The Greatest Holy Leaf Crosses to the Garden

*A retelling based on **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield, which records the Greatest Holy Leaf's own memories, with details from Adib Taherzadeh's **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh** and A. Q. Faizi's **A Flame of Fire**. Passages in quotation marks are the words of those books.*

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Bahíyyih Khánum, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh whom Bahá'ís call the Greatest Holy Leaf, was in her teens in the spring of 1863, and she had spent most of her childhood in exile. In the recollections she gave to Lady Blomfield she remembered the day in Ṭihrán, when she was six, that a servant ran in to tell her mother that Bahá'u'lláh had been arrested.

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The family's house was stripped of its belongings, and while He lay in prison they lived in a small house nearby. When He was released and banished, they set out for Baghdád in winter. Of that journey she said: "the weather was bitterly cold, snow was upon the ground."

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Ten years later the Ottoman government ordered Bahá'u'lláh to leave Baghdád. "We had to make preparation for a journey, we knew not how long, to a place we knew not where," she recalled. So many friends came to the house in grief that "There was such turmoil that we could not proceed with our preparations." Bahá'u'lláh then moved to a garden outside the city, on the far bank of the Tigris, the garden Bahá'ís call the Garden of Riḍván. "This relieved some of the turmoil," she said, "and we worked hard to make ready for the departure."

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He crossed the river on the afternoon of 22 April 1863. Taherzadeh records that three of His sons, among them 'Abdu'l-Bahá, went with Him, together with His amanuensis, Mírzá Áqá Ján. The women of the household stayed behind in the city. According to an account preserved in *A Flame of Fire*, the river overflowed that same day, "and only on the ninth day was it possible for His family to join Him in the Garden."

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Mírzá Asadu'lláh Káshání, one of the companions who served in the Garden, gave the same date in his own account in *The Chosen Highway*: "The family of Bahá'u'lláh joined Him in the Ridvan on the ninth day." On the twelfth day the whole party left the Garden on the journey to Constantinople. Bahíyyih Khánum went with her Father on that journey and on the exiles that followed, to Adrianople and to 'Akká.

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Of the twelve days Bahá'u'lláh spent in the Garden, Taherzadeh writes, three are Holy Days: "the first day on which He declared Himself, the ninth day when all His family joined Him and rejoiced at His Declaration, and the twelfth day when He left that garden."

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Chosen Highway** by Lady Blomfield and **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh**, volume 1, by Adib Taherzadeh.*

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