Bread for Whoever Knocked: The Baghdád Household

In the years that Bahá’u’lláh lived in Baghdád — between His arrival in 1853 and His exile to Constantinople in 1863 — the household occupied, for most of the period, a small rented house in the old city. The family was numerous; the resources were slender; the demands on the door were constant.

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Mr. Furutan, in *Stories of Bahá’u’lláh,* records the standing instruction Bahá’u’lláh had given to the household. No one who knocked, He had said, was to be turned away without having eaten. Not the believers who came in increasing numbers from Persia. Not the poor of Baghdád. Not the dervishes wandering the bazaars in their patched cloaks. Not the Christian beggars of the Armenian quarter. Not the Muslim faqirs of the great mosques. Not the children of the lanes. Each was to be fed.

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The kitchen of the household was, for a decade, organised around this rule. Ásíyih Khánum and the women of the family prepared, each day, more food than the household itself would need; the surplus was for whoever came. When there was nothing left, Bahíyyih Khánum or one of the others would borrow from the neighbours rather than send a hungry man away. The pattern became known, in time, in the lanes around the house. The poor of Baghdád had a door that they knew would feed them.

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Furutan preserves a particular recollection, drawn from the Greatest Holy Leaf in her later years. A certain old beggar of the quarter, she told the friends, had come every Friday for years. He had never asked anything but bread. He had received it each week without question, and gone on. After Bahá’u’lláh’s exile from Baghdád the old man came once more, found the door locked, and stood weeping in the lane. The neighbours tried to console him.

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He turned his face away. The fed mouth, he said, had not finally been the point. The door that had not refused him was the point. The door had been a friend to him. The door, he said, had honoured him.

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Furutan reads the story, in his short chapter, as the practical shape that Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching of universal love took in the domestic life of His own house. The teaching was not, in the Baghdád years, a doctrine read out of a book. It was a kitchen that fed everyone, and a door that did not refuse.

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*Paraphrased from Stories of Bahá'u'lláh (Ali-Akbar Furutan, George Ronald, 1986); see original for full text.*

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