A Year Named for the Names of God

A retelling based on The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, translated by Shoghi Effendi, which records the laws the Báb ordained. The narrative is retold in our own words.

When the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz in the year 1844, He did far more than announce the nearness of a Promised One. He came as the Herald of a new age, and He came also as a Lawgiver — One who set aside the worn forms of the past and brought, in their place, the framework of an entirely new order. In His chief book, the Persian Bayán, He laid down ordinances for the Day that was dawning. And among the most quietly revolutionary of those ordinances was a new way of reckoning time itself: the calendar the believers would come to call the Badíʿ, the "wondrous," calendar.

The old calendars of the world were built around the things people happened to honour — the names of emperors, of pagan gods, of the seasons of harvest and war. The Báb swept all of that away. He divided the year, as Nabíl's narrative and the history of the Faith record, into nineteen months of nineteen days each. Nineteen times nineteen is three hundred and sixty-one; a small number of additional days, set apart before the last month, complete the solar year and keep the festival of the new year fixed forever to the turning of spring. So far this is the work of a careful Lawgiver. But the Báb did something with these months that no calendar had ever done before.

He named them for God.

Each of the nineteen months He called after an attribute of the Divine. The believers know them as a litany: splendour, glory, beauty, grandeur, light, mercy, words, perfection, names, might, will, knowledge, power, speech, questions, honour, sovereignty, dominion, and — last of all, the month of the Fast — loftiness. These were not new words invented for the purpose. They were drawn from a beloved dawn prayer of Islam, in which the believer calls upon God by His most beautiful names, pleading at daybreak, "by Thy splendour," "by Thy glory," "by Thy beauty," "by Thy light." The Báb took the names by which His people had long called upon their Lord in the darkness before dawn, and made of them the very architecture of the year.

Consider what this means for a life lived inside such a calendar. One does not merely pass from "the third month" to "the fourth"; one passes from the month of Beauty into the month of Grandeur, from Mercy into the month of Words. The first day of every month, the believers gather for a feast and turn their hearts toward the quality whose name the month bears. The ordinary, unavoidable passage of time — which in most lives slips by unremarked — becomes in the Bábí and Bahá'í dispensation a slow, circling act of remembrance, a year-long meditation on the attributes of the One who made both the time and the soul that measures it.

The very first month the Báb named Bahá — splendour, glory. It is the same word, the same Most Great Name, that would belong to the One the Báb had come to herald: Bahá'u'lláh, the Glory of God. So the year does not open by chance upon a neutral square on a grid. It opens upon the name of God's own splendour. And the first day of that first month — the threshold of the whole year — the Báb set at Naw-Rúz, the ancient new year of the spring equinox, the day the sun crosses back into the sign of spring and the long winter yields. The Bahá'í year begins, every spring, upon the name of God's own splendour, at the very hour the world is made new.

The Báb did not stop at the single year. He gathered the years themselves into a larger rhythm of nineteen. A cycle of nineteen years He called a Váḥid — a word meaning "Unity," and bearing, in the system of numbers the Báb used, the value of nineteen. Nineteen such cycles, three hundred and sixty-one years, form a still greater period He named Kull-i-Shay', "All Things." From the smallest unit to the largest, the whole structure is woven from the number nineteen, and shot through, name by name and cycle by cycle, with the remembrance of God.

There is a deep purpose beneath the beauty. By tying the new year to the spring equinox, the Báb anchored His festival not in human decree but in the order of creation, so that the renewal of the calendar keeps perfect time with the renewal of the earth. By placing the month of Fasting last and Naw-Rúz first, He joined self-denial to rejoicing, so that the new year is the glad morning that follows the discipline of the night. And by naming the months for the attributes of God, He ensured that the followers of the new Faith could not so much as glance at a date without being reminded of their Lord. A calendar, in the Báb's hands, became a form of worship — a way of letting the structure of time itself preach the nearness and the glory of God.

Bahá'u'lláh, in His own Most Holy Book, would later confirm this calendar and set His seal upon Naw-Rúz, carrying into the law of the Bahá'í world what the Báb had begun. But the design is the Báb's: the nineteen months, the nineteen days, the cycle of unity, and the festival of splendour at the head of the year. Every time a believer keeps a Feast on the first of a month named for a quality of God, or greets the new year at the equinox, or speaks of the day, the month, or the year by one of those luminous names, the wondrous calendar of the Báb is quietly at work — making of the passage of time, as He intended, an unbroken remembrance of the Eternal.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Dawn-Breakers, Nabíl's narrative translated by Shoghi Effendi.

Nabíl-i-Aʻzam. (1932). *The Dawn-Breakers (Nabíl's Narrative)*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.