Unveiling the Bahá’í Faith: Concealment and Disclosure in the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh

This paper is about the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, which are foundational to the Bahá’í Faith, the emerging global religion whose origins are found in the nineteenth-century Middle East. In addition to its intrinsic interest to the study of religion, the value of studying the writings of Bahá’u’lláh is that it helps us understand why Bahá’ís have been persecuted in Iran and the Arab world for nearly two centuries. Bahá’u’lláh’s massive canon of writings were penned, primarily in Arabic and Persian, from 1852-1892. They include some 20,000 documents on a whole host of religious questions that can be classified in a wide variety of genres, including mysticism, poetry, exegesis, prayers, divine verses, correspondence, and laws. 

This paper explores the interplay of concealment and disclosure in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings with the aim of better understanding the ways in which he gradually unveiled the Bahá’í Faith, the only independent religion that has emerged in the modern Middle East. This process of unveiling through divine revelation is intimately connected with Bahá’u’lláh’s station and personage in a way that reveals a fundamental reality of the Bahá’í Faith and how it unfolded. Rather than imposing a theory or model on Bahá’u’lláh’s writings, this concept of concealment and disclosure comes from these writings themselves. This study, then, is an attempt to understand Bahá’u’lláh’s writings on their own terms. Methodologically, this paper takes a historical and linguistic approach to understand Bahá’u’lláh’s framework of concealment and disclosure and explore its implications on the meaning that Bahá’ís derive from his words. This paper is relevant to religious studies more generally in that it investigates the ways in which divinity is both manifest and hidden.

The analogy of the rising sun helps to understand the dialectic of concealment and disclosure in which Bahá’u’lláh claimed to gradually reveal divine truths. Bahá’u’lláh provides a complex image of the rising sun in which his revelation does not simply start out dark and grow brighter and brighter over time. Instead, the brightness of his revelation is relative to the spiritual capacity of the person(s) perceiving it. He writes, “Should the Word be allowed to release suddenly all the energies latent within it, no man could sustain the weight of so mighty a Revelation. Nay, all that is in heaven and on earth would flee in consternation before it (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, www.bahai.org/r/248365365).” In fact, he explains that the Sun of Revelation shines at all times and is sanctified from rising and setting. Nevertheless, at times it is seemingly hidden, and at other times it is outwardly manifest for all to see. Therefore, the sun remains in a fixed place, but human perception of the sun changes. To complete the analogy, the reality of Bahá’u’lláh’s divine station is fixed as the sun, but human perception of him changes. 

Bahá’u’lláh’s canon of writing, therefore, can be read as a gradual, progressive lifting of veils associated with his personage and divine reality. He gradually disclosed the nature of his station and his religion in three general periods, associated with his successive exile to Baghdád, Constantinople, Adrianople, and ‘Akká. This paper focuses on the first period in which his writings were penned primarily in Baghdád (1862-1863). During this period Bahá’u’lláh outwardly concealed his station; yet he attracted a large following of Bábís by disclosing divine mysteries in veiled, symbolic language. Bahá’u’lláh explains that he restrained his pen at this time in order to protect the faithful from religious leaders (Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, www.bahai.org/r/344214715). This period of concealment in Baghdád also served the purpose of allowing a period of transition after the execution of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh’s predecessor and founder of the Bábí movement. In a letter addressed to his successor (Him Whom God shall make manifest), the Báb requests that he “grant a respite of nineteen years as a token of Thy favor so that those who have embraced this Cause may be graciously rewarded by Thee (Selections from the Writings of the Báb, www.bahai.org/r/282056184).” In 1863, nineteen years after the inception of the Bábí movement, Bahá’u’lláh began to explicitly lift the veil of his station to a small group of his followers in the Riḍván garden outside of Baghdád. He then gradually unraveled this mystery to the public during the course of a subsequent decade. 

Bahá’u’lláh indicates that concealment and disclosure is a characteristic of every religion and that divine teachings are handed down by God to humankind relative to its collective spiritual capacity. In this way, humanity gradually warms up to new horizons of spiritual realities, norms, and laws. This concept of gradual unveiling relates to Bahá’u’lláh’s conception of human history writ large, which is often referred to as progressive revelation in which successive religions gradually disclose divine teachings, with each religion building on the previous. Bahá’u’lláh writes, for example, that Jesus concealed numerous truths, “but as He found none possessed of a hearing ear or a seeing eye He chose to conceal most of these things (Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, www.bahai.org/r/051995858).” The implication, then, is that these things which Jesus had concealed would be unveiled by subsequent manifestations of God. This idea of progressive revelation, in fact, concludes that every divine religious figure (Muḥammad, Moses, etc.) conceals certain truths which will be disclosed by their successor at the appointed hour of fulfillment.