Bahá'í Faith: Unity of Religions: Baha'u'llah, the Bab, and the Mystical Path of Progressive Revelation - The Seven Valleys and the Birth of a New Wor

Baha'u'llah, the Bab, and the Mystical Path of Progressive Revelation - The Seven Valleys and the Birth of a New World Faith from Persian Mysticism

The youngest of the world's independent religions holds one of its oldest secrets: the mystical path is one, and revelation never ends.

In the mid-nineteenth century, in the messianic ferment of Qajar Persia - among Shaykhi esotericists awaiting the Promised One and Sufi mystics singing of annihilation in the Beloved - a merchant of Shiraz declared himself the Gate. Within six years the Bab lay executed by firing squad in Tabriz and thousands of his followers had perished. And in a lightless Tehran dungeon called the Black Pit, a Persian nobleman received the vision that would transform the Babi remnant into a world faith: Baha'u'llah, "the Glory of God," whose forty years of exile and imprisonment produced over a hundred volumes of scripture - mystical treatises, laws, and open letters summoning the kings of the earth.

This volume of the Esoteric Religious Studies Series traces the Baha'i Faith from its esoteric Persian roots to its global present - not as a footnote to Islam, nor a modern curiosity, but as a complete revelation with a mystical core that speaks the classical language of the Sufi path while announcing something without precedent: a Covenant that has preserved a world religion from schism for over 150 years.

WITHIN THIS VOLUME:
- The Esoteric Roots - Shaykhi mysticism, Sufi millenarianism, and the Persian expectation of the Qa'im that prepared the Bab's declaration of 1844
- The Gate and the Glory - the lives of the Bab and Baha'u'llah: the Bayan, the Black Pit, the Garden of Ridvan, and the exiles that ended in the prison-city of 'Akka
- Progressive Revelation - the doctrine of one unfolding divine education: Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab, and Baha'u'llah as mirrors of a single Sun
- The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys - Baha'u'llah's mystical masterpieces mapped stage by stage: Search, Love, Knowledge, Unity, Contentment, Wonderment, and True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness
- The Unknowable God and His Manifestations - an apophatic theology of the divine Essence and the sanctified Mirrors who reveal it
- The Soul's Eternal Journey - heaven and hell as states of nearness and remoteness, and the soul's endless progress through the worlds of God
- The Covenant - Baha'u'llah's unprecedented instrument of succession: 'Abdu'l-Baha, the Guardianship, the Universal House of Justice, and how a faith of millions has never split

Written for the student of comparative religion and the seeker of the perennial path alike, this volume reads the Baha'i Faith the way the Esoteric Religious Studies Series reads every tradition: through its inner dimension - where the Valley of Search opens before every wayfarer, and the nightingale of the ancient garden sings in a new dawn.

This book is part of the Esoteric Religious Studies Series - the world's sacred traditions, studied from within.