A Night in Ásíyih Khánum's Room

A retelling for children, based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield.

Lady Blomfield came from England to the Holy Land after 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed away. She stayed with His family and listened to the memories of the Greatest Holy Leaf, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh, about the early days of the Faith.

In May 1922 Lady Blomfield travelled by train with some of the ladies and children of the family to the old prison-city of 'Akká. There she saw the houses where Bahá'u'lláh and His family had lived as exiles. In one small house, Bahá'u'lláh had lived in a single room for twelve years, and for eight of those years He never once went out, not even across the street.

That little house had only four rooms, for the family and for the pilgrims who came from far away to see Him. In one room, thirteen people sometimes slept all together. There was even a shelf where a nimble pilgrim would sleep, and once he rolled off!

That night, Lady Blomfield slept in the room that had belonged to Ásíyih Khánum, the wife of Bahá'u'lláh and the mother of the Greatest Holy Leaf. She wrote to her daughter:

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

"Benign" means kind and gentle. All through the night, she could feel how kind and peaceful that room was.

The next morning, the Greatest Holy Leaf arrived from Haifa. That day she went with the visitors to see the old barracks where the family had first been imprisoned. A terrible sickness had once spread there, and she had fallen ill with it too. As the visitors listened to the story of those days, the Greatest Holy Leaf was with them, "her eyes charged with memories," Lady Blomfield wrote. She had lived through it all.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "The Room of Ásíyih Khánum".

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