# Tablet of Wisdom (Lawh-i-hikmat)

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

---

> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Juan Cole, Tablet of Wisdom (Lawh-i-hikmat), bahai-library.com.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> Tablet of Wisdom (Lawh-i-hikmat)
> 
> Juan Cole
> 
> 1995
> 
> The Tablet of Wisdom was revealed by Bahá'u'lláh for the
> Bahá'í philosopher Aqa Muhammad "Nabil-i Akbar" Qa'ini
> when the latter came to visit him in `Akka sometime in 1873 or
> 1874 (1290 A.H.). Bahá'u'lláh recalls in the course of this
> Tablet their earlier meeting, around 1859, at the house of
> `Abdu'l-Majid Shirazi in Kazimayn, Iraq, at which time
> Bahá'u'lláh had expounded Greco-Islamic philosophy. It was upon
> listening to such discourses that Nabil-i Akbar (who had the best seminary
> training the Shi`ite world could offer at that time) had given
> his allegiance to Bahá'u'lláh, though he had earlier been devoted
> to Subh-i Azal. Bahá'u'lláh's willingness to engage philosophy in
> the tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, as it was
> elaborated in Muslim culture by Avicenna (d. 1037), Suhravardi
> (d. 1191) and Mulla Sadra (d. 1641) among others, marked a major
> departure for Babi religious culture. The Bab had earlier
> discouraged the study of metaphysics and other scholastic
> disciplines, but Bahá'u'lláh made a place for philosophy in the
> Bahá'í Faith.
> 
> The Tablet of Wisdom, which could also be translated as
> "The Tablet of Philosophy," begins with ethical
> exhortations directed at the people of the world. Ethics,
> politics and household management were considered in Aristotelian
> thought branches of "practical philosophy." That he
> begins with praise of down-to-earth virtues such as diligence,
> generosity and service to humankind suggests that he saw
> "practical philosophy" as having primacy over more
> theoretical branches of the discipline.
> 
> Next, he addresses a question posed to him by Nabil-i Akbar,
> about the beginning of creation. The ancient Greeks believed that
> the universe has always existed, a doctrine that seems to clash
> with the biblical and qur'anic idea of the world having been created
> by God at a particular point in time (perhaps as recently as
> 6,000 years ago if one takes the Bible literally). The great Muslim
> mystic and clergyman Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. A.D. 1111) had, in
> his Incoherence of the Philosophers, energetically attacked the
> idea of the pre-existence of the cosmos, while the master
> philosopher Averroes (d. 1198) had in his The Incoherence of the
> Incoherence replied with a spirited defense of Aristotle. The
> followers of Aristotle in Iran, mostly Avicennians known as
> peripatetics, continued to believe in the eternality of the
> world. Nabil-i Akbar was eager to have Bahá'u'lláh resolve this
> controversy.
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh in reply says the both the eternality of the world
> and the creation of the world are valid ways of talking, each in
> its own way, about the God-world relationship. He affirms the
> standard Avicennian position, that the universe has always existed.
> "Wert thou to assert that it hath ever existed and shall
> continue to exist, it would be true" (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng.
> tr., p. 140). But he says that the world is nevertheless
> originated by the creative power of God. That is, the world is
> created, but it has always been being created and so has never
> been non-existent. Creation is not a unique divine act that
> occurs once, at a particular point of time, establishing a
> historical dividing-line between nonbeing and being. It is rather
> a continuous divine activity.
> 
> Yet he also affirms the validity of speaking as though the
> pre- existent God created the contingent world out of nothing.
> This way of talking, he says, is a metaphor. In Greco-Islamic
> philosophy, God's Being is Necessary and must by its nature
> exist, so that He is essentially pre-existent (qadim). The world
> need not have come into being, existing not because it must, but because
> of God's creative Will. It is therefore dependent or contingent
> (mumkin) and its essence is originated (muhdath) (Rahman,
> "The Eternity of the World," pp. 222- 237). When the
> scriptures or hadiths refer to God as having been alone "before"
> the creation, then, they are actually pointing to the difference
> in his metaphysical level from that of the originated world. His
> primacy is essential, not sequential. It is also valid, then, to
> speak of the contingent universe having always existed alongside
> the deity, since God's "Firstness" is not really a
> "firstness" of time but rather of essence (Lawh-i
> Hikmat, Eng. tr., p. 140).
> 
> To explain the dependence of complex matter on simpler
> building blocks, Bahá'u'lláh employs the formulation of Avicenna (Shifa',
> ed. Madkur, 7:147-59), which is in turn based on the schema put
> forward by Aristotle in his De generatione et corruptione.
> Ancient Greek thought identified the basic qualities out of which
> the universe was formed as moistness, dryness, heat and cold.
> Avicenna considered the tangible qualities of heat and cold to be
> "agents (Ar. sing. fa'il)," or active forces. He believed
> moist and dry to be "patients" or passive (Ar.
> munfa'il). The mixture of an agent and a patient in turn produced
> each of the four basic elements. That is, moistness and cold
> combined to form water, whereas dryness and heat made fire. This
> is the meaning of the phrase, "The world of existence came
> into being through the heat generated from the interaction
> between the active force and that which is its recipient"
> (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng., p. 140). In this way, from the combination
> of these attributes, the four elements of earth, air, fire and
> water came into being. Since the underlying qualities are
> indestructible, and they part and recombine, the processes of
> generation and disintegration are continuous and eternal. This
> Aristotelian physics was dominant in Islamic science, and became
> so in Western thought, in the medieval period, and continued to
> be held in Iran by most thinkers until the twentieth century.
> Bahá'u'lláh in using it was simply employing the terms that would
> be understood by his immediate audience, Nabil-i Akbar and other
> traditionally-trained Muslim philosophers.
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh then expatiates on his Logos theology, which holds
> that the origins and development of the universe ultimately depend
> not merely on natural forces, but upon the active Word of God
> (kalimat Allah) (Cole, "Concept of Manifestation," pp. 8-9).
> Nature itself, he says, is a reflection of the will of God. He
> makes it clear that his advocacy of a theology of science, wherein
> delving into nature represents an exploration of the divine will,
> is intended to counteract the influence of eighteenth- and
> nineteenth-century European materialism and positivism (Lawh-i
> Hikmat, pp. 141-144).
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh points out that modern European thought owes a
> great deal to the philosophical tradition of classical Greece. He goes
> on to quote verbatim from medieval Muslim writers such as
> Abu'l-Fath Shahrastani and `Imadu'd-Din Abu'l-Fida in praise of
> Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, and
> Aristotle. He further discusses Apollonius of Tyana (Ar. Balinus,
> b. 4 B.C.), and speaks of the Hermetic corpus (a group of
> anonymous, esoteric Greek writings produced in the centuries
> immediately after Christ and incorrectly attributed to Hermes of
> ancient Egypt; see Affifi, "Influence," pp. 840- 855).
> 
> The medieval Muslim biographers of the Greek philosophers
> quoted in this Tablet stress two important themes. First, the Greek
> philosophers tended to believe in the divine, and most were not
> materialists. This is true enough, though neither were all these
> Greeks Muslim-style monotheists, as Shahrastani and Abu'l-Fida
> tended to paint them. Second, they maintain that Pythagoras was
> influenced by Hebrew prophetic wisdom, and that other
> philosophers also "acquired their knowledge from the
> Prophets." (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng., pp. 144- 145). The latter
> belief was held in Europe, as well, among thinkers such as St. Augustine
> and the Cambridge Platonists, but no historical evidence exists
> for it. These Muslim sources placed Empedocles in the time of
> David and Pythagoras in the time of Solomon, a chronology typical
> of Greco-Islamic works but which is mistaken (Cole,
> "Problems of Chronology," pp. 32-38). Here, as
> throughout this Tablet, Bahá'u'lláh quotes or presents
> information from the standard Middle Eastern reference works
> considered authoritative at the time among thinkers such as
> Nabil-i Akbar (`Abdu'l-Bahá/Ethel Rosenberg, 1906, in A.
> Ishraq-Khavari, Ma'idih, 2:69).
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh maintains that the philosophers of antiquity were
> not solely concerned with abstract thought, but were often imbued
> with a spirit of experiment. The sources he quotes say that
> Aristotle first suggested the power latent in steam, and a Greek
> figure whose name the Arabic sources transliterate as Murtas or
> Muristus (Gr. Ameristos?) was said by Abu'l-Fida to have
> "invented an apparatus which transmitted sound over a
> distance of sixty miles" (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng., p. 150). In
> quoting Abu'l-Fida on this figure, Bahá'u'lláh is arguing that
> the philosophical and scientific advances of the European
> Enlightenment and nineteenth century are not unique; that they
> have parallels on a smaller scale in past world civilizations;
> and that in the other instances such civilizational progress was
> not associated with atheism or materialism (and so need not be
> now).
> 
> Bahá'u'lláh's forthright championing of figures such as
> Socrates, and his favorable view of modern science, was
> remarkable in a nineteenth-century figure from a Muslim
> background who had not studied in European or European-style
> schools. Many Muslim clergymen of the time rejected either Greek
> philosophy or modern Western science, or both. Bahá'u'lláh's
> "Tablet of Wisdom" raises some of the same issues as
> similar essays by reformers such as the Iranian Sayyid
> Jamalu'd-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) and the Egyptian Rifa`ah
> at-Tahtawi (d. 1873). This Tablet strongly affirms of the value
> of philosophy and modern science while insisting on the continued
> validity of religious beliefs.
> 
> Bibliography
> 
> The Tablet of Wisdom in English translation may be found in
> Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh Revealed after the Kitab-i- Aqdas,
> trans. Habib Taherzadeh et al. (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 2nd
> edn. 1988), pp. 137-152; the Arabic text may be found in the
> companion volume, Majmu`ih`i az Alvah-i Jamal-i Aqdas-i Abha kih
> ba`d az Kitab-i Aqdas nazil shudih (Hofheim-Langenhain: Bahá'í
> Verlag, 1980)
> 
> Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet on the dates for the philosophers in the
> Tablet of Wisdom is in Ma'idih-'i Asmani, ed. A. Ishraq-Khavari,2
> vols. - (New Delhi: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1984), 2:68-71 (new
> pagination). For its cultural context, see: A.E. Affifi,
> "The Influence of Hermetic Literature in Muslim
> Thought," BSOAS xiii (1950):840-55
> 
> Aristotle, Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione (Oxford:
> Clarendon Press, 1982)
> 
> Avicenna, ash-Shifa', ed. Ibrahim Madkur et al., 7 vols.
> (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-`Arabi, 1984)
> 
> J. Cole, "The Concept of Manifestation in the Bahá'í
> Writings," Bahá'í Studies 9 (1982):1-38
> 
> J. Cole, "Problems of Chronology in Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet
> of Wisdom," World Order vol. 13, no. 3 (1979):24-39
> 
> Fazlur Rahman, "The Eternity of the World and the
> Heavenly bodies in Post- Avicennian Philosophy," Essays in
> Islamic Philosophy and Science, ed. G.F. Hourani (Albany, NY:
> SUNY Press, 1975), pp. 222-237
> 
> Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London:
> Routledge, 1992)
> 
> Franz Rosenthal, Greek Philosophy in the Arab World (London:
> Variorum, 1990)
> 
> Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer,
> 1962)
> 
> Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New
> York: Vintage, 1969).
> 
> For Muslim views of the Greek philosophers mentioned in this
> tablet, the articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., written
> in English but given under the philosophers' Arabic names, are
> essential: R. Walzer, "Aflatun;" R. Walzer,
> "Aristutalis;" S.M. Stern, "Anbaduklis;" M.
> Plessner, "Balinus;" A. Dietrich, "Buqrat;"
> F. Rosenthal, "Fithaghuras;" M. Plessner,
> "Hirmis."
> 
> METADATA
> 
> Views26733 views since posted 1999; last edit 2024-12-31 07:07 UTC;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../cole_encyclopedia_tablet_wisdom;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
> Language
> English
> Permission
> author
> Share
> 
> Shortlink: bahai-library.com/461
> Citation: ris/461
> 
> select Collection:
> Archives
> Articles
> Articles-unpublished
> Audio
> Bibliographies
> BIC
> Biographies
> Books
> Chronologies
> Compilations
> Compilations-NSA
> Compilations-personal
> Documents
> East-asia
> Encyclopedia
> Essays
> Etc
> Excerpts
> Fiction
> Glossaries
> Guardian
> Histories
> Introductory
> Letters
> Maps
> Music
> Newspapers
> NSA-documents
> NSA-letters
> Personal
> Pilgrims
> Poetry
> Presentations
> Resources
> Reviews
> Scripts
> Software
> Statistics
> Study
> Talks
> Theses
> Transcripts
> Translations
> UHJ-documents
> UHJ-letters
> Video
> Visual
> Writings
> 
> home
> 
> sitemap
> 
> series
> 
> chronology
> 
> search:
> author
> 
> title
> 
> date
> 
> tags
> 
> adv. search
> languages
> 
> inventory
> 
> bibliography
> 
> abbreviations
> 
> links
> 
> about
> 
> contact
> 
> RSS
> 
> new
>
> — *Tablet of Wisdom (Lawh-i-hikmat) (Used by permission of the curator)*