Kitab-i-Iqan
sacred by followers of the Baha'i Faith.
Kitab-i-Iqan literally means book of certitude.
This book was written by Baha'u'llah the prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith in 1862. At this time Baha'u'llah was living as an exile in Baghdad, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. While Baha'u'llah had received revelation some ten years earlier in the Black-Pit, a dungeon in Tehran, He had not yet openly declared His mission. References to His own station therefore appear only in veiled form. This book is an answer to the questions posed by a maternal uncle of the Bab concerning the validity of the Cause of the Bab, and it was written within two days and nights. It constitutes the major theological work of Baha'u'llah.
The uncle of the Bab had been perplexed to hear that the promised one of the Islam was his own nephew. When he was told that this is the exact same objection voiced by the uncle of prophet of Islam, he was shaken and decided to investigate the matter. The questions that he had posed had to do with the signs of the appearance of the promised one.
The book is in two parts: the first part deals with the foundational discourse that divine revelation is progressive and religions are related to one another, with each major monotheistic religion accepting the previous ones and, often in veiled terms, prophesying the advent of the next one. Since the questioner is a Muslim, Baha'u'llah uses verses from the Bible to show how a Christian could interpret his own sacred texts in allegorical terms to come to believe in the next dispensation. By extension the same method of interpretation can be used for a Muslim to see the validity of the claims of the Bab. The second and larger part of the book is the substantive discourse and deals with specific proofs, both theological and logical, of the mission of the Bab.
This article is a stub. You can help BambooWeb by .
