Seven Valleys

The Seven Valleys (Persian: هفت وادی‎‎ Haft-Vádí) is a book written in Persian by Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith. The Four Valleys (Persian: چهار وادی‎‎ Chahár 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 Seven Valleys was written around 1860 in Baghdad after Bahá'u'lláh had returned from the Sulaymaniyah region in Kurdistan where he spent two years anonymously with various Sufi sheikhs using the pseudonym Darvish Muhammad-i-Irani. The work was written in response to questions posed by Shaykh Muhyi'd-Din, a judge, who was a follower of the Qádiríyyih Order of Sufism. About the time of writing to Bahá'u'lláh, he quit his job, and spent the rest of his life wandering around Iraqi Kurdistan.

This work has been called by Shoghi Effendi Bahá'u'lláh's "greatest mystical composition", and in the West was one of the earliest available books of Bahá'u'lláh, first translated directly to French in 1905, and English in 1906.

The style of The Seven Valleys is highly poetic, though not composed in verse. Nearly every line of the text contains rhymes and plays on words, which can be lost in translation. As the recipient was of Sufi origin, Bahá'u'lláh used historical and religious subtleties which sometimes used only one or a few words to refer to Qur'anic verses, traditions, and well-known poems. In English, frequent footnotes are used to convey certain background information.

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