Kitáb-i-Íqán

The Kitáb-i-Íqán (Persian: كتاب ايقان‎‎, Arabic: كتاب الإيقان‎ "The Book of Certitude") is one of many books held sacred by followers of the Bahá'í Faith; it is their primary theological work. One Bahá'í scholar states that it can be regarded as the "most influential Quran commentary in Persian outside the Muslim world," because of its international audience. It is sometimes referred to as the Book of Iqan or simply The Iqan.

Background

The work was composed partly in Persian and partly in Arabic by Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, in 1861, when he was living as an exile in Baghdad, then in a province of the Ottoman Empire. While Bahá'u'lláh had claimed to have received revelation some ten years earlier in the Síyáh-Chál (lit. black-pit), a dungeon in Tehran, he had not yet openly declared his mission. References to his own station therefore appear only in veiled form. Christopher Buck, author of a major study of the Íqán, has referred to this theme of the book as its "messianic secret," paralleling the same theme in the Gospel of Mark.