اسرار الآثار

About: Over the past several decades, there have been formal attempts to produce reference materials that define words and phrases used in the Baháʼí writings. The most serious and comprehensive of these endeavours have been undertaken in Persian, which is unsurprising considering that is the language in which much of the religion’s primary texts were written, and in which early Baháʼí scholarship inevitably first developed. A distinguishing feature of these Persian-language dictionaries is their inclusion of Arabic terms that occur in Baháʼí scripture – no doubt helpful to the reader of Persian seeking to grasp the meaning of Baháʼí scripture written in that language that also draws on Arabic vocabulary, or even the Arabic Baháʼí writings themselves.

Perhaps the first truly large-scale attempt at such an endeavour in any language was conducted by Fáḍil Mázandarání when he wrote Asráru’l-Áthár, "The Mysteries of the Writings." This work spans several volumes, only some of which have been published, and it is essentially a dictionary of terms that appear in the Baháʼí writings or stem from other religious traditions that bear some relevance to the Baháʼí Faith. The work features entries of various terms, laid out in alphabetical order, complete with definitions of those terms and examples of their usage derived from scripture. Mázandarání apparently completed Asráru’l-Áthár sometime between 1955 and 1956, but the work did not appear in print during his lifetime. About a decade after his death, the Baháʼí Publishing Trust of Iran finally began to publish Mázandarání’s manuscript, a process that lasted from 1967 to 1972. (Adib Masumian, An Introduction to the Bahá'í Religiolect)

The Word documents below might require the Zar font: font_ZAR2.ttf and font_ZAR2b.ttf.