Gate of the Heart: Understanding the Writings of the Bab.

• Author: Lambden, Stephen N.
• Position: Baha'i Studies Series, vol. 1 - Book review

Gate of the Heart: Understanding the Writings of the Bab. BY NADER SAIEDI. Baha'i Studies Series, vol. 1. Waterloo, Ont.: WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. viii + 423. $85.

Since the Victorian era of the great Western Islamicists and Orientalists, very few modern academics have been bold enough to write about the life and writings of Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad Shirazi (1819-50 C.E.), the early Qajar-era, Persian-born, messianic claimant widely known as the Bab or 'Gate' (primarily to the occulted twelfth Imam). Even fewer have attempted to translate his numerous, notoriously complex Arabic and Persian writings, (he knowledge of which is indispensable to a proper comprehension of the short-lived religion that he founded in 1260/1844. The Bab was executed by a firing squad in Tabriz in 1850, but within a few years his post-Islamic religion was resurrected in a new form by Mirza Husayn 'Ali Nuri (1817-92), the founder of the now globally diffused Baha'i religion.

Aside from the Persian Bayan and a few other writings, the corpus of the Bab for the most part remains unedited, unpublished, unstudied, and little understood. As early as 1865, with the aid of Persian assistants, the French writer and diplomat Joseph A. Comte de Gobineau (d. 1888), managed to produce a tolerable (yet wrongly titled) French translation of the Arabic Bayan Of the Bab, the "Ketab al-Hukkam" [sic]. Forty years later, another sympathetic French consular official and Persianist, Louise (A. L. M.) Nicholas (d. 1939), translated the same work along with its longer Persian counterpart and a few other writings of the Bab. The great Cambridge scholar Edward G. Browne (d. 1926) wrote much about Babi history, bibliography, and factionalism, but translated and analyzed only a few items of his challenging literary output.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a few Western-trained academics, including Denis MacEoin (UK). Abbas Amanat (USA), and Todd Lawson (Canada), published important books and articles in the emergent field of Babi studies. In 1992 MacEoin, a pioneer of Babi studies, published his ground-breaking and indispensable The Sources far Early Babi Doctrine and History, which has recently been supplemented by many more of his collected papers in the massive volume The Messiah of Shiraz (Brill, 2009).

The over four hundred page book reviewed here stands as the first in a new Canadian Wilfrid Laurier University Press Baha'i Studies Series. It contains a short preface and longer...