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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
6 stories on this theme.
The Báb was born in Shíráz, Bahá'u'lláh in Ṭihrán, two years and two cities apart — yet on the old lunar calendar Their birthdays fell on consecutive days, and Bahá'ís keep them together as a single festival of light. A reflection, drawn from Esslemont, on why the Faith remembers its two Founders as twin luminaries of one and the same Dawn.
Among the laws the Báb set down in His Bayán was a wholly new way of measuring time: the Badíʿ calendar, a year of nineteen months of nineteen days, each month bearing the name of an attribute of God, and nineteen years gathered into a cycle called a Váḥid. At the head of it all He placed Naw-Rúz — so that the Bahá'í year begins, every spring, upon the name of God's own splendour.
Esslemont, gathering the ordinances of the Bahá'í year, shows how Bahá'u'lláh framed Naw-Rúz with exquisite care: a handful of intercalary days given to hospitality and the poor, then the nineteen-day Fast of inward devotion, and then, at the spring equinox, the new year breaking in joy. The festival is the bright morning that the whole shape of the year is built to reach.
Within the laws of His Bayán, the Báb swept away the old calendar and brought into being an entirely new one — nineteen months of nineteen days, each named for an attribute of God, the first month bearing the name of splendour itself. At its head He set Naw-Rúz, the day the sun returns to its springtime power, naming it the Day of God and crowning with it the month of the Fast.
In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, the Most Holy Book of His Revelation, Bahá'u'lláh confirmed the calendar the Báb had ordained and set His own seal upon Naw-Rúz — joining it forever to the close of the Fast, fixing it to the moment the sun enters the sign of Aries, and designating the new year of the spring equinox as a festival for all the people of the world.
The festival of Riḍván lasts twelve days, and of these the first, the ninth, and the twelfth are kept as holy days on which work is set aside. Drawing on the early Bahá'í periodical Star of the West, this retelling looks at how the ninth day — the day the Holy Family crossed to join Bahá'u'lláh in the Garden — came to be hallowed, and how the friends keep it.