Kitab-i-Aqdas

Bahaullah, born Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri in Tehran in 1817, spent the last forty years of his life in Ottoman custody, moved from Baghdad to Istanbul to Edirne and finally in 1868 to Akka, a prison city on the Palestinian coast. He wrote the Kitab-i-Aqdas there in Arabic around 1873, some twenty years after the experience in a Tehran dungeon that Bahais count as the beginning of his mission and about ten years after his public declaration.

The book does not read like a legal code. Its laws are dispersed among passages of exhortation, warning and address, including direct summonses to the rulers of the day. Its provisions are extensive for so short a work. It sets an obligatory daily prayer and a nineteen-day fast in the month of Ala preceding the Bahai new year at the spring equinox. It fixes Huququllah, a payment on wealth to the head of the faith. It prohibits alcohol and opium, gambling, slavery, backbiting and the carrying of arms without cause. It abolishes monasticism and asceticism, forbids confession of sins to any person, and abolishes the professional clergy outright, there are no Bahai priests, and the community's affairs are run by elected bodies. It legislates on marriage, requiring the consent of all living parents, on divorce with a year of waiting, on inheritance where no will exists, and on burial, which must be within an hour's journey of the place of death. It ordains the Mashriqul-Adhkar, the house of worship, and the Universal House of Justice, the elected international body first constituted in 1963 and empowered to legislate on matters the revelation does not address.

Bahai scripture reached English piecemeal, and the Aqdas came late. Unauthorised translations circulated, but the authorised full English text was not published until 1992, on the centenary of Bahaullah's death, more than a century after it was written.

The reasons given are institutional rather than defensive. Shoghi Effendi, head of the faith from 1921 to 1957, held that a codification of the laws had to precede any full translation, so that provisions written without headings or ordering would not be read as isolated rules stripped of context, and so that laws not yet applicable in the West would be understood as such. He was working on that codification when he died in 1957. The Synopsis and Codification was completed on the basis of his work and published in 1973. In 1986 the Universal House of Justice judged the time right and made the translation a goal of a six-year plan, completing it in 1992.

The published volume is mostly apparatus. The text itself occupies a minority of the pages; the rest is a supplement of Questions and Answers, being Bahaullah's own responses to queries put to him about the laws and treated as part of the book, together with the Synopsis and around two hundred explanatory notes. Bahai law also applies unevenly by design. A number of provisions are stated by the institutions to be binding only where conditions permit or where the Universal House of Justice has brought them into force, so the book as read is not a description of what every Bahai currently does.

Bahais hold to progressive revelation: that God has disclosed himself through a succession of messengers, Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Bahaullah among them, each suited to the capacity of an age, each renewing the same religion under different social law. On that view the Aqdas supersedes the ritual and legal provisions of earlier scriptures for this age without denying that those scriptures were revealed, and Bahaullah himself is not the last, a further messenger being expected after not less than a thousand years.

The Aqdas is not the whole of Bahai scripture, or close to it. Bahaullah's written output was enormous, running to thousands of tablets and letters; the doctrinal work Kitab-i-Iqan, the ethical Hidden Words and the mystical Seven Valleys are all held equally revealed. So are the writings of the Bab, executed at Tabriz in 1850, whose Persian Bayan the Aqdas both fulfils and abrogates, and those of Abdul-Baha, Bahaullah's son.

What keeps that body of text from splintering is the Covenant. Bahaullah's will, the Kitab-i-Ahd, appointed Abdul-Baha as his successor and as the authorised interpreter of his writings; Abdul-Baha's own will appointed Shoghi Effendi as Guardian with the same interpretive authority. Since 1963 authority has rested with the Universal House of Justice, which Bahais hold can legislate but not interpret revelation. The line matters because it is how the community avoided the schisms that followed comparable successions elsewhere: rival claimants appeared at each transition, including Bahaullah's half-brother Mirza Yahya and his own son Mirza Muhammad Ali, and each attracted only a small and short-lived following.