Papers delivered at the ‘Irfán Colloquium Session #12 (English)

Newcastle, England

December 6–8, 1996.

Bahá'u'llah's Surat al-ism (Sura of the Name)     edit

by Nuha Sabour-Willington

Presentation of and commentary on a provisional translation of Bahá'u'llah's Surat al-ism (Sura of the Name), a tablet revealed in 1867.

Bahá'u'llah's tablet to Pope Pius IX     edit

by Stephen Lambden

The paper offers an overview of the tablet's context as one of a series of messages penned by Manifestations to religious and political leaders and surveyed the tablet's contents, including possible allusions to the First Vatican Council (1869).

Christianity and the Bahá'i Faith: An Historical and Doctrinal Overview     edit

by Stephen Lambden


God of Bahá'u'llah, The     edit

by Moojan Momen

Bahá'u'llah's concept of God and its ability to reconcile Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and some Buddhist notions of the Ultimate.

Immortality and the Afterlife: Some Christian, Bahá'i, and Modern Western Secular Perspectives     edit

by Fariba Hedayati

One part of this paper discussed cryonics (freezing people at the point of death in the hope that in the future they can be thawed and revived) and its possible implications for Bahá'i theology.

In Quest of the Ocean of True Understanding: The Mystical Paradigm of Bahá'u'llah's Book of Certitude     edit

by Ismael Velasco

The importance of earlier tablets by Bahá'u'llah in understanding the Kitab-i-Iqan, that the Iqan's literary paradigm is that of a mystic journey of the seeker, and that the paradigm shaped Bahá'u'llah's replies to the questions that prompted the revelation of the Iqan.

Millennialism in the Bahá'i Faith: Progressive and Catastrophic Themes     edit

by Robert Stockman

Review of the different aspects of the Bahá'i vision of the future; most are optimistic and progressive.

Mission of Religion: A Bahá'i Perspective, The     edit

by Iraj Ayman

A study of some sixty passages in the Bahá'i scriptures that state different purposes of religion.

Understanding Exclusivist Bahá'i Texts     edit

by S Fazel

There is a series of approaches to apparently exclusivist passages in Bahá'u'llah's writings that minimize their tendency to exclude non-Bahá'is.
Click here to read this paper online.