Naw-Rúz Confirmed in the Most Holy Book

A retelling that quotes the Kitáb-i-Aqdas of Bahá'u'lláh. Passages in quotation marks are His own words, rendered in the authorized translation.

The Báb had ordained a new calendar and set Naw-Rúz at its head, naming the new year of the spring equinox the Day of God. But in the Bahá'í understanding the Báb was the Herald, the One who prepared the way; the fullness of the Revelation He announced was to come through "Him Whom God shall make manifest" — Bahá'u'lláh. And so it fell to Bahá'u'lláh, in the Most Holy Book of His own Dispensation, to confirm what the Báb had begun and to fix the festival of Naw-Rúz permanently within the laws of the new world Faith.

That Book is the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, revealed in the prison-city of 'Akká around 1873 — the charter and mother-book of the Bahá'í Dispensation, in which Bahá'u'lláh laid down the laws and ordinances by which His followers were to live. Among those laws are the ones that govern the Bahá'í year. Bahá'u'lláh confirmed the calendar of nineteen months: "The number of months in a year, appointed in the Book of God," He wrote, "is nineteen." And He gave to Naw-Rúz His own unmistakable seal.

He did so first by binding the festival to the Fast that precedes it. In the Aqdas, Bahá'u'lláh addresses the whole of humanity and joins, in a single breath, the discipline of fasting and the joy of the new year: "O people of the world! We have enjoined upon you fasting during a brief period, and at its close have designated for you Naw-Rúz as a feast." The structure the Báb had drawn — the days of self-denial giving way, at the spring equinox, to celebration — is here ratified by the Pen of Bahá'u'lláh and offered not to His followers alone but to all the peoples of the earth.

He gave the festival, too, a precise and beautiful anchoring in the order of the heavens. So that there should be no confusion about when the new year falls, Bahá'u'lláh tied it to the astronomical turning of spring itself: "The Festival of Naw-Rúz falleth on the day that the sun entereth the sign of Aries, even should this occur no more than one minute before sunset." In this single verse the festival is fixed not by human reckoning or by tradition, but by the very moment the sun returns to its springtime power — the instant the long winter yields and the year turns again toward the light. Even a minute of that returning light is enough; if the sun crosses into spring before the sun has set, that day is Naw-Rúz.

There is great meaning folded into these provisions. By making Naw-Rúz the close of the Fast, Bahá'u'lláh taught that the deepest joy is the joy of those who have first turned away from the world to seek the spirit; the festival is the glad morning that follows the discipline of the night. By fixing it to the entry of the sun into Aries, He rooted the Bahá'í new year in creation itself, so that the festival of the soul keeps perfect time with the festival of the earth. And by addressing the ordinance to "the people of the world," He signalled that this renewal is meant not for one nation or one community but for all humanity — a universal new year for a Faith that proclaims the oneness of the human race.

The first month of the Bahá'í year bears the name Bahá, splendour and glory — the Most Great Name itself — and Naw-Rúz is its first day. So the year opens, every spring, upon the name of God's own splendour, at the very hour the sun renews the world. What the Báb had instituted, Bahá'u'lláh confirmed and crowned. The festival of renewal was set, by the supreme authority of the Most Holy Book, at the threshold of every Bahá'í year — a yearly feast of light, joy, and the making new of all things.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the Kitáb-i-Aqdas of Bahá'u'lláh.

Bahá'u'lláh. (1873). *The Kitáb-i-Aqdas*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah/kitab-i-aqdas/