The Winter Road to Baghdád

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield (George Ronald), drawn from the recollections of the Greatest Holy Leaf, Bahíyyih Khánum. 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 complete account.

When Bahá'u'lláh was at last released from the Síyáh-Chál, He came out gravely weakened — His health broken by four months in that pestilent underground prison. There was no time to recover. Within days the family was ordered into exile: ten days' notice to leave Tihrán and make the long journey to Baghdád, in the depth of winter.

The little family had been stripped of nearly everything. To pay for the journey at all, Ásíyih Khánum — Bahá'u'lláh's wife, who had been born to wealth and raised amid every comfort — sold the last of her jewels and her fine embroidered garments, parting with the remnants of her old life for a few hundred túmáns to carry them to exile.

Then came the road itself: some four weeks of travel through bitter cold. As Bahíyyih Khánum, then a girl of six, remembered it, the weather was bitterly cold, snow was upon the ground. Her mother, six weeks with child, rode jolting along in a curtained litter over the frozen miles. At the rough caravanserais where they stopped, this gently raised woman knelt at the public baths and washed the family's clothes with her own hands, until those hands grew painfully chapped and cracked in the cold.

And there is one detail the family kept, small and almost unbearably tender. The months in the Síyáh-Chál had gravely weakened Bahá'u'lláh's blessed health, and the coarse fare of the road was more than His body could take. Longing to prepare something He might eat, Ásíyih Khánum set about making a little sweet cake with what meager means she had — and, in the dark and the cold and the exhaustion, reached for sugar and used salt instead. The cake was spoiled. One imagines her dismay; one imagines, too, the gentleness with which He would have received it.

It is in such details that the greatness of these souls becomes real to us. We speak of exile and persecution as grand and terrible words; but for this family it meant a pregnant mother's chapped hands, a ruined cake prepared in love, and a six-year-old girl watching it all and remembering — while He whose suffering would redeem a world bore the hardships of the road in silence. They endured it without bitterness, and they endured it together; and out of such patient, unglamorous love the whole future of the Faith was carried, like a flame cupped against the wind, along that frozen winter road to Baghdád.

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