The Eldest Son in the Garden: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at Riḍván

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Among the small company that crossed the river Tigris with Bahá'u'lláh on the afternoon of the twenty-second of April 1863, to enter the Garden of Riḍván, was His eldest Son — known to history as 'Abdu'l-Bahá, "the Servant of Bahá," though in those years He was still called by the believers Áqá, the Master. He was, at that time, a youth of eighteen. And though the eyes of the world were fixed on the Father, the Son who walked beside Him into the Garden of Paradise would one day become the perfect Exemplar of all that the Father had come to teach.

He had grown up inside the storm. He had been a boy of eight in Ṭihrán when the soldiers came and seized His Father and cast Him into the Síyáh-Chál, the black pit beneath the city. He had known the plundering of the family's home and the sudden descent into fear and poverty. As a child He had been taken, on one of the rare permitted visits, to the door of that dungeon to catch a glimpse of His chained Father — and the memory of that scene He carried all His life. He had made, while still very young, the bitter winter journey of exile from Persia to Baghdád. And there, in Baghdád, something had happened that set Him apart even among the believers: while still a child, He had recognized, of His own accord and without being told, the station of His Father. He had recognized His Father's station while still a child, and now, a youth of eighteen, He crossed the river at His side into the Garden of Paradise.

There is a tenderness in that fact worth pausing over. The great Declaration of Riḍván — the announcement to the chosen companions that Bahá'u'lláh was the Promised One foretold by the Báb — came as overwhelming, almost unbearable news to those who heard it. But to 'Abdu'l-Bahá it cannot have come as a stranger comes. He had already known, in the secret of His own heart, who His Father was. The Garden, for Him, was not the place where a hidden truth was first disclosed, but the place where the truth He had long carried was at last spoken aloud to the world. He had been waiting for this hour, in His own way, longer than almost anyone.

In the years that followed, 'Abdu'l-Bahá would become His Father's closest companion and shield. Through the further exiles — to Constantinople, to Adrianople, and at last to the prison-fortress of 'Akká — He would take upon Himself, increasingly, the burdens of the household and the care of the believers, so that His Father might be left free for the work of Revelation. He would meet with officials, calm the fears of the friends, manage the affairs of a hunted and impoverished family, and stand always between Bahá'u'lláh and the hostility of the world. Shoghi Effendi records that Bahá'u'lláh came to lean upon Him as upon no other, calling Him in time "the Master," and pointing to Him as the One the believers were to turn to after Him. The youth who crossed the river into the Garden at eighteen would become the Centre of the Covenant, the appointed interpreter of His Father's Word, and the example, for all who came after, of a life poured out in servitude to God and humanity.

But all of that lay ahead. On the days of Riḍván, He was simply the eldest Son, walking the flower-lined avenues of the Garden at His Father's side, in an atmosphere the histories describe as charged with joy and majesty. And on the ninth day, when the swollen river at last allowed the rest of the household — His mother Navváb, His sister the Greatest Holy Leaf, and the others — to cross and be reunited with Bahá'u'lláh, the family He so loved was gathered whole about the One they all revered. The Ninth Day of Riḍván is, in this sense, a family day: the day the household of Bahá'u'lláh, including the young Master who would carry the Cause into its next age, was made complete in the Garden of Paradise.

It is fitting that the Faith remembers Him here, at the very dawn of the Declaration. For the whole of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's life would be a commentary on what happened in that Garden. Everything He later became — the friend of the poor of 'Akká, the prisoner who would not let imprisonment make Him bitter, the aged traveller who carried His Father's message across Europe and America, the Master whose every act was an act of love — grew from the devotion of the boy who had known His Father's station before the world was told, and who crossed the river into Paradise at His side.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/