The Red Roan Stallion: Twelfth Day of Riḍván

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

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For twelve days the Garden on the bank of the Tigris had been a place apart. Bahá'u'lláh had entered it on the afternoon of April 22, 1863, with the order of a fresh banishment already hanging over Him, and there, among the roses, He had spoken aloud for the first time the secret He had carried in silence for ten years: that He was the One whose coming the Báb had everywhere foretold. The believers had encamped about Him.

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Crowds had streamed across the river to pay their respects. The Garden the world had meant for a staging-ground of exile had become, instead, the cradle of the most joyful festival the Faith would ever keep.

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Now the twelfth day had come, and with it the hour of departure.

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It was at noon, on the third of May, that Bahá'u'lláh came forth from the Garden to begin the journey north and west — a journey of more than a thousand miles that would carry Him to Constantinople, the seat of the Ottoman Empire. A horse had been made ready for Him: a red roan stallion of the finest breed, the best, Shoghi Effendi records, that His lovers could purchase for Him.

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There is a whole world of devotion folded into that small fact. The people who loved Him could not spare Him the exile, could not lift the decree, could not soften the long road or the cold that waited at its end. What they could do, they did — they found Him the finest mount in the country and gave it to the One they were about to lose, so that at least He should ride out as befitted Him.

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And ride out He did. Mounted on that stallion, Bahá'u'lláh left behind Him a bowing multitude of fervent admirers. The histories preserve the scene with a plainness that only deepens its power. Numberless were the heads which, on every side, bowed to the dust at the feet of His horse, and kissed its very hoofs; and countless were those who pressed forward to embrace His stirrups.

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It was a leave- taking of overwhelming feeling — what the chronicle calls scenes of tumultuous enthusiasm — and it swept up everyone present. Believers and unbelievers alike sobbed and lamented. The chiefs and notables of the city, who had gathered to see the banished One on His way, were struck with wonder.

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Consider what was actually happening, by every outward measure. A prisoner, twice exiled already and stripped of His homeland and His wealth, was being driven farther still into banishment by the command of an empire — sent away precisely because the authorities could not bear how greatly He was loved. By the logic of power, this was a defeat, a man removed in disgrace. Yet not one person who stood in that crowd saw a defeated man.

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They saw a Figure of such majesty that hardened officials forgot themselves and wept, and men and women of every rank bent to the dust at the feet of His horse. The decree had stripped Him of a city. It had not been able to lay a finger on His sovereignty.

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This is the heart of why Bahá'ís keep the Twelfth Day of Riḍván as a Holy Day. It does not commemorate a triumph that the world would recognize as a triumph. It commemorates a riding-forth into suffering that was, in its inmost reality, the procession of a King.

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The Garden had been the place where the Glory of God lifted the veil; the road that opened beyond its gate was the road on which that Glory would carry His Cause out of one obscure city and into the gaze of history — to Constantinople, to Adrianople, at last to the prison-fortress of 'Akká, and from that captivity to the kings and rulers of the whole earth.

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The red roan stallion would bear Him only as far as the first stage. But the image of that noon hour has never faded from the memory of His followers: the Promised One of all ages, dispossessed of everything the world counts as security, riding out of a garden of roses into exile — and the crowds, friend and stranger and even adversary together, weeping in the dust as though it were not a banishment at all, but a coronation.

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For so, in truth, it was.

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

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