A City Climbs the Mountain: The Funeral of 'Abdu'l-Bahá

*A retelling based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the family's own account of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing, together with the contemporary record gathered in Haifa soon afterward. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.*

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The grandeur that the world understands arrives with trumpets. A great man dies, and the state decrees the honors: the procession is arranged, the dignitaries are summoned, the ranks are marshaled, the public is told where to stand. The splendor is organized in advance, because it depends on office — on the throne or the high command or the chair of state that the man occupied while he lived.

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The grandeur of the morning on which 'Abdu'l-Bahá was carried up Mount Carmel was of an entirely different kind, and that is exactly what makes it so striking. He held no office. He commanded no army and governed no province. He had spent the greater part of His life as a prisoner and an exile of the Ottoman state, and when at last that captivity ended, He did not seek rank or station of any sort.

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He lived, in His final years, simply — receiving the seeker at His door, walking the lanes of Haifa and 'Akká in His white turban, giving with His own hand to the poor. There was no machinery of state to summon the multitudes when He passed. And yet the multitudes came.

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'Abdu'l-Bahá ascended at His home in Haifa in the early hours of the twenty-eighth of November, 1921. He had returned from the Shrine of the Báb the evening before, and had spoken with His family late into the night. By morning the news was moving through the town, and from the town outward into the surrounding hills. What happened next was not arranged by any committee. It happened because of what one life had meant.

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The account preserved in *The Chosen Highway*, and in the contemporary record written down in Haifa in those days, tells of a gathering of around ten thousand people on the following day. They came from every community of the land.

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There were Sunní and Shíʻih Muslims; there were Christians of the Eastern and the Western churches; there were Jews from the old city and from the settlements; there were Druze from the villages in the hills above Haifa; and there was a small body of Bahá'ís who had come from many countries. It was as though the whole patchwork of a famously divided land had, for a single morning, been gathered into one grief.

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The procession formed, and began its slow ascent of the mountain. The coffin, the chronicle records, "was borne to its last resting-place on the shoulders of His loved ones." Behind it came the long train of mourners. The record describes how, "amid the sobs and moans of many a grief-stricken heart," the slow column "wended its slow way up the slopes of Mt. Carmel to the Mausoleum of the Báb" — to the very Shrine that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had Himself raised, with such labor and such love, over the remains of His Lord's Forerunner.

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When the procession at last reached the Shrine, something happened that no decree of state could have produced. Nine speakers rose, one after another, to deliver the funeral orations — and these nine, the record notes, "represented the Muslim, the Jewish and Christian Faiths." Each spoke from within his own tradition. Each reached, in his own language and out of his own scripture, for words to name what the city had lost.

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Think of what that scene meant in that time and that place: clergy and notables of religions that ordinarily kept their distance, and sometimes their suspicion, from one another, standing in turn beside the same coffin, united for one morning by a single man's life.

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The coffin was then, the chronicle continues, "removed to one of the chambers of the Shrine, and there lowered, sadly and reverently, to its last resting-place" in a vault adjoining that in which lay the remains of the Báb.

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Among those present was the highest representative of the governing power itself.

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Sir Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner, attended; and afterward he observed that the mourners had come "sorrowing for His death, but rejoicing also for His life." It is a remarkable sentence to fall from the lips of a high official of an empire — not the formal condolence of protocol, but a true reading of the day: that this was grief shot through with gratitude, the mourning of people who felt not merely that a great man had died, but that a blessing had passed among them.

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The Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, set down a tribute no less telling. He said that he had "never known a more united expression of regret and respect than was called forth by the utter simplicity of the ceremony." A more united expression — from a land whose divisions were a byword; called forth not by splendor, but by simplicity.

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There is a further reversal in the scene that should not be passed over. For most of His life, 'Abdu'l-Bahá had been a prisoner of the state — exiled as a child with His Father, raised behind the walls of one banishment after another, and held for decades in the prison-city of 'Akká under a sentence meant to extinguish the Cause He embodied.

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The authorities of that empire had regarded Him, in His youth and middle years, as a dangerous captive to be confined and watched. And now, at the end, the highest officials of the governing power came to His funeral to do Him honor, and confessed before the world that they had never seen such unity of grief and respect. The walls that had been built to make Him small had not made Him small.

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He had outlived the captivity, outlived the empire that imposed it, and drawn to His resting place a tribute no captor could have imagined and no decree could have commanded.

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That last word holds the secret of the whole day. The majesty of that funeral was built out of utter simplicity, because it was built out of a life of utter service. The day after the procession, the chronicle records, the houses of the poor in the streets of Haifa remained dark with grief. These were the people 'Abdu'l-Bahá had quietly fed and clothed for years — through the long captivity, through the hunger of the war years and beyond.

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Many of them learned only that morning that the friend who had kept them alive was the same Master they had sometimes glimpsed walking along the seashore. He had not done His good in order to be seen doing it; much of it had been done in secret, bread sent to a closed door so that no one need be shamed.

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The grandeur of His passing was the grandeur of all that hidden love, surfacing at last and gathering a city.

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This is why that morning on Mount Carmel belongs so fittingly to a Feast of 'Aẓamat — Grandeur. It teaches that the greatest greatness is not the kind that office confers and the grave dissolves, but the kind that a life of love builds, stone by unseen stone, until it stands so high that no decree is needed to proclaim it. Kings have been buried with every pomp the state could devise, and the crowds dispersed and forgot.

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Here a Prisoner who had held no rank at all was carried up a mountain by ten thousand mourners of every faith, and the men who governed the land confessed they had never seen its peoples so united. He had built, out of pure servitude, a majesty that the powers of the earth could only witness and admire.

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

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