The King of Festivals: Bahá'u'lláh's Own Naming of Riḍván

A retelling drawing on The Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book of Bahá'u'lláh. Passages in quotation marks are His own words, revealed in that Book.

Of all the days the Bahá'í world keeps, the First Day of Riḍván is the most exalted. It is sometimes called the King of Festivals. But where does that rank come from? It is easy to assume that the believers, looking back with gratitude, simply decided that the Declaration deserved the highest honour. The truth is more striking: the supreme station of Riḍván was conferred not by Bahá'u'lláh's followers but by Bahá'u'lláh Himself, in the verses of His Most Holy Book.

Some ten years after the Garden — by then a prisoner in the fortress-city of 'Akká — Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book, the charter of the laws and ordinances of His Dispensation. In its pages He set in order the festivals of the new Age. "All Feasts," He declared, "have attained their consummation in the two Most Great Festivals, and in the two other Festivals that fall on the twin days." Of those two supreme festivals, He named the first as "those days whereon the All-Merciful shed upon the whole of creation the effulgent glory of His most excellent Names and His most exalted Attributes." These are the days of Riḍván. With that single verse, the days He had spent among the roses of Baghdád were lifted, by His own pen, above every other commemoration of the year.

He went further, and told His followers what had truly happened in that garden — not merely in the eyes of those who watched, but in the very fabric of existence. "Verily," He wrote, "all created things were immersed in the sea of purification when, on that first day of Riḍván, We shed upon the whole of creation the splendours of Our most excellent Names and Our most exalted Attributes." This is a sentence to sit with. To the onlooker, the first day of Riḍván was an afternoon: a Man crossing a river, entering a garden, beginning to speak to His friends. But in the words of the One who entered, that afternoon reached to the farthest bounds of the created world. Every existing thing, He said, was bathed in that hour as in a purifying sea; the names and attributes of God were poured out fresh upon the whole of creation. The garden was the visible point at which something immeasurable broke into the world.

It is from such words that the festival has drawn its titles of honour. Tradition, following His own pen, has hailed Riḍván as the "Most Great Festival" and the "King of Festivals" — the sovereign among all the holy days of the Bahá'í year. The name Riḍván itself means Paradise, and the name Bahá, by which Bahá'u'lláh is known, means Glory; so the King of Festivals is, quite literally, the festival of the Glory of God in the Garden of Paradise.

What does it change, to know that this rank is Bahá'u'lláh's own gift and not a later embellishment? It changes the weight of the day. When Bahá'ís suspend their work on the First Day of Riḍván, gather to read His Writings, and turn their hearts to that garden of 1863, they are not merely honouring a cherished memory. They are keeping a festival appointed by the Manifestation of God Himself, marking an hour that He testified had touched the whole of creation. The joy of Riḍván — the joy of the roses and the nightingales — is, in His own telling, the joy of a world made new.

For ten years He had carried His station in silence; in a garden He unveiled it; and in His Most Holy Book He set its commemoration at the summit of the Bahá'í year and told His people why. The First Day of Riḍván is the King of Festivals because the King of Glory, with His own hand, made it so.

This is a retelling. The quoted passages are the words of Bahá'u'lláh in The Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1873). *The Kitáb-i-Aqdas*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/kitab-i-aqdas/