The Serenity of the Greatest Holy Leaf

A retelling drawing on Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf, the compilation prepared at the Bahá'í World Centre, and chiefly on the tributes Shoghi Effendi wrote after her passing. Words in quotation marks are from that volume.

Bahíyyih Khánum, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh and Ásíyih Khánum and the sister of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, was still a small child when her Father was imprisoned in the Síyáh-Chál of Ṭihrán. Shoghi Effendi remembered hearing her describe those days. The family's house was pillaged, and within a single day she went from being a member of one of the wealthiest families of Ṭihrán to "a sufferer from unconcealed poverty." Her mother once put a handful of flour into her palm and urged her to accept it in place of her daily bread.

She went with her Father into exile. In Baghdád, while still in her teens, she was given missions by Bahá'u'lláh "that no girl of her age could, or would be willing to, perform," and Shoghi Effendi writes of the "spontaneous joy" with which she took them on. In Adrianople a winter of exceptional severity, poor housing and hardship undermined her health for good.

In the prison-city of 'Akká she ran the household and served her Father and her Brother. Shoghi Effendi writes: "No calamity, however intense, could obscure the brightness of her saintly face, and no agitation, no matter how severe, could disturb the composure of her gracious and dignified behaviour." Her heart, he adds, felt the slightest injury to any creature, friend or foe, but her will held her feelings so firmly in check that "a superficial observer might well be led to question the intensity of her emotions."

The losses came one after another. Her brother Mírzá Mihdí, the Purest Branch, died young, "in the most tragic circumstances." Her mother and her uncle Áqáy-i-Kalím passed away. In 1892 Bahá'u'lláh ascended, and when most of the family turned against the Centre of His Covenant, she stood at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's side. While He travelled in the West she was "His competent deputy, His representative and vicegerent." She outlived Him too, and supported the young Guardian through the first years of his ministry.

Among the qualities Shoghi Effendi saw in her was "a resignation and serenity that evoked to the mind the calm and heroic fortitude of the Báb." When she died in July 1932, he wrote that she had borne her trials "with an astonishing forbearance, and for more than eighty years." A letter written on his behalf that year says: "Her angelic face was so calm, so serene in the very midst of sufferings and pains. Not that she lacked tenderness of heart and sympathy. But she could overcome her feelings and this because she had put all her trust in God."

Shoghi Effendi placed her in rank beside "those immortal heroines such as Sarah, Ásíyih, the Virgin Mary, Fátimih and Táhirih."

This is a retelling. For the full tributes, see Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf.

Various. *Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf*. Bahá'í World Centre. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19242