The Hidden Words

The work announces its own purpose in a short preamble: this is that which hath descended from the realm of glory, the inner essence of what the tongues of the prophets have uttered aforetime, taken and clothed in brevity as a token of grace, that all may stand faithful to the covenant of God. What follows are not laws or arguments but addresses, God speaking directly to the soul under names that map the soul's conditions: O Son of Spirit for counsels of the heart's nobility, O Son of Man for tenderness and testing, O Son of Dust for warnings against attachment, O My Servant for the summons to action. The first Arabic word sets the tone of the whole, counselling the possession of a pure, kindly and radiant heart as an ancient and imperishable sovereignty. Recurring themes bind the two parts: love as the reason for creation, justice named the best beloved of all things in God's sight, death made a messenger of joy, wealth and poverty weighed by detachment, the nearness of God to the one who remembers him.

The Persian part grows more imagistic, with nightingales, gardens and the friend, drawing on the idiom of Persian mystical poetry while redirecting it. Bahai practice has answered the book's design: passages are memorised, set to music, and read in devotional gatherings across the worldwide community, and Shoghi Effendi's English translation fixed phrases now common in Bahai speech.

Baha'u'llah revealed the Hidden Words around 1858, in the middle years of the Baghdad exile that followed his imprisonment in Tehran, a period that also produced the Seven Valleys and, in 1861, the Kitab-i-Iqan. The community's memory, transmitted through Abdu'l-Baha and the early chronicles, pictures portions of the text composed as Baha'u'llah paced the banks of the Tigris in meditation. An earlier designation for the collection was the Hidden Book of Fatimih, linking it to a Shia tradition of a book of consolation revealed to Fatima after the death of her father, a promised book whose appearance would mark the promised age; by adopting and transforming the motif, the work quietly signalled a messianic claim years before Baha'u'llah's open declaration in 1863. The bilingual structure serves two audiences of the original milieu, the Arabic terse and lapidary, the Persian warmer and more lyrical, and the two parts are treated as one book with two registers rather than an original and a translation.

In the Bahai canon the Hidden Words is classed among the ethical and mystical writings rather than the legal ones, yet Shoghi Effendi called it a treasury of divine mysteries and counted his own translation, begun in 1923 and refined through 1954, among his most careful works. It is often the first Bahai scripture given to inquirers, and remains the most widely translated of Baha'u'llah's writings.