The Greatest Holy Leaf Crosses to the Garden

A retelling based on Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf, the compilation of letters and reminiscences gathered by the Bahá'í World Centre. The narrative is retold in our own words.

When we tell the story of Riḍván, our eyes are drawn, rightly, to the Garden on the far bank of the Tigris — to the tent pitched among the roses, to the nightingales singing through the warm Baghdád nights, to the Declaration that broke upon the chosen companions like a sunrise. But there is another vantage point on that festival, quieter and just as dear to the friends, and it belongs to a girl who, for the first nine days, could only watch the Garden from across the water. She was Bahíyyih Khánum, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh, and the Faith would come to know her, in the fullness of her long life, as the Greatest Holy Leaf.

In the spring of 1863 she was still a girl in her teens. Her whole girlhood, by then, had been shaped by exile and sacrifice. She had been a small girl in Ṭihrán in the terrible year when her Father was seized and cast into the Síyáh-Chál, the black pit beneath the city, and when the family's house was plundered and they were plunged from comfort into fear and want. She had made, while very young, the bitter winter journey of banishment from Persia to Baghdád. And in the years that followed she had grown up inside a household that had learned, through every trial, to meet hardship with dignity and to keep its sorrows hidden behind a serene face. The recollections preserved of her childhood dwell on exactly this: a girl of unusual gentleness and self-command, devoted beyond her years to her Father and to her mother, Navváb, and a steady help in the daily work of a family that had very little.

So when the order came from the Ottoman capital, summoning Bahá'u'lláh away from Baghdád, the blow fell on a household already practised in endurance. The friends of the city, learning that He was to be taken from them, came in such numbers to His house on the riverbank, day and night, to pour out their grief and take their leave, that there was scarcely room to receive them. To make space for the crowds, a garden across the Tigris was made ready, and on the afternoon of the twenty-second of April Bahá'u'lláh crossed the river and entered that garden — the place His followers would ever after call the Garden of Riḍván, the Garden of Paradise. With Him went His eldest Son, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, then a young Man of eighteen, and others of the men of the family and a small company of companions.

But Bahíyyih Khánum did not cross with her Father that day. The river that spring had risen and overflowed its banks. The Tigris, ordinarily crossed by a bridge of boats, had swollen into a flood, and the passage became impossible for the women and children of the household and for those still finishing the preparations for the great journey ahead. And so, while across the water the most momentous announcement in the history of the Faith was beginning to unfold, the young daughter of Bahá'u'lláh remained on the near bank with her mother and the rest of the family, separated from Him by the rising river.

It is worth pausing on what those days asked of her. She was a girl who loved her Father with her whole heart, and He was, just then, at the very threshold of the hour for which His whole life had been a preparation — and she could not be at His side. On the far bank there were roses and singing and the unveiling of a long-hidden Glory; on the near bank there was waiting, and packing, and the ordinary labour of getting a large and impoverished household ready to be uprooted yet again. There is no record of complaint. The girl who would one day be the comfort of a whole community had already learned, while still young, the lesson that would mark her entire life: to serve where she was placed, to wait without bitterness, and to trust that the waters would fall in their time.

And the waters did fall. On the ninth day of the festival the swollen Tigris settled back within its banks, the bridge of boats became passable once more, and the household completed their crossing at last. Bahíyyih Khánum stepped from the boats onto the bank of the Garden of Riḍván and was reunited with her Father in the green quiet of that hallowed place. The family that the flood had divided was made whole again in Paradise. It is this reunion — the arrival of the Holy Family in the Garden — that Bahá'ís commemorate every year on the ninth day of Riḍván, one of the holy days on which work is set aside.

We do not have a diary of her feelings on that morning; the histories are restrained, as she herself was restrained. But we know what kind of soul crossed the river that day, because we know what she became. The girl who waited so patiently on the bank would one day be called the Greatest Holy Leaf, the trusted sister of the Master and shelter of the whole community. Through the further exiles that followed Riḍván — to Constantinople, to Adrianople, and at last to the prison-fortress of 'Akká — she would share every hardship of her Father's banishment without flinching. She would nurse the sick of the household, comfort the grieving, and bear in silence the loss of her gentle brother Mírzá Mihdí, the Purest Branch. In the years of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's ministry she would stand at His right hand; and after Him, in the early days of the Guardianship, when Shoghi Effendi was a young man bowed under his sudden burden, it would be her hand that steadied the affairs of the Cause. A lifetime of that quiet, unwavering service was already folded, in seed, into the patience of the girl who waited nine days for the river to let her cross.

That is why the ninth day of Riḍván is, among other things, a day for her. The first day belongs to the Declaration; the twelfth, to the departure into exile. But the ninth belongs to the homecoming of the family — to the mother and the daughter and the younger children who crossed the fallen waters to be gathered once more around the One they loved. When the friends keep this day each spring, they remember not only a great proclamation across the river, but a young girl stepping from a boat onto the bank of Paradise, her long faithfulness only just beginning.

For the Cause of God is carried forward not by its great hours alone, but by the quiet fidelity of those who wait on the bank and do the ordinary work of love until the waters fall. Bahíyyih Khánum knew that fidelity from her childhood, and she never let it go. The Garden received her on the ninth day as a daughter coming home; the community would receive her, in time, as its Greatest Holy Leaf.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahíyyih Khánum: The Greatest Holy Leaf, compiled by the Bahá'í World Centre.

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