1. PDF (see English-language introduction below)

2. Introduction

The book was commissioned by the local governing body of the Bahá'ís of Khorasan. Fuádi wrote most of it while in Mashhad and completed it in a year, in 1931. After his death, the original copy was kept by Baha-aldin Nabil Akbar, Fuádi's brother-in-law. A copy was circulated among his immediate family and the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Iran, the national governing body of the community, and a copy was sent to the Bahá'í International Archives in Haifa. Although the original copy of the book was confiscated by revolutionary guards in Iran in 1982, there were a number of accurate copies in existence that have been used for this publication.

Fuádi studied Eastern Languages at the University of Tashkent, Soviet Union, and went on to become a leading philologist in Iran. After completing his studies, he worked in Eshqabad. He was incarcerated in 1929 because of his religious beliefs, and after around 8 months in prison, he was exiled to Iran after an amnesty was granted to prisoners with Persian backgrounds. The short period of his life in Iran from 1930 to 1936, when he was relatively settled, enabled Fuádi to publish many articles and a few books on Persian linguistics. Some of his works in this area were published in Mehr, a literary magazine, and some were unpublished due to his sudden death from septicaemia in 1936 at the age of 37. He wrote three books: Mabadi va Usul-e Zaban Senasi ('The Principles and Fundamentals of Persian Philology'), Vazayef-e Ma dat Mas'aleh Zaban ('Our Duties towards the Question of the Persian Language'), and the present work.

The History of the Bahá'í Faith in Khorasan makes an important and unique contribution to the knowledge of the early days of the Bábí-Bahá'í religions in Iran, and includes the story of many of its heroes and heroines, the sustained persecution of the community, and its growth and development.

The first edition was published in 2007 and was out of print by 2010. This second edition prepared for bahai-library.com corrects some minor typographic errors, and adds some new historical photographs of interest. [-Seena Fazel, 2023]

See the entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica for more details: iranicaonline.org/articles/foadi-boshrui-hasan, also online at bahai-library.com/vahman_iranica_hasan-foadi_bushrui.