The Sun of Bahá Has Set: The Ascension and the Days of Mourning

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which records the ascension of Bahá'u'lláh and the mourning that followed. The phrase in quotation marks is preserved in that history.*

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The fever that had taken hold at Bahjí in early May did not relent. Shoghi Effendi records that after a brief subsiding it returned in a more acute form, that complications set in, and that Bahá'u'lláh's general condition grew steadily worse. Six days before the end He had gathered the believers and the pilgrims for their last audience, thanking them and bidding them remain united. Now the hours ran down toward the inevitable.

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In the seventy-fifth year of His age, eight hours after sunset on the twenty-ninth of May, 1892 — corresponding to the second of Dhi'l-Qa'dih, 1309 in the Muslim calendar — Bahá'u'lláh passed from this world. The Sun that had risen, decades before, out of the darkness of a pit-prison in Ṭihrán, and had shone through banishment after banishment without ever being extinguished by His captors, now set upon the horizon of 'Akká.

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The believers' grief was beyond describing. For forty years they had turned toward Him across deserts and seas; the chronicler Nabíl, who could not bear the separation, would within a short time cast himself into the sea. But even in the first shock of bereavement, the practical work of those hours had to be done, and it was done with a dignity that befitted the One it honoured.

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The news of His ascension was carried at once to Sulṭán 'Abdu'l-Ḥamíd, the very monarch whose empire had held Bahá'u'lláh prisoner.

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The telegram that bore the tidings began with words that turned an announcement of death into a confession of majesty: "the Sun of Bahá has set." In the same message the Sultan was informed of the intention to lay the sacred remains to rest within the precincts of the Mansion — an arrangement to which, Shoghi Effendi notes, he readily assented.

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The Power that had banished Bahá'u'lláh to its foulest prison now deferred, without objection, to the manner of His burial.

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That same day, shortly after sunset, the interment took place. Bahá'u'lláh was laid to rest in a room of the house adjacent to the Mansion of Bahjí — the spot that would become the holiest place on earth for His followers, the Qiblih toward which Bahá'ís the world over turn in prayer. He who had been dragged in chains from city to city, and shut behind the barred gates of a penal colony, came to rest at last in the green country north of 'Akká, in the very land of His exile, in honour.

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Then came the days of mourning. For a full week, Shoghi Effendi records, a vast number of mourners — rich and poor alike — lingered at Bahjí to grieve with the bereaved family. And the company that gathered was itself a kind of testimony. Among them were numbered Shí'ahs and Sunnís, Christians and Jews and Druzes, as well as poets, learned divines, and officials of the government.

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People who in their ordinary lives were divided by religion and rank stood together in a common sorrow at the door of One who had taught that humanity is a single family. Many of them brought written tributes, in verse and in prose, laying their grief and their praise before the memory of Him whom their own authorities had condemned.

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There is a quiet vindication in that scene. The kings and clergy who had set themselves against Bahá'u'lláh had meant to bury His Cause in 'Akká. Instead, at the hour of His passing, the notables of the region — Muslim and Christian and Jewish alike — came of their own accord to mourn Him and to honour Him with their poems. The world had done its worst to Him; and the world, in the end, wept at His threshold.

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For Bahá'ís, the Ascension of Bahá'u'lláh is observed each year in the small hours of the night, at the hour of His passing, with the chanting of the Tablet of Visitation. The day holds the deepest grief in the Bahá'í calendar. Yet folded within that grief is the strange consolation of these events: the setting Sun named in the telegram, the once-despised Prisoner laid to rest in honour, and the peoples of many faiths gathered as one to weep — a foreshadowing, even on the day of His departure, of the unity He had come to bring.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi.*

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