The Words of Paradise: The Kalimát-i-Firdawsíyyih

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 4, by Adib Taherzadeh, which devotes a study to the Kalimát-i-Firdawsíyyih. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that study and in the authoritative texts of the Faith.

In the closing years of His earthly life, after the long imprisonment within the walls of 'Akká had at last been relaxed and He had been able to take up His residence in the countryside nearby, Bahá'u'lláh revealed a series of Tablets that gather together the great social and ethical teachings of His Revelation. Among the most celebrated of them is the Kalimát-i-Firdawsíyyih — the "Words of Paradise." Its very name announces its theme: it is a Tablet of Words, a sequence of luminous counsels for the renewal of human life.

Adib Taherzadeh explains the unusual structure of the Tablet. Bahá'u'lláh arranged it as a succession of what He called "leaves" — Varaqát — each leaf a distinct counsel "of the Lote-Tree of Bahá," so that the whole reads like a garden of guidance, leaf following leaf. The image is deliberate and tender: the reader is invited to walk through the Words of Paradise as through an orchard, pausing at each tree, gathering what grows there.

The leaves range across the whole field of human concern. The first counsel is the fear of God, "the supreme commander of religion," which restrains the soul from wrongdoing and adorns it with the fear of its Lord. Other leaves turn to the ordering of society. Bahá'u'lláh calls in this Tablet for the education of children, urging that every child be schooled in reading and writing and in whatever is of use, and warning against the kind of learning that "beginneth with words and endeth with words." He summons humanity to consultation and to union, and He sets out the world-embracing remedy that the age requires: "That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one common Faith."

One leaf in particular has rung down the years. In the Kalimát-i-Firdawsíyyih Bahá'u'lláh exalts the virtue of trustworthiness to a station few would have thought to give it. "Trustworthiness," He declares, "is the greatest portal leading unto the tranquillity and security of the people. In truth the stability of every affair hath depended and doth depend upon it." It is a striking note to find at the heart of a Tablet on the building of a new world: that the foundation of a just and peaceful society is not, in the first place, its laws or its institutions, but the plain honesty of the human beings who compose it.

Taherzadeh draws attention to the conviction that runs beneath the whole Tablet — that it is the Word of God itself that possesses the power to remake the world. In this very Tablet Bahá'u'lláh affirms the creative might of the divine utterance: "Every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God is endowed with such potency as can instil new life into every human frame." The leaves of counsel are not, then, mere good advice. They are charged Words, released into the world to quicken it. A teaching about education, a summons to trustworthiness, a call to the union of nations — each is, in Bahá'u'lláh's understanding, an utterance with the power to take root in the soul and to bear fruit in the conduct of whole peoples.

This is why the Kalimát-i-Firdawsíyyih sits at the very centre of a Feast of Words. The attribute the Feast celebrates is the transforming power of the revealed Word — and here is a Tablet that names itself the Words of Paradise, that is built leaf by leaf out of distinct Words of counsel, and that declares in its own pages that the Word of God can "instil new life into every human frame." To read it is to receive, in concentrated form, the assurance that gives the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh its confidence: that the world is not mended by force or by cleverness, but by Words sent down from the realm of glory and planted, like the leaves of a garden, in the soil of the human heart.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Volume 4, by Adib Taherzadeh; the Tablet itself appears in Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1987). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 4 — Mazra'ih & Bahjí 1877-92)*. George Ronald.