1) on the End, that there is a Future

No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.

Thus begins Baha'u'llah's Kitab-i-Iqan, the central aim of of which is to explain and defend claims made by the Bab that He fulfills Shia Islamic end-times prophesies of the Qa'im. Central among the prophecies is that the Qa'im will fill the earth with justice even as the earth is currently filled with injustice. In fact, it is this expectation of divine justice that undergirds every prophecy of "end-times," Shia Islamic or not. Baha'u'llah may not directly address in the Kitab-i-Iqan what we moderns would call "social justice." But in an Islamic context, the end-times is the topic par excellence within which to address such concerns. The Kitab-i-Iqan should then be interpreted as a foundational text on social justice, rather than a catalogue of specifics.

Traditionally, the end-times are thought of as a transformation, even a destruction of the physical world. It is in keeping then with this end-times context that Baha'u'llah begins with a statement on a person's relationship with heaven and earth. Furthermore the end-times are traditionally regarded as free will's expiration date, when all the choices one has made in life are added up and a place is assigned for their possessor among either the righteous or the wicked. What will be seen though is that the attainment of these shores speaks more to a beginning than it does to an end, and that it is in this that Baha'u'llah charts out a distinctively Baha'i world-view.

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Juan Cole interprets Baha'u'llah's message as the reversal of various traditional arrangements at the time within Islam and contemporary cultures. He identifies five. But others are clearly implied by other arguments in Modernity and the Millennium.

Where Religion had mandated war, it now mandated peace;
where it had ordained a lesser status for non-believers, it now required equality;
where it had persecuted the non-conformist, it now guarenteed freedom of belief;
where it had sought to rule, it now left government to civil authorities;
where it had viewed non-believers as the Other, it now promoted political union among the earth's diverse peoples.
(Modernity and the Millennium 138)

Furthermore, Baha'u'llah argued for the equality of men and women, mandated the equitable distribution of wealth, and prophesied the demise of various elites, along with the triumph of popular sovereignty. Cole's analysis is sound but he restrains his analysis of the theme of reversal to writings that come after Baha'u'llah's Ridvan declaration. While recognizing that the Kitab-i-Iqan is an important move towards separation of religion and state, he fails to recognize in the book the explosive reversal of received tradition from which all the above reversals must be derived: 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. The first implication of this foundational truth is that the Day of Judgment tests revitalizes and unleashes human freedom and power rather than terminating it in an all-consuming annihilation. The reversals that take place in Baha'u'llah's later writings are only coherent with His end-time claims within the context of this assertion that our life in this world has a future worth seizing.

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