typhoid swept through the prison in the early 1870s; she herself, Lady Blomfield writes, had been sick of that same fever.

The chamber had outlasted the empire that built its walls. Decades later, a Western pilgrim could feel it. The Greatest Holy Leaf, who had lived through it all, said only what her mother’s name required of her — and went on with the day’s business of receiving the friends.

Paraphrased from The Chosen Highway (Lady Blomfield, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1940); see original for full text.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.