The Purest Branch in the Garden of Riḍván

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the first-hand recollections of the Holy Family — among them the Greatest Holy Leaf, who lived through these events. The narrative is retold in our own words.

In every household there is a youngest, and in the household of Bahá'u'lláh in the days of Riḍván that youngest of the sons who would grow to manhood was Mírzá Mihdí. History would give him a name of great tenderness — the Purest Branch — and would remember him, above all, for the sacrifice of his life years later in the prison of 'Akká. But long before that final offering he was simply a boy of the family, sharing its exile, its poverty, and its love; and the recollections gathered in The Chosen Highway let us set him, gently, into the scene of the festival of Riḍván.

He had been born in Ṭihrán and had known, from his earliest years, only the life of the banished. He was very young when his Father was torn from the family and shut in the black pit beneath the capital, and very young when the household was stripped of its comfort and driven into want. He had made the long, hard journey of exile to Baghdád while still a small child. The reminiscences of the Holy Family dwell on the sweetness that marked him from the beginning — a gentleness of nature, a quietness, a purity of heart so evident that the believers came, in time, to call him the Purest Branch. He was the full brother of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the beloved younger brother of Bahíyyih Khánum, and the three of them, the children of Navváb, grew up close in the shelter of that devoted family.

By the spring of 1863 he was still a boy, old enough to feel something of the weight of the hour that had come upon his Father, young enough still to be counted among the children of the household. And the hour that came was a momentous one. The order had arrived from the Ottoman capital summoning Bahá'u'lláh away from Baghdád. The believers of the city, hearing that He was to be taken from them, thronged His house on the bank of the Tigris in such grieving numbers that a garden was made ready across the river to receive the crowds who wished to take their leave. On the afternoon of the twenty-second of April, Bahá'u'lláh crossed the Tigris and entered that garden, which the friends would forever call the Garden of Riḍván — the Garden of Paradise.

Picture, then, the household in those days. 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 family. So while Bahá'u'lláh and the eldest Son and the companions were in the Garden on the far bank, the Purest Branch remained on the near side with his mother Navváb, his sister Bahíyyih Khánum, and the rest of the household — waiting, as the whole family waited, for the waters to fall.

We are not told the particulars of how a boy of that age passed those nine days. But we know the household he was part of, and we can imagine the part a gentle child would have played in it: the small helps offered in the work of preparation, the comfort of a family drawn close by the strangeness and grandeur of the moment, the long looks across the flooded river toward the green line of the Garden where the Father was. The Cause of God was being unveiled across the water; on the near bank, a family — the Purest Branch among them — kept faith and made ready and waited.

On the ninth day the river settled back within its banks. The bridge of boats became passable once more, and the household completed their crossing at last. The Purest Branch stepped from the boats onto the bank of the Garden of Riḍván and was gathered, with his mother and sister and the younger ones, around his Father in the Garden of Paradise. The family that the flood had divided was made whole again. It is this homecoming that Bahá'ís commemorate every year on the ninth day of Riḍván.

There is a particular poignancy in placing him in this scene, knowing what we know of what lay ahead. The same purity of soul that the family remembered in the boy who crossed the river at Riḍván would, years later, in the harsh confinement of 'Akká, lead him to a sacrifice that has moved hearts ever since. Pacing the prison roof one evening, wholly absorbed in his prayers, he would fall through an open skylight and be mortally hurt; and in his last hours, offered by his Father whatever he might wish, he would ask not to be healed but that his death be accepted as a ransom, so that the pilgrims kept from Bahá'u'lláh's presence might one day attain it. That is the offering for which his name is most beloved. But the soul capable of so selfless a wish in its final hour was the very soul that, as a quiet boy, had crossed the fallen waters into the Garden — the same gentleness, the same self-forgetting love, only grown to its full stature.

So when we keep the ninth day of Riḍván, we may rightly let our thoughts rest, among the others, on the Purest Branch. He was not yet the hero of 'Akká; he was a child of the exile, one of the household waiting on the bank for the river to fall. And there is something fitting in that. The great sacrifices of a life are rarely sudden; they grow out of a long fidelity practised quietly, day by day, in the ordinary love of a family under trial. The boy who crossed to the Garden on the ninth day was already, in the hidden way of such souls, becoming the man who would give his life for others' nearness to God.

The Garden received him on the ninth day as it received them all — a son coming home to his Father across the fallen waters. And the believers, remembering that homecoming, remember with it the whole of the gentle life it opened: the Purest Branch, the youngest of the brothers in the Garden of Paradise.

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

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.