The Household That Shared the Black Pit: The Holy Family and the Ninth Day

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont, one of the earliest comprehensive introductions to the Faith. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.

To understand why the Ninth Day of Riḍván — the day Bahá'u'lláh's family joined Him in the Garden — is kept as a holy day at all, it helps to remember who that family was, and what they had already passed through together by the spring of 1863.

Esslemont, tracing the early history of the Faith, sets down the bare facts of their suffering. In 1852, when an attempt on the life of the Sháh by two half-crazed young Bábís unleashed a savage persecution, Bahá'u'lláh — though wholly innocent, and indeed opposed to such acts — was arrested and flung into the Síyáh-Chál, the notorious underground dungeon of Ṭihrán. There He lay for four months, His feet in stocks and a heavy chain about His neck, among murderers and highwaymen, in darkness and filth. His family, meanwhile, saw their home plundered and their possessions seized; the wealth and rank into which they had been born vanished almost overnight. When at last He was released — His innocence undeniable — it was not to freedom but to banishment. In the depth of a Persian winter, stripped of nearly everything, the household was driven out of their native land and set on the long, bitter road to Baghdád.

This was the family. A wife, Ásíyih Khánum, the noble lady He had named Navváb, who had given up a life of ease to follow Him into want. Children — among them the young 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His sister, the future Greatest Holy Leaf — whose childhood had been broken open by terror and loss. They had not merely heard of Bahá'u'lláh's sufferings; they had lived inside them. They had waited outside the prison. They had felt the cold of the exile road. They had made, with Him, the ten-year sojourn in Baghdád, where the family lived in modest circumstances and the household's door was kept open to the poor even when there was little within.

And then, after those ten years, the order came for a further banishment, to Constantinople. It was on the eve of that new exile that Bahá'u'lláh withdrew to the garden of Najíb Páshá across the Tigris — the Garden the believers would call Riḍván, Paradise — and there declared to His companions that He was the Promised One foretold by the Báb. Esslemont describes the strange and luminous spirit of those twelve days:

During those days Bahá'u'lláh, instead of being sad or depressed, showed the greatest joy, dignity and power. His followers became happy and enthusiastic, and great crowds came to pay their respects to Him. All the notables of Baghdád, even the Governor himself, came to honor the departing prisoner.

What the authorities had meant as a humiliation had become a coronation. And into the midst of that coronation the Holy Family was to be gathered. Bahá'u'lláh had entered the Garden on the twenty-second of April with His sons; but the river that day ran high, and His wife and the rest of the household could not cross to follow Him. For nine days they remained on the far bank. Then, on the ninth day, the twenty-ninth of April, they crossed at last and were reunited with Him in the Garden. The family that had shared His darkest hours was brought across the river to share, at last, the dawn of His open glory.

Here is the meaning the Faith has found worth keeping. The Declaration of Riḍván belongs to the whole world; it is the unveiling of the Glory of God to all humankind. But the Ninth Day belongs, in a special way, to the household. It remembers that the very people who had been with Him in the Síyáh-Chál's shadow, in the plundered house, on the frozen exile road, and through ten years of Baghdád, were not left outside the Garden gate. They were brought in. The patience of all those hard years was answered with a reunion in Paradise.

There is a pattern in this that runs through the whole life of Bahá'u'lláh, and indeed through the spiritual life as such: that the deepest sufferings, faithfully borne, are not the end of the story but the threshold of a greater joy. The family had descended, stage by stage, into loss; and now, in a rose-filled garden on the bank of a river, they ascended together into a gladness that the histories struggle to describe. The Garden was not their final home — in twelve days the caravan would set out for harder exiles still — but for those days they were together with Him in the place He had made Paradise, and the long road behind them was, for a little while, transfigured.

That is why Bahá'ís keep the Ninth Day of Riḍván. Not because a journey was interrupted, nor because a river was crossed, but because the household that had shared the Black Pit was gathered, whole, into the joy of the King of Festivals — a sign, set at the very dawn of the new Revelation, that those who share the sufferings of God's Cause will be brought, in the end, to share its glory.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19241/pg19241-images.html