Omid Ghaemmaghami (SUNY, Binghamton). “A Copy of the Book of the Baub of Akka”: The Nineteenth Century Journey from Tehran to New York of the Bahá’í Religion’s Most Important Text

Among the holdings of Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library is the oldest known manuscript in the West of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Written by Bahá’u’lláh (d. 1892) as an exile in Ottoman Syria, the manuscript was donated to Columbia University by Alexander Cotheal (d. 1894) of New York City, a one-time director of the American Oriental Society and a rabid collector of Arabic manuscripts. Cotheal had obtained the manuscript from the Reverend James Bassett (d. 1906) who, in 1872, under the auspices of the American Mission Board, founded the first American mission in Tehran, Persia (now called Iran). The manuscript that was donated to Columbia University in the early 1890s contains the following prefatory note in Cotheal’s handwriting: “A Copy of the Book of the Baub of Akka in Arabic, with interlinear translation in Persian, presented to Rev. James Bassett by the chief of the Baubees in Tehran, Persia, 1877.” Known as the “Mother Book” of the Bahá’í religion, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas constitutes the central religious text of the new faith. This paper explores the circumstances attending the Kitáb-i-Aqdas’s composition in Ottoman Syria and dissemination in Persia in the 1870s. It then tells the story of the Bassett manuscript’s journey from Tehran to New York. Among the questions that will be explored: Who was the “chief of the Baubees in Tehran” who delivered the manuscript of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas to Bassett? How does the Bassett manuscript of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas compare with other early manuscript witnesses of the book? And what can we learn about the Bahá’í community in Tehran in the 1870s from Bassett’s descriptions of his encounters with Bahá’ís he met and from their eagerness to present to an American missionary a copy of the recently written “Book of the Baub of Akka”?

Omid Ghaemmaghami is Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Binghamton University, the State University of New York (SUNY). He is the author of works in Islamic, Bábí, and Bahá’í studies, including Encounters with the Hidden Imam in Early and Pre-Modern Twelver Shīʿī Islam (Brill, 2020) and, with Shahin Vafai, Exploring the Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Laws and Teachings of the Bahá’í Faith (I.B. Tauris, 2025).