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Building. His translations to English of the writings of Baha'Ullah have been published in the West, and his God Passes By is a history of the first Baha'i century (18441944). Shoghi Effendi died in 1957, leaving the international direction of Baha'i affairs to a body of nine individuals. |
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The Baha'i calendar, then, is a unique one, on several accounts: |
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1.) It is originally the product of religious revelation. There is no known historical source that explains the process used in developing the calendar. The early history of the calendar is almost entirely unknown, even though the events occurred in relatively recent times. |
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2.) It is clearly a break with the lunar Islamic calendar used in 19th century Persia, returning to strong roots in the solar calendars used in Persia since the times of Zoroaster. The Baha'i calendar is also a break with these calendars, however, in its year and month structure. |
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3.) The strongest single influence on the Baha'i calendar is a system known as a abjad (also abdjad, abadjad, or abu djad), which arranges the 28 consonants of the Arabic alphabet into a series of eight terms. The most common system, the Eastern or Oriental, is ordered as "abjad hawwaz huttiy kalaman sa'fas karashat thakhadh dagazh." A second system, the Western, is used in North Africa and the Iberian peninsula and arranges the fifth, sixth, and eighth terms differently. Conceptually, both systems are essentially the same abecedarian ordering. |
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The arrangement of the first six of the eight terms in the Oriental series preserves the order of the Phoenician alphabet. The order of the series is dictated by historical tradition of great antiquity. The order of the first 22 letters, for example, appears on a tablet discovered at Ra's Shamra, which dates from the 14th century B.C. This letter order is also preserved in the Hebrew and Aramean alphabets, to which Arabic is closely related. |
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There is actually only one practical point of interest in the abjad system, and that is that the Arabs have associated each letter in the series with a number by effectively dividing the letters into three groups: |
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3.1.) The first through the ninth ordinal letters are associated with the cardinal numbers one through nine, respectively. |
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3.2.) The 10th through 18th letters are associated with the numbers 10 through 90, respectively. |
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3.3.) The 19th through 27th letters are associated with the numbers 100 through 900, respectively. The 28th letter is associated with the value of 1,000. |
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There is a very close relationship between this system and that employed by the Greeks, which, in the form of Neo-Pythagorean philosophy, influenced both the Arabs and the Hebrews. |
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