The Nightingales of Riḍván

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, which preserves the eyewitness words of Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, the chronicler of the Faith's earliest days. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

When Bahá'ís picture the Garden of Riḍván — the roses, the nightingales, the overflowing joy of those twelve days in the spring of 1863 — they are very often picturing it through the eyes of a single man. His name was Nabíl-i-A'ẓam, and he was one of the most devoted believers of the early years, a tireless traveller and teacher who would later compose the great narrative of the Faith's beginnings. Nabíl had a chronicler's gift: he gathered what he saw and what he heard from those who were present, and he set it down with care, so that generations who could never walk that riverbank might still stand, in imagination, beneath those trees. It is largely his testimony, woven by Shoghi Effendi into God Passes By, that has carried the fragrance of Riḍván down to us.

The setting was a garden on the bank of the Tigris outside Baghdád, a green and flowering place that the believers would name the Garden of Riḍván — the Garden of Paradise. Bahá'u'lláh had come there on the eve of a fresh banishment, and for twelve days His companions encamped about His tent. By every outward measure the hour was sorrowful: a household uprooted again, a long and uncertain road ahead. Yet what Nabíl records is not sorrow but a joy so great it seemed to belong to another world.

Each day, Nabíl relates, before the heat of the sun had risen, the gardeners would go out along the four avenues of the garden and gather the roses that lined them. They would carry their fragrant harvest to Bahá'u'lláh's tent and heap the blossoms in its centre. And here is the detail that has lodged in the memory of the whole Bahá'í world ever since: so great would the heap of roses grow that, when His companions gathered to drink their morning tea in His presence, they would be unable to see one another across it. From that mound of flowers Bahá'u'lláh would take the roses up in His own hands and send them out — by the hands of His companions — to friends across the river and to those who came to honour Him, so that the fragrance of the Garden travelled with them into the city.

The nights, in Nabíl's telling, were as wonderful as the days. The believers scarcely slept. They moved between awe and gladness, hardly able to take in what was unfolding before them, for the One they had loved and followed had now begun to declare to His chosen companions the truth He had carried in silence for ten years — that He was the Promised One foretold by the Báb. And through those warm nights the nightingales of the garden sang without ceasing in the trees.

It was of these very birds that Bahá'u'lláh spoke one evening, in words Nabíl preserved. Walking in the avenues of the garden, He paused and drew the attention of His companions to the singing all around them. "Consider these nightingales," He said. "So great is their love for these roses, that sleepless from dusk till dawn, they warble their melodies and commune with burning passion with the object of their adoration." Here was the whole spirit of those days gathered into a single image: a love so consuming that it could not rest, a devotion that turned the long night into a song. The nightingale and the rose, beloved emblems of the poets of Persia for centuries, were lifted by Him into a parable of the soul's longing for its Lord.

The companions did not yet grasp the full immensity of what was being given to them. Nabíl himself, looking back, understood that those twelve days had opened "the holiest and most significant of all Bahá'í festivals." But in the living moment they knew only that they had been admitted to something overwhelmingly holy — that the sorrow of exile had been transfigured, in this one garden, into a foretaste of paradise.

It is worth pausing on the smallness of the means by which so great a thing was kept. There were no photographs of that garden, no recordings of that voice. There was a believer who paid attention — who noticed the roses heaped in the tent, who remembered the saying about the nightingales, who carried it all in his heart and afterward wrote it down. Because Nabíl looked, and listened, and recorded, the morning roses of Riḍván are still being handed across the years, and the nightingales of that Baghdád spring are, in a sense, still singing.

This is why the First Day of Riḍván is kept as the most joyful festival of the Bahá'í year. We remember not a prison and not a battlefield, but a garden — and we remember it, in large part, through the faithful eyes of one who was there.

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/