Stories
the narratives it tells itself
Two hours after sunset.
Mullá Husayn had been searching, had fasted forty days, and was walking outside Shiraz when a young man in a green turban greeted him by name and invited him home for tea. The conversation began two hours and eleven minutes after sunset on 22 May 1844 and continued until dawn. The Bahá'í calendar counts its era from that evening.
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The volley that missed.
The Báb was suspended by ropes against a barrack wall in Tabriz in July 1850 and a regiment of seven hundred and fifty fired. When the smoke cleared the ropes were severed and he was gone — found back in his cell finishing a conversation he had been interrupted in. A second regiment was brought and did not fail. British and Russian officials in the city reported the event.
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The Black Pit.
A disused underground water reservoir in Tehran with no light and no ventilation, holding around a hundred and fifty prisoners. Bahá'u'lláh spent four months there in 1852 with a chain of over a hundred pounds around his neck that left permanent scars. He describes it as the place where the revelation came to him, and the faith dates his prophetic consciousness from that cell.
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Táhirih takes off the veil.
At the conference of Badasht in 1848, called to work out what the new revelation meant, she walked into the assembly unveiled and announced that the day of the old law was over. The gathering was appalled; one man cut his own throat and ran from the tent. The break with Islamic law was made by a woman removing a piece of cloth in front of men.
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The garden by the Tigris.
On the eve of being exiled from Baghdad to Constantinople in April 1863, Bahá'u'lláh crossed the river to a garden and told his companions who he was. He stayed twelve days. The garden was called Najíbíyyih; Bahá'ís call it Ridván, paradise, and the twelve days are the holiest period in the calendar.
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The letters to the kings.
From an Ottoman prison Bahá'u'lláh wrote to Napoleon III, Queen Victoria, Tsar Alexander II, Kaiser Wilhelm I, Pope Pius IX, the Sultan and the Sháh, announcing himself and telling them to reduce their armaments, settle disputes collectively, and attend to the poor. Napoleon III is reported to have thrown the tablet aside; he lost his throne in 1870.
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The journeys west.
Released at sixty-four after a lifetime as a prisoner, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spent 1911 to 1913 travelling through Europe and North America, speaking in churches, synagogues, universities and settlement houses. In Washington in 1912 he insisted on integrated audiences, and arranged the marriage of a white woman and a Black man in a country where it was illegal in most states.
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The ten women of Shiraz.
On 18 June 1983 ten Bahá'í women and girls were hanged in Shiraz, one after another, each made to watch the executions before hers, each offered freedom in exchange for recanting. All ten refused. The youngest, Mona Mahmúdnizhád, was seventeen and had been arrested for teaching children's classes.
⚖ contested within
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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