The Sūrah Titles of the Qayyūm al-asmā’ of Sayyid `Alī Muḥammad Shīrāzī     (1819-1850 CE) : Gateways to the Earliest Thought of the Bāb.   ________________________________________________________________

Stephen Lambden (UC-Merced, USA).

         At a previous MESA meeting of the Shaykhī-Bābī-Bahā’ī Studies forum around the year 2000, I presented a paper on the al-ḥurūfāt al-muqaṭṭa`a (the `isolated’ or `disconnected’ letters) of the Qayyūm al-asmā’ (henceforth = QA.) of the Bāb (1819-1850 CE)  to a small but select group of individuals,  including Juan Cole, Mohamad Tavakoli and Sholeh Quinn. This presentation to the same MESA group supplements and extends aspects of that previous presentation. Both these papers will appear in more detailed, partly tabular form on my personal Website (http://www.hurqalya.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/. A  preliminary chart based version of the substance of  this paper is already published there.

See URL : The Sura Titles within the Qayyum al-asma'

 The subject of the QA sūrah titles or names is neither obscurantist nor irrelevant to central issues within Bābī and related studies. An understanding of them throws important light on the earliest thought of the Bāb and gives a glimpse of what this important messianic claimant considered key topics or words within his new religious discourse as primarily rooted in the Islamic-Shī`ī-Shaykhī world of early Qajar Persia. It remains a major, regrettable academic desideratum that the QA is still unpublished. There is no critical edition even thought this weighty and important Bābī scriptural text is foundational. It has been very little studied or translated. Its Sūrah titles remain largely unknown and unstudied. 

The QA Sūrah titles have been little more than listed then only briefly and inadequately commented upon by Edward G. Browne (d. 1926) in his early 188X Catalogue & Description... (pp. 262, 699-701), A. L. M. Nicholas (d. 19XX) in his 1905 Seyyed `Ali Mohammed (pp. 22-28) and `Abd al-Hamid Ishraq Khavārī (d. 1972) in his Qāmūs-I Īqān (Vol. IV: 1279-1282. These aforementioned writers made no comprehensive survey of multiple QA manuscript source(s) usually failing to indicate even the few they consulted. Up till now the QA Surah titles were only tabulated from limited sources and very briefly analyzed or commented upon. In his 1987 Ph.D thesis Todd Lawson (see pp.262-254+ ) summarized matters succinctly but did not devote the subject to any detailed analysis. Few of these previous writers spelled out the source(s) of the QA Surah titles. None made a comparative evaluation of mss. of the Kitab al-Fihrist (on which see below) or  charted pertinent data  from a range of unpublished QA mss.

This summary paper remains very much work in progress the detailed results of which will gradually be posted in more detail on my personal Website -  which you can find either by typing my name or the word Hurqalya into the Google search engine which should bring you straight to its main entry page. I initially imagined that this would be a quick, simple, straightforward  paper to write though the more I looked into the matter the more complex and rewarding it has become. The aforementioned writers have generally given too scant attention to the question of the Sūrah titles of the QA. Key, fundamental issues remain unstudied, ignored or unanswered. Hopefully these notes will carry matters a little further. 

There are three less Sūrahs in the QA than in the Qur’ān (114-3 = 111) though the length of these two Arabic texts is not very different for reasons which will be clear later in this paper. The QA has 111 Sūrahs each of (around) 42 verses of rhyming prose (saj`) of varying length, totaling 111 X 42 verses or 4662 verses. The Qur’an has 114 Surahs totaling around 6,200 verses again of varying lengths. While the qur’anic Surahs lengths can vary considerably those of the QA are generally all around 3-5 pages long. Certain suras in both these sacred books have some both very long verses and some very short verses, hence their differing sizes.

 The 111 Sūrah titles of the QA were almost all registered by the Bab himself in his early Kitāb al-Fihrist (Book of the Index) which is dated to the 15^th Jumādā II /1261 or 21^st June 1845 being written in Bushire during the post pilgrimage period of the Bab's life, before the completion of his journey back to Shiraz (for four or more mss listed by MacEoin, see Sources, 188- more mss. are now known). Four Surahs are untitled. They seem never to have been named in extant copies of the Kitab al-Fihrist or in any other mss. known to the present writer -- of course not all mss of the Qayyūm al-asmā’ record the Surah titles. They are not always written in. Not all scribes, it seems, had easy access to copies of the Kitab al-fihrist. How early extant mss. of the QA included the Surah titles is currently unknown; though Sūrah titles seem to have appeared in a few  mss. which might be even earlier than the Kitab al-fihrist (e.g. very early pre-1845 CE mss. ??).

The Sūrah titles of the QA may be viewed as gateways or signposts to major themes within the nascent or emergent Bābī religion, the QA being the first major obviously neo-Quranic revelation of the Bāb. The Sūrah titles are conceptual gateways into the religious mind the Bāb who was a messianic figure about to challenge the inimitability (the i’jāz) of the Qur’ān and found a new dīn al-khalīṣ (“pristine religion” so QA. 1:5a), a pure essentially neo-Shī`ī religion which he refers to as al-dīn al-qayyim, an “Upright Religion” (QA. 1:7a). This emergent, ultimately post-Islamic  Faith would come to challenge and shake mid-19th century Qajar Persia (Iran) to its foundations.  The QA presents itself as the bāṭin or the deep, inner dimension of the Qur'an. It has much in common with this Arabic text upon which it is modelled as a  kitāb jadīd ("new book") of divine revelation from God communicated via the occulted and hidden Imam  via  his messianic agent the Bab.