The Year Nine Fulfilled: The Báb's Promise and the Garden

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi. Short phrases in quotation marks are words of the Báb and of Shoghi Effendi preserved in that history.

To understand why the First Day of Riḍván is the holiest festival of the Bahá'í year, one must look back nineteen years before the Garden — to the brief and blazing ministry of the Báb, and to a promise He never stopped repeating.

From the very night of His Declaration in Shíráz in 1844, the Báb made clear that He had not come to be the end of God's purpose but its herald. Again and again, in tablet after tablet, He spoke of One yet to come — One greater than Himself, the very Beloved for whom His own life and death were only a preparation. He called this Promised One by a title of exquisite humility and expectation: "Him Whom God shall make manifest." The whole of the Báb's revelation, He taught, was a gift laid at the feet of that coming One; His followers were to recognize Him, to cling to Him, to let nothing — no learning, no leadership, no pride of their own — keep them from Him when He should appear. "O people of the Bayán!" He warned them in His Book, "act not as the people of the Qur'án have acted, for if ye do so, the fruits of your night will come to naught." The one unforgivable failure would be to miss the One they had been told to await.

And the Báb did something more remarkable still: He pointed, in veiled but unmistakable words, to when that One would come. Shoghi Effendi gathers these prophecies in God Passes By. "In the year nine," the Báb had written, referring to the date of the advent of the promised Revelation, "ye shall attain unto all good." And again, in a passage Shoghi Effendi calls remarkable, He admonished His followers to be attentive "from the inception of the Revelation till the number of Vahíd" — the number nineteen. In the Tablet of the Letters He had alluded, the Guardian writes, "to the nineteen years which must needs elapse between the Declaration of the Báb and that of Bahá'u'lláh." The Báb was, in effect, setting a clock for His followers: count the years; watch for the year nine; do not be caught sleeping when the number is complete.

The Báb did not live to see the promise kept. In 1850, after a ministry of only six years, He was executed by a firing squad in the barrack-square of Tabríz. His dispensation, He had foretold, would itself be brief — and so it was, lasting the nine years He had named. To His grieving followers, scattered and persecuted, the promise of "Him Whom God shall make manifest" must have seemed, in those dark years, like a light glimpsed across an impassable distance.

Yet across that distance One was already drawing near. Among the believers who had embraced the Báb's Cause was a Personage of the noblest bearing, who in the Black Pit of Ṭihrán had received the first intimations of His own Mission, and who through ten years of exile in Baghdád had carried that secret in silence — reviving the scattered Bábí community, pouring out kindness on a whole city, waiting for the appointed hour. He was the One the Báb had promised. And the hour the Báb had named was at hand.

It came in the spring of 1863. On the eve of a fresh banishment, this long-hidden One entered a rose-filled garden on the bank of the Tigris — the Garden the believers would call Riḍván, the Garden of Paradise — and there, to His chosen companions, He at last lifted the veil and declared that He was Himself the Promised One foretold by the Báb. And the date upon which He entered that garden, the twenty-second of April 1863, fell nineteen years to the season after the night the Báb had declared His own mission in Shíráz. The clock the Báb had set had run its full course. The "year nine" had ripened into its harvest; the number of Vahíd was complete; and the One the Báb had spent His life proclaiming stood revealed.

This is what gives the First Day of Riḍván its peculiar depth of joy. It is not only the unveiling of Bahá'u'lláh; it is the keeping of a promise. The Báb had gone to His death certain that the One He loved would come, and would come on time. In the Garden of Riḍván that certainty was vindicated to the letter. The herald's word was fulfilled by the Beloved He had heralded.

When Bahá'ís keep this day, they hold the two figures together in a single light: the Báb who pointed forward with His last breath, and Bahá'u'lláh who, nineteen years later, in a garden of roses, made the pointing true. The Forerunner and the Promised One; the night and the dawn; the promise and its keeping.

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/