One of Baha'u'llah's key aims in the Kitab-i-Iqan is to diminish (to an extent) the uniqueness of the Qa'im's exercise of divine sovereignty. He writes, This sovereignty hath not been solely and exclusively attributed to the Qa'im. Nay, rather the attribute of sovereignty and all other names and attributes of God have been and will ever be vouchsafed unto all the Manifestations of God. (KI 113 pp.98) The effect of this claim is to transform the Qa'im in the minds of His readers into a figure after whom there is a future, who is an initiator as well as a destroyer, and whose mission would bear resemblance to those of figures who have come before. Baha'u'llah takes Muhammad as an example.
Rather than just positioning the Day of Judgment in the future Baha'u'llah argues that the coming of Muhammad, a moment in the past was a Day of Judgment. The defining event of such a Day is the demarcation between the righteous and the wicked, which according to a particular tradition referenced by Baha'u'llah was accomplished through the utterance of one verse. Some accepted and received the spiritual life that comes from faith. The rest rejected the word of God and were thus abandoned to the death of unbelief. (KI 118 pp. 102)
Notable in Baha'u'llah's interpretation is the location of judgment on the aforementioned Day. God does not pronounce a verdict upon passive defendants in His cosmic courtroom. Instead, He sets up a situation by means of His Word in which those involved must come to a judgment regarding whether or not God has spoken and whether or not to obey. The people decide for themselves. This is absolutely crucial. It is the entrance of human agency into the end-times drama of divine justice. People do not just go where they are led. They are forced to think, decide, act, and deal with the consequences of this sequence in this our earthly life. In other words, a Day of Judgment is not the end of human agency. But rather it is its coming of age, a coming into one's own. Creativity is an essential virtue in the end-times, for it gestures at once to the promise of a new creation and as well to the human capacity for innovation and productivity. Interaction between divine and human agency is thus an essential characteristic of divine justice.
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Another example from the life of Muhammad to which Baha'u'llah refers is the changing of the Qiblih, the point on the Earth towards which certain prayer is directed. Once again, people are forced to think, decide, and act, producing a demarcation between the faithful and the unfaithful. Under increasing pressure from the Jews of Medina for Islam to more exactly reproduce Jewish tradition, Muhammad abruptly changed the Qiblih from Jerusalem, the seat of Judaism, to Mecca, the seat of Arab religion, during communal prayers. Suffice to say, this was deeply unsettling to these Jewish followers of Muhammad. Many left Islam on the spot. After all, at Medina this is nearly a 180 degree turn away from Jerusalem. Muhammad was literally turning his back on the symbol of all Jewish memory, pride, and hope. Even worse, He was turning in the direction of the Ka'bih shrine which at that point had not yet been cleansed of its idols. In Baha'u'llah's interpretation the consternation caused by this event is not an undesirable side effect of a necessary action. It is the decisive play within a general strategy of demarcation that is deployed within every Revelation. He writes, Yea, such things as throw consternation into the hearts of all men come to pass only that each may be tested by the touchstone of God, that true may be known from the false. (KI 55 pp. 48) In the image of Muhammad and His Jewish followers turning towards each other and against each other, towards separate Qiblihs is found a tearing, a friction, a painful tension that cuts straight through the spiritual body at both the individual and communal levels. It is the inner and outer cleaving that defines the spiritual terrain of the Kitab-i-Iqan's end-times perspective.
Earlier, I wrote of an explosive reversal of received wisdom within the Kitab-i-Iqan: that the destruction and re-creation spoken of in end-times prophecy corresponds to the arrangement of the human person and not of the physical universe. Consternation can be seen as the turning point of this event. For, it makes possible a radical transformation of the individual, the primary site of which is the inherited tradition of law (perhaps law of tradition) inasmuch as it defines his or her existence.
Baha'u'llah interprets the Quranic verse when the heavens shall be cloven asunder (82.1) as a reference to the setting aside of a previous Revelation in favor of a new one along the terrain of religious law and tradition. He writes,
That a divine Revelation which for years hath been securely established; beneath whose shadow all who have embraced it have been reared and nurtured; by the light of whose law generations of men have been disciplined; the excellency of whose word men have heard recounted by their fathers; in such wise that human eye hath beheld naught but the pervading influence of its grace, and mortal eye hath heard naught but the pervading influence of its grace, and mortal ear hath heard naught but the resounding majesty of its command- what act is mightier than that such a Revelation should by the power of God be "cloven asunder" and be abolished at the appearance of one soul? (KI 46 pp. 41-42)
Having become the common sense, any alteration of the established Revelation appears to its deepened practitioners as a violation of religion itself, a cleaving in the very fabric of sense. The new Revelation then appears to be quite "senseless." After all, what's wrong with the old one? Has it not been given to us by God? Historically speaking this cleaving of the inherited common sense is the Bab. There are few better ways to describe His incorporation of just about every major heresy from that part of the Islamic world: Hurufi numerology, Ismaili continuing revelation, native Iranian fire imagery, not to mention His iconoclastic and provocative approach to His claim to be the promised Qa'im of Shia Islam. His method of awakening the people of the world could be likened to the sharp sting that is best induced by a well-timed bucket of icy water. A hardening tradition of Islam had seized Iran and it was the place of the Bab to rattle the world into a new era. The site of this struggle was the communal conception of spiritual reality that structured people's conceptions of their very selves and strategic consternation was an invaluable instrument.
Upsetting old patterns of life, the cleaving of the heavens sets the stage for new patterns, new life, within each person. Baha'u'llah makes this move in His interpretation of the Quranic expression changing of the earth. Know thou that upon the hearts the bountiful showers of mercy, raining from the "heaven" of divine Revelation, have fallen, the earth of those hearts hath verily changed into the earth of divine knowledge and wisdom. (KI 48 pp. 42-43) And later, Reflect thou, how, in one hand, He hath, by His mighty grasp, turned the earth of knowledge and understanding, previously unfolded into a mere handful, and, on the other, spread out a new and highly exalted earth in the hearts of men. (KI 51 pp. 45) The human person, transformed by the Word of God, is then the new creation promised in end-times prophecy. Divine justice arrives as a person, one who far from being terminated, has come finally into a new maturity, a coming into oneself as human.
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