The Time for Deeds

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield (George Ronald), drawing on 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own recollections of His childhood. The narrative is retold in our own words; the short lines in quotation marks are verbatim from the book. Read the full text for the original account.

Among the very first to believe in the Báb was a woman — and what a woman. Ṭáhirih was a poet of dazzling gifts and a scholar whose learning silenced the learned men of her day. She was the only woman among the Báb's first eighteen disciples, His Letters of the Living, and her courage would carry her, in the end, all the way to martyrdom. But this scene catches her in a quieter room, and shows her fire just the same.

It was in Baghdád, in the home of Bahá'u'lláh. In one room, behind a curtain, a famous and learned believer named Siyyid Yaḥyá-i-Dárábí was deep in theological discussion with Bahá'u'lláh — the careful, circling talk of scholars: prophecies, traditions, arguments, proofs.

In the next room, in the parlour of Ásíyih Khánum, sat Ṭáhirih. And on her knee sat a small boy — 'Abbás, the child who would one day be known to the world as 'Abdu'l-Bahá. He never forgot her. Years later He would recall her lovely, radiant face, and the music of her voice, and how she would take Him up on her knee and talk with Him, and how deeply, as a child, He admired her.

As she sat there, Ṭáhirih could hear the learned debate going on behind the curtain — the endless weighing of texts while the world waited. And she could not keep silent. She lifted her voice and called out to the Siyyid across the rooms, cutting through all the scholarly fencing with a single bright blade of a sentence:

It is the time for deeds!

This was not the hour, she told him, for arguments and the idle repetition of old prophecies. The Promised One had come. What the moment demanded was not more debate but the courage to arise and proclaim it.

In that one interruption is the whole of Ṭáhirih. The most learned woman of her age, who could out-reason any scholar, knew that there is a point where reasoning must give way to action — that faith finally asks not for cleverness but for courage. A small boy heard her say it, and carried both the woman and the words in His heart for the rest of His life; and through Lady Blomfield's pages we may hear her still, calling each generation past its hesitations and into deeds.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. The quoted lines are 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