Original texts and English translations, side by side.
Opening the inventory…
This site offers several different ways of exploring the original texts and oral utterances attributed to the Central Figures of the Bahá'í Faith -- the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá -- that are accessible in the public domain. It includes both the original texts, authoritative translations where they exist, and provisional or AI generated translations in the absence of authoritative translations. It is a personal project and accuracy is not claimed or guaranteed; please visit the official website at https://www.bahai.org/library for fully authenticated texts and translations.
Search by word or phrase (in quotation marks) for a specific text, or use the menu at left to narrow your search by date, recipient, catalog ID, publications, related musical compositions, and more. View a text in the original Arabic/Persian, in English translation, or side by side where available. Authorized translations, which are here defined as translations appearing on the official website, are displayed in blue, while provisional translations, which may be AI-generated and lightly vetted, are in black and white.
The 29,000+ texts have been arranged according to the best guess of chronological order and provisionally grouped into 192 volumes for a more traditional reading experience. Each volume has its own introduction and is followed by an AI-generated study guide. The volumes can be read in-browser or downloaded to pdf.
Browse by subject by searching for a category in the left-hand panel, or use the knowledge graph in the center panel to navigate to related subjects. The 659 subjects and their relationships are human-generated and represent the perspective of one individual; many other subject categorizations are possible. Relevant passages touching on each subject -- some human generated and some selected with the help of AI and lightly vetted -- appear below the knowledge graph. These passages can be downloaded to PDF.
The passages compiled under each subject have been further condensed and re-ordered to facilitate an introductory thematic study of the texts. At the end of each guide is a set of open-ended questions (AI generated) and hyperlinks to adjacent subjects (human generated).
Texts and metadata are derived from the Partial Inventory project (version 6.01), an open-source, individual initiative not affiliated with Bahá'í institutions. For a summary of documents and presentations about this rapidly evolving project see this page. The project bibliography and key to source codes, with a summary of the source schema and color assignments, can be downloaded here.
To interact with this collection via LLM, see the separate Gemini Notebook instances in English and Persian/Arabic
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