Believers and Unbelievers Alike: Twelfth Day of Riḍván

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

It is one thing to be mourned by your own. It is quite another to be wept over by those who never accepted what you claimed to be. The departure of Bahá'u'lláh from the Garden of Riḍván on the twelfth day — the third of May, 1863 — was marked by exactly that rarer kind of grief, and it tells us something the merely loyal tears of His followers could not.

Shoghi Effendi, drawing on the testimony of those who were present, records that the leave-taking dissolved into scenes of tumultuous enthusiasm. And then comes the detail that lifts the whole moment out of the ordinary: believers and unbelievers alike sobbed and lamented. The sorrow did not respect the line of belief. It was not only the Bábís — those who had recognized in Him the Promised One of the Báb — who wept as He rode away. The people of Baghdád who had never embraced His Cause, who knew Him only as a neighbor and a presence in their city, grieved just as bitterly. And the chiefs and notables who had congregated to watch the banished One on His way were, in the words of the history, struck with wonder.

Why? What could make a man's enemies and strangers mourn his exile as keenly as his friends?

The answer lies in the ten years that had gone before. Bahá'u'lláh had come to Baghdád in 1853 as a dispossessed exile, with no fortune, no office, no protection — nothing the world counts on which to build a great life. And out of that emptiness He had poured kindness on everyone, without measure and without condition. The poor of the quarter learned the way to His door as one learns the way to a friend's house, for the rule of that door was that no one who knocked at it was sent away hungry. The frightened found calm in Him; the weak found refuge; the proud and the learned who came to test Him with their questions went away silenced and drawn. Even those who had once schemed against Him found their bitterness dissolving in the warmth of a forbearance that asked for nothing back. He had not ruled the city. He had loved it — fed it, healed its quarrels, sheltered its poor, forgiven its cruelties.

A city does not weep like that for a ruler it is glad to be rid of. It weeps like that only for one it cannot bear to lose. By the time the order came to take Him away, the people of Baghdád — whatever they believed or refused to believe about His station — had come to know Him, in the phrase the histories preserve, as their friend, their comforter, and their guide. And so when He rode out of the Garden, the grief was universal because the kindness had been universal. He had withheld His love from no one, and so no one was exempt from the sorrow of His going.

This is what the Twelfth Day quietly reveals about the power of His presence. It did not work only on those who accepted His Message; it worked on every heart it reached. The line that divides belief from unbelief, which seems so absolute, was crossed clean through by simple, sustained, unconditional love. Argument can persuade the mind of one who is willing to be persuaded. But the kindness Bahá'u'lláh showed in Baghdád went deeper than argument; it disarmed even those whose minds were closed, until adversary and stranger and friend stood weeping together in the same dust.

The notables were struck with wonder, and well they might be. They had come to preside over an ending — the removal of a troublesome exile from their city. They found themselves instead at something closer to a bereavement, surrounded by a whole people's tears, watching a Captive ride away with a dignity that turned the occasion of His disgrace into the occasion of His honor.

For Bahá'ís, then, the day of His departure is not only a day of farewell. It is a day that shows, once and for all, what the love of God looks like when it walks among ordinary people: it leaves no one untouched, and at the end even the hardest hearts come weeping to say goodbye.

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/