From the Daughter of the Beautiful to the Small House of 'Akká: Navváb

*A retelling based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the recollections of the Holy Family — chiefly those of the Greatest Holy Leaf, the daughter of Ásíyih Khánum. Short phrases in quotation marks are preserved as Lady Blomfield set them down.*

1 / 15

When Lady Sara Louisa Blomfield gathered, in the small house in 'Akká and at the side of the aged Bahíyyih Khánum, the recollections that became *The Chosen Highway,* one of the earliest portraits she set down was that of Ásíyih Khánum — the first wife of Bahá'u'lláh, the mother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and of the Greatest Holy Leaf, the lady upon whom Bahá'u'lláh bestowed the title *Navváb,* meaning Highness or Grace.

2 / 15

She had begun life as far from a prison as a person could be. She belonged to a noble Persian family of high rank, and she had grown up in Ṭihrán in considerable affluence — fine clothes, jewels, a household of servants, all the customs of an elevated station.

3 / 15

She was, by the testimony of those who had known her in youth, of remarkable beauty; so beautiful, the recollection records, "that she was called the Daughter of the Beautiful." Her marriage to the young Mírzá Ḥusayn-'Alí — He who would later declare Himself the Manifestation of God the world knows as Bahá'u'lláh — was arranged in the manner of two prominent families, and she came to it with the customary trousseau and the small jewels her people had laid up for her.

4 / 15

None of that, in the end, was what she would be remembered for. The recollection in *The Chosen Highway* is careful to make that point. The wealth she brought into the marriage "would not, in later years, prove finally relevant," for the imprisonments and exiles that lay ahead would strip the household of all of it. And here is the quiet drama of Navváb's life: she watched it all go, and she let it go.

5 / 15

The descent came in stages, each steeper than the last. The arrest of her Husband and His confinement in the black pit of the Síyáh-Chál; the plundering of the family's possessions; the order of banishment that sent them out of Persia altogether in the depth of winter; the long road to Baghdád, and from Baghdád, by further decrees, to Constantinople, to Adrianople, and at last to the prison-fortress of 'Akká. With each stage she had less.

6 / 15

The fine house gave way to rented lodgings, the lodgings to a cell in a barracks, and the barracks at last to a small house where, by the family's own account, as many as thirteen people sometimes slept in a single room. The jewels of her dowry did not stay jewels; they were sold, piece by piece, to put bread on the household's table.

7 / 15

The Daughter of the Beautiful, who had been waited upon by servants in Ṭihrán, now did the patient, unglamorous work of a poor household in exile — and did it without complaint.

8 / 15

What is striking in Lady Blomfield's portrait is the entire absence of lament. There is no record of Navváb protesting her fall, no record of her clinging to the rank she had been born to or grieving aloud for the comforts taken from her.

9 / 15

She had married, the recollection notes, not knowing what she married into — not knowing that her Husband would be charged with a worldwide Cause, that she herself would be carried into exile across half a continent, that she would one day stand in the prison of 'Akká and lose her young son Mírzá Mihdí to a fall from the roof. She could not have foreseen the cost.

10 / 15

And when the cost was demanded of her, item by item — her wealth, her homeland, her comfort, her health, even her child — she paid it as one pays what is owed to God, taking each loss as His will and not as a wrong done to her.

11 / 15

What she kept through it all was the one thing the exiles could not auction off: herself. The recollection insists on this. What she truly brought to the marriage, and what carried the household through every storm, "was herself" — the patient, courteous, faithful person of Ásíyih Khánum, refined rather than ruined by the years. The dowry of jewels was spent; the dowry of person only grew more precious.

12 / 15

Lady Blomfield, looking back across the long arc of that life, writes of her with the quietness her stature commands: "Of all the wives of all the men of His station, she was the one chosen."

13 / 15

The marriage that had begun in the great houses of Ṭihrán ended in the small house of 'Akká, and that downward road, measured by the world, was a ruin. Measured by heaven, it was an ascent. For Navváb had been given a hard and beautiful task — to let go, willingly, of everything she had been born to hold — and she had accomplished it with a grace that has made her name, among Bahá'ís, a synonym for noble submission to the will of God. She lost a fortune and gained a station no fortune could buy.

14 / 15

*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield.*

15 / 15