The Early Years of the Greatest Holy Leaf

*A retelling based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, who wrote down much of Bahíyyih Khánum's early life from conversations with Khánum herself. Words in quotation marks are from that book.*

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Bahíyyih Khánum, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh, is known to Bahá'ís as the Greatest Holy Leaf. She was six years old when Bahá'u'lláh was arrested in Tihrán, after an attempt on the life of the Sháh, and cast into an underground prison, where He was held in chains for four months. Relatives, friends and servants fled from the family's house; only one man-servant, Isfandiyár, and one woman stayed. The house was stripped of everything by the people.

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Mírzá Músá, Bahá'u'lláh's brother, helped Ásíyih Khánum and her three children escape into hiding, and she sold the few marriage treasures she had saved to pay the gaolers to take food to her husband.

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Khánum told Lady Blomfield: "How well I remember cowering in the dark, with my little brother, Mirza Mihdi, the Purest Branch, at that time two years old, in my arms, which were not very strong, as I was only six."

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When the family was banished to Baghdád, the journey took about four weeks in the month of December. "The weather was bitterly cold, snow was upon the ground," she remembered. They sometimes camped in the wilderness, and "we were not well prepared!"

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In Baghdád, Lady Blomfield writes, Bahíyyih Khánum was her mother's helper in the household, "working always beyond her strength." "No childish pleasures or companions were hers." Her brother 'Abbás, later known as 'Abdu'l-Bahá, was taught at times by His mother, by Mírzá Músá, or by His father.

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When Lady Blomfield asked about her own lessons, Khánum answered, "But I never had any time for studies." Lady Blomfield saw in that reply "the keynote of her whole life." She adds: "Her one joy was to devote every moment of her existence to being of use to her mother and father, to whom she was passionately attached." As 'Abdu'l-Bahá grew older, the same loving service was extended to Him.

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As she grew up, she asked her father to let her remain unmarried, "that she might the better devote herself to her three dearly loved ones. And so it was." An old friend of Bahá'u'lláh told Lady Blomfield that He once said: "I know no man worthy to marry such purity as my daughter."

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She went with the family into each later exile: to Constantinople, to Adrianople, and finally to the prison-city of 'Akká. There, she told Lady Blomfield, the family lived in three small rooms of the barracks, and in the first two years they were allowed out, even for an hour, only three times. "How tired we were of those three little rooms!"

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*This is a retelling. For the full account, see **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield.*

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