A Book Made of Questions: Laura Barney at the Table in 'Akká

A retelling based on Some Answered Questions, the table-talks of 'Abdu'l-Bahá recorded by Laura Clifford Barney during her visits to 'Akká, together with the account of the book's making preserved in its own pages. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

She was young, American, and full of questions. Laura Clifford Barney had been raised among people of culture and means, had travelled and studied in Europe, and had come — as so many earnest souls of her generation came — to the prison-city of 'Akká to sit at the feet of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. But Laura did not come merely to admire. She came with the particular hunger of a mind that wants to understand. The great questions that have troubled thoughtful people in every age were alive in her: What is God, and how can the finite ever know the Infinite? What is the soul, and what becomes of it after death? If God is good, why is there evil in the world? Are human beings truly free, or are their lives fixed in advance? What did the prophets of old really mean? She had read; she had wondered; and now she had the rarest of opportunities — to ask.

So she asked. Across several journeys to the Holy Land, in visits that stretched through the years 1904, 1905, and 1906 — staying, the accounts tell us, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months at a time — Laura Barney brought her questions to the Master. Many of the conversations took place not in some formal hall of instruction but at the ordinary lunch table, amid the modest hospitality of the household, in the brief intervals He could spare from a life crowded with the care of the poor, the sick, the persecuted, and the endless stream of pilgrims and petitioners. There, between one duty and the next, He would turn to her questions and answer them.

The method was simple and careful. Laura would pose her question. 'Abdu'l-Bahá would reply — sometimes briefly, sometimes at length, unfolding a subject with a clarity that made difficult things plain. A secretary or member of the family would take down His words in Persian as He spoke. And because this was to be a record others would rely upon, the text was not left to chance: the replies were written out and, where needed, read back and reviewed, so that what was preserved was truly what He had given. 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself went over the work. What emerged was not a set of Laura's impressions of His teaching, but His own considered answers, set down with His sanction.

Consider what this asked of her. It would have been easy to let such questions sit unspoken — to assume they were too large, too presumptuous, too likely to betray her own ignorance. It would have been easy, too, to let them curdle into doubt, as unanswered questions so often do, until faith itself grows cold for want of light. Laura did neither. She honoured her questions enough to voice them, and she honoured the Source enough to bring them to Him rather than settle for her own guesses. She asked plainly, listened humbly, and wrote faithfully.

And she did all of this not only for herself. From the beginning, Laura Barney understood that the answers she was gathering were not her private treasure. She was, in effect, asking on behalf of every seeker who would never reach 'Akká — every restless mind in Europe and America and beyond who carried the same questions and had no one to put them to. When the conversations were collected and published, the book bore a title that is itself a small portrait of the whole enterprise: Some Answered Questions. Not "the answers"; not "the doctrine." Just this — questions, and the answers given to them, preserved for whoever else might ask.

The book has never gone out of print. Generations of Bahá'ís and inquirers have opened it to find their own perplexities addressed — the nature of the spirit, the reality of the Manifestations of God, the harmony of science and religion, the meaning of the resurrection and of evil and of the human soul — each subject treated patiently, as a teacher treats a sincere student. And all of it exists because one young woman, faced with the deepest questions a human being can ask, did not let them go unasked.

This is the spirit the Feast of Masá'il — the Feast of Questions — holds before us. Seeking is not the enemy of faith; it is faith's beginning. The doubt that is spoken honestly and carried to the light becomes the door to certitude. Laura Barney's notebook of questions became a book of answers — and a quiet proof that the earnest question, far from being something to be ashamed of, is one of the most precious offerings a searching heart can bring.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Some Answered Questions by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, recorded by Laura Clifford Barney.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1908). *Some Answered Questions*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/some-answered-questions/