The Completion of the Arabic Bayan And the Eight Paths: English Translation Commentary and Notes

The Completion of the Arabic Bayān and the Eight Paths is the completion of a major scriptural item in the Bābī canon. Begun in 1847 by Siyyid ʿAlī Muḥammad Shīrāzī, the Primal Point, the Bāb (d. 1850), it was finished by Wahid Azal in 2022: 175 years from when it was first begun. It is the continuation of the Bayān from where it was left off by the Bāb at the end of its eleventh chapter (or Unity) and continues to its completion in its Nineteenth Unity. It is the compliment of the Persian Bayān which has also been completed by Wahid Azal beyond where Ṣubḥ-i-Azal (d. 1912) left it. This volume is a bilingual edition including the annotated English translation together with the original Arabic text.

Emulating the high scriptural Arabic of the Bāb Himself, high theophanology informs this work throughout. One-hundred and fifty-two (152) sub-sections (or gates) constitute the Completion of the Bayān in both its Arabic and Persian versions that together with the two-hundred and nine (209) completed by the Bāb (i.e. Arabic) and Ṣubḥ-i-Azal (i.e. Persian) produces the number three-hundred and sixty-one (361), i.e. the originally conceived total number of gates for the Bayān by the Bāb which is the numerical value of 'All-Things' (kullu-shayʾ).

It should be noted that the 2022 Iranian Revolution began precisely nineteen days after the Bayān was completed in both Arabic and Persian in its Nineteenth Unity, an event the Book explicitly called for months before it began. In its unabashedly feminist, eco-socialist, anti-capitalist and progressive thrust, the Fifteenth Unity also envisaged in advanced the clarion call of "Woman, Life, Freedom" and the direction that the 2022 Iranian Revolution would take as it eventually becomes world embracing in a spiritually directed movement of global revolutionary transformation.

With theocracy and authoritarianism unequivocally denounced in all of their forms, here social democracy, secularism, social justice, environmentalism and matriarchy have been given a sacred mandate from heaven as the true divine polity with the eradication of white supremacy and patriarchy throughout the planet as one of its chief goals (together with the system of capitalism and ecocide which its fuels). Homosexuals (especially gay women) have also been offered all rights, respect and dignities, and upon a scriptural basis that likewise anticipates endless Manifestations and Self-Disclosures of the Divine in the future. And just as the Bayān of the Bāb revolved around the figure of He whom God shall make Manifest (man yuẓhiruhu’Llāh), the Completion of the Bayān by Wahid Azal revolves around the figure of She whom God shall make Manifest (hīya yuẓhiruhā’Llāh) - i.e. an anticipated female Manifestation of God in the Abrahamic line - Who is deemed the logos (Word) as well as the sophia (Wisdom) behind the Completion of the Bayān.