Bahá'u'lláh and the Poor of Baghdád

A retelling based on chapters VIII and IX of God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, together with the account of Bahá'u'lláh's kindness to the poor that H. M. Balyuzi gives from Nabíl's narrative in Bahá'u'lláh, The King of Glory. Words in quotation marks are quoted from those books.

Bahá'u'lláh arrived in Baghdád as an exile in 1853 and lived there for ten years. After His return from Kurdistán in 1856 His fame in the city grew steadily. Shoghi Effendi records that His house, "an extremely modest residence" in the Karkh quarter near the river, became the focal centre of "a great number of seekers, visitors and pilgrims, including Kurds, Persians, Arabs and Turks," and people of the Muslim, Jewish and Christian Faiths. It became also "a veritable sanctuary" to which people wronged by the representative of the Persian government would flee, hoping for redress.

The poor of the city had their share of His care. Nabíl recorded that Bahá'u'lláh sent gifts to the people of His neighbourhood, particularly the poor, the disabled and the orphans, and that whenever He came upon the needy as He went about, He gave generously to them.

One of these was a woman of eighty who lived in a ruined house. Every day, at the hour when Bahá'u'lláh went to the coffee-house by the bridge, she stood in the road waiting for Him. He would stop, ask after her health and give her some money. She would kiss His hands. Sometimes she wanted to kiss His face, but she was short and could not reach it, and He would bend His face down toward her. He used to say, "She knows that I like her, that is why she likes Me." When He left Baghdád, He arranged for a daily allowance to be given to her for the rest of her life.

In 1863 the Ottoman government invited Bahá'u'lláh to Constantinople. The letter placed a sum of money at His disposal for the journey. He declined it, but when the Deputy-Governor urged that a refusal would offend the authorities, He accepted it and distributed it that same day among the poor.

On 22 April 1863 He left His house for the last time. Shoghi Effendi describes the crowd that filled the approaches to it: "friends and strangers, Arabs, Kurds and Persians, notables and clerics, officials and merchants, as well as many of the lower classes, the poor, the orphaned, the outcast," many of them in tears. On His way to the river He gave "with a lavish hand a last alms to the poor He had so faithfully befriended," and spoke words of comfort to those who pressed around Him, before He was ferried across to the Najíbíyyih Garden, the garden that Bahá'ís remember as the Garden of Riḍván.

This is a retelling. For the authoritative account of the Baghdád years, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi; for Nabíl's account of the old woman, see Bahá'u'lláh, The King of Glory by H. M. Balyuzi.

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