The Friend They Could Not Bear to Lose: Bahá'u'lláh in Baghdád

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, which draws on the eyewitness chronicle of Nabíl. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

When Bahá'u'lláh came to Baghdád in 1853, He came as an exile who had lost almost everything. He had been torn from His homeland of Persia, where He had been born into wealth and rank and had given it all away to the poor. He had been cast into the foul underground dungeon of Ṭihrán, the Black Pit, and had emerged from its chains with His health broken in body though unbroken in spirit. He had been banished across the winter mountains to a strange city in a strange land. He arrived with no fortune, no office, no protection — nothing, to the world's eye, on which a great life could be rebuilt.

And out of that emptiness He began, quietly, to give.

The little house the family rented in the old city had a door, and the standing rule of that door was that no one who knocked at it was ever to be sent away hungry. The believers who came in growing numbers from Persia were fed there. So were the poor of Baghdád, the wandering dervishes in their patched cloaks, the Christian beggars, the Muslim faqirs, the children of the lanes. When the household's own small store ran out, the women of the family would sooner borrow from the neighbours than turn a hungry man from the step. In time the poor of the quarter learned the way to that door as one learns the way to a friend's house.

But the bounty of those years was far more than bread. What the people of Baghdád slowly discovered, and could not stop talking about, was the One who lived among them. He was a captive and an exile, and yet there was about Him a nobility that no captivity could touch and a kindness that seemed to have no bottom to it. He turned no one away. The weak found in Him a refuge; the frightened found in Him calm; the indigent found in Him an open hand; and the proud and the learned, who came at first to test Him with their questions, went away silenced and drawn. The doors of His house, the histories say, stood open to all, of every creed and every station, and all alike were met with the same courtesy and the same love.

There was a particular sweetness in the way that love reached across old hatreds. There were those who had come to Baghdád as His adversaries, who had spoken against Him, who had wished and worked for His ruin. To these, Bahá'u'lláh returned not injury but gentleness. He overlooked the wrong; He treated the wrong-doer with a forbearance that asked for nothing back. When one man, long sunk in his own passions, repented and sought to be forgiven through a friend who pleaded for him, Bahá'u'lláh answered that because he had chosen that friend as his intercessor, his sins would be hidden away and steps taken to bring him comfort and peace of mind. Again and again, the bitterness of His enemies broke against His kindness and dissolved. It is one of the quiet wonders of the Baghdád decade: that the people who had reason to fear Him learned, instead, to love Him.

For He was reviving them. The Bábí community in those parts had been scattered, demoralized, and leaderless after years of persecution and the loss of so many of its best. Shoghi Effendi records that the very nobility of Bahá'u'lláh's character, the wisdom of His counsel, and the kindness that He showered upon all revived that downtrodden community and breathed new life and hope into hearts that had nearly given up. What grief and cruelty had emptied, mercy was filling again.

As the years passed, His renown spread far beyond the lanes around His house. Seekers and believers began to travel the long and dangerous roads from Persia on foot, crossing deserts and mountains, simply to reach His presence for a few days and then turn back the way they had come, carrying the warmth of those days home with them. Men of learning, officials of the city, and notables of the province came to call, and went away changed. The histories record that the city which had received Him as a banished prisoner came, by degrees, to regard Him as its chief ornament and its truest refuge. Even those who envied this rising love, and schemed against it, could not arrest it; the more kindness He showed, the more the hearts of the people inclined toward Him.

This is why what happened next struck the whole city so hard.

The authorities, alarmed that the prisoner they had banished to Baghdád had become, instead of a forgotten exile, the most beloved figure in the city, resolved to send Him farther still — to Constantinople, the seat of the empire, and so out of reach of the Persian frontier and the crowds He drew. A new banishment was ordered. And when it became known that He was to be taken away, Baghdád grieved as a city grieves for one of its own.

In the days before His departure, in the garden later called the Garden of Riḍván, He received an unending stream of those who came to take their leave — the humble and the eminent together, friends and officials and strangers, many of them weeping. Then, in the spring of 1863, He rode out of the city toward the river.

Nabíl, who saw it with his own eyes, set down the scene. Men and women, young and old, of every walk of life, gathered along the thoroughfare that led to the banks of the Tigris to bid farewell to the One who, in ten short years, had become — in the words preserved in that history — "their friend, their comforter and their guide." Numberless were the heads, Nabíl records, that bowed on every side to the dust at the feet of His horse; countless were those who pressed forward to embrace His stirrups. Some who had opposed Him stood among the mourners. The crowd would not be quieted. They had not lost a king; they had lost a friend, and they knew it.

He went on into a harder exile, and then a harder one after that, and at the end to the prison-fortress of 'Akká. But Baghdád had shown, once and for all, what His presence did to human hearts. A Man who arrived with nothing left behind Him a city in tears — not because He had ruled it, but because He had loved it, fed it, healed its disputes, sheltered its poor, and forgiven its cruelties, asking nothing in return.

That is the shape of divine bounty: it does not wait to be rich before it gives, and it does not wait to be loved before it loves. It pours itself out upon the deserving and the undeserving alike — and, in the end, even the hardest hearts come weeping to embrace the stirrup of the One who never turned them away.

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

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/