From the Qayyúm al-Asmá': The Báb's First Major Work

The Qayyúm al-Asmá' — sometimes rendered as *the Self-Subsisting Among the Names* — is the Báb's commentary on the Surah of Joseph from the Qur'án. The Báb began to reveal the work on the night of His Declaration to Mullá Ḥusayn, on the 22nd of May 1844, in the small upper room of His house in Shíráz; He continued the revelation through the following weeks; the finished work runs to over a hundred chapters and constitutes His first sustained literary composition.

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The work was understood, by the Báb's earliest disciples, as the proof and the substance of His mission. He had already, in the conversation of the night of Declaration, made the claim of being the *Báb,* the *Gate* through whom the Promised One would in time be made manifest. The Qayyúm al-Asmá' was the first body of Tablets that gave that claim its written form.

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It was carried, in manuscript copies, by Mullá Ḥusayn and the other early disciples on their teaching journeys; it was read in the gathering places of the Bábís of Khurásán and of Mázandarán; it was the principal book of the Bábí community in the early years.

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> Verily I am the Lord of mighty grandeur, of incomparable > glory, Who hath revealed His Cause unto thee, O thou whose > nearness God hath cherished.

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The opening lines of the work are set in the voice of the Beloved addressing the disciple. The Báb speaks not in His own name but as the channel through which the Divine voice addresses the soul of the seeker. The reader, opening the Qayyúm al-Asmá', is being invited into a conversation in which the Beloved Himself speaks first.

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The form of the Tablets is unusual in the Persian and Arabic literature of the period. The verses are short. The cadence is rhythmic. The Arabic is at moments deliberately ungrammatical — a stylistic choice that the Báb explained as a sign that the new Revelation was not bound by the conventions of the older religious literature, that the Speaker was setting His own canon, and that the receivers were being asked to attune their ears to a new music.

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The work has not been translated into English in its entirety. *Selections from the Writings of the Báb* presents several of its passages in translation, of which the present verse is one — a small witness to the great body of writing that the Báb began to reveal on the very night the Bábí Dispensation was declared.

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