The Nameless One Comes Home

*A retelling for children, based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, drawn from what the Greatest Holy Leaf remembered of her own childhood. The words in quotation marks are hers, as the book records them.*

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Bahíyyih Khánum was a young girl living in Baghdád when her father, Bahá'u'lláh, went away. One day in April 1854 He left the house without telling anyone where He was going or when He would come back. He took only a little rice and some coarse bread, and went into the mountains of Kurdistán. He went so that He would not be a cause of quarrelling among the believers.

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"Our grief was intense when my father left us," Bahíyyih Khánum remembered.

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The next two years were very hard. A relative was living in the house as a guest, and he was so afraid of being arrested that he kept the door locked and would not let anyone come in to help. So the family had to do all the work themselves. For hours every day the little girl stood at a deep well in the house, drawing up water. "The ropes were hard and rough, and the bucket was heavy," she said. Her mother, Ásíyih Khánum, helped her, but her mother was not strong.

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Then the baby of the family, a little boy born in Baghdád, became very ill. The guest would not let them bring a doctor, or even a neighbour, and the baby died. It was a time of great sorrow.

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All this while, her mother and her uncle, Mírzá Músá, asked everywhere for news. Her brother 'Abbás missed His father so much that one night He prayed the whole night long that their father might be given back to them. The very next day, He and Mírzá Músá overheard two people talking about a wonderful dervish living in the mountains of Sulaymáníyyih. People called Him "The Nameless One," and said He had won the hearts of the whole countryside with his love. 'Abbás and His uncle knew at once that it must be Bahá'u'lláh.

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A faithful friend, Shaykh Sulṭán, set off with another believer to find Him. While they were gone, Ásíyih Khánum made a coat for her husband out of some red Persian cloth she had saved.

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Then one day, as the mother and her two children sat waiting, they heard a step. It was a dervish, and through the disguise they saw that it was Bahá'u'lláh. He had been away for two years.

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"Our joy cannot be described as we clung to him," Bahíyyih Khánum said. She remembered her mother, "calm and gentle," and her brother 'Abbás, who would one day be known as 'Abdu'l-Bahá, "holding his father's hand fast, as though never again could he let him go out of his sight."

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*This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see ["The Return from the Mountains"](/stories/ch-the-return-from-the-mountains).*

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