The Mother Book: The Revelation of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas

A retelling based on God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which describes the place of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas among the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.

The most fitting place to begin is the wall. In 1868 the Ottoman authorities had banished Bahá'u'lláh and His family and companions to 'Akká, a penal colony on the coast of the Holy Land notorious for its foul air and its fevers — a place, it was said, to which the worst offenders of the empire were sent so that the climate might finish what the courts had begun. The decree of the Sulṭán was explicit and merciless: strict and perpetual confinement, with no hope of release. The Cause was meant to die behind those gates.

It was from within that prison — from the city Bahá'u'lláh Himself called the "Most Great Prison" — that He revealed the book Shoghi Effendi describes as the "Mother Book" of the Bahá'í Dispensation: the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the "Most Holy Book." It was set down, in Arabic, around the year 1873, while He was still, in the eyes of the State, a prisoner of the empire under sentence of death and banishment.

Consider the contradiction. A captive who owned almost nothing, who could not freely walk the lanes of the town that held Him, who had been stripped by two governments of every worldly support — this was the One who now took up His pen and legislated for the planet. The Kitáb-i-Aqdas does not read as the plea of a prisoner. It reads as the decree of a Sovereign. In it Bahá'u'lláh ordains the laws of prayer and fasting; abolishes the institutions of priesthood and confession and monasticism; lays down the foundations of a future order of society; counsels kings and addresses the rulers and the learned of the earth; and announces the coming of an age of unity such as the world had never seen. He sets forth the ordinances by which, in His own words, the peoples of the world were to be governed, and He summons every soul to obey them not out of fear of any man but out of love and reverence for God alone.

Shoghi Effendi, surveying the whole sweep of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation, singles this book out as His weightiest work — the repository, he writes, of those laws and principles upon which the structure of His World Order must ultimately rest. The other Tablets pour out praise, prayer, exhortation, and counsel; this one builds. Within its pages are the seeds of the Universal House of Justice, of the Houses of Worship, of the laws of inheritance and marriage and burial, of the relationship between the believer and the institutions of the Faith — the whole architecture of a civilization yet to be raised. It was, in the most literal sense, a book written ahead of its time, addressed to generations not yet born.

And the grandeur of the thing lies precisely in the circumstances of its appearance. A man held in a pestilential fortress, watched by sentries, cut off by the deliberate policy of an empire, does not normally presume to ordain the laws of nations. The world's idea of greatness is the throne, the army, the treasury, the crown. Bahá'u'lláh possessed none of these. What He possessed was the Word — and from behind a prison wall that Word reached outward to encircle the earth. The Sulṭán who signed the decree of perpetual banishment, and the Sháh who had driven Him from Persia, have passed from the scene; their dynasties are gone. The Most Holy Book remains, and the institutions it foretold rise today on the slopes of a mountain a short distance from the prison where it was penned.

There is a sentence in the Bahá'í Writings, dear to the believers, that captures the meaning of this. From the very prison, it was said, the banner of the Cause was raised aloft, "for all the world to see." The Kitáb-i-Aqdas is that banner in the form of a book. Its existence is the answer to every power that imagined the Cause could be confined. They built a wall to contain a Man; they could not contain the majesty of what He wrote within it.

To read the Most Holy Book with this in mind is to feel something of the awe that the Feast of 'Aẓamat — Grandeur — is meant to awaken. Here is greatness that owes nothing to circumstance: not the borrowed grandeur of office or wealth, which the grave dissolves, but the inherent majesty of the divine Word, which a prison only magnified.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi, and the Kitáb-i-Aqdas itself in the Bahá'í Reference Library.

Effendi, S.. (1944). *God Passes By*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/shoghi-effendi/god-passes-by/