The Mother Who Walked to the Prison

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield (George Ronald), drawn from the recollections of the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahíyyih Khánum, of her childhood in Tihrán. The narrative is retold in our own words; the short phrase in quotation marks is verbatim from the book. Read the full text for the original account.

In the winter of 1852, Bahá'u'lláh was taken to the Síyáh-Chál — the "Black Pit" — an old underground reservoir beneath the streets of Tihrán that had been turned into a dungeon. One descended to it by a flight of steps into the dark. There was no light and no clean air; the place was, as the family remembered it, ankle-deep in filth, and alive with vermin. There, in that blackness, He was chained among other Bábís, the weight of the iron cutting deeper into the flesh with every movement, for four long months.

Above ground, His family went into hiding. His wife, Ásíyih Khánum, had been born to wealth and raised in ease; now she lived in poverty and fear, with her children, never certain from one day to the next whether her husband was alive.

And so she did a brave and quiet thing, again and again. In the night, when the streets were dark, she would slip out and make her way through the dangerous city toward the prison — simply to learn whether He had survived another day. The mobs were merciless in those months; Bábís were dragged out daily to be tortured and killed. For a woman to move through those streets alone, toward that prison, took a courage few are ever asked to summon. She summoned it, and kept summoning it, out of love.

At home waited the children. Among them was Bahíyyih Khánum, then about six years old, and her little brother Mírzá Mihdí, only two. While their mother was gone into the night, it fell to the small girl to hold the frightened toddler in her arms and keep him calm — listening for every sound, fearing the door, waiting for the footstep that would mean their mother had come safely home again. Her elder brother, the boy 'Abbás who would become 'Abdu'l-Bahá, was himself only eight, and already He carried sorrows far beyond His years.

It is almost unbearable to imagine — and yet what shines out of the memory is not the horror but the love that held the family together inside it: a mother's nightly courage, a child's steadfast arms around a baby, a household that refused to let terror have the last word.

And there is this, which the family could not have known as they suffered: it was in that very dungeon, in those very months, that the first stirrings of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation came to Him. In the deepest darkness Tihrán could devise, a light was being kindled that no darkness would ever put out. The Black Pit, which His enemies meant as a grave, became instead the birthplace of a new Day for humankind — and the patient, loving endurance of one family in that winter became part of the foundation on which it was built.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted phrase is verbatim from The Chosen Highway (Lady Blomfield, George Ronald). See the source for the complete account.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/blomfield_chosen_highway