Nine Splendours from the Dayspring: The Tablet of Ishráqát

*A retelling based on **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh** by Adib Taherzadeh, the standard study of Bahá'u'lláh's Tablets and ministry. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that work.*

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The Bahá'í year opens with a month called Bahá, and the first of the nineteen Feasts that mark that year is the Feast of Bahá. The word means *Splendour*, or *Glory* — and it is the very name from which Bahá'u'lláh's own title is formed: the Glory of God.

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To understand why the believers begin their year under this name, it helps to turn to a Tablet that Bahá'u'lláh revealed in His later years, a Tablet that takes the word itself for its title and unfolds, in nine luminous passages, what that Splendour means for the world. Adib Taherzadeh recounts it in his study of Bahá'u'lláh's writings: the **Lawḥ-i-Ishráqát**, the Tablet of Splendours.

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By the time of its revelation, Bahá'u'lláh had spent some four decades in banishment. He had been driven from His native Persia to Baghdád, summoned from Baghdád to Constantinople, exiled again to Adrianople, and at last consigned to the prison-city of 'Akká, where the Sulṭán and the Sháh had agreed that His Cause should be sealed away and forgotten. Yet in those final years the walls that had been built to contain Him had, in a sense, opened.

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He had been permitted to leave the foul barracks of the city for the green country beyond it, and from the mansions of Mazra'ih and Bahjí He continued to pour forth a stream of Tablets that addressed not merely His own followers but the rulers, the learned, and the peoples of the entire earth.

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The Tablet of Ishráqát belongs to that great outpouring of the closing years — what Taherzadeh describes as the season in which the principles of a new world were set down in plain words for an age that had not yet learned to want them.

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The Tablet takes its structure from a single, radiant image. Taherzadeh draws out the metaphor at its heart: as light streams from the sun, breaking into distinct rays that nonetheless all proceed from one source, so the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh stream from the one Dayspring of His Revelation. Each principle is an *ishráq*, a splendour, a shaft of light from the rising Sun of the Cause. They are not a scattered collection of separate commandments.

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They are the rays of a single glory. To grasp any one of them rightly is to trace it back to its source; to set them against one another, or to seize on one and forget the rest, is to mistake a ray for the whole sun.

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What, then, are these Splendours? Taherzadeh follows the Tablet through its passages, and the breadth of them is itself part of their majesty. The first concerns the very ground of religion: the recognition of God and obedience to the One Whom He has made manifest in each age. From this all the rest descend, for in the Bahá'í understanding nothing in human affairs can be set right while the soul is severed from its Source.

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The Splendours move outward from there into the ordering of society. Bahá'u'lláh writes of justice as the trust of God among His servants and the instrument of His protection; of the duty of those who govern to deal equitably with the governed and to guard the oppressed; of the obligation laid upon kings to take counsel together and to expend their treasure on the well-being of their peoples rather than on the engines of war.

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Among the Splendours that have struck readers most forcibly is the one that goes to the purpose of religion itself. Religion, Bahá'u'lláh affirms, is the greatest of all means for the establishment of order in the world and for the peaceful contentment of all that dwell therein.

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But He couples the affirmation with a warning that Taherzadeh underlines as one of the most arresting in all His writings: should religion become the cause of contention and strife, of hatred and division, its absence would be preferable to its presence. The purpose of every Faith sent down from heaven is to draw human hearts together; the moment it is turned into a banner of separation, it has been emptied of the very thing that made it holy.

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In a century that had seen, and a century since that would see, so much blood shed in the name of God, the Splendour speaks with a terrible plainness. The test of true religion, Bahá'u'lláh teaches here, is whether it unites.

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Other Splendours touch the conduct of the individual soul. Bahá'u'lláh extols trustworthiness as a sun shining above the horizon of the heaven of the world, its rays warming all that lie beneath it; He links the prosperity and security of humankind to honesty, faithfulness, and a sanctity of character that no outward law can compel and no inward corruption can counterfeit.

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He writes of the duty of every soul to acquire a trade or profession and to engage in some useful work, raising the ordinary labour of one's hands, when undertaken in a spirit of service, to the rank of worship. The grand and the humble stand side by side in the Tablet: the counsel given to emperors and the counsel given to craftsmen flow from the same Pen, because they flow from the same light.

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Taherzadeh is careful to set the Tablet within the larger pattern of Bahá'u'lláh's final period. The Ishráqát does not stand alone.

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It is one of a series of Tablets — among them the *Tablet of the World*, the *Words of Paradise*, the *Ornaments*, the *Effulgences* — in which, near the close of His life, Bahá'u'lláh distilled the essence of His message into clusters of bright, ordered principles, almost as a teacher gathers the whole of a long instruction into a few sentences a student can carry.

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Each of these Tablets gives its name, in turn, to one of the months and Feasts of the Bahá'í calendar. So the very structure of the believers' year is built from the titles of these culminating Tablets — and the year begins, fittingly, with the one called Splendour, the name that contains within it the name of Him who revealed them all.

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There is a quiet grandeur in the circumstance. The teachings that the modern world now haltingly reaches toward — the oneness of humankind, the harmony of faith, equity between ruler and ruled, the dignity of honest work, the rejection of religion that divides — were set down, in their finished form, by a Prisoner in the Holy Land more than a hundred years before the nations began to speak of them.

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They were not argued into existence through debate, nor extracted from the slow experiment of history. They were, in the Bahá'í understanding, revealed: spoken into the world from a single Source, like rays from a rising sun, by Him whose very name is the Glory of God.

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That is why the believers open their year with the Feast of Bahá. To enter the month of Splendour is to stand, for nineteen days, beneath the light the Tablet describes — to remember that the principles by which a wounded world might be healed are not many scattered lamps but the rays of one Dawn, and that the Dawn has a Name.

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As the rays of one Sun, the Splendours broke from a single Dayspring — and the Dayspring was His own Revelation.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh**, Vol. 4, by Adib Taherzadeh.*

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