The Reunion on the Mountain

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum, with details of the Purest Branch's death from God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Words in quotation marks are quoted from those sources.

"Twilight has fallen on Mount Carmel," Rúḥíyyih Khánum wrote at the time, "and the veils of dusk have deepened over the bay of 'Akka."

A group of men stood waiting by a gate beneath the steps. There was a stir. The gardener ran to light the entrance, and in the white shafts of light a procession appeared, and in it a man in black carrying the weight of a coffin on his shoulder. It was Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Cause, and the coffin held what remained of the Purest Branch, the son of Bahá'u'lláh, who had died sixty-nine years before.

Mírzá Mihdí was twenty-two, an amanuensis of his Father and the brother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, when, one evening in 1870, he was pacing the roof of the barracks in 'Akká in the twilight, wrapped in his customary devotions. He fell through an unguarded skylight onto a wooden crate standing on the floor below. It pierced his ribs. He died twenty-two hours later, and his dying supplication to his Father was that his life might be accepted as a ransom for those who were being kept from His presence. Bahá'u'lláh spoke of him as one "created of the light of Bahá." The fortress guards escorted his body out of the city, and he was laid to rest beyond the walls. The burial, Rúḥíyyih Khánum notes, had been hastily carried out, in the days when Bahá'u'lláh was so strictly confined in the prison barracks.

His mother, Ásíyih Khánum — Navváb, the wife of Bahá'u'lláh and the mother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá — died in 'Akká years later and was buried there too. Her daughter, Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, had long wished to lie near her mother. But when she passed away in 1932 she was buried on Mount Carmel near the Shrine of the Báb, and the mother and the brother stayed where they were, across the bay, in graves Rúḥíyyih Khánum calls unsuitable.

Shoghi Effendi conceived the idea of bringing them to her. In 1939 he ordered from Italy twin monuments of marble, like the one he had raised over the Greatest Holy Leaf, and they reached Haifa safely in spite of the war. The rest was far harder. While the new tombs were still being cut out of the rock of the mountain, relatives who had long since turned against 'Abdu'l-Bahá protested to the government against the move. Once the authorities understood who these relatives were, they approved the plan and issued the papers for the exhumations. Two days later, without risking further delay, the Guardian acted.

After daybreak, with a few Bahá'ís, he went to 'Akká. He told Rúḥíyyih Khánum afterwards that it had been "a nerve-racking experience for him in every way." There was a real risk that those same opponents would come to the cemeteries with a party of supporters and try to stop the exhumations by force, and they would have had the sympathy of the Muslims, who regarded the opening of a grave as the greatest desecration.

They opened the mother's grave first. The wood of the coffin was intact but for the bottom, which had rotted away, and he told them to lift the lid gently. The shape of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's mother lay there in her shroud so clearly that one could almost make out her features, and at the first touch it fell into dust and bones. Shoghi Effendi went down into the grave and with his own hands helped to place her in the new coffin.

Then they went on to the second Arab cemetery, where the Purest Branch lay. He had been buried two decades longer than his mother, and his coffin had entirely disintegrated. The Guardian gathered up the few bones and the dust himself, and laid them himself in the coffin waiting beside the grave. It took many harrowing hours before he could start back to Haifa with what he carried.

So he came up the narrow path at dusk, the coffin on his shoulder, to a room in the house next to the resting-place of the Greatest Holy Leaf. A servant ran ahead with a rug and candelabra from the Holy Shrines, and the coffin was laid there for the time being, facing Bahjí. Then he went back down to the gate and came up again with the second burden: the wife of Bahá'u'lláh, the mother of the Master.

When it was done he cabled the Bahá'ís of America: "Blessed remains Purest Branch and Master's mother safely transferred hallowed precincts Shrines Mount Carmel. Long inflicted humiliation wiped away."

"Cherished wish Greatest Holy Leaf fulfilled," the cable went on. "Sister brother mother wife 'Abdu'l-Bahá reunited one spot" — for Munírih Khánum, the wife of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, lay near the Greatest Holy Leaf as well — and that spot, he told them, was designed to be the focal centre of the Faith's administrative institutions at its World Centre.

For three weeks the two coffins stayed in the little room. On Christmas Eve they were carried, again on the Guardian's shoulder, into the Shrine of the Báb, and lay in state by its threshold with candles burning at their heads and flowers before their feet. At sunset the next day they were borne out through the lighted garden and down the white path and out onto the moonlit road. Shoghi Effendi himself went down into the carpeted vault and eased the coffin of the Purest Branch into its place, and strewed it with flowers, "his hands the last to caress it." The mother of the Master was laid in the neighbouring vault in the same way. The masons sealed the tombs, and he sprinkled attar of rose over them. Then he chanted the Tablets revealed by Bahá'u'lláh and destined by Him to be read at their graves.

Rúḥíyyih Khánum notes that all this took place less than two months after the Guardian had risen from one of the most serious illnesses he had ever had.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.