Declaration of Baha’s Mission at The Garden of Ridvan
Summary
2. Declaration of Baha’s Mission at The Garden of Ridvan
Executive Summary
A mission Baha never declared in the Garden of Ridvan. This was an afterthought concocted in Acre to curtail the Point’s ministry to one Wáhid (i.e. 19) of years in order to give colour to Baha’s declaration of mission there. No record, however exists of “the exact circumstances attending that epoch-making declaration” save a description of “the roses picked by the gardeners and piled on the floor of Baha’s blessed tent” for distribution by Baha. A mission Baha never proclaimed.
All he did was to conduct his mission on paper within the four walls of his abode in Edirne and Acre, strictly intended for private circulation among his collaborators and partisans.
The first Ridvan provision in Aqdas, written in Acre in about 1873 and revised and printed years later, is an Acre afterthought intended to portray it as the opening utterance in Baha’s Ridvan declaration of mission in 1863, of which no record exists, and effective which Baha’s mission is alleged to begin. Both the year of Baha’s mission and the opening utterance were manufactured in Acre on the strength of Baha’s false interpretation of the Point’s Tablet of Letters. This interpretation Baha himself rescinded later. Where the principal, the declaration fails, the accessory, the maiden utterance, also fails.
What Baha is alleged to have revealed on the first day of Ridvan, “was,” not the Aqdas provision, but “the verse of patience” which glorifies Sayyid Yahya of Darab and his fellow-sufferers in Niriz.
“The Najibiyya garden was subsequently designated the garden of Ridvan, not by Baha, but “by his followers.”
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