Quddús has been referred to in Bahá’í texts as second in importance only to the Báb in the Bábí dispensation. Yet nowhere do we have his complete biography in English. We can pick up individual facts from books about the Báb and the Letters of the Living. The Dawnbreakers, the classic history of the Bábí dispensation, has large sections about his life as a Bábí. However, if we look in foreign language sources like the Táríkh-i-Jadíd and journal articles by Bahá’í historians, we find what may be multiple chains of narration regarding important events in his life, like his martyrdom. These differences may also represent sacred history superimposed on factual narrative.
In English, we also lack a catalog of surviving works by Quddús and a place where what the Central Figures and the Guardian have written about him is set down in one place. Additionally, no source in English examines why Quddús, in some of his writings, appears to speak with the Voice of God typically reserved for use by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. This phenomenon derives from the relationship between the Báb and Quddús, which has also been only minimally examined in English.
My presentation involved research of documents in multiple languages including several, like A.L.M. Nicholas, that are cited heavily in texts like The Dawnbreakers. Rather than relying on a single source for dates and other details, I tried to explain reasons for the discrepancies and introduced the idea of sacred history, based largely on the desire of Bábí historians in the mid-1800s to draw parallels between events in Bábí history and events in the history of Shia Islam, the audience to which early Bábí historians would be speaking.
History was the only subject in which Karen Anne Webb did not excel in through high school, and the first item on her checklist for a college was that it not have a religious affiliation. These both turned out to have negative predictive value for the course her life would take, as she discovered when she embraced the Bahá’í Faith a few weeks into her college career. Suddenly, the world opened up to her: history made sense when it wasn’t a string of
meaningless dates. With history came a burgeoning interest in theology. Although her pay-the-bills work ranged from nursing to working as an advanced practice clinician to owning her own STEM-enrichment business, she never quit studying the history and tenets (and texts) of the world’s great religions. After a late start acquiring and raising a family, she finally had an opportunity to formalize her studies in 2019 and returned to school for a second master’s in religious studies at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Her studies expanded her knowledge of world religions but thoroughly revolutionized her view of the Hebrew Bible and Gospels. Her master’s project, a comprehensive English biography of the Bábí martyr and hero Quddús, will be published shortly by George Ronald Publisher. She has written and presented extensively on subjects related to both Islam and the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths with emphasis on mystical or highly metaphorical works like Bahá’u’lláh’s Rashḥ-i-’Amá and Tablet of Patience/Súrih-i-Sabr/Lawh-i-Ayyúb. She continues to plumb the depths of religious mysticism, going so far as to include mystical elements from multiple religions in her fantasy books, currently under contract with Sage Publishing. She and her husband are long-term homefront pioneers in rural Utah, where they live with their four adult children, one human and three feline. She loves the Bahá’í Faith, but since she started writing for academia, she swears the next time she changes religions, she will check out how often diacriticals and “short” vowel marks figure into the important spellings!
Leave a Reply