The Mother Book: Bahá'u'lláh Reveals the Kitáb-i-Aqdas

*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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Of all the cities of the Ottoman Empire, the authorities had chosen the worst they could find. 'Akká was a walled penal colony on the coast of the Holy Land, notorious for its foul air and its fevers, to which the empire sent its hardened criminals to be forgotten. There, in the late summer of 1868, Bahá'u'lláh and some eighty of His family and companions were imprisoned, packed into the cells of the army barracks.

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The decree under which they were sent was meant to be final. The Sulṭán of the Ottomans and the Sháh of Persia had agreed between them that this Prisoner and His Cause should be sealed away behind those walls and heard of no more.

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It was from within that confinement — and, by the reckoning Adib Taherzadeh follows, around the year 1873, while the strictest period of the imprisonment had only lately begun to ease — that Bahá'u'lláh revealed the Book that He named the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book.

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Taherzadeh does not let the irony pass unnoticed. The Power that had banished Bahá'u'lláh to the most desolate spot it possessed received, from that very spot, the charter of the new world it had imagined it was burying. For the Kitáb-i-Aqdas is not a book of comfort or of mystic reverie alone. It is, in the Bahá'í understanding, the Mother Book of the whole Dispensation — the repository of its laws, the seed of its institutions, and the wellspring of the order that Bahá'u'lláh came to establish among the peoples of the earth.

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In its pages He set down the laws by which the Bahá'í life is ordered: the daily obligatory prayer, the annual fast, the law of marriage, the abolition of the priesthood, the prohibition of slavery and of cruelty to others. But the Book reaches far past the regulation of private conduct.

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In it Bahá'u'lláh foreshadows the institutions of a future global commonwealth — among them the elected councils He calls the Houses of Justice, the central institution that would in time guide the affairs of His worldwide community. He summons kings and rulers and the leaders of religion to recognize the Day of God. He calls for a universal auxiliary language and the reduction of the burdens that weigh upon the peoples.

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Above all He proclaims, again and again, the oneness of the whole human race as the pivot round which His teachings turn.

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What gives the Book its peculiar majesty, Taherzadeh observes, is the union it achieves of law and love. Bahá'u'lláh does not hand down commandments as a cold code. He weds them to the remembrance of God, bidding His followers receive His ordinances not as fetters but as the very means of their freedom and their nearness to Him.

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He likens His laws to "the choice Wine" sealed with the musk of His own name, and He counsels that the people of the world should "observe My commandments for the love of My beauty." The same Pen that legislates also adores; the same Voice that binds also liberates.

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There is a further wonder in it that Taherzadeh underlines. The Most Holy Book was revealed for a world that did not yet exist. The institutions it charters had no physical form in 1873; the global order it envisions was, in that century, unimaginable to the statesmen of the day.

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Bahá'u'lláh wrote, from a prison cell, to generations not yet born — laying down in advance the framework of a unity that humanity is still, in our own time, slowly labouring to build. The Book spoke a world-civilization into being a century and more ahead of itself, and left to His descendants and His followers the long work of unfolding what it had contained.

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So the decree of the two empires accomplished the opposite of what it intended. They had meant to extinguish a Cause. Instead, out of the cell to which they had consigned it, came the Most Holy Book — the supreme expression of the glory of Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation, the charter that would outlast every throne that had conspired against Him.

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Out of the most desolate prison in the empire came the charter of the unity of the whole human race. The walls that were built to contain Him could not contain the Word He revealed within them.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh**, Vol. 3, by Adib Taherzadeh.*

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