The Garden of Najíbíyyih on the Banks of the Tigris

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 1 by Adib Taherzadeh.

When Bahá'ís speak of the Garden of Riḍván, the words carry such weight that it is easy to forget the garden was, to begin with, an ordinary place — a wooded park on the edge of a great city, with paths and flowerbeds and a wall against the river. It belonged to a man of Baghdád, and it had a name long before it had its glory. To understand the First Day of Riḍván, it helps to stand for a moment in that garden as it was: to see the trees, the avenues, the roses, and the brown water of the Tigris sliding past its bank.

For ten years Bahá'u'lláh had lived in Baghdád. His house stood on one side of the Tigris, the river that runs through the heart of the city. In those years He had revived a scattered and disheartened community of believers, had poured out kindness on rich and poor alike, and had become a figure of such evident nobility that His presence drew the reverence of the whole town. But the very greatness that won the love of Baghdád alarmed His enemies, and at length, at the urging of the Persian government, an order came from the Ottoman capital summoning Him away to Constantinople. The decade in Baghdád was ending. A new banishment was beginning.

When the news spread that Bahá'u'lláh was to leave, His house was besieged. Men and women of every station — His own companions, and a host of others who had come to love Him — pressed toward His door, longing to see Him once more and to take their leave. The house could not hold them. It was then that a notable of the city, Najíb Páshá, stepped forward with an offer of great generosity. He placed at Bahá'u'lláh's disposal his own private garden-park, which lay across the river from the House. This wooded estate was called, after its owner, the Najíbíyyih garden. The believers, in the days and years that followed, would give it another name: the Garden of Riḍván — the Garden of Paradise.

It is worth dwelling on what kind of place it was. The Najíbíyyih was no wild meadow but a cultivated pleasure-garden, laid out with avenues lined by trees and flowers. In the warmth of the Baghdád spring it was heavy with roses; and when, on the afternoon Bahá'u'lláh entered it, the nightingales took up their singing in its branches, the fragrance of the blossoms and the song of the birds together made of it a kind of earthly echo of the Paradise whose name it would bear. Here was a garden made ready, as if by a hidden hand, to be the setting of the most momentous declaration in the history of the Faith.

But between Bahá'u'lláh's house and the garden lay the Tigris. To reach the Najíbíyyih, one had to cross the river — and this small geographical fact has left its mark on the way Bahá'ís remember the festival. On the afternoon of the twenty-second of April 1863, thirty-one days after Naw-Rúz, Bahá'u'lláh left His house and made His way down to the riverbank through streets thronged with weeping people. He was then ferried across the water. With Him went three of His sons — 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then eighteen years of age; Mírzá Mihdí, whom history would call the Purest Branch; and Mírzá Muḥammad-'Alí — together with His amanuensis, Mírzá Áqá Ján. As He set foot on the garden's bank, the call to afternoon prayer rose from a mosque of the city, and the words Alláh-u-Akbar, God is the Most Great, rang out across the river just as the King of Glory entered the Garden.

The histories preserve the impression He made in those first moments. Within the garden Bahá'u'lláh appeared in the utmost joy, walking with majesty along the flower-bordered avenues. To the eyes of His companions there was nothing in His bearing of a prisoner setting out on an unwanted exile; there was, instead, the serenity of One who had reached a long-appointed hour. And it was here, in this borrowed garden of roses, that He began to unveil to His chosen companions the secret He had carried in silence for ten years — that He was Himself the Promised One foretold by the Báb, the One for whose coming the whole of the Báb's revelation had been a preparation.

The crossing of the river became, in a quiet way, part of the meaning of the festival. For not everyone could cross at once. The histories record that the Tigris that spring had swollen and overflowed its banks, so that the rest of the Holy Family and many of the believers were kept back on the near side, unable to make the passage for several days. The garden, for a time, was reached only by those who could cross the flood — and the longing of those left behind to be reunited in Paradise gives the ninth day of the festival, when the family at last crossed over, its own tender significance. Even in the geography of the event there is a parable: Paradise lay across a river, and to enter it one had to be carried over the water.

Najíb Páshá, who owned the garden, was not a follower of Bahá'u'lláh. He was a man of standing in the city who, moved by the love and esteem in which Baghdád held its departing guest, simply offered the most beautiful thing he had — his garden — as a place where the people could come and take their farewell. He could not have known what he was giving. The wooded park he lent for twelve days would be remembered for as long as the Faith endures; the avenues he had planted for shade and pleasure would become the avenues down which the Promised One walked in the days of His Declaration. There is a lesson in that. God does not wait for perfect vessels. He takes the offerings of ordinary hearts — a garden, a kindness, a generosity that asks nothing in return — and makes of them the furniture of His most sacred hours.

When the twelve days were over, Bahá'u'lláh left the Najíbíyyih to begin the long road to Constantinople, and the garden returned, outwardly, to being what it had always been: Najíb Páshá's wooded park on the bank of the Tigris. But it was not the same. A place had been hallowed. The believers would carry its memory with them into every land, and would name their own gardens and gatherings after it, so that the fragrance of those roses might never be lost. The First Day of Riḍván is, before anything else, the memory of an afternoon when the King of Glory crossed a river, entered a garden, and turned an ordinary green place, forever, into Paradise.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 1 by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 1 — Baghdád 1853-63)*. George Ronald.