Four Valleys (Bahá'í)

The Four Valleys (Persian: چهار وادی‎‎ Chahár Vádí) is a book written in Persian by Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith. The Seven Valleys (Persian: هفت وادی‎‎ Haft-Vádí) was also written by Bahá'u'lláh, and the two books are usually published together under the title The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys. The two books are distinctly different and have no direct relation.

The Four Valleys was written around 1857 in Baghdad. Bahá'u'lláh had recently returned from the mountains of Kurdistan where he had spent two years studying with various Sufi sheikhs using the pseudonym Darvish Muhammad-i-Irani. The Four Valleys was written in response to questions of Shaykh 'Abdu'r-Rahman-i-Talabani, the "honored and indisputable leader" of the Qádiríyyih Order of Sufism. He never identified as a Bahá'í, but was known to his followers as having high respect and admiration for Bahá'u'lláh.

In the book, Bahá'u'lláh describes the qualities and grades of four types of mystical wayfarers: "Those who progress in mystic wayfaring are of four kinds."

The four are, roughly:

This last is considered the highest or truest form of mystic union.

There is some difficulty in translating a text written in a poetic style, with references to concepts of Sufism that may be foreign in the West. Some names are left in their original Arabic form. For example, Maqsúd ("the Intended One") in this book is used in connection with the holy Kaaba in Mecca and serves as an adjective for it, i.e., it means "the intended Kaba", however, from the context it is clear that this is not a physical place but rather one of the stations on the path toward God.

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