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.
The Seven Valleys was written in Baghdad around 1860 in response to questions from Shaykh Muhyi'd-Dín, a Sufi judge in Khániqayn, and it is deliberately composed in the idiom of Persian mystical literature, with the seven stages patterned on 'Attár's Conference of the Birds. The valleys are Search, Love, Knowledge, Unity, Contentment, Wonderment, and True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness. The imagery, vocabulary and verse quotations are those a Sufi reader would recognise — the moth and the flame, Majnún searching for Laylí, the seeker who must lose everything including the desire to arrive. A companion piece, the Four Valleys, addresses a different correspondent. Together they constitute the mystical strand of the Bahá'í writings, and they sit somewhat apart from the legislative and administrative material that dominates the later Akká period. Bahá'ís interested in the contemplative side of the faith go here, and its relative marginality in a tradition otherwise oriented toward social action is noticed within the community.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.