The Caravan Sets Out: Twelfth Day of Riḍván

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

The order had come from Constantinople months before: Bahá'u'lláh was to leave Baghdád, where for a decade He had lived as an exile, and present Himself at the capital of the Ottoman Empire. After much negotiation, undertaken at the request of the Persian Government, the summons had been issued, and there was no escaping it. When the news reached His followers, Esslemont records, they were in consternation; they besieged the house of their beloved Leader, unwilling to be parted from Him. It was to restore order, and to make ready in peace, that the family had moved out of the city to the Garden of Najíb Páshá and encamped there for twelve days — twelve days that became, in the keeping of His followers, the Festival of Riḍván.

But a festival is not the same thing as a reprieve. All through those twelve days, beneath the joy and the streaming crowds, a caravan was being assembled. The household and its goods had to be gathered; mounts and provisions secured; the order of the long march settled. The whole purpose of the encampment, as the accounts make plain, was that the caravan was being prepared for the journey. And on the twelfth day, the third of May, 1863, the preparations were complete, and the caravan at last moved.

It was no small undertaking. Esslemont sets down the bare shape of it: the journey to Constantinople, he writes, lasted between three and four months, the party consisting of Bahá'u'lláh with members of His family and twenty-six disciples. Twenty-six. That number deserves to be paused over. Each of those disciples was a person who had weighed an unknown and dangerous exile against the unbearable prospect of being left behind, and had chosen the road. They were not soldiers under orders or servants who had no say. They went because they could not imagine remaining where He was not. Around that small band gathered the members of His own family — those who had already shared the dungeon of Ṭihrán, the winter crossing of the mountains, and the long hidden years of Baghdád — and together they turned their faces toward a capital none of them desired to see.

The road itself was merciless. It ran for more than a thousand miles, north and then west, across uplands and through mountain defiles, in a season that turned cold and wet before they were done. Those who lived through it remembered weeks without proper food, small children and women bearing the worst of the hardship, and over everything a constant sense of apprehension, as though a sword were hanging above their heads. Nothing of the Garden's ease followed them onto that road. The roses were behind them; ahead lay only distance and the uncertain mercy of the power that had banished them.

And yet they went forward, and the going-forward is itself part of what the Twelfth Day means. For ten years the Cause had grown quietly, almost secretly, in the lanes of one city, gathering seekers who made their way to Baghdád and then carried its spirit home. Now that quiet season was over. With the moving of the caravan, the Faith of Bahá'u'lláh was set, openly and irreversibly, upon the road of history. It was being carried out of obscurity and toward the very heart of an empire — and, beyond that empire, toward the kings and rulers of the earth, to whom in the years ahead Bahá'u'lláh would address His mightiest summons. The banishment His enemies devised to bury His Cause became the very means by which that Cause was lifted onto the world's stage.

The First Day of Riḍván is remembered for an arrival — the entry into the Garden where the long silence broke. The Twelfth Day is remembered for a departure — the hour the household and the twenty-six gathered their courage, took up the road, and went. Between the two lies the whole pattern of the Festival: that the unveiling of God's Glory and the willingness to follow Him into exile are not two separate things, but one.

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