Beyond this, many poets wrote poems in imitation of parts of Rumi's Mathnaví. One poem in the form and meter of Rumi's Mathnaví by Sohbat-e Lâri (d. 1835) was apparently understood among the Bábís as an allusion to or prediction of the advent of the Báb.[40] Táhirih took a particular interest in Sohbat's works and sometimes quoted from them. There is even a mathnaví written in praise of Bahá'u'lláh attributed to Táhirih.[41] Whether this poem is indeed hers or not, it is clear that the mathnaví was a form appreciated by many of the Bábís and, later on, by Iranian Bahá'ís. Hájí Mírzá Haydar-'Alí, for example, is said to have lived in seclusion for four months, during which time he took four books with him: The Koran, the Mathnaví of Rumi, the Bayán of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh's Iqán.[42] Nabíl-i Zarandí, author of the Dawn-Breakers, after completing his pilgrimage to the House of the Báb in Shiraz as per Bahá'u'lláh's instructions in the Súriy-i Hajj, composed a mathnaví describing the experience.[43] Nabíl also composed another mathnaví describing the history of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh.[44] Both of Nabíl's mathnavís seem to derive their inspiration from Bahá'u'lláh's own Mathnavíy-i Mubárak, but Rumi could not have been far from his mind, either; when describing Bahá'u'lláh's ascension, Nabíl twice quotes from Rumi's Mathnaví, including this line:[45]

When the rose has gone and the garden's passed
You'll hear no more tell of the nightingale

Summoned by the Ottoman authorities to Istanbul, where he arrived in August 1863, Bahá'u'lláh perhaps observed for the first time the rituals of the "dancing dervishes," or Mevlevis, a Sufi order dedicated to the memory, poetry and turning meditation of Rumi. Further exiled to Edirne, a city of about 100,000 people at the time, during the last week of December 1863, Bahá'u'lláh resided in the northeast part of the city, in the Murádiyyih quarter near the Mevlevi lodge. He moved to another house shortly thereafter, where he remained for about ten months, announcing his claim with increasing openness in tablets such as the "The Tablet of the Traveller" (Lawh-i Sayyáh) and the "Tablet of the Point" (Lawh-i Nuqtih).[46] Still within proximity of the Mevlevi lodge, at least one member of the Bahá'í entourage was in contact with the nearby Mevlevis.

Hájí Mírzá Haydar-'Alí describes in his memoirs[47] how a public encounter between Bahá'u'lláh and Mírzá Yahyá was arranged at the Sultan Selim mosque in Edirne in September of 1867. Bahá'u'lláh entered the mosque on a Friday and his presence caused the preacher to stop speaking in the midst of his sermon. Mírzá Yahyá failed to show up and Bahá'u'lláh eventually set out for home.[48] Along the way, Bahá'u'lláh heard the Mevlevi dervishes dancing, repeating their zekr:[49] huwa Allâh, yâ Allâh (He is God, O God!). Bahá'u'lláh indicated an intention to "visit" Rumi (Mowlânâ), and headed towards the Mevlevi lodge[50] with the governor, the mayor and various town notables respectfully following along, as if part of Bahá'u'lláh's retinue. Bahá'u'lláh entered the Mevlevis' lodge, followed by these dignitaries. Although well into the samâ' or meditative dancing, the Mevlevi dervishes stopped their turning and their music, and the hall fell silent. Only after Bahá'u'lláh had seated himself and his companions, and motioned to the dervishes, did they continue their turning ritual. Hájí Mírzá Haydar-'Alí describes this event as if an eye-witness, though he does not explicitly indicate that he was present. Haydar-'Alí does state that Bahá'u'lláh himself described the incident to him on the following day as a kind of miracle.[51]

As part of their turning ceremony, or "whirling," the Mevlevis almost certainly recited from parts of Rumi's Mathnaví, which they still do today, and seem to have been doing since the 14th century.[52] When Marion Jack made a pilgrimage to Edirne in 1933 to see Bahá'u'lláh's house, she painted a picture of this Mevlevi lodge.

But it was in Istanbul in the autumn of 1863 that Bahá'u'lláh completed his Mathnaví partly in response to the Mevlevis' devotion for Rumi's great Mathnavíy-i ma'navi, the "Spiritual Couplets." Although Rumi's Mathnaví was read wherever Persian was spoken, the Mevlevi order operated mostly in Anatolia, the Levant, and the Balkans. Although Rumi had lived in Konya, Mevlevi activity in the 19th century entered on Istanbul, where literally dozens of commentaries on Rumi's Mathnaví had been written in Turkish. In the closing lines of the Mathnavíy-i Mubárak, Bahá'u'lláh indirectly alludes to the fame of Rumi's Mathnaví, which begins with the reed pipe. Because translations of this part of Rumi's poem are widely available, I will not give it at length here,[53] but quote the opening lines in Sir William Jones' 1794 translation:

Hear, how yon reed in sadly pleasing tales
Departed bliss and present woe bewails!
"With me, from native banks untimely torn,
Love-warbling youths and soft-ey'd virgins mourn
O! Let the heart, by fatal absence rent,
Feel what I sing, and bleed when I lament"[54]

Indeed, the title chosen by Bahá'u'lláh, Mathnavíy-i Mubárak (the "blessed couplets") evokes the title of Rumi's work. Rumi derived the name of his Mathnavíy-i ma'navi (the "spiritual couplets") from the verse form it employs - rhyming couplets with the rhyme scheme following the pattern aabbccdd, etc. Poets generally employed the mathnaví form for narrative verse; Ferdowsi used it in the epic Shâh nâme, whereas Fakhr-e Gorgâni and Nezâmi used it in the romances Vis and Râmin and Layli and Majnun, respectively. Beginning with Sanâ'i, poets adapted this form to ethical-didactic and mystical themes, and Rumi modelled his narrative couplets on the genre of such works as exemplified in Sanâ'i and 'Attâr. The adjective ma'navi means relating to the inner meaning, or for concision's sake, "spiritual." Hence in English one sometimes encounters the translation "Spiritual Couplets" for Rumi's Mathnavíy-i ma'navi. Though many works prior to Rumi's Mathnaví and a great many more after Rumi employed this verse form, Rumi's work is usually known as the Mathnaví, par excellence. Already within a few generations after its composition, according to the testimony of Qâzi Najm al-Din-e Tashti, as reported by Aflâki, the book was commonly referred to simply as the Mathnaví: "When they say the name Mathnaví, reason naturally assumes the Mathnaví of Mowlânâ [Rumi] is meant."[55]

In addition to the title and the trope of the reed pipe which opens Rumi's Mathnaví and closes Bahá'u'lláh's, Bahá'u'lláh's poem shares the same meter as Rumi's poem. Both poems also allude frequently to the Biblical prophets and to Muhammad, and to Sufi interpretations of Islam. However, the Mathnaví of Rumi includes many rather lengthy tales in its 25,000 lines to illustrate the mystical points it makes. These include philosophical, humorous and even bawdy stories. Bahá'u'lláh's poem, which is far shorter, at 318 lines, does not digress into stories, as Rumi's work does.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Rumi's fame had even spread to Europe, where Hegel and other European philosophers and poets drew inspiration from him.[56] William Jones had described the Mathnaví as perhaps one of the most extraordinary books known to man and said of Rumi (Mowlavi):

I know of no writer, to whom the Maulavi can justly be compared, except Chaucer or Shakespeare.[57]

Factors bearing upon the provisional translation of the Mathnaví

Bahá'u'lláh's texts circulated in manuscript for a relatively short time, a period of only two or three decades, before they were lithographed or printed. He wrote out most of these letters and books in his own hand, of course, or verified his secretary's copy with his seal. But most Bahá'ís in Iran did not have access to these original holographs (manuscripts copied out by the hand of the author) of Bahá'u'lláh; instead, they wrote out their copies from copies that were made from Bahá'u'lláh's copy, and so on. Although these scribes took great care in copying out the works of Bahá'u'lláh, which they regarded as divine revelation, errors or lapses did sometimes occur. Certain scribes, such as Zaynu'l-Muqarribín, were known for the greater accuracy of their manuscripts[59] (a function of their level of learning in Persian and Arabic, as well as their care and precision in copying, and the legibility of their handscript); this indicates that there may have been at least some inferior manuscripts in circulation among the Bahá'ís, no doubt copied by individuals with insufficient knowledge to understand all the words (Arabic being a foreign language for most Iranians, a certain degree of learning was necessary to correctly read and therefore copy the books and letters of Bahá'u'lláh).

Thus, some relatively minor variants are reflected in the wording of a few passages of various manuscripts of Bahá'u'lláh's works. This is also true for the Mathnavíy-i Mubárak: a few lines are preserved in slightly different readings in various manuscripts. As we have seen above, the poem was apparently composed over a period of time, and the poem may have been shared with family members and close companions at various points before it was completed in final form. The Kitáb-i Badí', completed several years later in Edirne, quotes several lines from Bahá'u'lláh's Mathnaví, and at this time Bahá'u'lláh may have chosen to revise these lines slightly from the earlier version written down in Istanbul or Baghdad. In one letter, 'Abdu'l-Bahá quotes four lines from the "Mathnaví of the Abhá Beauty," but gives variants that are not to be found in any of the editions mentioned above.[60] Therefore, the attested variants may indeed stem, not necessarily from scribal error, but from Bahá'u'lláh's own revisions. We can hypothesize that an earlier version of the poem, dating to before Bahá'u'lláh's departure from Baghdad, circulated among the Bahá'ís in Iraq, in both written and oral form. A later, and slightly amended recension of the poem may have circulated among the Bahá'í's in Istanbul, where Bahá'u'lláh completed and perhaps revised the poem.

Literary scholars attempt to resolve any textual variants reflected in the manuscript tradition by collecting as many manuscripts as possible and comparing the readings of the most authoritative manuscripts. Generally speaking, a manuscript written by the author is considered the most authoritative; next in rank comes the oldest manuscripts, and after that, the most carefully copied manuscripts. By collating the various manuscripts, an editor can reach conclusions about which readings are oldest or most likely, and on this basis, a critical text is established, with the variants noted in the footnotes.

Insofar as I am aware, no effort has as yet been undertaken to establish a critical text of Bahá'u'lláh's Mathnaví on the basis of the existing manuscripts. At least two important manuscripts of the poem, both copied out by noted Bahá'ís, and probably both copied within twenty years of the poem's composition, exist: one manuscript by Zaynu'l-Muqarribín, copied on 8 Ramadán 1299 (24 July 1882), and one by Mishkín Qalam, which is undated.

However, the Persian text of the poem has been published at least five times, as follows:[61]

• 1914 (1332 A.H.), printed in Cairo by Faraj Allâh Zakiy al-Kordi in an edition which included the text of the Seven Valleys and the Hidden Words.
• 1932 (89 B.E.), jellygraphed in Iran, a version in the hand of Jináb-i Musammá-parast, including poems of Táhirih and Na'ím, and an apologetic treatise by the latter.
• 1953 (110 B.E.), printed in Delhi in a volume of 54pp.
  
• 1964 (121 B.E.), in âsâr-e qalam-e a'lâ, volume 3 (Tehran: Bahá'í Publishing Trust; reprinted in New Delhi by the Bahá'í Publishing Trust).
• 1992 (149 B.E.) a facsimile reproduction of Mishkín Qalam's calligraphic copy of the poem, published with an afterword by Vahid Rafati.

For the purposes of this translation, I have compared the 1914, 1964 and 1992 editions mentioned above, as well as the text of the Kitáb-i Badí', in which Bahá'u'lláh quotes twelve lines of his own Mathnaví. In the endnotes to the poem, I have indicated most of the variant readings found in these three published editions of the poem. However, before we can claim to have a critical edition of the Persian text, a rigorous comparison of the surviving manuscript exemplars, and not just the printed texts, should be undertaken, noting and evaluating all variants (minor though they may be) in the number and order of lines and readings of certain words. Obviously, no translation could be considered completely accurate unless and until a critical edition of the original language text it renders has been established.

Interpretation and the translation process

Jews, Christians and Muslims continue to find new understandings of the Bible and the Koran in the light of theological developments, social and cultural transformation, and philological and historical scholarship. Each new reading, if valid, does not necessarily invalidate prior understandings, but deepens or tempers them, adding a new aspect to the multi-faceted aspects of the truth enshrined in that text. A rather extensive philosophy of the meaning of historical and religious texts has been developed over the last 150 years or so; the discussion of such matters is beyond the scope of this article, but readers interested in such matters can turn to the works on hermeneutics (e.g., Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method) and to the works of theologians influenced by "Process Theology" (as outlined by Alfred North Whitehead).

Bahá'ís have been particularly successful at abstracting the transcendent ethical and social message of their scripture, and the process of understanding the immediate historical context of the writings of Bahá'u'lláh is underway: Fâzel-e Mâzandarâni, Eshrâq-Khâvari, Taherzadeh, and more recently, Amanat and Cole have all made major contributions to the dating of the books and tablets of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh, and the historical circumstances to which they respond. Since the situating of texts in their particular historical context can help us gain a deeper appreciation of the author's immediate intentions and the audience's immediate understandings, the Bahá'í community ought to be open to the ongoing unfoldment of the meaning of revelation through the study of Bahá'u'lláh's texts in their micro-historical environment.

In making this provisional translation, I have tried to uncover historical information that would help to explain some of the allusions in the poem. I have also tried to recover, wherever I could, the Koranic, Sufi and Babi referents. This information is given in the above introduction and in the endnotes to the poem, in hopes that this will help re-create one horizon of the poem, though much work of this nature remains to be done for this text. This project will not be important to all or perhaps most of the Bahá'ís interested in reading or reciting Bahá'u'lláh's poetry. My hope has been, however, to provide background information to enhance a reader's appreciation of the poem without dictating how the poem should be interpreted or understood. This seems to me the most appropriate approach to take for future translation of the corpus of Bahá'u'lláh's poetry, in the absence of an authoritative interpreter of Bahá'í scripture. The meaning for me will be slightly different than the meaning another reader, with a different life experience, different knowledge base and different theological outlook, will derive.

Toward a provisional translation of Bahá'u'lláh's Mathnaví

The following provisional translation is offered in accordance with the permission given in a letter of the Universal House of Justice dated 30 June 1999, indicating that translations of Bahá'í scripture made by individuals may be published in circulars and journals "without review other than by the editors of such publications," as long as they are "clearly identified as 'provisional translations.'" This new arrangement, it is hoped, will lead to "the availability of a greater amount of translated material and avoid the present delays in approving fully authorized translations."

The version offered here is by no means, therefore, meant as a definitive translation of Bahá'u'lláh's poem; it is merely an illustration of one possible approach to rendering this and other poems of Bahá'u'lláh into English. That the translation stands in need of revision I will be the first to admit. Aside from improvements which can undoubtedly be made to the wording of the English, there are several points in the text which remain unclear or uncertain to me (most of these have been indicated in the endnotes). While I have suggested specific circumstances for some of the allusions in the poem, many others remain to be elucidated. Furthermore, one may reasonably disagree on the degree to which implicit historical allusions should be signalled in a translation; perhaps a hermeneutic of the timeless applicability of the images and ethics of the poem is to be preferred, particularly within a community reading the text as scripture.

Despite the tentativeness of the reading, I am nevertheless emboldened to offer this effort here in public because of the following factors:

1)   It is perhaps better to give English-speaking Bahá'ís some idea, however inadequate and provisional, of the contents and style of the poem for devotional purposes, than for them to have no access at all to the poem.

2)   Making a provisional translation available in this journal to a wider audience seems to me the best way to highlight problems and solicit improvements from translators with technical expertise, those with further insights into the allusions and references in the poem, and readers of literary taste.[64] For this reason, I have numbered the verses, to aid readers wishing to compare the lines of the poem with the original Persian.

3)   Though he translated a number of prayers with poetic imagery and sonorous phrasings, Shoghi Effendi did not translate any formal poetry of Bahá'u'lláh. The Bahá'í community will therefore need to experiment to find satisfying ways to render these poems into English, whether it be artistic prose, free verse, blank verse or rhyming verse. This translation is then not only provisional but also experimental, in that prior translations have not attempted to render Bahá'í scripture into traditional English verse forms.

Approaches to the translation of poetry

In Persian literature, poetry prior to the mid-20th century invariably observed rhyme. There are different rhyme schemes, but there are no poems which dispense with rhyme altogether. Due to the structure of its verb system, along with other morphological features of both its native lexicon and the large influx of lexical borrowings from Arabic, Persian is a rhyme-rich language. Although it is of course possible to produce rhyming translations into English,[65] the English reservoir of rhyme is far smaller, and this may often result in either a relatively free rendering, less precision in the rendering of specific terms, and/or a translation that seems artificially archaic. English is an analytic, not an inflected language, and English word order has become increasingly fixed. Modern English verse is less supple than it once was; poets three hundred years ago did not feel as constrained by the natural word order of English and would blithely place objects before verbs, or verbs before subjects. Such prepositioning is now largely out of favour amongst those who still write and read traditional verse meters. Too much finessing of normal syntax in order to get the proper rhyme at the end of a line will likely leave modern readers of English bemused and disoriented.[66]

However, for anyone who believes that form is an essential component of meaning, or for anyone wishing to experience a verse poem in translation as a measured rhythmical concatenation of syllables, a simple prose paraphrase will not do. Particularly in the case of Bahá'u'lláh's Mathnaví, which was designed for recitation, and the cadenced phrases of which unquestionably contribute to the effect of the poem on the listener, I felt it desirable and more authentic to translate to some form of English verse.

Blank verse, which observes a regular meter while dispensing with rhyme, seemed the best solution. Invented by Surrey in the 16th century, and employed by Milton for his Biblical epic, Paradise Lost, this form has been used by Shakespeare and others as a dignified vehicle for dramatic and epic poetry. Blank verse does not force the translator to stray as far from the original as a rhyming translation might, but it does impinge upon the translator's diction by limiting the number of syllables she may use per line, and by imposing an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. These constraints obviously affect the translation's precision and its ability to explain technical or theological terms. However, these constraints also help to shape the translation and create an aural experience similar to that of a person experiencing the poem in its original verse form.

But blank verse is by no means the only alternative. Other English verse forms available to a translator might include Skeltonics, the cadenced phrasings that John Skelton developed in the 16th century. These would give the advantage of breaking up metrical lines into parallel phrases that do not need to count syllables. A phrase-by-phrase translation, rather than a line-by-line one, would perhaps afford the translator the room to be more precise in formulating English equivalents of the Persian. However, most ears find Skeltonics awkward and jerky after a short while.

Poulter's meter (an alexandrine twelve-syllable line followed by a fourteen-syllable line) would also allow more precision in finding English equivalents for the Mathnaví, because it would give the English twenty-six syllables for every twenty-two syllables of Persian, as opposed to the twenty syllables of English for every twenty-two of Persian that iambic pentameter gives us to work with. Poulter's meter is rather old fashioned, however, and does not seem as successful in conveying a sense of rhythm.

The accentual prosody of Old English has been successfully mimicked in modern English, but seems far more appropriate to traditional epic and martial works than to religious verse. On the other hand, non-regular free-verse cadences, such as Walt Whitman uses, would perhaps work quite well.

I have chosen blank verse, in iambic pentameter, though this may not meet every reader's taste. As with all metrical poetry, variation is important; an entire poem of exactingly regular iambic pentameter would make for a lilting, lulling, if not stupefying, litany of syllables. In the translation below, the reader will find the iamb frequently abandoned for an anapest or dactyl or spondee, sometimes to fit the meaning in the line, occasionally for dramatic effect. Sometimes you will need to read words with syncopated syllables (the noun "confines," for example, may be accented unnaturally on its second syllable to fit the iamb), or with elided syllables ("mysteries" for example, will usually be read in this poem as two syllables: "mys-tries"). Such are the poetic licenses of which one speaks for verse, though I have generally avoided graphically marking elisions (e.g., Th' Ethereal); versifiers in the 18th and 19th century would have done this as second nature, but it looks rather unfashionable today.

This Mathnaví, while theologically preparing the way for the wider proclamation of Bahá'u'lláh's station, I have treated as more of a devotional text, intended for recitation like a prayer, than as an informational or doctrinal tablet about belief. It does, of course, elaborate certain ideas about progressive revelation, which Bahá'u'lláh had earlier put forth in the Iqán, and it also employs Sufi terminology. But it will probably have more use as a work to be recited in Bahá'í gatherings for its inspirational qualities, rather than as a text to be studied like the Iqán or the Tablet of Wisdom. For this reason, it seems important to translate the poem as a poem.

What follows is, then, an effort to create a poetic effect through verse using a recognisably Bahá'í vocabulary that nevertheless shares somewhat more in common with the late-twentieth century literary idioms of American English. For example, I do not use the archaic "thee" and "thou," nor do I use the early modern English verbal inflections (doest, doth, etc.).

These days translators of poetry will often drop some lines, or alter the meaning slightly by introducing images or situations more native in the culture of the target language, in the belief that this creates a more successful poem in translation. They may well be correct, but I do not agree with this premise and have not left out lines. I have tried to convey the imagery and import of each line without greatly altering or nativising it.

I have been greatly assisted in understanding the poem by the comments of many individuals who read drafts of the translation, especially Dr. Khazeh Fananapazir, whose immense knowledge and unfailing kindness have been instrumental to me in understanding the intended referent of too many lines to note each one individually. I am grateful to Dr. Fananapazir for suggesting several improvements to the translation. Likewise, Dominic Brookshaw at Oxford University has painstakingly compared a draft of this translation to the original Persian and provided copious comments and commentary which have helped make the English more precise.[67] My sincere hope is that others reading this provisional translation will further improve it by forwarding their comments and corrections.

Jump to Translation of this Tablet.

1. The Bahá'í community uses an official transliteration system which Shoghi Effendi, in his capacity of Guardian of the Bahá'í community, adopted in the 1920s to standardise spellings of the many Persian and Arabic terms and names being rendered into English. This transliteration system was, at that time, the academic standard, but now has fallen rather out of fashion. The Library of Congress system remains close to the Bahá'í system, though the Encyclopedia of Islam differs in several respects from this, as does the Encyclopædia Iranica and most of the major Iranian studies or middle east studies journals. The most recent transliteration norms for Persian words would more likely render Bahâ'i and Bahâ Allâh, but insofar as the purpose of accent marks in modern English is primarily to help readers pronounce words with which they are unfamiliar, it does not seem necessary to use accent marks for words like these, which, I would argue, have become domesticated in English and should be rendered as Bahaullah and Bahai.
         In this article, however, the names of works by Bahá'u'lláh and the Báb, as well as the personal names of individuals known from Bahá'í history books are given according to the official transliteration system, for the ease of readers looking for further references in Bahá'í secondary literature (with the exception that I do not underline digraphs or underdot letters, hence you will find here: sh for sh, th for th, t for t-dot, etc., and I do not give the dash after the -i of the ezâfe [Kitáb-i Iqán for Kitáb-i-Iqán]). Other Persian names, however, such as the names of Persian poets (Rumi, 'Attâr, Hâfez, Sâ'eb), are Romanized according to modern Persianist conventions. Please note that the Bahá'í spellings for Karbilá and Mihdí differ from the technically agreed upon vocalisations of Karbalá and Mahdí, but I have elected to follow the Bahá'í system here for the benefit of readers familiar with these works in Bahá'í sources.
2. Stephen Lambden's translation of Rashh-i 'amá appeared in Bahá'í Studies Bulletin 3:2 (1984); Juan Cole's translation of the "Dove Ode" appears on the internet at the Bahá'í library site: https://bahai-library.com/provisionals/ode.dove.html.
3. Originally published in Bahá'í Studies Bulletin 2:3 (December 1983): 105-112; Lambden's version subsequently circulated on the internet with the comments of a few readers, and is now available in a revised version at https://bahai-library.com/provisionals/hallelujah.html, along with a more literary version by Sen McGlinn.
4. These, along with a number of Bahá'u'lláh's other poems, are found in 'Abd al-Hamid Eshrâq-Khâvari's Mâ'ede-ye Âsmâni, vol. 4 (Mo'assese-ye matbu'ât-e Amri, 129 B.E./ 1972-3) 176-211.
5. We might render this title as "The Blessed Couplets," though the word "blessed" (mubárak) is also used as part of a title of Bahá'u'lláh, The Blessed Beauty (Jamál-i mubárak), so that Persian Bahá'ís would perceive this as a double meaning: the Blessed Couplets, and/or the Couplets of the Blessed One. Either way, the title certainly alludes to the famous poem of Rumi, called the Masnavi-ye ma'navi, usually translated as "the Spiritual Couplets."
6. An excellent effort is underway at the website http://h-net2.msu.edu/~bahai/bahatext.htm, which should help not only to date the works of Bahá'u'lláh more precisely, but also to identify variants in the existing manuscripts.
7. 'Abd al-Hamid Eshrâq-Khâvari, Ganj-e shâyegân ([Tehran]: Mo'assese-ye matbu'ât-e Amri, 124 B.E. / 1967-68) 71-2. The spiritual significance of Baghdad and Bahá'u'lláh's house there can be deduced from the fact that the the Kitáb-i Aqdas (K32 and K133; Q&A 25, 29, 32; n54, n154) ordains an obligatory pilgrimage to either Bahá'u'lláh's house in Baghdad, or to the house of the Báb in Shiraz, the places where the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh were respectively living when they revealed their stations as Manifestations of God. In the two tablets called Súriy-i Hajj, Bahá'u'lláh prescribed certain rituals for the pilgrimage to each of these houses. See Adib Taherzadeh, Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh 1:212 and especially 2:240, which indicates that the provisions of the Súriy-i Hajj "were later affirmed in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and will be implemented in the future..." However, Bahá'u'lláh later abrogated some of these pilgrimage rites (specifically, the shaving of the head) in the Kitáb-i Aqdas, as per the Questions and Answers section (see Aqdas, Q&A 10; n54).
8. Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh: Adrianople, 1863-68 (Oxford: George Ronald, 1977) 2:29. The late Mr. Taherzadeh was the first person to sketch in English the history of Bahá'u'lláh's books and tablets. His mammoth work on the subject provides more specific detail on his unpublished writings than is found in Hasan Balyuzi's Bahá'u'lláh: King of Glory, though the latter work gives more systematic biographical information. A large number of articles on various tablets and books of Bahá'u'lláh were commissioned and completed for the Bahá'í Encyclopedia project, but as this work has not yet been published, the vast amount of new and supplemental information it would add to our knowledge of Bahá'u'lláh's writings still remains inaccessible.
9. Vahid Rafati, in his postscript to the facsimile edition of Mishkín Qalam's calligraphic Mathnaví Mubárak ([Langenhain Germany: Bahá'í Verlag?], 1992) 1-2.
10. The latter conjecture about the revision of lines is based upon the fact that there are minor differences in certain lines of Bahá'u'lláh's Mathnaví as they appear in the published text of the poem, and as they are quoted in his Kitáb-i Badí'. I believe these differences (which are noted in the endnotes to the provisional translation of the poem which accompanies this article) are more likely due to revision, though it cannot yet be ruled out that they stem from scribal errors made during the decades that manuscripts of the Mathnaví and the Kitáb-i Badí' were copied out by hand, before they had been published by a printing press.
11. Fâzel-e Mâzandarâni, Asrâr al-âsâr 2:32-34.
12. He was appointed as the Shiite religious judge of Istanbul by the Persian Ambassador, Hâji Mirzâ Husayn Khân.
13. As I do not have access to the edition in the hand of Zayn al-Muqarribín printed in Tehran, quotations from the Kitáb-i Badí' (99-100) are taken from a manuscript copied in shekaste hand, 15 lines to the page, which was acquired by Hand of the Cause Abul-Qasim Faizi in the fall of 1940.
14. Eshrâq-Khâvari, Ganj-e shâyegân 67.
15. It is possible, given the Ottoman government's extensive penchant for record keeping, that a copy of this tablet has been preserved somewhere in the vast Ottoman archives.
16. Denis MacEoin translated the text in his Rituals in Babism and Bahá'ísm (London: British Academic Press/I.B. Tauris, 1994) 169-172; it is also available on the internet at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/ ~jrcole/bahai/naqus/naqus.htm.
17. Kitáb-i Badí', page 263 of a manuscript in shekaste script acquired by Abul-Qasim Faizi in the fall of 1940 (303 in the manuscript copied out by Zaynu'l-Muqarribín).
18. A translation of this by Juan Cole is available on line at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~bahai/trans/vol3/ ashab.htm and also at https://bahai-library.com/provisionals/ashab.html.
19. A poem of an indefinite number of lines (stichs), all composed in a specific meter, where the first and second hemistich (mesrâ') of each line rhyme, but the rhyme differs in each successive stich (conforming to the pattern aa bb cc dd ee, etc.)
20. Catalectic hexameter Ramal, consisting of six feet of four syllables each, alternating in the pattern long-short-long-long, divided in two hemistichs, with caesura in the middle after the first rhyme word. In the Mahzuf, or catalectic version of Ramal, the last foot in each hemistich (i.e., the third and sixth feet of the hexameter line) is truncated to long-short-long, as follows:

    - _ - - | - _ - - |- _ - || - _ - -| - _ - -| - _ - 
    
    1         2        3     A  4        5        6    A

21. For example, the English translation of the Seven Valleys makes an allusion to the Bayán in the Exordium explicit, though this word would likely have been read by non-Bábís as an allusion to the Koran (verses 75:19 or 96:5), with the meaning "explanation", and not as the title of either of the two works of the Báb by that name. The same is true of the reference to "all things" (kullu shay'), which had a special esoteric significance for Bábís, but was also a term well-known to Sufis and the Sunni ulama without any necessarily sectarian connotations.
22. Mâ'ede-ye âsmâni, ed. 'Abd al-Hamid Eshrâq-Khâvari (Mo'assese-ye Melli-ye matbu'ât-e Amri, 129 B.E. / 1972) 4:33.
23. It does, however, address specific theological concerns such as the meaning of qiyámat (resurrection), liqá Alláh (the meeting with God), or ra j'at (return), but tends to explain them in metaphorical and non-technical or non-esoteric terms.
24. See Juan Cole's "Bahá'u'lláh and the Naqshbandi Sufis in Iraq, 1854-1856," in From Iran East and West, ed. Juan Cole and Moojan Momen (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1984) 1-28.
25. See the articles "Bahâ al-Din Naqshband" and "Baghdadi, Mawlânâ Khâlid Ziâ al-Din" in Encyclopedia Iranica.
26. 'Abdul-Bahá, as recalled by Mírzá Mahmúd-i Zarqání, Badâye' al-âsâr (Bombay, 1914; reprinted Hofheim-Langenhain: Bahá'í-Verlag, 1982) 1:175.
27. Mention is made of these doctrines in the 7th of the Seven Valleys (True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness, p39 in the Gail/Khan translation). Naim Nabil Akbar and Nader Saiedi have studied the Bahá'í scripture's interpretation of the Sufi quest in an article originally called "Ab'âd-e soluk" [The Dimensions of the Quest], most of which has been incorporated into Nader Saiedi's 'Aql, din va jâme'e dar andishe-ye Bahâ'i [Reason, religion and society in Bahai thought] (Dundas, Ontario: Persian Institute for Bahá'í Studies, 1988).
28. Taherzadeh, Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh 2:27-8.
29. Taherzadeh, Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh 2:24-5, reports that Bahá'u'lláh encouraged his companions to adopt the guise of Bektâshi dervishes on their way to Istanbul as a measure of protecting them from recognition as "heretical" Bábís. However, the disguise of Sufis seems to have been used mostly by Mírzá Yahyá, who tied a black cord around his head and carried the begging bowl of a dervish in order to dissociate himself from the Persians in the entourage, who would have been openly identified as Bábís. Mírzá Yahyá travelled with an Arab companion and initially maintained contact only with the Arab and Turkish members of the party, according to a tablet from 'Abdu'l-Bahá and the memoirs of Áqá Muhammad Ridá-yi Qannád, as reported in Hasan Balyuzi, Bahá'u'lláh: King of Glory (Oxford: George Ronald, 1980) 183-4. Finally, outside of Diyárbakr, Mírzá Yahyá abandoned this disguise (ibid 190), once it had become clear that the party of Bábí/Bahá'í travellers were not in danger from government authorities. Though there was at least one actual dervish among the 72 members of Bahá'u'lláh's party, Bahá'u'lláh and most of his companions travelled openly. Námiq Páshá, the Governor of Baghdad, had provided a ten-man mounted military escort and a letter of introduction for Bahá'u'lláh, instructing the officials along the way to treat the party well. At most of the towns along the way (with the exceptions of a region near Mosul controlled by Yazidi Kurds, and Diyárbakr, where the Governor was uncooperative), Bahá'u'lláh was met with respect by the local dignitaries. See Balyuzi 175ff, and Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By 156-7.
30. We may safely exclude the possibility of writing in Turkish, even though Bahá'u'lláh lived the latter half of his life in an area where Turkish was the offical language of government. Bahá'u'lláh probably did not know literary Turkish well enough to compose a poem in that language, and, besides, few of the Bábis to whom Bahá'u'lláh is directly addressing his early writings would have known Turkish, but were primarily versed in Persian and/or Arabic.
31. Ruhollah Mehrâbkhâni, Maqâm-e she'r dar adyân (Tehran: Bahá'í Youth Committee, 1331/1952) 23ff, 33-35.
32. Ibid 35-6.
33. Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, Book 6, lines 777-805 in Reynold Nicholson's critical edition.
34. For the details of Rumi's popularity, see my Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000).
35. Rawzat al-jannât (Beirut: Dâr al-Islâmiyya, 1991) 8:63.
36. Nâmdâr was the father of Áqá 'Azízu'lláh, who became a Bahá'í in 1874, and later met with Leo Tolstoy to proclaim the Bahá'í Faith; see Hasan Balyuzi, Eminent Bahá'ís In the Time of Bahá'u'lláh (Oxford: George Ronald, 1985) 178.
37. Selections from this work are offered in Sharh-e Masnavi, ed. Mostafâ Borujerdi (Tehran: Vezârat-e Farhang va Ershâd-e Eslâmi, 1374/1995).
38. Nicholson edition, Book 1, line 2467.
39. This according to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own testimony in Memorials of the Faithful, tr. Marzieh Gail (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1971) 30.
40. Mehrâbkhâni, Maqâm-e she'r 93-104.
41. Ibid., 106-110.
42. Taherzadeh, Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh 2:70.
43. Eshrâq-Khâvari, Ganj-e shâyegân 83-5. Nabíl's masnavi is called the "Couplets of Reunion and Separation," and this title may have something to do with the section in Bahá'u'lláh's Mathnaví (see lines 270ff), which addresses the question of reunion (divine immanence) and separation (divine transcendence).
44. Masnavi-ye Nabil-e Zarandi dar târikh-e amr-e Bahâ'i va so'ud-e Hazrat-e Bahâ Allâh (Cairo: Mohyi al-Din Sabri-ye Kordi, 1924), and recently reprinted in Germany (Langenhain: Lajne-ye Melli-ye Nashr-e Âsâr-e Amri be Lesân-e Fârsi va 'Arabi, 152 B.E./1995).
45. Masnavi-ye Nabil-e Zarandi 70 and 76. The theme of this line seems to echo in Bahá'u'lláh's Hidden Words, Persian #15. The poem of Rumi translated here is from his Mathnaví, 1:29. The other lines quoted by Nabíl are 3:4718 and 3:4716, all according to Nicholson's edition.
46. See Balyuzi, King of Glory 219-20.
47. The Delight of Hearts, trans. A.Q. Faizi (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1980) 22-24.
48. Shoghi Effendi dates this incident with Mírzá Yahyá to September 1867 (Jamádíyu'l-avval 1284), and the details given by the Guardian in God Passes By 168-9 (perhaps based upon Nabíl's unpublished history of Bahá'u'lláh), differ slightly from the account given by Mírzá Haydar-'Alí. The Guardian does not mention Bahá'u'lláh's visit to the Mevlevi lodge at all.
49. Or dhikr, literally, "remembrance," a mantra-like chant used by Sufis in their devotions. Bahá'u'lláh instructs Bahá'ís to chant the zekr "Alláh-u-Abhá" 95 times daily.
50. These lodges, called khâneqâh in Persian and usually tekke in Turkish, were hospices and centres for Sufis, much like a monastery, where adepts and masters of a particular order would live. Most of the major cities of the Ottoman empire had a Mevlevi lodge, as well as the lodges of some other Sufi orders, such as the Refâ'is, the Bektâshis, the Jelvetis, etc.
51. Haydar-'Alí, Delight of Hearts 23-4.
52. See Chapter 10 of my Rumi: Past and Present, East and West.
53. Chapters 13 and 14 of my Rumi: Past and Present give a history of translations of Rumi's Masnavi; a recent attempt to render the "Song of the Reed Pipe" to English can be found in Chapter 8 of that work.
54. Asiatick Researches of 1794, in Collected Works of William Jones 4:230-31.
55. Shams al-Din Aflâki, Manâqeb al-'ârefin, ed. Tahsin Yazici, 2 vols. (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1959) 597.
56. See Rumi: Past and Present, Chapter 10, for the activities of the Mevlevis in Istanbul; for the history of Rumi's reception in the West, see chapters 12-14.
57. The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Cannon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 632, 735.
58. This is not to say that the printing process does not also introduce changes into a work over time (by changing spellings, by editing, abridging, etc.). However, the large number of examples of a given text that the printing process creates makes for more stable texts in print culture.
59. See, for example, the comments of 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Memorials of the Faithful 153, about his "faultless care" in copying the tablets.
60. Montakhabât-e makâtib, 3:227. We may either assume that 'Abdu'l-Bahá quoted these from memory, inexactly, or that he had heard Bahá'u'lláh recite the poem in this manner, at variance with the written version, or that he had access to yet a different manuscript of the poem.
          Three of the lines quoted in this letter have minor variants (haqiqat for elâhi; ma'âni for elâhi; yowm for ruz). One of the lines, however, exhibits a significant difference from the reading attested in the published manuscripts: lines 148 and 149 of the published text of the poem are condensed into one line and given a different ending, an ending which eliminates one particular textual difficulty. Âsâr-e qalam-e a'la, volume three, has:

    vay to az khamr-e 'enâyat gashte mast
      hich yâd-at âyad az ruz-e alast
    goft yâd âyad marâ ân sowt o goft
      u be-day bud o nabâshad shegoft

    (See the text of the translation below.)
    
    'Abdu'l-Bahá's letter, on the other hand, renders the following:

    hich yâd-at âyad az ruz-e alast
    goft âri chunke andar vay bod-ast
    
    Do you recall the day of "am I not"?
    He said, "Yes, for it was on that day"

61. The information on the 1932 and 1953 editions of the text comes from Vahid Rafati's afterword to the facsimile reproduction of Mishkín Qalam's manuscript of the text, Mathnavíy-i Mubárak (n.p., 1992) 2-3.
62. Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i Iqán, tr. Shoghi Effendi, 255.
63. This small volume of poetry (52pp) appeared in the series Colección de Poesía Juan Ramón Jimenez (ISBN: 84-8163-103-5). The version by Juan A. Guzmán seems quite accurate, and includes a glossary of technical terms. Guzmán's prologue (dated 1995) also provides a concise historical introduction to Bahá'u'lláh's writings. Without mentioning his source(s), Guzmán twice asserts that Bahá'u'lláh composed the Mathnaví in a single night in 1863 during his stay in Constantinople/Istanbul (7, 9).
64. Indeed, substantive corrections have been made even to official translations, such as the Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre), subsequent to its first publication in 1978 (see the supplement, which included an index and 6 pages of errata).
65. One may turn to the works of Dick Davis for a modern example; see his The Legend of Seyâvash and his earlier The Conference of the Birds, by Ferdowsi and 'Attâr, respectively, both published by Penguin.
66. Most modern poets writing in rhyme do not feel the freedom to prepose verbs before subjects or objects before subjects, and other licenses which poets did not feel the least bit of discomfort in employing from the 16th through the 19th century.
67. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their suggestions on various points, which came via the Tarjuman discussion list, where the first draft of the poem was offered: Iskandar Hai (who graciously supplied me with a copy of the 1914/1332 text); Nosratollah Zamani (who helped me collate and evaluate the readings of the various texts); Ahang Rabbani (who made valuable suggestions about the reading of lajlâj and pointed out the letter from Mirza Haydar 'Alí to 'Abdu'l-Bahá in which lines of the poem are quoted); Sen McGlinn, Juan Cole, Peter Terry, Susan Maneck, Todd Lawson, Stephen Phelps, Iraj Ayman, and Manuchehr Salmanpour.