The Book of Certitude.
Written in Baghdad in 1861 over two days and two nights, in answer to questions from an uncle of the Báb. Its method is to take the apocalyptic passages of the Gospels and the Qur'an — the sun darkened, the stars falling, the heavens rolled up — and read them symbolically, which clears the way for the claim that revelation continues rather than concludes.
Open the book — context →
The Kitab-i-Aqdas.
The Most Holy Book: not only laws but an architecture — a faith designed on paper before it was built in the world.
Open the book — context →
The Hidden Words.
Short numbered aphorisms in Arabic and Persian, each opening with an address — O Son of Spirit, O Son of Man, O Son of Being — presented as the essence of what was revealed to earlier prophets, restated. It is the book Bahá'ís memorise and quote in ordinary conversation, and the one they hand to strangers.
Open the book — context & 1 source →
The Seven Valleys.
Written to a Sufi judge in the language and imagery of Persian mysticism, tracing the soul through search, love, knowledge, unity, contentment, wonderment, and finally true poverty and absolute nothingness. It is deliberately in the register of 'Attár's Conference of the Birds, addressed to a reader who would recognise the form.
held by most
Open the book — context →
The writings of the Báb.
Enormous in volume and largely untranslated. The Persian Bayán contains laws of extraordinary severity and impracticality, and the tradition's own reading is that they were never intended for implementation — that the Báb's function was to prepare for Him Whom God shall make manifest, and that the laws were a demonstration of authority rather than a code.
⚖ contested within
Open the book — context →
Some Answered Questions.
Laura Clifford Barney, an American, sat at 'Abdu'l-Bahá's table in Akká between 1904 and 1906 and wrote down his answers to her questions on God, evil, the soul, evolution, resurrection, reincarnation and free will. Because he was the appointed interpreter, the book carries authority the ordinary talks do not.
Open the book — context →
God Passes By.
Shoghi Effendi's centenary history of the faith's first hundred years, written in English in 1944 — a head of religion writing the history of his own family and his own institution, in a deliberately archaic prose modelled on the King James Bible. That register became the house style for all Bahá'í translation, which is why the English scripture sounds the way it does.
held by most
Open the book — context →