Two Days and Two Nights: The Revelation of the Book of Certitude

A retelling based on Shoghi Effendi's history God Passes By, the authoritative survey of the Faith's first century. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that work.

The glory of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation is sometimes measured by the sheer volume of the Word that flowed from His Pen across forty years. But the glory shows itself just as strikingly in a single concentrated act — in the swiftness and the depth with which a vast subject could be unfolded, in answer to a single honest need, almost in one sitting. There is no clearer instance of this than the revelation of the Kitáb-i-Íqán, the Book of Certitude, which Shoghi Effendi recounts in his history of the Faith's first century.

The setting was Baghdád, in the years before the declaration in the Garden of Riḍván — the long Baghdád period in which Bahá'u'lláh, not yet having proclaimed His station openly, was already the heart and stay of the scattered community of the Báb's followers, and already the magnet that drew seekers of every kind to His door. Among those who came in search was a man whose searching carried a particular weight: an uncle of the Báb Himself. The Báb, the Herald whose brief and dazzling mission had ended in martyrdom only a few years before, had left behind in Persia members of His own family, and not all of them had yet come to recognise the truth of His claim. One of His maternal uncles, a merchant who had helped to raise Him and who loved Him, remained unsettled. He had questions — the deep questions that an honest soul cannot simply set aside: questions about the meaning of the prophecies of the past, about why the divines of religion had risen against the Promised One when He came, about the nature of the resurrection and the return spoken of in scripture, about how a sincere believer is to know the true Manifestation of God from the false.

These were not the questions of a man trying to win an argument. They were the questions of a man trying to believe, and unable to do so until the veils that stood in his way were lifted. He set them down and brought them, and they were laid before Bahá'u'lláh.

It is worth dwelling on who this questioner was, because it tells us something about the spirit in which the Book was given. He was no antagonist hunting for a weakness, no proud divine defending his standing. He was a kinsman of the Báb who had loved Him as a child and grieved Him as a martyr, and who now stood in the painful position of being unable to accept what his own nephew had claimed. There could be few sincerer petitioners. The questions came from grief and from longing, from a heart that wished above all things to be able to believe. And it is a mark of the tenderness that runs through the whole Revelation that such a heart was answered not with a brief note of reassurance but with one of the greatest books ever to flow from the Pen of Bahá'u'lláh.

What followed is one of the marvels of the period. Shoghi Effendi records that in reply, and within the space of two days and two nights, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the entire Book of Certitude — a work of some two hundred pages. It was not composed slowly, over months of drafting and revision, as the great books of religious controversy had always been composed. It poured forth, in answer to an uncle's questions, in little more than the turning of two days. And the result was not a hasty pamphlet but what Shoghi Effendi ranks as the most important doctrinal work revealed by the Pen of Bahá'u'lláh — the pre-eminent commentary, in the whole range of His writings, on the deepest themes of religion.

Consider what the Book accomplishes in that span. It ranges across the scriptures of the past and shows that the very prophecies which the learned had read as obstacles to faith were in truth the keys to it, once read aright. It explains why, in age after age, the doctors of religion have been the first to reject the Messenger of their own day, mistaking the letter of their expectations for the spirit of God's purpose. It interprets the language of resurrection, of judgement, of the return of the Promised One, lifting it out of the crude literalism that had made it a stumbling-block and restoring to it a meaning at once spiritual and exact. And it sets forth, with a tenderness that runs beneath all its power, the qualities of the true seeker — the detachment, the purity of heart, the severance from the idle fancies of men — by which a soul may at last attain to certitude. It is, from first page to last, a book written to bring an honest searcher home.

It did. The uncle of the Báb, Shoghi Effendi relates, read what had been revealed for him, and his doubts were resolved; he recognised the truth, and was numbered among the believers. The very purpose for which the Book had been called forth was fulfilled. But the Book did not stay with the one man for whom it was written. It passed from hand to hand among the believers, and then far beyond them, until it had become — and remains to this day — one of the principal works of the Bahá'í Faith, the book to which seekers in every land are pointed when they ask the great questions of religion. A reply composed in two days for a single searching heart became a treasury of certitude for generations.

There is, in this, the same pattern that runs through the whole of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation, and which the Feast of Bahá — the Feast of Splendour — exists to honour. The glory of the Word does not depend on the labour of long composition. It does not depend on the standing of the one who asks, for here the question came not from a famous divine but from a grieving merchant who simply wished to believe. It depends on the Source. When the Pen of the Most High moved, two days and two nights were enough to lift veils that the libraries of the learned had only thickened. The swiftness was not carelessness; it was a sign. It said, as plainly as the volume of the forty years' outpouring said it, that here was no ordinary author labouring at a desk, but the Glory of God revealing, out of an inexhaustible Source, the certitude that a darkened age could find nowhere else.

To read the Book of Certitude is to receive what was given to one searching soul in Baghdád and never withdrawn. To remember how it was given — entire, in two days and two nights, in answer to an uncle's love and an uncle's doubt — is to glimpse the splendour from which it came.

In two days and two nights the veils were lifted — and the swiftness itself was a sign of the glory of the Word.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see God Passes By by Shoghi Effendi.

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