The Kitab-i-Iqan (The Book of Certitude)

The Kitab-i-Iqan, the Book of Certitude, is Baha'u'llah's own principal doctrinal work, composed in 1862 and published in modern critical editions by the Baha'i Publishing Trust, the Baha'i Faith's own institutional publisher. As the founder's own text laying out core Baha'i doctrine, progressive revelation and the succession of Manifestations of God, it is the primary and authoritative source for what the Baha'i Faith itself teaches on those questions, not a secondary description of the faith by an outside observer. What it is cited for here is doctrine stated at the ordinary level any reference work states a tradition's beliefs; no restricted, initiatory or otherwise closed material is reproduced or described from it. Its limit as a source is that it is a believer's own scripture rather than independent scholarship, so a historical or comparative claim about the Baha'i Faith's development still benefits from an outside academic study alongside it.